Felicia Ooi; Metamorphoses

I found Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be a poem that was really very interesting. Besides the creation story and the flood myth, Ovid gave us an insight into the lives of the gods of Lycaon’s time. A similarity to Gilgamesh would be how the many gods in both texts are portrayed as having very human-like tendencies, whereas a marked contrast with the Bible is that God is the one and only divine being who is omniscient. God in the Bible is a loving and kind God who is merciful. In constrast, the gods of Metamorphoses and Gilgamesh are a discontented and fractious bunch, and they are in constant opposition of each other. The gods in Ovid’s literary masterpiece are shown to be almost human, and Ovid writes stories about how the gods seduce humans/nymphs and turn them into non-human creatures based on their whims. Clear examples are Daphne being turned into a laurel bush and Io into a heifer.

I also found that the reference made to Caesar by Ovid piqued my curiosity. It gave me a reason to research Roman and Greek mythology and I was then able to picture the kind of comparison Ovid was trying to make between Caesar and Lycaon. Overall, I preferred reading Metamorphoses to reading Gilgamesh.