Metamorphoses 1-4 notes

Proem .1 - first line

• ‘My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms’

  • in nova…corpora - emphasis on the body! In contrast to the mind (doesn’t always change eg. Callisto, Cadmus, Io, Actaeon)

    • But interestingly don’t see corpora until next line = first metamorphoses!

  • HOWEVER forma here could also refer to the change to epic (generic forma)

    • Tristia refers to the Met as ‘mutatas formas’ at 1.1.117 and 1.7.13 SO very ambiguous terminology used!

    • The word ‘metamorphoses’ is a very fixed idea in our current social understanding (especially with Kafka) thus should view this text much more broadly - about ‘change’ overall

      • Especially as in the text, range of nouns and verbs to describe the changes occuring!

      • mutare, vertere, formare, transformare (etc) / forma, facies, figure, species (all with different connotations!)

    • And generic changes everywhere! Python to Daphne, Calydonian boar to Meleager’s love (and Althaea’s soliloquy)

  • And nova → what poets strive for!

    • Aetia fragment - ‘do not drive your carriage along the tracks of others, nor along a wide road but along unworn paths, even though your course will be more narrow’ (narrow…)

    • Thus, Propertius 3.1 - primus ego ingredior

    • Horace 3.1 - carmina non prius audita

    • Irony that doing something new is a tired trope…

Proem .2 - second / third line

• Gods, ‘you have yourselves wrought the changes, breath on these my undertakings’

  • What power does the god have here? Less than we expect…?

  • Very NOVAL relationship to the gods here

• Calling on the gods like epic poets do! Serious work

  • But simply calls on the gods in general, not the Muses…

  • Odyssey calls on Mousa, Apollonius calls on Phoebus, and then Mousai 20 lines later

  • Aeneid is Musa in line 8

• Furthermore, are the Muses singing or themselves?

  • Iliad & Odyssey only have the Muse sing

  • Apollonius & Aeneid have both

• Ovid DOES invoke the Muses, just much later in 15.662, concerning Asclepius!

  • So exaggerated distance between opening and Muses AND about minor figure

  • And a figure who solves a plague that Romans knew about! 293/2BC yet ‘nec vos fallit spatiosa vetustas’… (also reminding us that Ovid, as narrator, is always there)

Proem .3 - fourth line

• Bring down song in unbroken strains from world’s very beginning even until the present time

  • ‘bring down’ ? → deducite!

  • deductum carmen in Ecl 6.5 (with the interrupting god sequence! Like in Aetia 1.23-4 - need a finespun song!)

  • + Virgil’s Georgics 3.10-13 → as long as life remains I will be the first to bring down the Muses from the Aonian peak (deducam!)

  • And Horace 3.30 - ‘ex humuli potens princeps Aeolium carmen at Italos deduxisse modos’

  • But irony of the perpetuum carmen surrounding the deducite → Callimachean and epic at once (not entirely impossible, but has Ovid achieved this)

  • But also perpetuum doesn’t mean long, it means endless → NO end

    • Tr 2 - Met is sine fine (without end as didn’t finish or without ending…)

    • Aeneid - imperium sine fine…

• + primaque ab origine

  • Aeneas in Virgil suggests that if he tried to chronicle his labour from the very beginning (prima repetens ab origine) the Evening star would close Olympus = not time!

  • Ovid as ‘beating’ Aeneas and thus Virgil

  • And being Lucretian - prima concepta ab origine mundi

• LOTS going on here

Is Ovid now doing epic?

• Genre is a tricky subject as it is both strict with defined boundaries yet something that is so often dismantled

  • Quintilian suggests for oratory - sua cuique proposito lex → each discipline has its own law

  • Horace, Ars Poetica 92, too - ‘each should keep properly to its allotted space’ (should be aware that Horace also subverts genre…)

  • ‘from the very start of recorded literature, authors generally disregarded Quintilian’s admonition to stay timidly within the parameters set by traditions’

• AND something that Ovid plays with from the start

  • Metrically, would not know that the text was not pentameter until vos (5th word in 2nd line)

  • Meter and meaning coinciding

• What defines epic?

  • Being long? If so, Ovid does succeed at this

  • Yet Horace again suggests that one should not begin with Helen popping from the egg to narrate the Trojan war = too far ahead

  • ‘How much better the poet who builds nothing at random?’ - what is Ovid?

Epic genre-bent before

• Lucretius de natura rerum

  • ‘…that my argument must show how the world was born and formed of matter that is subject to death’ (scientific epos!)

  • Didactic and epic at the same time

• Diodorus Siculus also praises this approach - ‘for if a man should begin with the most ancient times and record to the best of his ability the affairs of the entire world down to his own day…he would have compoed a treatise of the upmost value to those who are studously inclined’ → value for scholars!

  • Prose tradition of historiography

  • And see Catullus ‘praise’ Nepus for writing the history (of Rome?) in three books

  • Described as doctis and laboriosis

• But from the start, also have the Hesiodic approach to epos (NOT Homeric)

  • The Muses celebrate the gods by narrating their birth, beginning with Chaos!

  • Also see Chaos in the Met as a primordial mass, surprisingly not anthropomorphised

• Yet can also see later influence with the 6th eclogue and Silenus’ song - ‘he sang how the seeds of land, air and sea were driven together through the great void and those of liquid fire’ → hardened and took on the form of things (formas)

  • + Georgics where Clymene narrates the loves of the gods from time of Chaos (4.345f)

Is it elegy?

• Ovid is often not considered an actual epic poet

  • Lightheartedness and emphasis on comedy?

  • But turn to the Iliad B1 - see domestic violence and then ableism humourised!

  • Tone is meant to fluctuate to have meaning (much like life & death go together)

• Others also view the Metamorphoses as too blurred with other genres (eg. elegy)

  • But Harrison - ‘the search for generic diversity in Ovid’s Met bears firm witness to the effect that the extensive generic enrichment of epic in the Aeneid had on subsequent examples of the genre’ = NOT new!

• But love remains a central theme to the entire poem (not just one book say)

  • primus amor Phoebi → first proper episode

  • Beforehand was conquering Python but now in love → would have been acting like epic god if not shot by Cupid’s arrow !! LIKE OVID IN AMORES 1.1

  • And both ask Cupid a patronising question - beginning quis/d tibi, X puer, ?

  • But also! See the saeva ira of Cupid similarly to saeva ira of Juno (1.4) that propels the plot forward! = epic and elegy in one

Opening after proem (1)

• Ovid does as he says and begins from ‘beginning of time’ - ‘before the sea was and the lands and the sky that hangs over all’ (the three regions)

  • ‘ante’ - actually beginning before the beginning! Time & change very similar ideas!

  • ‘face of Nature’ was the same = one thing mixed together, ‘rough unordered mass of things’, ‘lifeless’ and ‘ill-matched’

    • This formless nature has to change for world to exist but also for the poem! Need new faces for change

    • ‘iners’ and ‘rudis’ also connote artistic rusticity → the poem has not yet being polished!

  • No sun or waxing moon (slender horns), everything was at odds = inherent chaos existed

• ‘God - or kindlier Nature - composed this strife’ = does Ovid not know?

  • He rent asunder the land from sky etc = control via division

    • Can we call this the first metamorphoses? Or are they miraculous intrusions into the natural wrld

  • ‘set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony’ = dissociata and ligavit (idea of fixed nature - is this seen in the Metamorphoses?)

  • AND ‘when he, whoever of the gods it was, had thus arranged in order…’

  • (hemmed the rivers = trapped!)

• Five zones, and only one is liveable = where Italy and Greece is?

