Ovid’s Metamorphoses Metamorphosed

A portrait of Johannes Spreng taken from the first, posthumous printing of Ilias Homeri (Augsburg, 1610).

Habent sua fata libelli: “Books have their own destinies,” wrote the Roman poet Ovid.

When it comes to books and destinies, he should know, since he was banished by the emperor Augustus to the shores of the Black Sea in 8 CE for a book — “Arts of Love,” published some years before — and some more proximate unspecified offense. Ovid cooled his heels in what is now Romania until his death in 17 CE.

As for his books, they lived on and were copied hundreds of times through the Middle Ages. Early printers issued myriad editions.

When in early March Anthony Bliss, Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts, e-mailed me that the Bancroft had just acquired a 1583 copy of Ovid’s longest and most famous poem, Metamorphoses, I have to admit I expected to be underwhelmed. “Just another 16th-century impression!” I thought to myself.

I was in for a surprise, for it turns out not to be an edition of the poem at all. Instead, it is a Parisian printing of an illustrated reworking of Ovid’s poem by Johannes Spreng (1524-1601), a remarkable Augsburg Meistersinger.

Just detailing the various traditions and practices out of which the book emerged opens a window on a fascinating set of cultural currents in Germany and France in the second half of the 16th century.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is treasured by current scholars of Latin literature for its witty, often ironic shifts of perspective, its complex narrative structure, its juxtaposition of literary styles. But over the long run of its European reception, Ovid’s magnum opus was treasured above all as a compendious collection of classical myth. Glosses and commentaries indicate how much attention masters and students paid to the mythological lore it contained. Translations into just about every European language, not to mention thousands of works in every medium inspired by tales from the Metamorphoses, brought Ovid out of Latin schoolrooms into the wider vernacular world.

Then as now, such obviously “irrelevant” learning had both cultural cachet and cultural opponents. The tales of pagan gods and heroes (and their amorous adventures) had often raised concerns among Christian educators. From the late 12th century, but with increasing fervor in the 13th and 14th centuries, Latin commentators variously mined the tales for universally applicable morals or allegorized them in specifically Christian terms, not only justifying continued study of the Metamorphoses but creating a new industry — a complementary tradition itself inexhaustible and infinitely malleable. Vernacular audiences presented new challenges and new opportunities, as did, of course, the great technical novelty of printing.

By the end of the 15th century, enterprising printers engaged scholars to prepare more and more material for publication. Latin books predominated, but the 16th century saw increased printing of vernacular texts, which opened new markets and called for new promotions. So it was that near the middle of the century, a German publisher, Ivo Schöffer, got Jörg Wickram to prepare a German translation of the Metamorphoses for printing.

Wickram didn’t translate the 12,000-some lines of Ovid’s Latin anew. Instead, he got hold of a manuscript of a rare, late-12th-century German verse rendering of the Metamorphoses by monk and poet Albrecht von Halberstadt, likely written for the great literary patron Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia.

Wickram updated the language to appeal to contemporary tastes (think colorizing technician working for a 16th-century Ted Turner). The book came out in 1545 and had an immediate impact. No less a figure than Hans Sachs in the two months following publication of Wickram’s Metamorphoses created over 40 songs inspired by tales from Ovid.

Collections of engravings based on tales from the Metamorphoses were also popular, and printers were quick to exploit the fact that the same set of woodcuts could be used to illustrate editions in Latin and multiple vernacular languages. This principle is well illustrated by the work of Bernard Salomon, master of the Lyons school of woodcutting. (Lyons was a much more important center for printing at the time than Paris.)

Salomon created an influential set of 178 illustrations for a 1557 edition of the Metamorphoses in which the text is subordinate to the pictures: while the drawings are inspired by Ovid, we read not Ovid’s verse but verse summaries of the “fables.”

By 1563 the very enterprising Frankfurt printer Siegmund Feyerabent had commissioned a Nürnberg artist, Virgil Solis, to produce a series of illustrations closely based on Salomon’s originals. Feyerabent used these 178 woodcuts in no fewer than three books in that one year, all aimed at slightly different markets.

A Solis woodcut from Bancroft’s new Metamorphoses.

Accompanied only by four-line verse captions in Latin and German composed by Johan Posthius, they appeared in what was primarily a picture book. They also appeared in Micyll’s edition of Ovid’s Latin text, with a variorum commentary in Latin for the learned. Somewhere in between fell Spreng’s book of fables from the Metamorphoses, published in 1563 in Latin. Spreng and Feyerabent would bring out a German version of the same work the following year; nor was that the last time Feyerabent used the Solis woodcuts. Spreng himself exemplifies the wider, bourgeois public who snapped up such books and for whom the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses comprised a veritable 16th-century “dictionary of cultural literacy.”

