Taking it further

If you have enjoyed learning about the Roman context of Ovid’s poetry, you might want to study the free course The many guises of the emperor Augustus [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] by Ursula Rothe, or if you have enjoyed studying epic poetry as part of this course, you might want to study Exploring Homer’s Odyssey, a free course by Emma Bridges.

If you would like to know more about the language in which Ovid wrote his poetry, you might want to try your hand at the OpenLearn course Getting Started on Classical Latin.

Drawing on what you have learned from studying classical reception on this course (and from the artistic and literary receptions of the myths you have studied) you might want to think about how you personally would approach the myth of Actaeon if you were going to write (or draw, or paint, or perform, or animate in any other way) your own version. Which aspects of the story would you focus on? Whose perspective would you choose to tell the story from, and what kind of an interpretation of the myth would you produce? Are there elements of Ovid’s story that you would want to change, or would you stick close to this ancient version? You could write a short reflection on these questions.

You might like to return to some of the stories that you have been introduced to in this course. One way to do this is to read more of Ovid’s Metamorphoses itself. In this course you have mostly referred to Stephanie McCarter’s translation, Metamorphoses by Ovid (2023, Penguin) which is a modern translation, but you can also find the text in different (usually older) translations available freely on the Internet. The Perseus Digital Library will give you free access to a translation of the Metamorphoses by Brookes More. And the Poetry In Translation project will provide you with free access to a translation by A.S. Kline. The story ‘The World that Came from a Shell’ that you read in Activity 3 came from a collection of stories from around the ancient world called Gods of the Ancient World (2022, Dorling Kindersley) by Marchella Ward, the author of this course. In that book you will find more stories from different groups of ancient people about how the world began, as well as other myths about gods and goddesses.

If you enjoyed learning about Patience Agbabi’s poem About Face, you could listen to it or read it again. You could also watch this video in which the poet explains some of her motivations in writing her version of the Actaeon story: Poets Inspired by Titian: Patience Agbabi

If you would like to know more about the process of translation that led to Stephanie McCarter’s version of the Metamorphoses, you could read this interview with the translator: Having Their Say by Lily Meyer (Poetry Foundation). You may also be interested in this academic lecture that McCarter gave, where she goes into the process of creating her translation in a lot of detail: Morse Lecture 2024: Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Professor Stephanie McCarter.

To learn even more about the context of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, you might like to listen to this podcast by the London Review of Books: Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones: Among the Ancients: Ovid.

If you enjoyed listening to the excerpt from the interview with Liz Gloyn, you can listen to the rest of the interview.