  • Self-centrism in world-building

• ‘The Creator’ bid the mists and clouds to take their place (place!) and thunder, ‘that should shake the hearts of men’ (FIRST mention of man is their fear of gods 1.55)

The cosmogony continued (1)

• The winds - the ‘world’s creator’ did not let them fly wherever they wished

  • They can scarce be prevented from tearing the world to pieces = the concord of earth is tenuous!

  • vix nunc - now at creation or now at composition

  • Thus, they are given different region, based off of the NESW

• ‘all things within their determined bounds’ !! when the stars began to shine

  • And so animate life be everywhere, have fish, beasts and birds (not really explained why)

• Creation of man: ‘a living creature of finer stuff than these, more capable of lofty thought, one who could have dominion over all the rest, was lacking yet’

  • ‘Then man was born’ - very sudden transition

  • Whether this same creator god (out of own ‘divine substance’) or that the earth still contained something of the sky (mixed with water by Iapetus)

    • Moulded into form of all-controlling gods

    • And man looks up! To the heavens = preoccupation with the gods (sanctius & mentisque capacius altae → lofty gods)

    • Yet, if made by Prometheus, reminder of what happens because of this (and only a rudis (unartistic) form of the gods, NOT them)

The Ages of Man (1)

• ‘Golden was that first age’ - the same Augustan rhetoric of the Ages!

  • Everyone does right, without need of law

  • And ‘not yet had the pine tree, felled on its native mountains, descended thence into the watery plain to visit other lands; men knew no shores except their own’ (comment on empire?)

  • And no war either and the earth was untouched by hoe or plowshare (gave everything that was needed)

  • And men were happy to eat berries and plants

  • ‘streams of milk and streams of sweet nectar flowed, and yellow honey was distilled from the verdant oak’ - very pastoral imagery!

• But then Saturn was banished to ‘the dark land of death’ and the world under the sway of Jove = silver race

  • And Jove shorted the bounds of spring and added the other seasons AND now we see grain planted and bullocks groaning under the heavy yoke

• Third came the brazen age (more ready to fly to arms, but not unholy)

  • And lastly, the age of hard iron = ‘modesty and truth and faith fled the earth’

  • And now see ‘keels of pine … leaped insolently over unknown waves’

  • And boundary-lines drawn out, when before the land had been shared

The Iron age of man falls (1)

• Men now delved into the very ‘bowels’ of the earth (wounding the earth herself)

  • ‘Men lived on plunder’ & no relationship safe (guest not safe from host = foreshadowing!)

  • Now all immortals abandoned the earth

• And at this time then that the Giants (they say - whom?) essayed for the throne of heaven

  • ‘Almighty Father’ hurled his thunderbolts

  • And the Mother Earth, drenched with their blood, created new life and provided it human form = ‘proved contemptuous of the gods’ (still preoccupied with the divine though!)

• Saturn’s son saw all of this from his throne and groaned (thought of Lycaon = already happened)

  • ‘a story still unknown because the deed was new’ = still at beginning of time (meta element)

  • The first ‘contemptor superum’

The Milky Way?

Jupiter summons a council → description of the Milky Way

• By this can you fare to the royal dwelling of the mighty Thunderer, and on either side are the palaces of the gods of ‘higher rank’ (folding doors flung wide = like Roman patrons!)

• ‘the lesser gods dwell apart from these’

• ‘This is the place which, if I may make bold to say it, I would not fear to call the Palatine of high heaven’

  • The gods’ status distinguished by human and specifically Roman means

• Also emphasises that even being a god does not make you ‘the best’ → there are social divisions

  • Olympian, lesser, demi-gods / nymphs

• Also use of Palatine when Jupiter ‘lives’ on the Capitoline is intentional = where Augustus lives…next to temple of Apollo

• From start, see how the gods too act in ways dependent on status

The first divine council (1)

• Gods taking their seat within marble council chamber, but the king himself (seated high above the rest) shook thrice and again his awful locks (shake the entire world)

  • Worse than when the giants tried to take the heavens (as not one source, but all mankind)

  • ‘All means should first be tried, but what responds not to treatment must e cut away with the knife let the untainted part also draw infection’ … (does he?)

    • temptanda & temptata (which do we see?)

  • Also have demigods & monticolae… (HL) - not worthy of a place in heaven but should be safe on land (are they?)

• The council responds viciously - confremuere & studiis ardentibus & stimulos frementi adiciunt

The ‘Senate’ in horror

• Will they be safe when Lycaon went against me ‘who wields the thunderbolt’ - sign of his power?

  • All clamoured like when ‘an impious band was mad to blot out the name of Rome with Caesar’s blood, the human race was dazed with sudden fear of mighty ruin, and whole world shuddered in horror’

    • Which ‘Caesar’ is Ovid talking about here? Only an attempted murder so Augustus, but that is less well-known…

    • + emphasises that humanity has not learned (cyclical nature of time)

  • ‘now is the loyalty of thy subjects, Augustus, less pleasing to thee than that was to Jove’ !!

    • But also ‘royal authority’ - is this a good comparison?

• And then we move into Lycaon’s punishment - narrated by Jove (first metamorphoses is in internal narration!)

  • About 40 internal narrators, who narrate about 1/3 of the poem

  • Also already punished - Jove does not have to wait for council (what is the point of the council)

Lycaon’s story (1)

• ‘Infamous report of the age had reached my ears’ = by whom, and how did he not know himself

  • Descended from high Olympus and disguised as man (and terrifying / bristling with haunts…)

  • Take too long to recount how great impiety was found on every hand (worse than the report!)

  • Thus approached the haunt of the Arcadian king, gave signal that a god had come and common folk began to worship

• Lycaon’s first crime is mockery and attempting to work out if Jove was immortal - ‘he planned that night while I was heavy with sleep to kill me’ (how does Jove know this?)

  • Also brings forth human flesh for dinner but as soon as it was placed on the table, Jove ‘with his avenging bolt’ brought the house down on the household gods (worthy of this… - really?)

• The king now flies in terror and ‘howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak’

  • ‘And with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter’

  • Becomes a wolf, ‘and yet retains some traces of his former shape’

  • ‘the penalties which they deserved’

Is Lycaon’s punishment moral?

• Inserted into Council of the gods → internal narrator…

  • But also shows Ovid utilising a standard device of serious epic! Opening of Odyssey

  • And reusing of the phrase ‘conciliumque vocat’ from Aeneid 10.2 and 10.167

• But is the story what we expect?

  • From the start, Jove characterised by his anger that is ‘deserving’ of him (dignas iras) & ora indignantia

  • And Lycaon does not actually attempt god murder but seems Jove believes he will

  • Jupiter uses his thunderbolt but misses the man and strikes the penates → theme of “undeserving” victims of the bolt (Phaethon, Asclepius)

  • And then somehow (never explained) Lycaon becomes a wolf, only to continue savaging victims (but lifestock, not man)

• And with Io, Jupiter, the supposed arbitor of justice, transforms Io to hide his own victimisation of her

  • ‘metamorphosis as proof of divine injustice’

  • And here even swears on the Styx…

• Ovid has constructed and then quickly dismantled the epic theme of the Metamorphoses

The flood begins (1)

• Jove finishes his speech and some proclaim approval for words (added fuel to his wrath) while others gave silent consent

  • And yet all grieved over threatened loss of human race BECAUSE ‘who would bring incense to their alters?’ (inherently selfish reasoning)

  • The king tells them be of good cheer for he would give them another race of wondrous origin far different from the first

• And thus about to hurl thunderbolts against the whole world

  • But afraid for the sacred heavens (not that accurate?)

