For this week’s reading I did the second unit for Ovid. The first part of this section dealt with Pluto and Proserpine, and it seemed a little stunted. Then again, Ovid does take the stance of it being a rape, and so the myth isn’t as full as it is in the Greek. In the Greek Demeter goes off and takes on a surrogate child in her grief, and Persephone is in the Underworld for quite a long time before Demeter finally demands her back. Plus, Hades makes the deal with Zeus before any ‘abduction’ happens, so he did technically go through the proper channels (for the day, anyway). Ovid’s taking a certain stance on the matter so it makes sense, but it takes away from the richness of the myth.
The second part of this unit was a collection of several myths, and it was neat to see some you don’t often hear of mixed in with the more common. They had Minerva and Arachne, taking the opinion that Arachne won which isn’t really the popular way of telling the tale; Niobe’s challenge of Leto, which I had never heard of until I took a class on Classical Mythology last year; Marsyas, which I hadn’t heard of until that class either; the bit on Latona and the Lycians I have never read before so that was really interesting; I had heard of Procne and Philomela, but it isn’t a highly popular tale so it was still mostly new to me. Although with all these new tales I would have appreciated some more background information, or links to wikipedia pages.
Likewise I thought the last portion didn’t have nearly enough context for the story. Ovid is telling lots of commonly known tales, especially Jason and the Argonauts (who were basically the Avengers of their day). But not most people know these tales now, and Medea and Jason are such a huge myth and have such a large impact on each other that it seemed odd to just have the one episode without any real context besides an “oh, he’s on a quest and she’s the daughter of the dude he wants to steal from.” Jason is such a fascinating bit of classic mythology, and I would have enjoyed seeing more of him.
Overall I enjoyed this unit, but just wanted more context to go along with the stories. They’ve all got such great depth, and Ovid just kind of glances over them to get to the parts he wants to tell and then skips the rest as he jumps around. I'm nosy - I want to know all the juicy details and get into the real meat of the story. Ovid isn't concerned about that because he just assumes everyone already knows the tales. Guess it’s no wonder why Virgil ended up writing the Roman equivalent of the Bible even though Ovid lobbied really hard to get the job, is it?
(Just something fun - it's Avengers so it totally fits :P
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