










































James Joyce’s Dedalus: Transformations of 
Ovid, Vergil and Plato

Stephen Rojcewicz

Numerous critics have demonstrated how James Joyce’s 
characterization of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of A 
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, is indebted 

to the story of Daedalus in the Metamorphoses (completed 8 CE 
by Publius Ovidius Naso), and that Portrait owes much of its 
labyrinthine structure and various plot elements to Ovid’s epic-
like poem. Building on the insights of these scholars, the present 
study closely examines key passages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 
and also expands our understanding of Joyce’s intertextuality to 
include additional accounts of Daedalus in Vergil’s Aeneid, Book 
6, and in Platonic dialogues, works familiar to Joyce at the time 
of writing Portrait. 

The magisterial scholar of the modern reception of classical 
Roman poets, Theodore Ziolkowski, asserts that Ovid enters 
modern English literature in the person of Joyce’s Stephen 
Dedalus in the 1916 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
Man. Portrait signals its indebtedness to Ovid with an epigraph 
from Metamorphoses.1 Joyce prefaced his novel with “Et ignotas 
animum dimittit in artes” (Met. 8.188). In English translation, this 
reads: “and he [Daedalus] sent forth his mind to unknown arts.” 
Ovid also treated the story of Daedalus and Icarus in his earlier 
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) 2.21-98, written circa 2-1 BCE; 
however, Joyce’s epigraph, Portrait’s emphasis on transformation, 
and Stephen’s memory of the teacher who “taught him to construe 
the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English”2 indicate 
that Joyce relied primarily on Metamorphoses for the Ovidian 
influences in this novel. The Latin citation from Metamorphoses 
is the only time Joyce prefaced any of his works with an epigraph. 
In addition, the main character’s surname, Dedalus, derives from 
the name of Ovid’s hero. In early 1904 Joyce started signing his 
letters with the name “Stephen Daedalus.”3 In Stephen Hero, the 
surviving pages of an early draft of Portrait, the protagonist’s name 
is spelled “Daedalus,” and Joyce published three short stories 

1   Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005), 32-
36.
2   James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. 
Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968), 179. Parenthetical page references to this 
edition will include the letter P. 
3     Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984), 30.



68    James Joyce’s Dedalus

in1904 under the pen name, “Stephen Daedalus.”4 In analogy 
to the labyrinth invented by Ovid’s Daedalus, Joyce’s Stephen 
Dedalus will wend his way through the complex and confusing 
structure of the streets of Dublin. As noted by Lateiner, Portrait 
borrows narrative, similes, and metaphors from Ovid’s account.5 
Like Ovid, Joyce will spend the rest of his life in exile—in his case 
a voluntary removal from Ireland, while Ovid was banished from 
Rome by the emperor Augustus.

This paper provides a close reading of three major passages 
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—the opening section (called a 
proem, 1.1-4), the narrative of Daedalus and Icarus’ flight (8.183-
235), and the epic’s conclusion (called a sphraxis, 15.871-79). 
Corresponding sections of Portrait and an examination of Joyce’s 
word “artificer” illustrate Joyce’s reception and modification of Ovid. 
Joyce was very familiar with Ovid and Vergil from his attendance 
at a Jesuit-run secondary school, Belvedere College, from 1893 to 
1898. While he was introduced early to selections from Ovid and 
Vergil, Joyce specifically studied Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 8, 
containing the Daedalus narrative, in middle grade, beginning in 
June 1897, at age 15. Ovid’s account of Daedalus’ burial of his 
son was a focus of that school year’s national-wide examination 
for Latin by the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland, a test 
in which Joyce participated.6 Joyce also continued with studies of 
Latin literature at University College, Dublin.

Ovid’s Proem, Joyce’s Epigram, and Portrait

Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, starts with a programmatic 
statement that the poem will emphasize relentless changes related 
to forms, that the literary style itself will undergo modifications 
inspired by the gods, and that the epic will represent a continuous 
narrative from the creation of the world to the author’s own times. 
Joyce’s Portrait provides an Ovidian epigraph about the artist 
applying his mind to unknown arts, with the indication, for those 
who know the passage in Ovid, that the artist will “give a new form 
to nature.” While the gods (di) inspire Ovid, Joyce’s inspiration 
comes from Daedalus as represented by Ovid, Vergil, and Plato, 
as well as from Plato’s account of the demiurge, the creator of 
the world. 

