The Greek Mythology behind Hadestown -- Hadestown (1/8, episode 30).

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In ancient Rome, there is a poet.  What we now call western civilization is just beginning to find its first roots take hold … there’s an academy, and Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle are writing books that will be read for centuries.  In fact, books that we still read and talk and think about today.  And in this line, just around the time of Jesus, is our poet.

His star is rising, then crossed.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica documents his rise: “No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 ce the Metamorphoses was complete, if not yet formally published”

The poet doesn’t yet know the impact that his work will have; he can only know that his work is just now complete.  It’s fate, like that of the heroes he’s writing about, is not to get to a final destination unscathed.  Brittanica continues: “and it was at that moment, when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, that he was banished to Tomis by the emperor.”

The work would have to be finished in exile.  And the travails would not end there; the emperor would ban his books from public libraries.  He would write his own autobiography…the title would be “sorrow.”

But history has a way of turning a censor’s work to folly; you can try to ban books but you can’t stop ideas, and when a good book finds it’s audience that genie won’t go back in the bottle.  I’ll keep reading from the Brittanica entry; our poet’s “chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing: its gaiety, its sympathy, its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality…It is those things that have recommended him, down the ages, to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ezra Pound.”  

Really, Ezra Pound?  Ew…yuck.  That dude was a racist monster who sucked in all the ways our poet did not.

The poet’s name was Ovid, the 12th and 13th centuries are called the “age of Ovid,” and he flourished again in the Renaissance.

The book he wrote was called Metamorpheses, and in there is the tale of Orpheus and Eurdyce.  Among those who would not share the Emperor’s scorn for the work was Anais Mitchell, who would pick up the tale in 2006 and turn it into a Broadway smash hit a decade later.

And today, we’ll learn where that story came from.

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