How The Lusiads drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: Luís de Camões 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 Lusiads
Luís de Camões · 1572
RenaissanceRelevance
6/10
On The Lusiads’s page
- The poem's most unforgettable figure — Adamastor, the Titan turned into the rock of the Cape by a love he could not have — is built on Ovid's machinery of metamorphosis
- Camões was as good a reader of the Metamorphoses as of Virgil; reading Ovid first shows you the tradition Adamastor competes with, body undone into landscape by frustrated desire
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Camões read Ovid as closely as he read Homer and Virgil — and it shows in his boldest invention
- Adamastor, the spurned giant petrified into the Cape of Good Hope, is a pure Ovidian metamorphosis: thwarted love turning a body into stone
- It's Camões competing with Ovid on his own ground, driving the whole mythological machinery of the epic with a transformation Ovid would have recognized