Spreng studied at the famous university at Wittenberg and taught high school, first in Augsburg and then in Heidelberg, before returning to Augsburg to marry, practice as a notary, and participate in Augsburg’s circle of Meistersinger.

Neither as a classical scholar nor as a poet is Spreng of the first rank — most would say, “not even of the second” — yet his accomplishments are by no means slight. Given his own education and pedagogical activities, his facility at Latin in no way surprises, but Spreng also had more than a little Greek. Indeed, Spreng was the translator of the first complete German version of Homer’s Iliad, for which (typical of the time) he made use of existing Latin translations as well as the Greek original. That poets like Spreng, or the much greater Sachs, adapted material from Homer and Ovid shows that the “classical” and the popular were most definitely not incompatible.

Spreng’s Metamorphoses (Latin, 1563; German, 1564) begin with a dedicatory epistle to the two oldest sons of emperor Maximilian II, the archdukes Rudolf and Ernst. In a foreword to the general reader, Spreng explains his mode of presentation, highlighting the educational aims and values of his Metamorphoses. For each of the 178 fables — and he is quite frank that he has a foreign source for this particular division of the Metamorphoses — Spreng provides a brief prose argument or summary. This appears directly beneath the woodcut on the recto of each folio. On the verso he then retells the tale in Latin elegiac couplets, a verse form derived from but not identical to the hexameters of the original. With shorter syntactical units and more easily recognized patterns of agreement, these are certainly more quickly digested by intermediate readers. (Students of English might contrast Milton’s verse paragraphs with Pope’s heroic couplets.) As he says in his letter to the archdukes, Spreng often uses vocabulary from Ovid’s own poetry. His aim is both to give all readers a shortened, simplified version with some Ovidian color and to give a leg up to those readers who, after reading his version, would move on to authentic Ovid.

Finally, filling out the verso, he adds for each tale a brief allegory, also in Latin elegiacs. All are “moral,” in line with his claim (and not his alone) that beneath the fictions of the poets lie meanings that can help us advance on the “path of virtue” and avoid the “way of perdition.”

For example, he provides the following allegory for Ulysses’ comrades turned into pigs by Circe’s hospitality: “The draughts of Circe represent the empty pleasures that fill hearts with blinding madness. Lethal poison destroys the human image in all who rashly love their charm. In filth, they are justly called pigs” (165).

Satan appears in quite a few of the allegories. The last, 178th metamorphosis — Caesar’s transformation into a star — is overtly Christian:

This is the text we have at Bancroft in our new book, which represents, however, yet one more transformation. Spreng was initially inspired by Solis’ recreations for a Frankfurt printer of Salomon’s original Lyons engravings. Much more faithful, almost exact copies were effected in France, in particular for the Parisian printers Jerome de Marnef and Guillaume Cavellat, who used them in a series of books printed in Paris from 1566 on.

In 1583 de Marnef and Cavellat’s widow combined Spreng’s Latin text with these French copies of Salomon’s illustrations to create the quite rare exemplar now in Bancroft.

It would be risky to suggest that this particular set of summaries and moralizations had a particular attraction in France in the 1580’s, especially since printers often grasped whatever was at hand. Yet in the immediately preceding years, France had been wracked by battles between Protestants and Catholics. Those who urged any kind of tolerance or accommodation were attacked by extremists on one or both sides. Spreng’s allegorizations would seem capable of appealing to readers of all factions. At least from the French vantage point, the Augsburg educator represents a pleasing balance in every regard.

It is a coincidence, but telling nonetheless, that only three years earlier Montaigne stopped at Augsburg and marvelled at, among other things, the city’s many churches, Protestant and Catholic.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, illustrated and allegorized, distracted readers from contemporary crises, but more importantly, taught lessons that predated and transcended them.

Ralph Hexter is Professor of Classics
and Comparative Literature and
Dean of Humanities in the
College of Letters and Science.

Volume 113
Fall 1998

Table of Contents

"Sinners & Pilgrims" Colonel Denny’s Journal and Photo Album

From the Director: Students in Bancroft?

Ovid’s Metamorphoses Metamorphosed

Bonnie Hardwick Follows Her Passions

Rube Goldberg: An American Genius

William P. Barlow, Jr.—A Friend Indeed

Plumbing the Depths of the Spring Valley Water Company

Basketball? At Bancroft? The Oral History of Pete Newell

UC History Journal Debuts

Jean Stone Honored at Annual Meeting

New Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting

For Sale: Two New Bancroft Publications

Desiderata