  • And remembers the fate that a time will come when ‘sea and land, the enkindled palace of the sky and the beleaguered structure of the universe should be destroyed by fire’

  • = uses the waves instead

  • Like Luc DRN 5 where he discusses water and fire battling, one conquering the other

• The North-wind shut up in the cave of Aeolus but let the South loose

  • Dripping wings, awful face shrouded in darkness

  • Grain overthrown, crops ruined etc BUT not good enough so asks his brother to aid (who summons his rivers to council, and to open their doors)

  • Neptune himself smites the earth with trident (orchards, crops, herds, man and dwelling, even shrine are swept away)

Purpose of the earth?

• Is the earth for man, animal or god?

• Humans prior to this have been given special status over animals (anthropocentrism)

  • Here, a theological conception (created by god, thus the world made for us)

  • ‘quod dominari in cetera posset’ !!

• Cicero, de natura deorum 2.133 - purpose of the world is for mankind

  • Not for trees or plants or ‘dumb, irrational creatures’ but for gods and man because we have reason!

  • This is Pythagoras’ reason later why humans should not eat meat!

    • Although animals eat one another, they do so blindly but we can choose not to! ‘nature both untamed and ferocious’

• But in this passage, seems the gods view the earth for them ! And mankind’s existence as an aid for their sustenance

  • Deocentric perspective provided here

  • Yet still the earth without humans is viewed as worse (‘plundered by wild animals’) so still a hierarchy

The flood destroys all (1)

• ‘And now the sea and land have no distinction. All is sea and a sea without a shore’ = back to the chaos of beginning (tenuous…)

• Now one sails over his fields of grain = chaos

  • And where goats, now seals (the Nereids are amazed at the groves and cities and haunts of men)

  • The wolf swims among sheep = all order reverts

  • + Horace, ars poetica → ‘the man who tries to vary a single subject in monstrous fashion is a like painter adding a dolphin to the woods, a boar to the waves’ !! What Ovid does here…

• And now everything has either drowned or been starved by lack of food (even the animals who were not committing evil)

Two survive (1)

• Now focus in on Phocis (fertile land while it still was a land)

  • Mount Parnasus, and here find Deucalion and wife in little boat come to land on peaks

  • First worship the Corycian nymphs and mountain deities and Themis (no better man than her and no woman more reverent of the gods)

• Jove sees them and recalls the rain and the sea too (Triton blows his resounding conch)

  • The rivers now return and ‘keep within their channels’

  • Yet the trees still hold the slime which the flood had left - symbolic of the reminent effects of the flood

• Deucalion, seeing the empty world, cries and addresses his wife - sister (cousin) & wife, and asks how she would have dealt with this alone (would die if she had)

  • Allowed to live by Jupiter because they are metuentior ulla deorum !

  • What man should be

Humanity is restored (1)

• Deucalion now wishes that he might restore the nations by his father’s arts (Prometheus’ son!), by the moulded clay (believes this strain)

  • Decide then to seek aid through sacred oracles = to waters of Cephisus’ stream (nulla mora est)

  • Sprinkle on head and then climb to the shrine, then kiss the chill stone and ask Themis how they might restore their world

• Goddess is moved and replies that they should throw the bones of their great mother over their shoulder

  • Pyrrha weeps and refuses to obey, daring not to outrage her mother’s ghost (but does not speak…)

  • It is Deucalion who guesses this is the earth, she is distrustful but nothing wrong with trying

  • ‘who would believe it unless ancient tradition vouched for it?’ → the rocks melt and soften, and are between rock and man (comp to a marble statue being created - like with Prometheus sculpting man!)

  • = why we have endurance of toil (origin = characteristics, a reverse metamorphosis!)

  • Human durability to suffering → continuity of suffering…

The animals too (1)

• After man is created again, the earth ‘spontaneously’ produced the rest through the moisture warming and marshes heating (more scientific approach)

  • As in a mother’s womb

  • Farmers turned over the soil to find animate things (some unfinished and lacking in their proper parts, some bits alive and others dirt)

  • ‘for when moisture and heat unite, life is conceived’

  • ‘inharmonious harmony’

• Ancient shapes but also special ones = Python borne

  • Size of a mountain, and thus has to be killed by the god of the bow (move from does and wild she-goats) with emptied quiver

  • And so ‘the fame of his deed might not perish through lapse of time’ = sacred games (Pythian games!)

  • And oak given as the laurel tree had not yet been created

Empedoclean animals

• Here, see Ovid emphasise the fantastical inherent to the land itself

  • Unlike prior epic eg. Odyssey, where the fantastical is kept to speech

  • But Apollonius concerning Circe’s beasts - ‘which were not entirely like flesh-devouring beasts, nor like men, but rather a jumble of different limbs - all came with her …similar to these creatures which in earlier times the earth had created out of the mud’ !!

    • In Aeneid, only described as monstra!

  • Which itself was inspired by Empedocles - ‘held that the first generation of animals and plants were not complete but consisted of separate limbs not joined together…’

• Ovid utilising scientific process of creation and evolution within his mythical world

  • + diverts from Lucretius who assures however that ‘each thing proceeds after its own fashion and all by fixed law of nature preserve their distinctions’

  • Against metamorphoses (Ovid doesn’t care! Going to use it for his text on Metamorphoses!)

  • Evolution, change, transformation = all part of life!

Apollo & Daphne episode (1)

• ‘Now the first love of Phoebus was Daphne, daughter of Peneus, the river god’

  • No blind chance but Cupid (like Ovid himself in the Amores)

  • Apollo insults Cupid, boasting of his epic achievement of killing Python (‘do thou be content with thy torch to light the hidden fires of love, and lay not claim to my honours’) = hubris!

  • ‘by as much all living things are less than deity…’ = two arrows (one golden and sharp / other dull and lead)

• Now swiftly over the first or so meeting and only see her flight (‘many sought her’ and her father asks for a son-in-law but she begs successfully for eternal maidenhood like Daina)

  • But beauty would not allow this (much like Cephalus calling his wife ‘more worthy of raping’ in 7…)

  • Comp to the hedges burned with torches a traveller has chanced too near

  • ALSO asks ‘what if it were arrayed’ about her hair (he wants to civilise her, take her out of the woods)

  • ‘I am no mountain-dweller, no shepherd I, no unkempt guardian here of flocks and herds’ = Apollo! Better than the rustic men

  • Apollo as symbol of the ‘urban chic’ who wishes to tame the countryside

    • Irony later when Polyphemus attempts to tame his looks but has to comb hair with rake (humour in the invasive rusticity)

  • ‘Jove is my father’

• ‘Her beauty enhanced by flight’

Daphne’s metamorphosis (1)

• Now Apollo wastes no more time on ‘coaxing words’ but is urged on by love and pursues her at utmost speed = Gallic hound pursuing a hare on an open plain (similis iam iamque tenere = Aeneid 12)

  • Meant to think of Aeneas and Turnus

    • ‘rapist pursuit when politeness and courtly ardour prove useless’ → predator and prey (Apollo almost like wolf)

    • Is this a theodicy??

    • Similar sequence occurs with Polyphemus and Galatea (but also kills rival, Acis)

  • When she realises he is close enough to breathe on her neck and her strength is gone, she spots her father’s waters and asks that her beauty be destroyed

• = transformation (no agency again realised)

  • Numbness, soft sides begirt with bark, hair into leaves = ‘her gleaming beauty alone remained’ (NOT what she wanted)

  • Even the wood shrank from his kisses and thus he cries out = ‘since thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt at least be my tree’

  • (‘long processions climb the Capitol. Thou at Augustus’ portals shalt stand a trusty guardian and keep wach over the civic crown of oak which hangs between’

  • ‘and seemed to move her head-like top in full consent’ - logic? Way to lighten the feeling of total entrapment?

