Roman Poetry & Prose
Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.871–879 — I Shall Live
The final lines of the Metamorphoses turn transformation back onto the poet himself. Ovid declares that fire, iron, age and even Jupiter’s anger cannot destroy the work he has completed. His body may die, but the better part of him will rise beyond it: his name will remain, his poetry will be read, and — if poets’ prophecies contain truth — vivam, “I shall live.”
This passage gives Metamorphosis a second primary source beside Tristia 1.7. The exile poem shows Ovid begging that his books may live without him; the closing lines of the Metamorphoses make the more audacious claim that the poet himself will live through them.
Text Information
Author: Ovid Work / Passage: Metamorphoses 15.871–879 Language: Latin Genre: Epic / mythological poetry Context: The closing lines of the fifteen-book Metamorphoses
Original Latin
Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
38th Scroll Translation
And now I have completed a work that neither Jupiter’s anger, nor fire, nor iron, nor devouring age will be able to erase.
When it wishes, let that day — which has power over nothing except this body — bring the uncertain span of my life to an end. Yet in the better part of me I shall be carried everlasting above the high stars, and my name will be indelible.
Wherever Roman power extends across the conquered lands, I shall be read by the mouths of the people; and through every age, in fame — if the prophecies of poets possess any truth — I shall live.
Translation Notes
opus exegi — “I have completed a work.” The line deliberately sounds monumental. The poem closes by presenting itself as something built to outlast ordinary destruction.
Iovis ira — “the anger of Jupiter.” The phrase is cosmic and poetic. It should not automatically be converted into a coded reference to Augustus or to Ovid’s later exile.
edax vetustas — “devouring age.” Time itself is imagined as a force that consumes material things.
nil nisi corporis huius ius habet — death has authority over “nothing except this body.” The sentence sharply separates bodily mortality from the poet’s literary survival.
parte ... meliore mei — “in the better part of me.” Ovid does not define that better part philosophically in detail; within the closing claim it is the part preserved through name, text and fame.
ore legar populi — literally, “I shall be read by the mouth of the people.” Reading is imagined as repeated public speech: the poem survives because future voices continue to pronounce it.
vivam — “I shall live.” The final word of the poem turns literary fame into a form of continued life.
A Poem About Transformation Ends with Literary Survival
The Metamorphoses spends fifteen books showing bodies, cities, gods, landscapes and identities changing form. At the end, Ovid applies the logic of transformation to authorship.
The body remains mortal. The poem does not promise physical escape from death. Instead, the poet imagines a second mode of existence: text becoming memory, memory becoming fame, and future readers repeatedly giving voice to a name that cannot otherwise remain present.
That is why the ending is more than a conventional boast about reputation. It completes the poem’s central obsession with the persistence of identity through change.
Before and After Exile
These lines belong to the Metamorphoses, not to the poetry Ovid wrote from Tomis. They should therefore not be read as a direct description of exile.
Their later resonance is nevertheless striking. In Tristia 1.7, after his removal from Rome, Ovid tells a friend that his poems are a greater image of him than a portrait, recalls trying to burn the unfinished Metamorphoses, acknowledges that other copies survived, and prays that the work may live and remind readers of him.
The two passages therefore create a powerful dialogue. The earlier epic ends with vivam. The exile poem tests what such survival actually means when the poet’s body is no longer in Rome.
From the Text to Metamorphosis
The composition’s final movement — flesh becoming silence, memory becoming the word, and a sealed scroll opening so that a lost world breathes again — develops the same principle in modern language.
Ovid’s text does not literally describe a scroll resurrecting its author. It does something subtler: it claims that repeated reading can carry the “better part” of the poet beyond the death of the body.
The song turns that literary survival into a visual and musical metamorphosis. The ancient line underneath it is simpler and more defiant:
vivam — I shall live.
Text and Edition
The Latin follows the standard text of Metamorphoses 15.871–879 as represented in modern critical editions and the Packard Humanities Institute corpus. Orthography is lightly normalized.
The English is a new 38th Scroll translation.
Selected Sources and Further Reading
- Ovid. Metamorphoses 15.871–879.
- Packard Humanities Institute. Latin text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
- Ovid. Tristia 1.7.11–30, the companion exile passage already represented in the Ancient Texts library.
- Ovid. Tristia 2.207–212, for the separate phrase carmen et error and Ovid’s explanation of the charges behind his exile.
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