Teaching Myth via Ovid

Martin Helzle (Case Western Reserve University)

Myth courses have been extremely popular  in North American universities for decades. Students cannot get enough of them and departments  use them to justify low enrollments in language courses.

Faced with the need to teach myth, I studied the relevant textbooks, namely Powell, Harris and Platzner as well as Morford and Lenarden. They all group myths under various themes and try to expose students to as many primary sources as their publisher will allow. I was not excited by any of them. The question for me was: if I am not excited about the material, how can I excite my students?

Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided the obvious way out of this quandary since even a half line of the Metamorphoses can get me excited. Consequently, I decided to use Melville’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the textbook for my myth course and Powell’s Greek Mythology as a secondary resource and reference work. All the major myth cycles are at least touched on by Ovid. What Ovid leaves out could easily be supplied by Powell. Rather than reading purple passages from Homer and the tragedians, we would be reading “one continuous poem about gods and heroes”.

The advantages were numerous. I was teaching a text that I knew very well, but I was looking at it from a non-literary perspective that I had previously only considered  peripherally. Not only would the students learn something, I would expand my own view of what lay behind Ovid’s stories.

When considering the  structure of the course, things already fell into place very neatly. The Fall semester at my institution has 15 weeks  which meant that students could be assigned to read a book of the Metamorphoses per week.  Of those 15 weeks, the last two would be devoted to some Roman stories while the rest were mostly of Greek origin. This distribution seemed perfect. Moreover, like a modern textbook  Ovid’s first book starts at the beginning with  myths of creation, the flood and the ages of mankind which have interesting parallels in ancient Near Eastern texts and in Hesiod.

Furthermore, the structural principle of Ovid’s arrangement is variatio,  the very feature that I found most lacking in the modern textbooks.  Since similar story patterns recur at different intervals, students can be asked to recognize a pattern that they have met weeks ago and apply what they have learnt, rather than just memorize another story with new names. This also means that material already covered is repeated and re-enforced under a different guise.

Ovid’s very variatio also means that the Metamorphoses covers all the important  story patterns, such as heroic myth, initiation and ktiseis. His version may not always be the closest to an ancient ritual, but it always provides an excellent and enjoyable starting point for digging deeper. Moreover, it vividly illustrates that myth is not static and that there are no canonical versions. Variatio also means that tone, length, even hidden literary genre change constantly from one episode to another, keeping the attention of young adults who were raised on episodic television programs such as Sesame Street.

As far as critical approaches are concerned, myth and ritual increasingly became my weapon of choice, but nobody can avoid psychological interpretations when dealing with stories such as Salmacis and Hermaphrodite. Art from all ages was also easily worked in. Students could not escape being exposed to suasoriae and controversiae as well as stories within stories in which the narrator and her tale shed reciprocal light on each other.

Finally,  even if they remember nothing about Indo-European city foundations or any kind of initiation story, my students did end up having read one of the greatest works of world literature by the end of the course.