In literature, for example, we find this myth in the tragedy of Dr. Faustus, where the protagonist's fall is compared to the ambition of Icarus. In the visual arts this theme and myth is evident in famous paintings, such as, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (1558), by Peter rueghel. Critics have noted that reughel used many of the detail from Ovid's story in his painting -- thus proving the pervasive influence of Ovid. "Notice how he takes details of ordinary life from Ovid's language: the farmer at his plow, the shepherd leaning on his staff, the fisherman down by the water."
To further substantiate this point we can also refer the opinion of the poet, W.H. Auden, who stated that
Ovid is the source, not only of the story but also of a great deal of standard figurative language. Anyone needing a plot for a play or a classical allusion…...
Though he achieves geat comic effect with this, Ovid could also be undelining the impotance of the following poem by his inclusion of such a lage potion of the Roman pantheon. Thee is also explicit evidence that Ovid is not meely -- o at least not solely -- talking about lust in the poem, at one point addessing the eade as, "You...who seach fo the essence of lasting love" (Pat II, line 9). Late on in the poem, when descibing instant love -- o lust -- in the couts, he paints the lawyes as idiculous chaactes, clealy signaling his feelings towads them.
The messages themselves ae not had to find once one begins looking fo them. Thoughout the poem, thee is a violent, militaistic aspect to the desciption of male seduction -- the opening of Pat III suggest one might find a love on "Pompey's shady colonnade" -- a subtle…...
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references simply come too often otherwise. From Pompey's colonnade to the theatre to later statements directly about war, the poem is too full of military images for it not to be meaningful.
Mercury tells the story of Pan (whose flutes represent water) and Syrinx, another river daughter.
In the second book, Ovid focuses on fire and air. He writes about the Palace of the Sun, where both air and fire are represented. The story of Phaethon is also associated with fire and air, and the sisters of Phaethon turn into trees which weep amber which is solid fire. Cygnus, Phaethon's cousin, becomes a swan, which is a bird of the air that lives in water, and fears fire. In the story of Apollo falling in love with Coronis, the raven betrays her and turns black when Apollo kills him (an air creature). The crow also betrays Erichthonius, who is born of the earth. The god of medicine, Asclepius, is born from fire. Ovid returns to earth and water in this second book when Aglauros turns to stone (earth) for feeling envy, which…...
If one doubts this, consider Ovid's most overly scathing prose is served for Caesar and contemporary politics. Even better than at plays, one can pick up women witnessing spectacles and triumphs: "hen, lately, Caesar, in mock naval battle, / exhibited the Greek and Persian fleets, / surely young men and girls came from either coast, / and all the peoples of the world were in the City? / ho did not find one he might love in that crowd?
Ah, how many were tortured by an alien love! (I.4)
The implication is that while Caesar believes people flock to triumphs to see him, really the average man or woman is seeking to press his leg close to an attractive girl, using the press of the crowd as an excuse for his friendliness. Although this may not sound very scandalous, Ovid's implication is that while Caesar may believe people flock into public spaces…...
This is also accomplished by "sliding" from a story centered around one character to that of a friend or relative (Epaphus and Phaethon, end of Book 1). These different links, or disjointed continuations, reaffirm the superficiality with which Ovid demands the reader to operate.
Ovid uses the conformities of the epic throughout the Metamorphoses, but the height of this usage is achieved in the Ajax-Odyssey debate. Ovid's use of the epic begins with the general stylist selection he makes throughout the story, particularly by positing the tragic victim as a struggling object expressed through a series of present participles. As is common in epics, tales of particular meter and form, he then uses a verb to signal death and mutilation, represented by the use of enjambment (continuation of syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause). (Met. 6.555-57, 636-41.) Sometimes, positioning his…...
We actually feel that we are there, one of the spectators, experiencing the story along with Procne and Philomela. Titus lacks these specificities and cultural details.
imilarities, however, may be found in other elements. The imagery in both narratives is rich. Both Ovid and hakespeare have a penchant for enlivening the passages with verbal imagery, particularly in the forms of simile and metaphor. Tamora's praise of the forest alludes to the speaker's adulterous sensuality. The scene (as it is in Metamorphosis) is alive with allusion to predators of the animal kingdom -- most often wasps, flies, snakes and adders -- no doubt correlation to the human predators who fill the tale, and descriptive images of landscape are often sexualized; there is the "unhallowed and bloodstained hole" and "the swallowing womb" for instance. imilarly in Ovid too, there is the design that Philomelus weaves: " threads of deep purple on a…...