4    Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 164.
5    Donald Lateiner, “The Epigraph to Joyce’s Portrait,” Classical and Modern 
Literature 4 (1983): 77-84, at 78.
6    Bruce Bradley, James Joyce’s Schooldays (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), 
129.



Stephen Rojcewicz    69

Here is my literal translation, and the Latin original, of the 
proem of Metamorphoses: 

My mind moves me to tell of forms changed into new
bodies. You, gods, inspire my undertakings 
(for you have changed them, too), and draw out a 
   continuous song
from the world’s first origins to my own time.

   In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!

Met. 1.1-47

The accusative phrase in the opening line, mutatas ... formas 
(“forms having been changed”), appears to have been the basis 
of Ovid’s Latin title, mutatae formae (nominative case), the words 
by which Ovid refers to his epic in his poems from exile, Tristia 
1.1.117, 1.7.113, and 3.14.9. The Greek rendition of this phrase, 
Metamorphoses, does not appear until some decades later, used 
first by Seneca, and then by Quintilian.8 Ovid structures the first 
clause of his poem so that the reader does not learn the noun 
object of the preposition In until after the enjambment leading 
to the second line, corpora. Many English translators render 
“In nova ... mutatas formas corpora” as “bodies changed into 
new forms.”9 The Latin grammatical structure, however, says 
otherwise: the adjective nova must modify the noun corpora, with 
which it agrees in gender and case, so that Ovid is instead writing 
that “forms are changed into new bodies.” 

Ovid’s words begin Joyce’s Portrait: “Et ignotas animum 
dimittit in artes” (Met. 8.188); “and he [Daedalus] sent forth his 
mind to unknown arts.” Like Ovid’s opening clause (“In nova ... 
corpora”), the epigraph does not disclose its basic meaning until 
its last word, artes (“arts”). Joyce, a superb Latin scholar, knew 
the phrase Ovid placed immediately following artes, and would 
assume that many of his readers would make the connection. 
Ovid continues: “naturamque novat” (Met. 8.189), “and he gave a 
new form to nature / changed the constitution of nature / invented 

7    Ovid. Metamorphoses. Latin text at  thelatinlibrary.com.
8    Stephen M. Wheeler, A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance 
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999), 14, 214.
9    E.g., Rolfe Humphries, Metamorphoses (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955); 
Stanley Lombardo, Ovid: Metamorphoses (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010).

http://thelatinlibrary.com.


70    James Joyce’s Dedalus

a new nature.” The first words of Portrait thus correspond to the 
first clause of Metamorphoses: the artists (Ovid, Daedalus, Joyce) 
will apply new forms to bodies, creating a new nature. Just as the 
last word of the epigraph, artes, clarifies what has been unknown 
(ignotas), the last words of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of Joyce’s 
Portrait will clarify, and even reinterpret, their respective proem 
and epigraph. 

Lines 2-3 of Ovid’s proem address the gods, asking them to 
inspire the poet’s writings, and indicating that they have already 
changed them. In addition to any change of content, the gods 
have influenced the poet’s style. The first elegy of the Amores, 
an earlier work by Ovid, explains how the gods have changed the 
metrical form of that poem: 

par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. Am. 1.1.3-4

 [As if planned in hexameters], the second verse was 
equal in measure to the first. Cupid, it is said, laughed 
and stole away one metrical foot. 

Removing one foot (unum ... pedem) from the second line of 
each couplet results in the meter known as the elegiac couplet, 
consisting of a hexameter line followed by a so-called pentameter 
line, a rhythm suitable for erotic poetry. In Metamorphoses, in 
contrast, Ovid uses the characteristic Latin and Greek meter for 
heroic epic, hexameter lines, throughout. The gods have changed 
Ovid’s poetry again. The style of Joyce’s fiction will undergo even 
more metamorphoses than Ovid’s.

Following the proem, Ovid depicts chaos, then the creation of 
the world and the four ages of mankind. The narrative continues 
with the stories of hundreds of metamorphoses of humans into, 
for example, trees, stone and animals, eventually incorporating 
recent Roman history, and concluding with a statement 
underlining the permanence of the poet’s achievement. Joyce’s 
Portrait proceeds from early childhood to young adulthood, with 
examples of the chaos of Stephen’s fears and insecurities, leading 
to a religious crisis in which he rejects his mother’s beliefs and 
practices, despite her desperate pleas that he fulfill his religious 
obligations. The novel concludes with Stephen’s decision to 
become an artist and an exile, evoking Ovid’s Daedalus and 
other creators in the process.



Stephen Rojcewicz    71

Ovid’s Daedalus and Stephen Dedalus

Portrait repeats and transforms multiple themes from Ovid’s 
account of Daedalus and Icarus in Metamorphoses 8.183-235, 
including the comparison of humans to birds (P 169 and 171), 
the importance of feathers (P 171), and a parody of Icarus’ fall 
when a boy who is swimming cries out, “I’m drownded!” (P 169). 
The most frequent Joycean allusions to this passage in Ovid 
relate to Daedalus as an artist, and to the flight of Daedalus, 
whom Joyce sees as heroic in his choice to become an exile. 
Stephen Dedalus becomes an artist when he fully accepts the 
implications of his name, “Dedalus.” In the second half of Book 
IV, when Stephen’s schoolmates are teasing him about his name, 
he experiences an epiphany related to the name of “the fabulous 
artificer.” Schoolfellows, while swimming and diving, tease 
Stephen, calling out:

—Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! 
Bous Stephaneforos!

Their banter was not new to him and now it 
flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never 
before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. 
So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and 
impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one 
to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient 
kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the 
vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of 
the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of 
dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the 
waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? 
Was it a quaint device opening a page of some 
medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-
like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy 
of the end he had been born to serve and had been 
following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, 
a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop 
out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring 
impalpable imperishable being?  (P 168-69).

The Greek or quasi-Greek names by which young men tease 
Stephen directly point to the legend of Daedalus. Stephanos is 
Greek for a wreath or crown. Dedalos is a Greek-like form of 
Stephen’s surname, the correct Greek transliteration being 
Daidalos. Bous is Greek for ox or bull. As Lateiner has noted, 



72    James Joyce’s Dedalus

bous evokes the bull loved by Pasiphae, for whose consummation 
Dedalus built a contraption in the form of a wooden cow, as well 
as recalling the half-bull, half-human Minotaur, to contain whom 
Daedalus built the labyrinth.10 Although Gifford and Seidman 
claim that Stephanoumenos is “[s]choolboy Greek,”11 the word 
is authentic ancient Greek, the middle or passive voice present 
participle of the verb stephanoō, meaning “being crowned by 
a wreath,” as a bull or ox would be crowned prior to sacrifice. 
While stephanōmenos is the most common form of this participle, 
Achilles Tatius spells it stephanoumenos. Stephanēforos is an 
active voice present participle of the verb stephanēphoreō, which 
means “to wear a wreath.” This word is also authentic Greek, 
although the “e” is not the short vowel epsilon, but the long form 
of “e,” eta (here transliterated as ē). Joyce returns to several of 
these phrases in Ulysses. The first page of Ulysses, for example, 
calls attention to Stephen’s name when Buck Mulligan addresses 
Stephen: “The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an 
ancient Greek!” (U 1.34).12 In addition, in the Scylla and Charybdis 
chapter, Joyce will repeat the phrases Bous Stephanoumenos (U 
9.939), Stephanos (U 9.947) and “Fabulous artificer” (U 9.952). 

After further allusions to Daedalus, Portrait depicts Stephen 
seeing a girl wading in the water. As Fritz Senn states, “[A]t 
Stephen’s climactic awareness of the portent of his own name, 
classical echoes conveniently cluster. The artist, in his new-
found vocation, proceeds at once to transform the first real being 
available, the girl in the water, into a literary composition.”13 Joyce 
writes:

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and 
still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom 
magic had changed into the likeness of a strange 
and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs 
were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an 
emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a 
sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued 

10    Lateiner, “Epigraph,” 81.
11    Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James 
Joyce’s Ulysses. 2nd ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 245.
12   Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler. (New York: 
Random House, 1986). Parenthetical references are to chapter and line 
numbers in this edition.
13   Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 136.



Stephen Rojcewicz    73

as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the 
white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of 
soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted 
boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her 
bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft 
as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her 
long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with 
the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. (P 171).

Ovid frequently writes of the transformation of humans into birds, 
such metamorphoses occurring over forty times. Scylla and her 
father change into birds in the narrative prior to the Daedalus 
narrative, and Daedalus’ nephew becomes a bird in the passage 
immediately after Icarus’ drowning.