Purpose of transformation?

• Daphne’s story reveals one purpose of transformation → to stop a supposedly worse action from occuring (here, rape)

  • See the same with Syrinx and the crow

  • But also see Callisto, Actaeon, Lycaon where the transformation is viewed as punishment

  • Losing humanity is viewed of as a horrific punishment but worth it for women who would be raped

• Anius mourns his daughters who become doves

  • abire … niveas columbas → no longer present

• AND rivers don’t know whether to congratulate or mourn with Peneus…ambiguous within the world

  • Macaraeus from Circe’s isle - et pudet et referam

• But also sometimes see the human mind sustained, othertimes more blurry

  • More uncomfortable

Transformations / tragedy?

• Interestingly, this does also mean that the transformations can act as dampeners to the pure tragedy of rape, death and suicide

  • We rarely see someone die without something remaining in the living world to become a memory for them (memory as most important…)

  • Argos dies but his eyes will remain on peacocks, Narcissus perishes but he will be a flower etc

  • And no suffering! Never see these transformations requiring pain in themselves!

• The readers are ‘insulated from the full implications of an action imitated’

  • Which isn’t necessarily bad

  • Callimachus too suggests that he does not create epic works, but rather ones ‘honey-sweet’ → his purpose is pleasure!

  • Aesthetic value to his poetry, not moral

  • Can have poetry that is just nice!

Should Apollo have known better?

• First amatory tale = prototype (that doesn’t go well…)

• Might be inspired by Parthenius but only in part! Ovid never simply ‘translates’ these mths but combines different versions to construct his own

  • Also a question of if we should try to uncover the source material here? Is that helpful?

• CAN be useful to understand how the characters have been reshaped!

  • Eg. Apollo from Callimachus’ hymn to Delos

  • There, Leto is chased by Juno across the land as no land will accept her to give birth

  • And now Apollo chases a nymph (part of the land)

    • Both implore Peneus to aid them as ‘father’ (and his daughters! = Daphne has fled Apollo before)

    • Daphne taking on the role of his mother = irony of Apollo’s lack of consideration

    • Leto pleads meinon, meinon, just as Apollo does for Daphne

  • see fugere 13 times in this passage (mirrors 8 in 35 lines of Callimachus)

  • Ovidian Apollo even recalls his cult sites including Delos!

• And the island of Asterie will be rooted because of Apollo and be a devotional item to him, unable to roam free → both receive a paean!

• (And see parallels to Io later, raped by Jove like Leto and also begs a river to aid her)

• ALSO in media res! Requires Leto’s story to already have occurred!

Io’s story (1)

• Sudden shift = ‘there is a vale in Thessaly which steep-wooded slopes surround on every side’

  • This is where the river Peneus flows from Pindus and here the rivers of his own country come ‘not knowing whether to congratulate or console the father of Daphne’

    • Going to the father! Much like Jupiter when Persephone is raped by Pluto (labels it amor, not iniuria, even though Persephone is so young she is more worried about her dress…)

• And lone did Inarchus not come as he was lamenting his daughter’s absence

  • Into myth of Io = ‘now Jove had seen her returning from her father’s stream and said, ‘Oh maiden, worthy of the love of Jove…’ = go into the woods with me!

  • ‘Nor am I of the common gods, but I am he who holds high heaven’s sceptre in his mighty hand, and hurls the roaming thunderbolts’!! (also cares about his status)

• But she is already running (as he speaks) but only 3 lines later and she has been raped (‘rapuitque pudorem’)

  • Only action is flight (lack of narrative agency)

• Now Juno is looking over Argos and is perplexed by the sudden clouds and cannot find husband = ‘I am either wrong or am being wronged’ = flies down

• And yet Io has already been turned into the ‘white heifer’ (‘even in this form she still was beautiful’)

Episodic transitions?

• Is this what Ovid meant when he said that he was telling a carmen perpetuum?

  • No sense of time passing, more of a geographical transition

  • He is taking on a hard task! ‘The genre of metamorphoses is essentially discontinuous’ because the myth ends with the transformation occurs (built-in endings)

• Yet Ovid still attempts an illusion of continuity contrived through ingenious transitions

  • Yet does this one even make sense? All the rivers gathering around Peneus, except Inarchus because his daughter has vanished too

  • ‘illusion of wholeness’

  • (See in B11, where old man sees birds from previous episode and then points to another bird on lake - ‘then one next to him or the same man if it so chanced’ = DOES NOT CARE)

• Lyne also suggests that Ovid doesn’t even tell the stories in full

  • For Daphne and Apollo just prior, we don’t even see their first meeting, but are rushed into the final chase scene

• Is Ovid bad at continuity, or is he playing with his predecessor Callimachus’ ideas of epic and poetry?

Io is taken (1)

• Juno knows Jupiter’s trick but deceptively asks where she is from to which Jove also lies

  • Gift! ‘what should he do?’ and stuck between two responses (BUT gives Io over)

  • Deliberative question (quid faciat) followed by two options balanced → Phaethon!!

• But Juno’s suspicion was not dismissed = gives Io to Argus (100 eyes, two sleep at a time)

  • ‘unworthy halter’ around her neck (as she’s human!)

  • And tries to stretch out arms she does not have and ‘when she attempted to voice her complaints, she only mooed’

• Would come to the banks of her father but terrified of what she saw (gaping jaws and sprouting horns)

  • ‘and if only she could speak, she would tell her name and sad misfortune and beg for aid’

  • So then traces her name in the sand = father realises (laments his immortality as he cannot end his grief)

• Jove can no longer bear the suffering so calls his son whom the shining Pleiad bore (more mistresses) = Mercury takes up the character of a shepherd (steals some goats & plays the reed pipe)

Io is returned finally (1)

• Argus is entranced by the song = asks him to sit on the rock (‘you see that there is shade convenient for shepherds’)

  • Talk of many things and makes music but Argus still keeps some eyes open = tells him of the creation of the reed pipe

  • On the mountain-tops, one nymph sought by suitors, called Syrinx by her sisters

    • Eluded the satyrs and other gods (life of maidenhood like Delian goddess, could even be mistaken as her save her bow of horn)

    • Pan sees her coming from mount Lycaeus, head wreathed with pine-needles and… ‘it remained still to tell what he said and to relate how the nymph…’ (suddenly in indirect speech)

  • Even for a story that can send a man to sleep, Ovid cannot bear to leave untold!

    • Overarching narrator has to come back to save the day

Pastoral in epic!

• Still in book 1 - see programmatic inclusion of external genre (neither elegy or epic)

• See allusion to Calvus’ Io in this narrative but also Eclogues!

  • Language very similar to

  • eg. capellas, avenis, harundibus

  • Argos urging Mercury to sit is similar to Tityrus to Meliboeus → ‘hoc poteras mecum considere saxo’ / ‘hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requiescere noctem’ (1.79)

  • Polite grammar!

• Also adds that ‘aptamque vides pastoribus umbram’ → shade as symbolic of pastoral! And aptam = pastoral is fit for this poem!

  • Not out of place

• + the story we see here is not only a god falling in love, but origin of pastoral poetry via the creation of the pipes

  • Yet the tale still ends with puellae - elegy remains

  • In Eclogue 2.32 - it is Pan who creates the pipes

  • BUT in Homeric hymns, it is Mercury! who creates the συριγγων (aware? Emphasis on trickery?)

