vid, a famous poet under Caesar Augustus, was forty-three when Christ was born. He was a pagan. So were Virgil and Horace, his contemporaries, but they were cultural conservatives. Ovid, on the other hand, represents the left side of the cultural spectrum in the Augustan age -- the tolerant, promiscuous liberals. He was the poet of pagans who acted like pagans.
Ovid wrote books like Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), and Remedia Amoris (The Remedy of Love). These were immensely popular accounts of love affairs, how to conduct them, and how to get out of them. Later, in the Middle Ages, they were popular partly for the same reason (monks were very social creatures), partly because anything from the classical world was revered, regardless of its worth, and partly because they contained a great deal of pre-Augustan classical lore.
Ovid's most famous book, the Metamorphoses, seems on the surface to be different. It is a compendium of classical mythology, one of the best from the ancient world, using metamorphoses, or changes, as a transition technique to move from story to story. This book is a marvelous collection of many of the most famous stories from the classical age, such as those of Hercules, Jason, Medusa, the Minotaur, Icarus, the Trojan War cycle, Romulus, etc. In many cases, the shape in which a story has come to us has been defined by the Metamorphoses, because it was one of the most well-known and influential classical works in the Middle Ages.
However, the Metamorphoses has two main themes: 1) the principle of change, a sort of materialistic Epicurean flux, that forms the basis for the entire cosmos; and 2) loves, mostly illicit, in many varying combinations. A great many of the stories center on behavior that the Scriptures condemn in the roundest tones. Though Ovid's tone clearly disapproves of some of his characters, other stories of various kinds of perversion, he doesn't find objectionable. Though his style is poetic and graceful, and he relies on vivid suggestion rather than explicit description, he makes very clear what is going on.
This all leads to a difficult problem for the Christian reader of classical literature. He recognizes the value of classical studies for his understanding of history, early Christianity, and the deviations from biblical truth (the flux principle). But Ovid focuses precisely on that which a Christian ought not to focus on when reading for entertainment (illicit, sensual love). Even the scholar, who studies Ovid not for entertainment but as one of the sources for much of medieval and Renaissance literature, must take a position on Ovid's focus on biblically condemned human behavior.
Fortunately for the student of literature who finds himself in this quandary, the English Renaissance provided an answer in the practice of Edmund Spenser, a man who was not only well-educated in the classical tradition, but who was also a Christian, an Anglican Protestant who moved in powerful Elizabethan Puritan circles, and who was deeply interested in the problem of using the materials of history and the classical heritage in a way that would glorify the Word of God, not compromise it. Like his literary father Chaucer, Spenser used the work of Virgil less, and Ovid more, than most of his contemporaries, especially in his great allegory of Christian virtue, The Faerie Queene. In this book, Spenser takes stories from Ovid and, rather than rejecting them as unsalvageable evil, turns them to the service of good.
One example should illustrate the point. One of Ovid's stories is of Hermaphroditus (the son of Hermes and Aphrodite), to whom a lovestruck nymph clung, praying for permanent oneness with the youth, until the two literally melted together (giving rise to our term hermaphrodite--a creature having the characteristics of both sexes). Hermaphroditus, protesting, cursed the pool in which he was standing when it happened, so that whoever stepped into it would lose his strength and grow as weak and soft as the androgyne he had become.
In Spenser's Faerie Queene, Redcrosse Knight (representing holiness in the allegory), having been deceived by a beautiful witch, steps into a spring to bathe and immediately grows weak, whereupon a giant (similar to Giant Despair in Pilgrim's Progress) beats him into submission and imprisons him. The allegory in this episode is that the Christian must be spiritually on guard at all times in order to grow into a more mature holiness (the lesson, ut pictura, of Hebrews 5:14). Yet Spenser uses for the matter of his allegory that of an ancient pagan whose primary concern in passing on the story is a corrupt interest in erotic myths.
This tells us at least two valuable things. One is that even those pagan works like the Metamorphoses which lack the redeeming qualities of an Iliad or an Aeneid (both of which, though they do have moral problems, elevate courage, dignity, duty, filial honor, etc.) can be redeemed by Christians who are devoted to the task of taking every thought captive.
The other is that in order for us to carry on the literary scholarship of those Christians before us like Spenser, we must understand precisely what it was they were doing. Most Christians would agree to the worth of Spenser's work. But in order to understand Spenser thoroughly, one must know something of Ovid. And though the value of Ovid seems questionable to us, Spenser and his fellow Christian poets (being in a better position to judge than we) have much to teach us on the subject.
