Aesop Fables And Metamorphoses: Literary Analysis

Marjorie Luciano H.

Professor Elfers-Mabil

Masterpieces of Literature I

16 October 2015 Since we started class we have discussed about ancient Romans and Greeks literature. One out of ten people would be interested in learning these kinds literature. However, these past two weeks we’ve been reading Aesop Fables and Metamorphoses in which each story either teaches someone’s a lesson about life or somewhat changes their physical appearance. Aesop Fables are usually presented as children’s literature. These stories were to demonstrate a moral lesson to the adults in the 5th century B.C. but the themes and characters that were used in the short stories are animals that talked just like human at the same time as retaining their animal’s traits.

This word means changes. Metamorphoses insinuate that people are often transformed in punishment for some misbehavior. Ovid wanted to write more then a traditional epic. Ovid said that his epic was not going to be like Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Illiad. He wanted to create something unlike and new to the other poetries. He started Book I by telling the creation of the world. He describes it in a mixture of scientific and supernatural terms. The differences of the earth and heaven: sea and land. Then he talks about the creation of human beings. Ovid also involved gods, demigod, and mortals, all centering on moments of transformation from one physical state to another. The stories we’ve read in class are full of rapes, deceptions, murders, and unpredictable revenges of the gods. The gods will use their power to get what they want. Whoever that was against their words or actions they were going either be transform into an object or animal or destroyed. As what I have read in the Metamorphoses I can conclude that everything has to do with a beautiful woman who is trying to live as a virgin, free of all men, but chased or raped by a

A beautiful girl name Io refuse to go along with Jupiter, he covers the earth with fogs and raped her. Juno (Zeus’s wife) notices something strange is going on and that her husband was in to something. She cleared the sky and went down to earth where Jove was. Jupiter transformed Io to a cow. He didn’t want Juno to see Io but she pretended she didn’t know what was going on so she decided to take the Io with her and have Argus (100 eyes watchman) to look over her. Jupiter order Mercury to kill Argus so he can take back Io to her father who is looking for her. Mercury pretended to be a shepherd and tried to make Argus to fall asleep by telling him the origin of an unusual instrument (reed pipe). He tells Argus the story about the nymph Syrinx, whom Pan loves though she wishes to be remain a virgin. Argus finally fell asleep and Mercury cut his head off. Juno was furious about it so she was trying to through a spelled to Io but it didn’t work. Jove convinced her to return her to human form. Juno took Argus’s eyes and set them into the tail feathers of her symbolic bird, the