• Also Pan’s wreath is pine, another beloved nymph who turned plant…

Pastoral elsewhere in epic

• The programmatic Mercury scene is not the only time we find the bucolic

  • As Galatea and Polyphemus in Met 13 continues this theme

  • Homer too is quite bucolic in his description of Polyphemus’ life (focus on his sheeps)

• Theocritus is first to characterise Polyphemus as bucolic

  • But also see the Aeneid!

  • Pine trunk supports him and wooly sheep accompany him

• Thus in the Met, he has a pinus, and his lanigerae (!!) flock followed

  • The trunk is enough to support sail-yards → allusion to Odyssey 9 with the staff that looked like mast of 20 oared ship (but this then blends him…reminder of his other genres)

• + Ovid adds humour through the absurdity of a pipe made of hundred reeds

• More allusion to Eclogue with Galatea whom Ovid describes as ‘whiter than the lead of the snowy privet’ while Virgil ‘whiter than swans’ and Theocritus ‘whiter than cream cheese’

End of Io’s tale (1)

• And when she comes to Ladon’s stream, she is checked in her flight and asks to be changed = Pan now holds marsh reeds in his arms = his lament creates a low and complainng sound = ‘this converse at least shall I have with thee’

• But as Mercury was about to tell this, he realises Argus is asleep = hooked sword chops off his head (the many eyes added to the feathers of her bird, the peacock)

• But Io is not free as now a fury chases her = reaches the Nile (‘with her head thrown back she raised her face which alone she could raise to the high stars’

  • ‘agonising mooing, she seemed to voice her grief to Jove’

  • Asks Juno to end her vengeance = Io returns to her original form (‘no trace of the heifer is left in her save only the fair whiteness of her body’)

    • Again, only hear about how her beauty remains (the only continuity)

  • But still she doesn’t speak

Io as traumatised? (1)

• Does Io’s tranformation parallel the dehumanisation often featured in the rape of the female mortals?

  • Can even see the dark cloud before the rape as foreshadowing the disruptive act as well as the suppression of her true feelings

  • Io becomes ‘dehumanised…depressed, detached and estranged from other people’

    • This feeling of dissociation from others, from reality and from body is physicalised in her transformation into a cow

• Argos too can act as the personification of the feeling of paranoia, public humiliation and shame (inescapable and threatening reminder of her rape)

• And inability to speak (Io never speaks directly!) → inability to explain the situation, silencing of the victim (like Syrinx & Philomela)

  • Caught simply as a pawn between husband and wife (suffering only ends when they reconcile - ‘she will never be the cause of pain to you again’)

  • Juno as strikingly mortal role here

Shift to Phaethon (1)

• Io is now worshipped as a goddess by the ‘linen-robed throng’ = son Epaphus is too worshipped in temples with his mother

  • Had a companion in like mind and age = Phaethon, child of the Sun

  • Phaethon was once speaking arrogantly, boasting that Phoebus was his father = ‘you are a fool to believe all your mother tells you…’ so Phaethon goes to his mother

  • Anxiety about fatherhood!

• Ashamed that he could not answer this insult = give me proof if I did in fact spring from heavenly seed (begging by own and her life)

  • Clymene was moved (‘it is uncertain whether by the prayers of Phaethon or more by anger at the insult to herself’ - how uncertain?) = swears by the sun that he is borne by Him

  • And if she is lying, let her perish = should go however to his father’s house to check and ask the Sun himself

• Phaethon rejoices, ‘already grasping the heavens in imagination’ and thus crosses own Ethiopia and land if Ind = comes to father’s rising-place (do not see the journey)

  • ‘meque adsere caelo!’ → wants to be a god…

Book divisions?

• Phaethon’s episode does not end as the first book does but rather covers the first and second book

  • One argument for this could be to emphasise the continuity of the chronology

  • Yet the more episodic nature of the myths does seem to undermine this idea…

• The second book does begin with Phaethon at his father’s palace, thus can assume the travel occurred during the book divide

  • But a much more specific reason than eg. Virgil’s utilisation of the book divides

• + can see the ending of book 1 with animus fert in relation for Phaethon

  • Paralleling Ovid himself whose animus fert him to write this text!

  • Thus the journey of Phaethon across the continent of Africa is compared to poetic composition

  • And Ovid believes the poem will reach immortality, much like Phaethon does… (anxiety?)

• Also can see the opening ekphrasis of book 2 paralleling the cosmogony of B1 !

  • Some utilisation of the books to create sense of cyclicality

Opening to book 2

• Begins ‘the palace of the Sun stood high on lofty columns, bright with glittering gold and bronze that shone like fire’ (the palace like the god)

  • Ivory and silver folding doors (decorated with an ekphrasis!)

  • ‘and the workmanship was more beautiful than the material’ (meta?)

  • Mulciber had carved the water that enfolds the central earth, circle of land and sky overhanging = like the cosmogony!

    • Move into the gods of the sea (foreshadowing for the fire to come?)

    • Onto lands and then to the sky with the 12 zodiac signs ordered (soon won’t be)

• ‘Now when Clymene’s son had climbed the steep path which leads thither…’ = identified by his mortal parent!

  • Turns to look at his father’s face but halts some space away (cannot endure the radiance closer = cannot endure the immortality)

  • Phoebus sits on his throne, and about him stand Day and Month and Year and Century and Hours at equal distance (ordered)

  • Young spring wreathed with floral crown = her body is representative of her nature (!)

• Into the narrative → Sun sees all things / the boy who is terrified at the new things he sees (contrast!)

  • Asks why he has come here to his father

  • Wants a proof to know for certain that he is his son (and Clymene isn’t hiding her shame)

Phaethon’s hubris (2)

• Phoebus embraces his boy and tells him he is his son and will provide him anything he wishes (swears on the Stygian river!)

  • And scarce had he finished when the boy asked for his father’s chariot and the right to drive the winged horses

  • → into long speech by Phoebus (‘repented of his oath and shook his head again and again)

  • ‘thy lot is mortal: not for mortals is that thou askest’ and asks for more than is even granted the gods themselves

    • Not even Jove who hurls dread thunderbolts with his awful hand

    • Has to go against the swift current of the universe, and pass lurking dangers and fierce beasts of prey

    • And the steeds themselves breathe fire and scarcely suffer Phoebus’ control

    • ‘Behold, I give sure pledges by my very fear; I show myself thy father by my fatherly anxiety’

    • Asks him to make a wiser choice, but Phaethon still desired to drive the chariot → leads forth the youth to the chariot (made by Vulcan = brilliant workmanship)

Phaethon begins the journey (2)

• Aurora now opens wide her purple gates and all the stars flee away → Titan now bades the switf Hours yoke the steeds

  • The horses breathe fire and are given ambrosia for feed = the son is anointed so that he may not die by the devouring flames and places the radiant crown upon his head

  • Advises him to spare the lash and use the reins, and go not too low, not too high (the middle! Neither too close to the Serpent or the Altar)

  • Asks him one last time to ‘take his counsel, not his chariot’ but the lad had already mounted the car and thanks his unwilling father for the gift

• Meanwhile, the horses (Pyrois, Eous, Aethon and Phlegon) paw impatiently = given free flight (but the weight is lighter, like curved ships without the ballast roll and are unstable)

  • Like a riderless car = run wild and leave the well-beaten track

  • ‘He knows not how to handle the reins entrusted to him, nor where the road is’

  • = destruction to the constellations (the oxen tries to plunge into the sea, the serpent awakes by the warmth and the ox-cart holds back the Bootes)

Phaethon destroys the world (2)

• Phaethon now looks down, terrified, and suddenly wishes ‘never to have touched his father’s horses and repents that he has discovered his true origin and prevailed in his prayer’

  • Eager to be called the son of Merops yet is still borne along (like a ship without a pilot)

    • Merops → mortal!

