Anytime a story is told by different people, there are understandable number of variations. This is especially true for Greek and Roman myths, which were written during vastly different centuries with opposite views of religion. The Greeks seemed to view their early gods as perfect yet still human with their interactions with mortals. The actions of the divine motivated and drove the course of the stories. The Romans, by contrast, put their gods on a pedestal and shifted the blame to the mortals. The writings of Hesiod and Ovid reflect these differences, depicting the actions in a perfect light and a harsh, punishing, and complicated light, respectively.
The creation writings of Hesiod and Ovid start in there similar ways with their content. After a lengthy invocation to the muses, listing all the gods, Hesiod begins the creation through a matter of fact description of lineage. In fact, he uses the following phrases to being the narrative: “In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss, but then Gaia, the Earth came into being, Her broad bosom the ever-firm foundation of all” (Tazaskoma, Smith, Brunet 135). This gives very little flourish, except for a few adjectives used to describe the characters. Additionally, the narrative starts with chaos or nothingness giving way to Earth. Ovid is similar is his beginnings saying “Nature’s face was one through the universe, Chaos they call it [until] some god, or superior nature, settled this conflict, splitting earth from heaven, sea from earth, and purse sky from the dense atmosphere” (“Origin of the World” 5). This description follows the same basic progression of earth coming from chaos or nothing. Ovid then goes further to describe the ages of man and his society. For example, Ovid describes separate golden, silver, bronze, and iron ages.
While Ovid and Hesiod start with the same seed to begin the actual creation part of the myth, their styles dictate different a different course and tone. For example, Hesiod spends a significant portion of the first hundred lines lauding the muses as the inspiration for his work. This is demonstrated by the lines “happy is the man Whom the Muses love. Sweet flows the voice from his mouth.” (Tazaskoma, Smith, Brunet 134). This language shows an opinion of reverence toward the deities as well as a belief that they are the main, perhaps only, cause of events in the mortal world. Ovid’s description of the four ages of man reveals an equal balance of causation originating from man and from the gods. In the fourth age, the iron age, “Shame and Veracity and Faith took flight, and in their place came Duplicity and Fraud, Treachery and Force, and unholy Greed” (“Origin of the World” 8). This wording places blame on the mortals for allowing these traits to overcome them, while also giving the items an autonomy of their own. Additionally, the language used to tell this tale is more elevated, perhaps even scientific in tone.
Another of Ovid’s myths about Arachne and Athena continues this tone of precision yet verboseness to explain the origin of specific facets of the contemporary world. In this story, Ovid tells of how the proud Arachne now “still spins thread and plies as a spider her old art of weaving” (“The Contest of Arachne and Minerva” 151). The end result is clear in that it explains the origin of the spider, a universal feared creature, and why it is tasked with weaving strong webs from its body. Central to this story are the interactions and emotions of the goddess Athena as well as the pride of the mortal Arachne. Near the beginning of the passage Athena thinks “let me be praised, and not allow my godhead to be scorned without reprisal” (“The Contest of Arachne and Minvera” 147). Additionally, near the end, she destroys Arachne’s creation and assaults Arachne merely because she (Athena) was bested in a competition. These two examples display the very human emotions of anger and pride, which writers such as Hesiod would most likely not attribute to a deity. True, Athena is not alone in her responsibility for causing the course of the myth; Arachne bears equal responsibility for being proud and boastful. However, the tone leaves nothing to question regarding the source of the blame and the plausibility of the outcome.
With every source of literature and individual author, there will always be variations on tone, style, and point of view. This is certainly the case with the writings of Hesiod and Ovid telling creation myths of the universe. Hesiod takes a reverent tone and delineates the experience with very little flourish outside of the invocation. Ovid, by contrast, shows the gods as being equal to mortals in negative emotion and causation of events. Additionally, he uses a verbose tone that still portrays the events as foregone conclusions, in both the creation story and the myth of Arachne. Based on these observations, one could easily conclude that rest of Ovid’s writings follow a similar pattern and that there is a huge amount of variety to found among the entire collection of myths.
Works Cited
Ovid. “The Contest of Arachne and Minerva”. Metamorphoses. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett Publishing Co: Indianapolis. 2010. Ebook
Ovid. “The Origin of the World”. Metamorphoses. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett Publishing Co: Indianapolis. 2010. Ebook
Trzsakoma, Stephen, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet, ed., Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation
