How Metamorphoses drew on On the Nature of Things
A documented line of influence: Ovid demonstrably engaged Lucretius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
On the Nature of Things
Lucretius · c. 55 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeRelevance
6/10
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Behind Ovid's account of a world in perpetual transformation stands Lucretius's poem of atoms in eternal motion
- The closing Pythagoras speech borrows Lucretius's didactic voice and cosmic scope — then bends his materialist physics toward myth, the exact opposite conclusion
- Read On the Nature of Things first and the Metamorphoses reveals itself as a sustained, mythologizing answer to it
On On the Nature of Things’s page
- Ovid takes Lucretius's cosmic sweep and runs it backward — into myth
- The Pythagoras discourse that closes the Metamorphoses adopts Lucretius's didactic mode and his vision of a universe in constant flux, even as it inverts the godless Epicurean physics underneath
- Where Lucretius explained natural phenomena to banish the gods, Ovid re-mythologizes the same wonders to put them back