  • ‘what shall he do? Much of the sky is now behind him, but more is still in front!’ (like Jove…)

• And now the constellations surround (Scorpion curves its tail, threatening to sting = drops the reins)

  • And now the horses break loose and rush wherever their impulse leads them (up to the heavens and down to the earth)

  • ‘the earth bursts into flame, the highest parts first and splits into deep cracks…’

  • Meadows, trees, leaves, grain destroyed but ‘small losses I am lamenting’ → entire cities perish and woods and mount ablaze

• Phaethon is surrounded by the ‘dense hot smoke’ and cannot tell where he is or where he is going

  • ‘it was then, as men think, that the people of Aethiopia became black-skinned, since the blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies by the heat’

  • Libya also became a desert

• All the pools vanish, the rivers steam (old Peneus, Mysian Caicus and swift Ismenus)

  • And the swans on the Maeonian stream are scorched

  • And the Tiber, ‘to whom had been promised the mastery of the world’

  • Even Hades is stricken with fear

  • And Neptune cannot even lift his arms above the water

Earth responds (2)

• So now Terra is parched by heat and thus turns her face up (but still lower than before) and asks in broken tone, ‘if this is thy will and I have deserved all this, why, O king of all the gods, are thy lightnings idle?’ (choked by the hot smoke)

  • Is this the reward thou payest of my fertility and dutifulness, ‘that I bear the wounds of the crooked plow and mattock, tormented year in, year out?’

  • Provides pasture for flock, grain for man, incense for altar

  • But then also why his brother too? And the waters he gained by lot…

  • And even then now the heavens are smoking and Atlas is close to dropping the sky entirely = ‘primevial chaos’ (returning!)

  • The end as beginning, cycle!

• The Almighty Father now calls on the gods to witness and especially Phoebus that all would be destroyed = balances a bolt which is hurled at the car, tearing it to pieces

  • Phaethon falls and is received by Eridanus and provide him an epitaph (‘here Phaethon lies: in Phoaebus’ car he fared, and though he greatly failed, more greatly dared’)

• Now return to Phoebus who is sick with grief, ‘and if we are to believe report’ one day passes without light

  • Clymene too grieves, wandering the whole earth for the body, and then just the bones

Further metamorphoses in the family (2)

• The mother weeps atop the tomb, and the Heliades join too (‘with useless tribute to the dead’)

  • Call upon their brother night and day and after four months, the eldest Phaethusa complained her feet had grown cold

  • Lampetia now cannot move, and a third in tearing her hair finds only foliage (see the changes through all of them, one by one)

  • They call on their mother, who runs between them, giving kisses and trying to tear away the bark but blood drops from the wounds

  • ‘tis my body that you are tearing in the tree’ = the bark closes over the last words and yet they continue to cry = amber (‘one day to be worn by the brides of Rome’)

• Like Niobe later, see how the women becoming trees actually embodies their grief

  • Rooted to the ground → kept in the moment of their loss

  • ‘contant practice had turned it into habit’ → subsuming them

  • ‘however the tears flowed on’ = AGAIN, BECOME THEIR GRIEF

Cycnus? (3)

• Cycnus, son of Sthenelus, was witness to this (cousin?)

  • He abandoned his kingdom of Liguria and wept along the banks of the Eridanus → voice ‘became thin and shrill’, white feathers, neck stretched = a swan!

  • But does not trust himself to the sky, ‘because he remembered the fiery bolt which the god had unjustly hurled’ = spreading lakes

• iniuste - is this a comment from Ovid as narrator or from the character himself?

  • Are we meant to view Jupiter’s actions as amoral here AND THUS question all actions of the gods even when appear more ‘right’?

Phoebus rebels (2)

• Phoebus remains in mourning garb (like an eclipse), hates himself and adds rage to grief

  • ‘Enough from time’s beginning has my lot been unrestful; I am weary of my endless and unrequited toils’

  • The Sun also providing commentary on Jupiter’s actions !

    • And suggests that Jupiter would not be able to ‘rule’ these horses well = Jupiter’s omnipotence being questioned in language of rulership

    • Emphasising that not only has Jupiter killed a child, but that the Sun too rules, and in a way Jupiter cannot

• Asks Jove to, and will know that those who guide them do not deserve death…

  • Yet ‘Jove himself seeks to excuse the bolt he hurled, and to his prayers adds threats in royal style’

  • Does not like being threatened, and insists on his ultimate authority (‘royal-like’)

  • What connotations does ‘king-like’ have here? Tyranny? Jupiter is exercising his power much like one

• So Phoebus returns to his job but lashes the horses more fiercely in vengeance for his son → has to obey Jupiter and thus takes his anger out on his subordinates…

Callisto is taken (2)

• The father is now circling the earth to ensure everything is in order (quasi-creator god!)

  • Arcadia is his greatest care (brings back springs, grass, leaves etc) = sees an Arcadian nymph (‘and straightaway the fire he caught grew hot to his very marrow’)

    • Born in Arcadia - back to HIS beginnings

  • She did not spin wools or arrange hair, but had a simple brooch and a white fillet in her hair (one of Phoebe’s warriors)

  • ‘but no favour is of long duration’

• Sun was high, when the nymph entered forests and unstrings her bow, and lays down

  • Enters woods that ‘no longer age had felled’ → the flood?? How long has passed?

  • ‘Here surely my consort will know nothing of my guile; or if she learnt it, well bought are taunts at such a price’ = becomes Diana in form

  • She addresses him as greater than Jove (‘rejoicing to be prized more highly than himself’) = a little kiss (but not modest), and when she begins to tell of the hunts, he embraces her and although she struggles, is raped

  • ‘but whom could a girl overcome, or who could prevail against Jove? Jupiter won the day and went back to the sky; she loathed the forest and the woods that knew her secret’ (almost forgets her bow and quiver)

Callisto is revealed (2)

• Diana now approaches over the slopes of Maenalus, sees ‘our’ maiden and calls to her (Callisto flees, untrusting but then seeing the other nymphs is assured)

  • ‘alas how hard it is not to betray a guilty conscience in the face!’

  • Silence and blush give clear tokens of her plight but Diana is a maid herself and thus remains unaware (‘it is said that the nymphs knew it’)

  • 9 months pass, and Diana decides to bathe and while the Arcadian sought excuses of delay, the others force her to comply = ‘there her shame was openly confessed’ (and called a crimen!)

  • Diana orders her to leave and not pollute the sacred pool and she is thus expelled

• Juno (‘the great Thunderer’s wife) had known all along, but had put off her vengeance

  • And now a boy Arcas is born = ‘publish my wrong by his birth’

  • And thus threatens to take away her beauty which Jove delighted in = throws her to the ground, and as she stretches arms for mercy, her arms begin to grow shaggy, jaws widen

  • ‘and that she might not move him with entreating prayers, her power of speech was taken from her’ / ‘still her human feelings remained, though she was now a bear’

Juno and the mistresses (2)

• Why is it Juno who punishes these young women so much?

• Firstly, she embodies the horrendous and transformative dangers of childbirth (Semel, Latona, Alcmena, Callisto, Io all pregnant!)

