Context Essay

For my Ovid project, I decided to focus on the fighting of Perseus against Phineus and his companions, specifically Book V, lines 30-73. These lines take place at an interesting point in the flow of Metamorphoses: They are some of the very first lines of the fifth book, but this story as a whole is the last one in Perseus’s saga in Metamorphoses. We first meet Perseus in Book IV when he is attacked by the titan Atlas after stopping in his kingdom. Because Perseus is nowhere near as strong as the titan, he uses Medusa’s head to turn him to stone to defeat him. After killing Atlas, he finds the princess Andromeda chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the sea monster, Cetus. Perseus makes an arrangement with her parents that he will rescue her from the monster if he can marry her. He once again uses Medusa’s head and petrifies the monster to fulfil his end of the bargain. Book IV ends with Perseus and Andromeda set to be wed. Perseus’s story picks up again right away in Book V when he and Andromeda’s wedding is crashed by the bride’s former fiancé, Phineus, who wishes to prevent the two from marrying. My section kicks off when the jealous Phineus throws his spear at Perseus, but misses and hits the couch. The scene that follows is a fight in which Perseus kills a few people (including two teenage boys, Athis and Lycabus, whom I believe are lovers), before using Medusa’s head to turn the rest of them to stone. Perseus’s story ends when he promises a defeated Phineus that he will not harm him with his sword, and technically makes good on that promise by turning him to stone with the gorgon’s head. The story that follows depicts Minerva visiting the Muses at the spring that Pegasus created with his hoof, and the Muses getting into a song competition with the nine daughters of Pierus, who have been transformed into birds. All of these stories take place quite early in the narrative of Metamorphoses during the time of gods and heroes, and before any real Roman history. 

The story of Perseus is an old Greek myth that long predates Ovid’s time. The story of Perseus fighting and defeating the gorgon Medusa appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, an ancient Greek epic that is dated around 750 BCE, which is over 750 years before Metamorphoses was written in 8 CE. Perseus is also referenced in the Iliad, which was written before Hesiod’s Theogony. Because he is only mentioned in the Iliad and does not have a story dedicated to him, it is safe to assume that the composer of the Epic assumed that the readers or listeners knew who he was, which implies that Perseus’s stories had been passed down through oral traditions for generations. Despite the character Perseus and his stories predating Ovid by hundreds of years, Book V of Metamorphoses is one of the earliest surviving written depictions of his fight against Phineus and his men at his wedding, and it portrays him as more ruthless and violent than heroic. The character Perseus has greatly influenced modern culture, especially kids learning about Greek and Roman mythology. Although his stories aren’t as popular or well-known as they were during Ovid’s or Hesiod’s time, Perseus is the namesake for the protagonist in Rick Riordan’s popular series Percy Jackson, which has singlehandedly introduced thousands, if not millions, of kids to Greek and Roman mythology.