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Sources
Dowden, Edward. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. New York, Barnes & Noble, 1967.
Bate, Jonathan. Titus Andronicus. Cengage Learning Publishing, 1995.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York Publishing Company: New York, 1998
Cutts, John P. The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare's Early Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968.
But Ovid's "Metamorphosis" complete disconnects morality from human fate, even more radically than in either Hesiod or Plato. In Ovid, almost every person is transformed into one thing or another, regardless of how good or bad they might be in moral terms.
But the sorts of suffering in these tales still have shadings of moral difference, even if bad actions does not cause one's bad fate, as meted out by Zeus. For instance, the cold, shivering sufferings of humans and their inability to resist the evils of Pandora's box in Hesiod's re-telling of the Pandora myth are illustrative of the limits of the transient and inferior human physical condition. Even Prometheus cannot die, but those whom he helped can and will, as decreed through Zeus' creation of Pandora, even with fire -- that is the nature of human vulnerability, human's suffering physical fate. The limits of human philosophical understanding and…...
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Ovid's Metamorphoses begins by promising to describe the way in which bodies change into new forms, but immediately follows into a primal myth of the creation of the world. Indeed, the poem as a whole is seemingly obsessed with myths of creation, human and divine. I would like to examine three particular episodes in Ovid's epic -- the myths of Arachne and Daedalus in Books VI and VIII, and the speech of Pythagoras in the final book (XV) -- in order to examine Ovid's handling of myths of creation. I hope to demonstrate by way of conclusion that although Ovid interestingly explores the correspondences between craftsmanship (a way of creating things) and parentage (a way of creating human beings), his ultimate concern is with his own medium, which is poetry. In some sense, the proliferation of creation myths within Ovid's poem are all directed toward a covert self-analysis by…...
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Works Cited
Allen Mandelbaum (translator). The Metamorphoses of Ovid. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Print.
Playfully, this sexualized scene where the god embraces the beautiful tree becomes transposed with Roman victory: "Let Roman victors, in the long procession, / Wear laurel wreaths for triumph and ovation. / Beside Augustus' portals let the laurel/Guard and watch over the oak."
Like Ovid, the Chinese poet Li Po alternated between respect for authority and irreverence, functioning as a kind of "cross between court poet and jester," and injecting "additional dimension of poetic fantasy" and comedy to his works in contrast to his contemporary T'ang poets. Li Po mixes high and low sentiment, ribald humor with meditations upon the nature of life, as can be seen in his poem on hospitality "Bring in the Wine," where he urges his host: "So you, my host, / How can you tell me you're short on cash? Go right out! / Buy us some wine!" And almost immediately follows with a concluding:…...
Instead, even the differentiations he makes are generalized and show a view of women as malleable and generally similar.
In Book III, in contrast, the individuality of women -- not as typified or generalized into certain classes, but as truly independent women -- is the opening and over-arching focus. This is not just seen in the lines quoted above, although these do serve as arguably the most important lines in setting this tone for the rest of the book. This is reflected to some degree in Ovid's discussion of beauty in Part II of Book III. He acknowledges that most women are not born beautiful, and even admits that this was not necessarily a bad thing when society was rude and ill-formed anyway. Now, however, he tells women that they should care for their appearance in the same way that men have improved in their own. He seems to be…...
Perhaps the biggest difference between these two discussions of Creation is the differing accounts of the creation of man. Ovid will not acknowledge man is created in God's own image. He writes, "So Man was born, it may be, in God's image, / or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated / From the old fire of Heaven, still retained / Some seed of the celestial force which fashioned / Gods out of living clay and running water" (Ovid 1068). Ovid seems afraid of acknowledging one God, one force, and one creator for some reason, while the Bible has no qualms about giving God the credit for all Creation and for man as well. The Bible says, "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,…...
However, people have had a choice, and, while they could have continued to grow their crops peacefully, they preferred to fight endlessly instead, having despair constantly present in the world. It is not certain whether or not people could have actually stopped evil from entering their lives, but it is certain that it would need a miracle for it to disappear.