  • And were all virgin girls beforehand

• But she also is the divine patroness of the social institution of marriage

  • Embodiment of society’s attitudes towards marriage and such related matters as virginity and adultery

  • Now Jupiter is no longer arbiter of order (anarchic rapist) and Juno becomes the defender of society’s rules regulating marriage and extramarital sexuality

• AND Juno is part of the patriarchal system

  • Her depiction as a prominent victimiser of women shows how a patriarchal society conditions women to punish their own sisters

  • And how often a woman cannot punish their husband for their affairs, and thus takes their anger out on the victimised mistress even if non-consensual

Callisto becomes a star .2

• She constantly moans, stretching up hands to the heavens

  • Does not dare to lie in the lonely woods, and wanders before her home that was once hers

  • But is driven away by the baying of hounds and ‘huntress though she was, fled in affright before the hunters’

  • She forgets who she is, hiding from wild beasts and even other bears (and wolves, though her father is one)

    • Even as a hunter, the wild is a terrifying place (residual humanity manifests in fear of the uncivilised)

• Arcas is now 15, and while hunting the wild beasts, he chances upon his mother

  • She steps forth and as he is about to pierce her breast, the Omnipotent stayed his hand and together he removed both themselves and the crime → set them in the sky as neighbouring stars

• But then Juno’s wrath is strengthened = goes down to Tethys and Ocean who are held in reverance

  • ‘Another queen has usurped my heaven’

  • She has such unbound power but now this mortal has become a goddess → do not let that harlot bathe in your pure stream

Story of the birds (2)

• Saturnia is now borne away by peacocks, now decked with slain Argus’ eyes, which happened at the same time that the raven became black

  • = this episode is actually in the past! (B1) Not a linear chronology!

  • Once had been white but his tongue was his undoing → no fairer maid in Thessaly than Coronis (Apollo loved her but the bird discovered her unchastity and was going to tell his master)

  • But then the gossiping crow came and warned him because once Erechthonius was borne, but hidden in a box to become immortal (story for lesson! require & invenies)

    • Like Jupiter before! docebo!! Moral lesson here

    • Three daughters of double-shaped Cecrops to look after it, and two were faithful but the third Aglauros was not and saw the boy with a snake

      • For warning Minerva, he was expelled from attendant and put after the bird of night (Nyctimene of Lesbos, who was turned into bird for outraging sanctity of father’s bed)

      • But still loves me! Another tale → once daughter of king Coroneus, who was chased by Neptune until her prayers were answered by Minerva who transformed her into crow

  • Raven ignores and tells Phoebus → anger rises and he shoots her with his bow (‘twas right, O Phoebus, that I should suffer thus from you, but first I should have borne my child’)

    • The lover repents but cannot save her (groans like a young cow when the suckling calf is killed by a hammer)

Horse transformation (2)

• Although Coronis must be placed on the pyre, he allows himself to save his son (gives him to Chiron)

  • And now the raven is black

• Chiron now rejoices in the foster child of heavenly stock, when suddenly Ocyrhoe, his daughter of red locks, comes forth realising prophecy is coming

  • Sings to the child that he will be ‘health-bringer to the wole world’

  • But he will dare to give a second life to one and thus be stayed by Jove’s lightning

  • But he will become a god again after this

  • Turns now to her father who shall wish soon to die when his limbs burn with the Hydra’s blood until he is allowed to pass

• There was much more to tell but suddenly she sighed deeply and weeps that the fates forbid her to speak more

  • ‘I would that I had never known the future. Now my human shape seems to be passing. Now grass pleases as good’ (confused why she is becoming entirely a horse while her father is half)

  • Switch from her perspective to Ovid’s as her voice is scarce understood and her words confused → figure of a horse

  • Hear more about Asclepius later in B15! Ovid wanted to tell the story himself (salutifer Orbi from Oc, and salutifer Urbi from Ovid)

• Chiron weeps for his daughter and calls on Phoebus but ‘he couldst not revoke the edict of might Jove’

Controlling speech (2)

• Orcyrhoe here is robbed of her ability to speak of the future → robbed of her ability to speak at all

  • ‘use of my voice is denied me’

  • Since defined by her ability to speak, this is a complete destruction of her previous identity

• But she is far from the only one! See Io before still afraid to speak when she returns to human form

  • Callisto, Lycaon, Cycnus, sisters of Phaethon

  • Actaeon too sounds like between a man and deer = emphatic of his blurred identity

  • And Orcyrhoe - ‘soon it seemed neither like a word nor like the sound a horse makes…’

• + often the desire to speak is to plead and paired with supplication

  • Actaeon supplicates the dogs, Pentheus his mother without arms → speech is never neutral (system of cultural norms where we see non-verbal signals used alongside)

  • Humans defined by desire to ‘communicate’ intent (not simply ‘speak’)

• But are we as readers silent too?

  • Actaeon is responsible for what he saw (Diana nude) and thus deserved to die

  • And we too watch these horrid scenes of rape and mutilation (even by man of woman) and can only observe …

Phoebus → Mercury’s troubles (2)

• Phoebus at this time was wandering the Messenian fields with a shepherd’s cloak, and pipe of reed in hand

  • And here Mercury spied the cows scattering = stole the cattle

  • No-one saw save Battus (hired servant of wealthy Neleus) who is persuaded by one heifer (BUT when Mercury comes in disguise offering a cow and bull he reveals the truth → turned into a flinty stone)

• Mercury was now flying over the Munychian fields (which Minerva love) and spotted a festival for Pallas where they wore baskets of flowers on their heads

  • Swept in a curve down to them like a kite spotting fresh sacrifice and catches sight of Herse who shines more brightly than the others as Lucifer does to the stars

  • Caught the flames of love like a leaden bullet thrown by a Balaeric sling

• Trusting in his appearance, he only smooths his hair and cloak and comes to the house (three chambers, one for each daughter)

  • Aglauros stops him → ‘I am he who carry my father’s messages through the air. My father is Jove himself’ and reveals he is here for Herse (demands gold for her service)

Minerva’s vengeance (2)

• Minerva sees the girl (who profaned her secret and now would have god and sister as ally as well as gold)

  • Thus she sought the cave of Envy, filthy with black gore

  • Hidden away in deep valley, no cheerful fire burning and the goddess cannot even enter (the natural world shaped by the character within?)

    • See this with the house of sleep too (surrounded by poppies, suffocating, cannot leave)

  • Minerva too has to turn away her eyes from the sight of the creature → pallor spread over face, shrivelled body, venom off her tongue, never sleeps and smiles only at other’s failure

  • Tritonia asks her to infect Aglauros and flees → takes her staff and wrapped in mantle of dark cloud, flowers withered, pollutes with breath

• Aglauros now, as poisonous breath fills her heart with prickling thorns, imagines her sister with the god in all his beauty

  • Eat her heart out in secret misery, consumed as when a fire is set under weeds and smoulders

  • Does not allow Mercury to enter her sister’s room (‘for I shall never stir from here till I have foiled your purpose’ → limbs grow heavy, deadly chill until she is changed until a lifeless statue, stained black by her soul)

• Mercury now leaves her behind, flying to heaven where his father calls him to go to Sidon and drive down the cattle to the sea-shore (to where the king’s daughter was accostumed to play)

Europa (2)

• ‘Majesty and love do not go well together, nor tarry long in the same dwelling-place’

  • Thus the father and ruler of the gods, who holds the three-forked lightning, whose nod shakes the world laid his majesty aside to become a bull

  • Mingled with the cattle, lowed like the rest and wandered

  • Colour was white as the untrodden snow, muscles strong in his neck and long dewlap hung down in front (‘horns were twisted but perfect in shape as if carved by an artist’s hand’)

• Agenor’s daughter admired him because so beautiful and friendly

  • She holds out flowers and he rejoices, kissing her hands

  • And could hardly restrain his passion, thus allows her to pat him and entwine his horns with garlands

  • Princess now sits on his back and as he edges from the land, he is suddenly amidst the sea → now she trembles with fear and holds on, her fluttering garments streaming behind

Opening of B3

• Jove now removes his disguise, when they reach the fields of Crete

  • But the father, Agenor, is furious and threatens his son Cadmus to find her or be exiled

  • Jove’s secret affair cannot be found and thus Cadmus in exile seeks the oracle of Phoebus → ‘a heifer will meet you in the wilderness…follow where she leads and where she lies down to rest upon the grass there see that you build your city’s walls and call the land Boeotia’

  • ‘silently giving thanks the while to Phoebus’ and follows the cow until it kneels in the grass

• ‘with intent to make sacrifice to Jove…’ (pious!)