Portrait of the Artist/Artificer

The last paragraph of the novel specifically evokes Ovid’s 
Daedalus: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in 
good stead” (P 253). In one sense, Stephen Dedalus is Icarus, 
the son of Daedalus, since the person he now calls “father” 
is Ovid’s “old artificer.” In another sense, Stephen himself is 
the mythic Daedalus, since he is about to cross the sea into 
exile, and to become an artist, an artificer. Joyce’s sentence is 
multivocal, with even additional identifications. The concluding 
words (“stand me now and ever in good stead”) sound like a 
prayer. Sidney Feschbach has argued that the Platonic dialogues 
provide a structure for Portrait. In reference to the final chapter 
of Portrait, Feschbach writes that the “chapter’s divine mode 
suggests that Stephen’s final appeal to the ‘old father and old 
artificer’ is directed not only to Ovid’s Daedalus, but also to Plato’s 
more divine demiurge.”14 In the 1871 translation of Timaeus by 
Benjamin Jowett, a work that would have been available to Joyce, 
the demiurge, the creator of our world, uses these precise words 
to describe himself to the other gods: “gods, children of gods, 
who are my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my 
creations are indissoluble if so I will.”15 

14    Sidney Feschbach, “’A Slow and Dark Birth’: A Study of the Organization 
of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce Quarterly 4 (Summer 
1967): 289–300, at 296.
15   Plato, Timaeus 41a, trans. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (1871; rpr. Oxford: 
Oxford UP, 1924). Italics mine.



74    James Joyce’s Dedalus

Joyce actually compares the fictional word he constructed to 
the world created by the demiurge, suggesting that his fictional 
world is superior since he has though more carefully about 
the order. The Swiss journalist and critic, Jacques Mercanton, 
recalled the following, in an article published, appropriately, in the 
Geneva journal, Labyrinthe: 

Il est curieux d’observer d’ailleurs que ce maître 
de l’équivoque ... avait ... besoin de l’ordre dans le 
monde....

Désordre, oui, désordre vivant qui vient 
troubler notre ordre stérile, mais soumis à ces lois 
implacables que Joyce ne cessait de scruter.... [I]l ... 
me demandait: — N’est-ce pas? C’est bien ainsi que 
doit pratiquer le démiurge pour fabriquer notre beau 
monde? ... il ajoutait: — Peut-être, en somme, qu’il 
réfléchit moins que nous.16

It is curious to observe, however, that this master 
of ambiguity had need for order in the world.... 

Disorder, yes, a living disorder, which could 
upset our sterile order, but one submissive to 
these implacable laws which Joyce did not cease 
to scrutinize. He asked me, “Isn’t this the way the 
demiurge must operate to make our beautiful world?” 
... He added, “Perhaps, after all, he [the demiurge] 
reflects less than we do.”

Two collections of Platonic dialogues are known to have been in 
Joyce’s personal library in Trieste while he was writing Portrait. One 
of these volumes, Socratic Discourses by Plato and Xenophon, 
contains a translation of Plato’s Euthyphro by Florence Stawell. 
In Euthyphro, the eponymous participant compares Socrates to 
the philosopher’s ancestor Daedalus. Joyce was well aware of 
this attribution since an archival note while he was writing Portrait 
(VI.B.1.16) refers to Euthyphro, noting that one of the ancestors 
of Socrates was the master craftsman.17 The dialogue identifies 
Socrates with Daedalus because the philosopher’s words keep 
changing their meanings just as Daedalus’ statues were reputed 
to move on their own. Euthyphro, in the translation in Joyce’s 

16    Jacques Mercanton, “Les heures de James Joyce,” Labyrinthe (14 October 
1944): 2.
17   R. J. Schork, Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: UP of 
Florida, 1998), 286, n.11.



Stephen Rojcewicz    75

collection, says to Socrates, “you are our Daedalus” (the Greek 
text has ὁ Δαίδαλος, more correctly “you are the Daedalus”), 
prompting this reply:

Then, my friend, I must think myself so much the 
better artist than that great man, insamuch as he only 
made his own works move, but I, it appears, can give 
this power to the works of others too. 18 

Here is the original Greek text of Euthyphro 11d, followed by my 
translation:

κινδυνεύω ἄρα, ὦ ἑταῖρε, ἐκείνου τοῦ ἀνδρὸς 
δεινότερος γεγονέναι τὴν τέχνην τοσούτῳ, ὅσῳ ὁ μὲν 
τὰ αὑτοῦ μόνα ἐποίει οὐ μένοντα, ἐγὼ δὲ πρὸς τοῖς 
ἐμαυτοῦ, ὡς ἔοικε, καὶ τὰ ἀλλότρια.
Then, my friend, I run the risk of turning out to be this 
much more awesome than that man in my artistry, 
in that he made only his own works move while I, it 
seems, cause the works of others as well as my own 
to move.

