In our session for the graduate students, we spoke much about the tropes, characteristics, and elements of an epic. It was very interesting to point out the similarities and also the differences between the four beginning excerpts of the four epics, The Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses. We noticed that in the first three there was mention of the “received song” aspects, but not in The Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses focuses very much on the “I” and therefore the poetic voice is the hero of the story. The other three introduce a hero that will be the protagonist of the epics, and here we see the difference between The Metamorphoses and the others. The Metamorphoses focuses on a much wider cosmos and shifts the focus from the individual to a plurality. In The Metamorphoses, man becomes the measure of time in the quote, “spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time”, here we can see that the gods and their immortality are no longer the measure of time, but rather the poetic voice, the hero, is the center, and therefore becomes a more centralized “I”.
Epic
It was also pointed out, how many of the women in the epics are not given much to say, for example Odysseus’ mother. In The Aeneid, the Sybil is not recognized by Aeneas, and this shows how there is a strong male presence in The Aeneid, and therefore Aeneas is unable to recognize female power. In The Metamorphoses, however, the Sybil is asked to talk about herself, and thus giving her a voice. We concluded that this dynamic is due to Ovid’s wider view of the cosmos, and how he incorporates a wide variety of stories, characters, and concepts in his work. We are looking forward to seeing how the genre of the epic develops through the Anniad in Gwendolyn Brooks.
Prisilla writing for Robin, Marian, Nadege, and Yun