The Metamorphoses

By: Ovid

Narrated by: Charlton Griffin

Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

An undeniable masterpiece of Western Civilization, The Metamorphoses is a continuous narrative that covers all the Olympian legends, seamlessly moving from one story to another in a splendid panorama of savage beauty, charm, and wit. It marked the first attempt to link all of the Homeric and pre-Homeric myths into a single work and to carry the entire chronology into the Roman pantheon. All of the gods and heroes familiar to us are represented. Such familiar legends as Hercules, Perseus and Medusa, Daedelus and Icarus, Diana and Actaeon, and many others, are breathtakingly recreated.

Ovid was probably the most popular of all the Roman poets during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and his verse was the inspiration for countless artistic and literary masterpieces of the time. Shakespeare, Bernini, and Rubens were only a few of those who mined his work to extraordinary effect.

Ovid has left mankind a magnificent achievement, and his sparkling poetry is a tour de force of Homeric and Roman myth. As Ovid himself wrote: "As long as Rome is the eternal city, these lines shall echo from the lips of men."

©2006 Audio Connoisseur

Great rendition of questionable content

With no prior experience with classics, I sat down to hear this recasting of the Greek myths with Ovid's late Roman sensibilities. I found the telling of these mostly painful, and wondered that so many stories involve someone turning into a bird. (put a bird on it? ancients must have been totally mind blown that some animals fly)

I was particularly irked by the "Greek myth avengers" stories where Ovid just name drops a bunch of heros into one scene (fighting a pig) and then goes on and on about what each one did. proves that Hollywood is not the only character recycling wasteland.

Really, all of the fighting described in here is a bit over detailed in ways that made it sound pulpy (his brains came out like cheese through cheese cloth) and I didn't come away understanding the gods attitudes any better at all. they are all extremely petty.

More engaging than the Bible, for sure, but I medium regret having given 17 hours to this work. Maybe I don't have the right attitude to appreciate the classics; I was expecting more story power than what is here. Which is described well but gives no strong sense of the morality behind the stories. Even despite the heavy focus on the surface the stories are Ok.

Imagine my horror to have wasted several years learning ancient Greek to get this content. On that score, 17hrs is a bargain.

Dare I continue this foolish line of inquiry with the Iliad next? probably but I'm pretty stubborn and masochistic with the western intellectual tradition.

Wes Craven, read it and weep!

If you have ever had an interest in the mythology of Greece and Rome, then you need to listen to or read The Metamorphosis. This book is the source of many of the stories that have come down to us. After avoiding the book for years (the title put me off), I finally listened to it. Oh my! Modern horror writers would blanch at some of the stories. Being held helpless in bed as you are covered in vipers and driven mad by the furies. Being transformed into a deer and hunted by your own friends and dogs. The horror lies in the loss of agency and the retention of knowledge of who you were. And stories of love and compassion, of betrayal and loyalty.

The book is more a series of short stories that explore the psyche of people than a single piece. It can be digested in delightful tidbits over time. It's one that I probably would never have taken the time to read, but it was a magnificent listen.

Solid

This is a solid well done production. The narration was very good. The central theme of this epic poem is "things that change" and this is the thread which interconnects all of the various tales. Its full of very colorful stories and loaded with fanciful creatures and all the gods are there. Loads of beautiful Nymphs hanging about in the glades and shores of quiet pools...

Spirited reading of the Horace Gregory translation

It took my 15 days to hear the entire reading. One enters into an alternate world of unexpected changes of entwined human and divine hearts.
Ovid was the Rod Serling of the ancient world.
This epic of Being in the midst of surprise, sexual violence and trapped identities speaks more to our time than political Vergil or pedantic Lucretius. Go enter this ever relevant Twilight Zone where many "know the best but do the worst' And Ovid of course was the author Shakespeare most lovingly learned and stole from!

It’s good

I like these stories. I wish I had any idea who translated this version. I want a book to properly follow along with while this audiobook plays.

Terrific Narraration

Griffin does a terrific job narrating. He breathes life into each character without taking away from the majesty that is Ovid. Worth the price. I would say it is the best Audio version on Ovid performed by a single narrator.

Eh. A better translation would help

This is just ok. The translation is fair. There is a bit of monotheism applied which really is distracting. The performance is fine but it doesn’t uplift a dull translation.

Not that translation mentioned in Amazon reviews

I think this source of audio book was translated by Horace Gregory, link as follow:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Metamorphoses-ebook/dp/B00328ZUO8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369420126&sr=1-1&keywords=horace+gregory

Beautiful experience

It was a beautiful experience to go through this work, which has inspired so much of our own literature. In one of the Great Lecture series the professor mentioned that for many historical reasons this work, originally written around 8 BC, was preserved and went on to be widely studied by many influential English authors, such as Shakespeare and Chaucer. Ovid's mastery of poetic form and his use of the mythologies as a symbolic medium to explore life and existence, rather than serve as a worship of the gods, made his writing imminently approachable to intellectuals from the Christian era even while other ancient works were abandoned. After the professor's description of the scope of Ovid's influence, I decided to dive in and experience this for myself.

Ovid did something unspecified by historical sources to anger Augustus and was exiled to a small backwater area where he wrote this masterpiece. It is unclear what he did, but he continually petitioned to be allowed to return to Rome and was rejected. Ovid was cynical, irreverent, sarcastic, hilarious, slightly perverse and very eloquent, which comes through in his writing. I enjoyed the beautiful imagery and scope of this work and, personally, think he was dropping hints to the reason for his exile by Augustus in certain stories and arguing for the end of his exile in others.

I particularly loved the imagery of the first two and final books, and the description of the forests being flooded and branches brushing against the sides of dolphins as they swam between the trees was breathtaking. I also laughed aloud in several places as Ovid made dry pronouncements about somebody's motives or personal limitations. This was definitely a weighty book, so I could not go through it in a single sitting, and took several breaks from it to ensure I was in the frame of mind to be able to focus on it. It was also hard for me to remember all of the deities and their traits, particularly since he used their Latin names, but I was able to get through it with the occasional reference (e.g. - Phoebus is Apollo, even though earlier in the work Ovid actually calls him Apollo instead of Phoebus; and Lucifer was a completely different character in Latin mythology affiliated with the brightest morning star whose name was later applied to Christianity's Satan). I'm sure being a scholar of classical mythology would really help illuminate this work, but that certainly isn't necessary and I was able to comprehend what was going on without those credentials.

This definitely was not an easy piece of literature to go through, but it was not a chore to do so either and the experience was both enjoyable and enlightening. Give it a try!

Charlton Griffin's Metamorphoses

I listened to Charlton Griffin read an obscure translation of the Odyssey last year and came to love the poem after years of resistance. He excelled in that reading in conveying the voices of wily warriors and lowly peasants. Here he is reading a very different poet. He makes Ovid sound urbane, "cool," "hip." The poet wallowed in stories of emotional distress and extreme passion and deeds of bloods. Griffin tells these stories with relish. He doesn't create a vivid gallery of distinct characters the way Robert Whitfield did in his great reading of Don Quixote but he slip into Ovid's characters, men and women, in a quiet, smooth manner that doesn't call attention to itself, letting the hearer following along without any inconsistency of tone to jar him or her out of the story. If I got tired at times of the reading, it was because I listened to this long poem in a short time, instead of drawing it out and savoring it more. A fine performance.