Daedalus in this dialogue is an artist who can make statues 
move, but Socrates is much more awesome (δεινότερος, 
deinoteros) since his words can shift meaning. The adjective 
deinoteros is the comparative form of deinos, which has multiple 
connotations, including “tremendous,” “wonderful,” “skillful,” 
“clever,” “marvelous,” “strange,” and even “terrible.”  Joyce’s 
prose could also be called “words that can shift meaning.”  In 
becoming the artist/artificer Daedalus, Stephen also becomes 
the creator demiurge and the wise man, Socrates.

Joyce applies “artificer” to the mythological Daedalus both in 
the last sentence of Portrait (“Old father, old artificer,” P 253) and 
in the passage where Stephen accepts the implications of “the 
name of the fabulous artificer” (P 169). The adjective “fabulous,” 
as McBride notes, suggests the teller of fables, bringing the 
reader back to the first words of Portrait following the epigram: 
“Once upon a time” (P 7).19 R. J. Schork comments that Ovid 
never describes Daedalus with the term artifex, the Latin 
equivalent for “artificer,” instead using opifex. Referring to Latin 

18    Plato, Euthyphro 11b-d, trans. Florence Stawell, Socratic Discourses by 
Plato and Xenophon (London: Dent, 1910), 300-320, at 313. Greek text at http://
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0169.
19   Margaret McBride, Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus 
(Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2011), 15.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0169
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0169


76    James Joyce’s Dedalus

dictionaries, Schork speculates that Joyce understood artifex to 
mean a master in the liberal arts, and opifex a craftsman in the 
manual arts.20 The noun “artificer” is significant because of its 
close phonetic association with the protagonist, the “Artist as a 
Young Man.” Schork’s distinction, however, is not clear-cut in the 
Oxford Latin Dictionary,21 where the first definition given for artifex 
is the “practitioner of any art,” and only definition 4 is “a craftsman 
in one of the fine arts,” and definition 1 for opifex is “Craftsman, 
artificer,” to be followed by 2, “one who works with his hands, a 
craftsman, artisan (often disparagingly).”  In addition, while Ovid 
does not refer to Daedalus as “artificer,” he does apply that name 
to himself in Tristia 3.14.6, writing of his Art of Love) that injured 
its artificer (“artifici quae nocuere suo”). 

It could be argued that Stephen at the conclusion of the novel 
cannot be identifying with the mythological Daedalus, because 
Stephen is just starting to become an artist, while after the death 
of Icarus, the father is no longer an artist because he “cursed 
his arts” (“devovitque suas artes,” Met. 8.235). In this passage, 
however, Ovid does not specify whether the artes include 
Daedalus’ sculpture and architecture, or only the “unknown arts” 
(“ignotas ... artes”) (Met. 8.188) that led to the building of a flying 
apparatus. Having studied Vergil thoroughly, however, Joyce 
was familiar with a description in Aeneid 6.14-33 of Daedalus’ 
artistic creation after his son’s death, and thus Joyce knew that 
Daedalus continued as an artist, carving sculptures on the doors 
of a temple in order to tell the story of the Minotaur, the labyrinth, 
and Daedalus and Icarus. Vergil describes Daedalus, however, 
as trying twice to portray the death of Icarus, but bis patriae 
cecidere manus, “twice the hands of the father failed.”

Ovid’s Sphraxis and Joyce’s Conclusion

Ovid’s proem concludes with his desire that the gods will 
inspire him to compose a “continuous song / from the world’s first 
origins to my own time” (Met. 1.3-4). Compare the penultimate 
paragraph of Joyce’s Portrait. About to leave Ireland for European 
exile, Stephen Dedalus writes in his journal: “Welcome, O life, I 
go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and 
to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my 

20   Schork, 1997. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 
1997), 155.
21   P. G. W. Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary, rev. ed. (London: Oxford UP, 2006). 
Definitions of artifex are on pp. 176-77, while opifex is on p. 1253.