The poet presents the tyrant Lycaon as being a symbol of the ages in which people had been devoted to engaging in battle without taking into account the fact that it had been extremely ineffective and malicious. Lycaon proved his disinterest for people by offering his own son as a sacrifice for the gods. This act had acted as an offense towards the Gods, which, in their turn, transformed Lycaon into a werewolf-like creature, which had been both man and wolf in the same time. Ovid made a reference…...
In "The Story of Daedalus and Icarus," we have a similar lesson regarding knowledge. Icarus, much like Phaeton, does not follow his father's advice. In the air, he is distracted by everything happening below and before long "left his father, / Soared higher, higher, drawn to the vast heaven,/nearer the sun" (188). His mistake is deadly for no one can rescue him from up above. This story is importantbecause it also teaches us that we should never assumewe are something we are not or that we are more than human. Icarus forgot his humanity and "turned his thinking / Toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature" (187). Daedalus must face his culpability here for it was his idea to leave Crete in a way that was not conventional. He assumed everything would turn out just fine.
In Hippolytus, Theseus assumes he knows the truth regarding Hippolytus and Phaedra. However, he…...
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Work Cited
Ovid. "The Story of Daedalus and Icarus." Metamorphosis. Rolfe Humphries, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1955.
"The Story of Phaeton." Metamorphosis. Rolfe Humphries, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1955.
The first story from Ovid's Metamorphoses to be interpreted is "Echo and Narcissus." There are some traditional elements to the story as a love story paradigm. There are stories of "boy meets girl" and often part of that story is that one or both of the romantic leads like each other, but have difficulty synching together to have a romantic interlude. Narcissus calls out to Echo in the woods for them to meet together. She is excited but she can only repeat the last phrase or so of what Narcissus says, keeping them from meeting together. In another way, the story is a traditional love story, in that the girl loses the boy. What is non-traditional is that the girl loses the boy to himself. Narcissus sees his reflection in water while roaming the forest and falls in love with himself. Thus, this is a love…...
When watching the Coen Brothers' film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, it becomes immediately apparent that the film is meant to be a creative adaptation of The Odyssey by Homer. Rather than a straightforward mimicking of The Odyssey, however, the film makes use of Homer's plot to tell a very different story about escaped convicts in the southern United States in the late 1930s.
The most obvious parallel between the original and the Coen brothers' adaptation is the main character, played by George Clooney. While he is called by his middle name, Everett, throughout most of the film, the full name of Clooney's character is Ulysses Everett McGill. "Ulysses" is, of course, the Latin translation of the name "Odysseus." By giving him an Irish last name, it could even be suggested that the Coen brothers are also making reference to another famous adaptation of The Odyssey, James Joyce's novel…...
Choosing a research paper topic doesn't have to be difficult. In many cases, an instructor will choose a topic for you. Some instructors allow you to choose your own topic, but request that you get approval from them before beginning your paper. If you're left completely alone to choose a topic and start writing, consider the following questions as you're thinking about topic ideas:
• What is the class about?
• What are some of the main points or themes addressed by the instructor?
• What about the class specifically interests you?
• What ideas or themes from the class naturally lend themselves to research?
• Is your topic idea....
To develop a thesis statement, the first thing you'll need to do is determine what kind of paper you're writing. It will be either expository (explain something to the reader), argumentative (make and justify a claim), or analytical (break down and evaluate an issue). The type of paper you're writing will affect the content of your thesis statement, which should be very specific. The main issue you'll cover in your paper should be listed in your statement, and should be backed up with proper evidence. Generally, the statement will appear at the very end of the paper's first paragraph. As....
Citing a web resource in MLA format requires you to provide specific information about the source you used. In some cases, you won't be able to locate all the information. When that happens, provide as much as you can. Overall, you should provide the name(s) of the author(s), the name of the article (in quotation marks), the title of the webpage, project, or book (in italics), the publisher information, the page numbers (if there are any), and publication medium, and the date accessed. As an example:
Author, A. "Article about MLA style." The webpage where you found the article. The place....
You can find information to create this thesis statement by using several different types of sources. In addition to the standard Google search for websites about the topic, there are online and offline books and magazines that deal with religious subjects.
Ministry Magazine is a good source to consider, along with Enrichment Journal and Christian Standard. Liberty University's Digital Commons also provides a lot of good insight into growing small churches.
Any church can be successful in a small city, as long as it provides the community with what the people need in order to feel their lives are being....
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