Ovid & Identity

When Jesus of Nazareth was still a boy, the Roman poet Ovid was putting the finishing touches on his “book of changes”, Metamorphoses. Long after Homer and Hesiod, but just one generation after Virgil, Ovid contributed the 4th and ‘final’ epic in the series of Greco-Roman origin stories…final that is until Joyce revived the genre (Ulysses) a century ago.

Ovid consciously strings together mythical material from multiple sources to produce a coherent narrative. His esteemed predecessors used mythology to tell their stories, Ovid uses those stories to tell the uber-story of mythology itself.

Admit it: the first 10 times you read Homer’s epics, you asked, “What did these people really think was going on in these stories?" Ovid sketches an answer. His artful retelling of the ancient myths reveals an ontological thread that gives consistency and significance to these myriad fables. Ultimately, he wrestles with the same questions we do, 2000 years later: 

“Who am I? What makes me, me? How is it that I am me and not you? (Am I me and not you? Or am I both? Or neither?) What about me is essential and what accidental? How is it that I retain my identity irrespective of my form, and when (if ever) are accumulated changes of form sufficient to destroy that identity and/or to constitute a new one?”

In another essay on this site, we talked about Ovid’s ontology using an onion as our model. We are required to systematically remove layer upon layer of ‘form’ to reach the ‘core’, the onion’s Identity. 

But an onion is not an apple (Vidalia’s ad campaigns notwithstanding); an onion has no tangible core. When all the layers of identity are peeled away, we’re left, appropriately, with nothing (Sartre’s Neant). 

The self is not just ‘another form’; the self is the absence of all forms, the negation of ‘form’ per se; the self is what is left when all forms have “dissolved into thin air” (The Tempest). Or the self is what all its forms have in common, the form of forms. When it comes to modeling our identity, apples and onions are apples and oranges.

Let’s start with the easy stuff, the outermost layer: I am not what I seem. I am agnostic as to form. I can be male or maid, vegetable or beast, a tree, a grove, a waterfall, a heifer or a crow. In all these guises, I am ever and forever only me! This is Ovid’s bedrock insight.

Ovid is no phenomenologist, much less a nihilist. He does not abandon the notion of identity. But for Ovid, identity lies below the superficial dichotomies of form: blond or brunette, animal or plant, animate or inorganic. 

Ovid throws down his marker early. His version of Genesis 3, the creation of human beings, makes his project crystal clear: “By the ‘great mother’, the earth is meant, and ‘bones’ I think mean stones…and they throw the stones behind them as they go, and yes…the stones began to lose their hardness; they softened slowly and in softening changed form…one could see the dim beginning of human forms…quite soon the stones the man had thrown were changed to men and those the woman cast took women’s forms.” (1: 18)

Perhaps surprisingly, Norse mythology contains a similar version of human evolution: “Ymir lived on four rivers of milk that came from a cow who fed herself by licking the salty lime stones found in Ginnungagap. As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones…(soon) there was a complete man.” (Prose Edda)

A generation after Ovid, Matthew the evangelist quotes Jesus: “Out of these stones, God can raise up children of Abraham.” (3: 9) Outside of the academy, there is a persistent anti-Platonic tradition: Identity > Form.

The scope of Ovid’s metamorphoses is clear: Great Mother, Earth, bones, stones, men and women – all ‘just’ forms. As I transition among various Platonic forms, what if anything, survives? What are our essential qualities, if any? What constitutes my Identity?

• A subjective Sense of Self (Recursion)

• An objective, inherited, and shared Past (Memory - Freud, Facticity - Sartre) 

• Qualities & Values (Free Will)

These are what constitute Identity (per Ovid), not forms, be they frozen or forever flowing!

Understand Ovid is as the ‘anti-Plato’. Philosophy’s 4^th BCE GOAT gave pride of place in his ontology to forms, i.e. species. Ovid regards form as the equivalent of costume.   

Finally…and ironically, Ovid’s full throated exposition of Greco-Roman polytheism may have ploughed intellectual furrows into which the seeds of a new Weltanschauung - I mean of course, Christianity - could fall, germinate, take root, and grow.

By rejecting the arid rationalism of Plato and Aristotle (geniuses though they were), Ovid restored mutuality and personality to ontology and cosmology. The grandfather of Western philosophy, Anaximander (6th century BCE), grounded identity in dynamic mutuality; Plato grounds it in static form. Ovid grounds cosmology in naked identity. For Ovid, Identity is the universal substructure!  

For example, Ovid’s pantheon reserves a prominent place for Bacchus, a controversial, late breaking deity. Bacchus falls in the tradition of man-gods,  mixing divine and human parentage. The ‘status’ of such demi-gods is a controversial topic in both the hearth and the forum. 

Like the coming Jesus, Bacchus is more humanly relatable than Jove or YHWH. The evolving notion of deity, from tyrant to fellow-traveler, is simultaneously evident on both sides of the Bosporus and in both Hellenic and Semitic cultures. Ovid merges these two great traditions. His gods are consequential; but at the same time, they are wholly relatable. 

If Jesus kicked off the Age of Pisces, then John the Baptist was his Semitic prophet and Ovid was John’s Greco-Roman avatar.

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Image: Stepping In by De Es Schwertberger depicts a humanoid figure whose body appears carved from fractured stone, emerging with quiet awareness and deliberate motion. The cracked, geological surface of the figure suggests that consciousness itself has arisen from the earth, as if the planet has formed a living being through time and pressure. The painting symbolizes awakening and transition—representing the moment when inert matter becomes aware, crossing the threshold from lifeless stone into conscious existence.