The Aeneid and Metamorphoses have continued to be rediscovered and reinterpreted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The two world wars which defi...
Afterlife I: Late Latin and Renaissance
Virgil and Ovid were both incredibly influential upon later poetry and culture, and in this lecture we look at some of the texts which look back to th...
'I shall live': Immortality
Ovid ends his work with a series of deifications: Julius Caesar becomes a god; Augustus will become a god. This most allusive and transformative of te...
Aeneid again? Troy and Rome
In books 11-14 of the Metamorphoses Ovid takes on the stories of Troy's fall and Rome's origin - have we finally reached the point of 'real epic'? In ...
Art and Song: Orpheus and Pygmalion
This lecture focusses on the two most prominent lovers in Metamorphoses 9-11, Orpheus and Pygmalion. Both also happen to be artists. We first examine ...
Changing Nature: Genre in the Metamorphoses
It is often said that Ovid's is a 'Callimachean epic', in other words an episodic and aetiological poem which eschews big scale narratives. As we are ...
Gods and Mortals: Vengeance
Epic poetry often features a hostile and punitive god, who forms a barrier to the hero’s journey, but the Metamorphoses takes the theme of vengeful go...
Ovid Metamorphoses: Gods and Nymphs
On the surface Ovid’s Metamorphoses appears to question traditional gender norms, in particular those held about elite Roman men. Even women are given...
Introducing Ovid’s Metamorphoses
When Virgil died in 19 BCE, the Aeneid became an instant classic, and even before his death references had been made to it in the works of other autho...
Virgil’s Iliad? Epic Intertextuality
Virgil was undoubtedly very well-read: he had a deep knowledge of the epics of Homer and Ennius, as well as a myriad of other Greek and Roman poets. I...