Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. The poet Jericho Brown opens his 2019 collection, “The Tradition,” with a poem called “Ganymede,” in which Jove’s abduction of the beautiful Trojan prince becomes a metaphor for the agonized dynamics of American slavery. Julie Taymor’s notorious Broadway flop, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” was an awkward riff on Ovid’s tale of Arachne, the artistically talented young woman who foolishly challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and, as punishment, was turned into a spider. Already during his lifetime, dance versions of his work were being staged, and the adaptations and borrowings have continued to the present day. More than those of any other poet of ancient Rome, the works of Publius Ovidius Naso-we know him as Ovid-have insinuated themselves into the mind of Europe, influencing its literature, art, and music. That these lines of Roman erotic verse had become indistinguishable from Scripture by the Middle Ages isn’t really all that surprising. The eleventh-century theologian and philosopher Abelard once cautioned against excessive harshness in monastic rule by observing that “we always chafe at restrictions and want what is forbidden”-sensible enough advice, except that the sentence in question was actually meant as a warning to married men that keeping too close an eye on their wives would only make them more eager to stray. (The first part is about where to find them the second, about how to get them into bed the third-the part that James quoted-about how to hold on to them.) The Spanish king was hardly alone in conflating this poet with a Higher Authority. It comes, rather, from a notoriously risqué book of poems, published during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, whose narrator doles out advice on how to seduce women-preferably married ones. The problem is that that line of Latin doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. “It takes no less talent to keep what you’ve got than to acquire it”: for a crusading medieval monarch, what more convenient justification for territorial consolidation could there be than “Sacred Scripture”? We got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam quaerere parta tueri. And we ordered the bishops and the nobles to our Court and we had them assembled in the church of the Preachers. . .
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