Essays on Metamorphoses

Milton's Satan is perhaps one of the most hotly discussed literary characters, as generations of critics over the last three hundred years have kept the battle over the issue of the primacy of Satan in Paradise Lost not only alive but also enduringly animated. It appears as if every generation has found its own reading and interpretation of this highly complex character created by Milton. The critical pendulum swings from one extreme to another: While some hail Satan as the hero of the epic, some find him a lowly creature worse than a worm (Vijayasree, 68). Milton presents Satan ...

In his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Nietzsche does introduce the three remarkable metamorphoses in a philosophical manner. These metamorphoses basically describe the process that we undergo during spiritual transformation, which characterize Nietzsche’s vision of a flourishing life. Perhaps we hardly think or regard Nietzsche as a great “spiritual” philosopher. Nonetheless, has put by Nietzsche, the story of the three metamorphoses is purely as spiritual transformation saga. He symbolically represents the phases of spiritual metamorphosis with the camel, the lion, and the child. A camel, in this case is used to describe and depict the scene that allows for ...

Titian’s and Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus and Adonis

The essay looks at Rubens and Titian version of Venus and Adonis and makes a comparison of their style. While Rubens and Titian version of Venus and Adonis, Rubens’s picture is typically Baroque. Rubens was greatly influenced by Titian and copied his version of Venus and Adonis. The story behind Venus and Adonis is derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The goddess Venus is shown clinging to her mortal lover, the handsome young Adonis, whom she is infatuated with. Venus attempts to stop her lover from going hunting. But hunting is a passion with Adonis and he knew that it ...

The idea of metamorphosis – a full or partial transformation of a person into a creature – is often met in various books and films and appeared long ago. In course of time, the notion of metamorphosis has changed and gained new meanings and forms of expression that can be traced on the examples of Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, that is dated back to the year 1915, and a quite modern film Spider-Man directed by Sam Raimi. But, unfortunately, these changes and alterations in the human are not always acceptable by the society. Metamorphoses usually consist in acquiring characteristics, ...

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 ...

The present paper is devoted to two accounts of creation made by Ovid, Roman poet, in his poem Metamorphoses, and Hesiod, who described it in his poem Theogony. The purpose of this work is to reveal similarities and differences between the above-mentioned poems and analyze Ovid’s approach to myth. Despite of the same subject – creation of the Universe, Metamorphoses by Ovid and Theogony by Hesiod are very different. Theogony describes the birth of numerous Olympic gods who were born after creation. The process of creation is described in the very beginning of the poem: the Earth, called Gaia, ...

Each nation has own myth about world’s creation and team of gods, spirits or other powers that control it. Some of them can sound really weird. For example, Scandinavian myths say the world was created from the body of a dead giant. More common mythologies have show less bloody ideas with own features. They depend not only up the culture and country, but up the author. This essay will compare Greek and Roman poet’s Hesiod and Ovid points of view. These cultures had similar pantheons of Gods, which differed mostly by names, like Venus and Aphrodite. However, ...

Ancient Mythology

"Metamorphosis" is a poem by the Ancient Roman poet Ovid in fifteen books, which tell about various transformations that have occurred since the creation of the world, according to the Greek and Roman mythology. “Theogony”, written by Hesiod, is an earlier version of creation that describes the origin of the gods. Both stories depicts the creation of the world, however, there are significant differences, and also similarities in the approach of creation of Ovid and Hesiod. Monumental work of Ovid considered, which goes under the title "Metamorphoses", is written in characteristic for the epic poetry hexameters. In the 15 ...