How The Divine Comedy drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Dante Alighieri 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 Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1320
MedievalRelevance
8/10
On The Divine Comedy’s page
- Ovid is everywhere in Dante — after Virgil, no poet feeds the Comedy more, and Dante seats him in Limbo with the greats (Inferno IV)
- Inferno XXV's thieves-into-serpents is Dante competing with Ovid directly, claiming to surpass the Metamorphoses' transformations
- Read Ovid first and you'll hear the contest: Dante didn't just borrow the art of metamorphosis, he set out to beat its master
On Metamorphoses’s page
- After Virgil, Ovid is Dante's most-used source — and Dante names him in Limbo among the great poets (Inferno IV)
- The Metamorphoses taught Dante how to write transformation as poetry; in Inferno XXV he stages thieves turning into snakes and openly claims to out-do Ovid at his own art
- Scholarly consensus treats the Metamorphoses as a primary model standing behind the Comedy