Stephen Rojcewicz    77

race” (P 252-53). To balance Ovid’s history of the world, Joyce 
will forge, in a rhythm that echoes the music of Ovid’s dactylic 
hexameters, “the uncreated conscience of my race.”22 The verb 
“forge” refers back to Stephen’s words when he decides to become 
an artist, “forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter 
of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?” (P 
169). While this goal of forging “the uncreated conscience of 
my race” may not constitute writing the history of the Irish race 
or of the human race, Joyce’s writings will achieve a new style, 
summing up and transforming centuries of literary styles.

In both the conclusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (called a 
sphraxis, or “seal”) and the ending of Joyce’s Portrait, the writers 
set the stage for art that will last beyond this world characterized 
by metamorphoses and chaos. Ovid writes:

Now I have completed the work.
The fury of Jove, fire, sword, guzzling time—
None can destroy it.
Let that day arrive
(Claiming a right only to my flesh)
Which will cut short life’s uncertain years.
I shall be carried above eternal stars,
My name deathless and indelible.
Where Roman influence extends
People will read my poems.
If prophesies by poets capture truth,
Then I shall live, throughout all ages.23 

Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis 
nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas.
cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aeui:
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 ueri uatum praesagia, uiuam.  

Met. 15.871-79

22   Scansion of the clause “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated 
conscience of my race,” using the Latin rule of elision between a word ending in 
a vowel and the next word beginning with a vowel (“the un-created”), yields five 
dactyls and a trochee, a perfectly metrical hexameter, with a pause (caesura) in 
the third foot, after “soul.”
23   This translation previously appeared as “Beyond Metamorphoses” in Delos 
29-30, (1999, pub. 2003), 16.



78    James Joyce’s Dedalus

After thousands of verses and hundreds of transformations, 
Ovid has arrived at something not subject to metamorphosis, 
namely his poem and his literary reputation. This conclusion 
reverses the opening lines that suggest that forms continuously 
change into new bodies. Permanence, from Ovid’s standpoint, 
has finally been achieved. In the final pages of Portrait, Stephen’s 
development reaches a conclusion. His last two journal entries 
are:

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand 
clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may 
learn in my own life and away from home and friends 
what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. 
Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time 
the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of 
my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
APRIL 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and 
ever in good stead.   (P 252-53)

While Stephen is not as confident as Ovid, he is determined 
to go into exile and to become an artist, so that the concluding 
sentences reverse the chaos, insecurities, and difficulties of 
his labyrinthine wanderings through Dublin. These two journal 
entries delineate the multiple identities that enable Stephen’s 
decision. McBride claims that “Stephen’s story is neither that 
of Icarus nor that of Daedalus. Stephen, at the story’s end, is 
a mythopoetic writer like Ovid, telling the tale of a Daedalian 
artist.”24 Joyce, however, never limits himself to an either/or, 
binary exclusion: Stephen self-identifies, in part, with all these 
individuals. He is Ovid’s Daedalus as a heroic artist and exile. 
He is Vergil’s Daedalus in combining hopes of artistic success 
with fears of artistic failure, but unlike Vergil’s Daedalus who 
cannot depict the death of his son, Stephen will be courageous in 
fully portraying the truth. Stephen also is Icarus in going against 
parental advice and warnings by rejecting his mother’s beliefs and 
religious practices. Moreover, he is Socrates’ Daedalus in that 
his words keep changing their meanings, and Plato’s demiurge 
through the creation of a world that builds order out of disorder. 
Joyce entitled his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 
it is also a “Portrait of the Artist” as shaped by the reception and 
transformation of Ovid, Vergil, and Plato. 

24   McBride, Ulysses and the Metamorphosis of Stephen Dedalus, 16.



Stephen Rojcewicz    79

With the final paragraphs of Portrait, James Joyce becomes the 
consummate artist who perfects art by concealing art. A medieval 
Latin saying, erroneously attributed to Horace, states that ars 
est celare artem, “the perfection of art is to conceal art.” Joyce 
accomplishes this not in the sense of hiding the labor needed to 
make the art seem unlabored, but instead by enclosing a wealth 
of meaning in just a few words. Stephen subsumes a world of 
literary allusions to ancient texts in these two phrases, “to forge 
in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” 
and “Old father, old artificer.” The Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
Man has now become the portrait of an artist who will be modern, 
courageous, innovative, and rebellious, but also an artist imbued 
with, and contributing to, the classical tradition.


