How Metamorphoses drew on Theogony/Works and Days
A documented line of influence: Ovid demonstrably engaged Hesiod’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Theogony/Works and Days
Hesiod · c. 700 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeRelevance
7/10
On Metamorphoses’s page
- The Metamorphoses opens with the world emerging out of Chaos — that cosmogony is straight out of Hesiod's Theogony
- Ovid knew the Theogony exceedingly well and counted Hesiod among his principal sources
- Read Hesiod first and Ovid's opening reveals itself as a Roman poet building on the oldest Greek account of how the gods and the world came to be
On Theogony/Works and Days’s page
- Ovid knew Hesiod's Theogony exceedingly well, and the Metamorphoses opens by paying the debt
- Its creation out of Chaos belongs squarely to the Hesiodic tradition — Ovid begins the world the way Hesiod first taught the Greeks to begin it
- Hesiod stands among the principal sources Ovid is drawing on as he sets the cosmos in order before the transformations begin