How The Complete Essays drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Michel de Montaigne demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Complete Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1580
RenaissanceRelevance
7/10
On The Complete Essays’s page
- Montaigne names Ovid's Metamorphoses as the very first book to give him a love of reading, discovered at seven or eight — the origin point of the mind behind the Essays
- He quotes it throughout, and its great theme — perpetual change, nothing fixed — runs straight into his own restless self-portrait
- Read it to meet the boy before the essayist; the flux Montaigne keeps circling started in Ovid's lines
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid's Metamorphoses is the book that made Montaigne a reader — he found it at seven or eight and never let go
- In 'On Books' he names it as the source of his first taste for reading; it stays a quoted companion across the Essays
- Its governing idea — that nothing holds still, everything is in flux — becomes one of Montaigne's deepest themes