  • His men go to find water for a libation = find a locus amoenus, with spring and a serpent sacred to Mars (even a beautiful wood can hide a dangerous monster!)

    • But also should be aware that it isn’t only ‘beasts’ or ‘animals’ that one should fear (gods & man too)

  • The serpent, when it hears then drop their vessels into the water, stretches up and then seizes the Phoenicians (some he slays with fangs, some he crushes in his constricting folds, others he stifles with poisoned breath)

  • Cadmus now wonders where he companions are = finds all friends dead and the serpent licking their wounds

Cadmus battles with the snake (3)

• ‘either I shall avenge your death or be your comrade in it’

  • Lifts up a massive stone with right hand and hurls it (ramparts would have fallen, tower and all), but the snake remains unharmed with his scaley skin

  • But the javelin slides between, and although he tears it out, the metal remains within

  • He hisses and breaths out breath more rank than the Stygian caves, moving like a stream in flood

  • Until Cadmus follows the snake back, pressing him until he pierces him to an oak-tree

• As it dies, he hears a voice, ‘why o son of Agenor dost thou gaze on the serpent thou hast slain? Thou too shalt be a serpent for men to gaze on?’

  • But then Pallas glides down and bids him plow the earth with the teeth of the dragon

  • ‘then a thing beyond belief, the plowed ground begins to stir’ → see warriors rise up, ‘so when on festal days the curtain in the theatre is raised…’

  • Cadmus takes out his sword to fight, but one urges him to not take part = fight one another until only 5 remain

Foundation? (3)

• ‘To found a city is to impose culture on untamed nature’

  • And here the inaugural act is violence (against the snake)

  • And when the snake is defeated, its teeth has sown to produce the citizens (agriculturalism)

  • ‘cosmogonic motif of the creation of the ordered universe out of the body of a slain monster’ BUT the monster returns (in Pentheus, son of ‘Echion’ - viperman - who tries to rouse the anguigenae)

  • AND in Cadmus who is transformed at the close of the text

  • And civil war will rise again later with the sons of Oedipus (Pythagoras comments on!)

• But interestingly, despite this scene of foundation, we will rarely see the city!

  • Actaeon, Narcissus, Salmacis are all outside

  • Rome later will too not appear grandly (only 5 lines on the building of it)

Aeneid? (3)

• Also very key that this tragic section is rather Virgilian in its allusions

  • Ovid’s third book begins with exile trying to found his city, much like Aeneas in B3

  • And the place is marked out by a recumbent animal (sow / cow)

• The serpent battle here is also very reminiscent of Hercules and Cacus from B8 of Aeneid (at the site of Rome!)

  • Cadmus in search of his companions, while Hercules for his cattle

  • Cadmus also dressed in lion-skin! And attacks snake with nolaris as Hercules does against Cacus

• Yet the description of the snake is reminiscent of the snakes that kill Laocoon → prophecy of downfall of city when the snakes crawl into the citadel (Minerva’s temple)…

Tragedy arises

• Near the opening of the Theban section of the Metamorphoses, see simile where the snake men are compared to the curtain on stage rising

  • Which heads up the more tragic episodes (like the curtain rising, now the tragedy will be revealed)

    • ALSO the comparison emphasises this mingling of art and nature

    • The theatrical world as comparison for the production of the earth (BUT even in the narrative, the nature is producing men dressed in arms, ‘with painted apex’

    • The ‘crop of men’ simile physicalised

  • But have already had Phaethon before (treated by Euripides) = should not suggest the tragedy is contained within Thebes

• Horace on tragedy (Ars Po 182f) - ‘but don’t put on stage that which ought to happen inside…Cadmus into a snake’

  • Says that Cadmus should not transform on the stage!

  • Yet, we do ‘see’ these happen, because of the difference in form (narrative not dramatic) = playing with the discrepencies between the two!

  • Ovid does not seem to care about what is ‘believable’ as in the world of epic

Actaeon’s death (3)

• Cadmus even in exile was now happy, but ‘of a surety, man’s last day must ever be awaited, and none be counted happy til his death, til his last funeral rites are paid’

  • Actaeon was the first cause of grief, ‘upon whose brow strange horns appeared, and whose dogs greedily lapped their master’s blood’

  • ‘for what crime had mere mischance?’ (changes the myth)

• Tale opens when Actaeon asks his friends to stop the hunt now that it was midday, and that they shall start again tomorrow

  • Here was a vale, called Gargaphie, ‘the sacred haunt of high-girt Diana’

  • ‘But Nature by her own cunning had imitated art’ = native arch of rock and tufa, sparkling spring with slender stream (art and nature NOT diametrically opposed here!)

    • + see 11.235-6 where unclear if cave made by nature or art (magis arte tamen)

    • And even B2 ekphrasis is combo of N&A

  • Diana is here this day and is undressed by her nymphs

  • ‘And while Titania is bathing there in her accustomed pool, lo! Cadmus’ grandson, his day’s toil deferred, comes wandering through the unfamiliar woods with unsure footsteps and enters Diana’s grove’

  • ‘for so fate would have it’

Actaeon’s death /2 (3)

• The nymphs now smote their breasts at the sight of the man, they throng about Diana and try to hide her body with their own

  • But the goddess stood high, yet her face was blushed - ‘red as the clouds which flush beneath the sun’s slant rays, red as the rosy dawn’

    • She views ths as a defilement (challenge to her virginal status, essential part of her identity - like Callisto! laesi dat signa rubore pudoris 450)

    • Savagry of patriarchy’s obsession with female modesty!

  • She then flings the water at the young man’s face and as she ours the ‘avenging’ drops upon his hair, she forebodes his doom

  • ‘Now you are free to tell that you have seen me all unrobbed - if you can tell’

• Very swift transition here and ends by planting fear in his heart

  • The heroic son flees and marvels at his speed (HE DOESN’T KNOW)

  • He tries to bemoan his fate when he sees himself in a clear pool but no words come (can only groan)

  • ‘Only his mind remains unchanged’

  • ‘What is he to do?’ - like Phaethon

• And now come his hounds, all given names and descriptors (Ichnobates and Melampus)

Acteon’s death /3 (3)

• The dogs follow him onwards and he flees over the very ground he oft pursued

  • ‘He flees (the pity of it!) his own faithful hounds’

  • ‘Words fail all desire’ (cannot say his own name), and only hear barking

    • ‘individual human identity has two aspects - a name and a body’

    • The dogs have names while he does not…

    • And Aristotle - ‘Nature…has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech’ (to express what is right)

• Melanchaetes first fixes fangs into the shoulder and then all take hold (groans not like man or deer)

  • On knees in suppliant pose and turns his face towards them ‘as if stretching out beseeching arms’

  • All the companions urge them on and look around for Actaeon and shout his name (which he turns to), yet he lies there as the hounds ‘plunge their muzzles in his flesh, mangle their master under the deceiving form of the deer’

  • ‘wrath of the quiver-bearing goddess appeased’

The wrath of gods? (3)

• Common talk wavered this way and that: more cruel than just? Or act worthy of her virginity

  • Juno was happy though as she had transferred her rage at Europa to her entire family (emphasises her immortality as her grudges permeate lifespans)

• Ovid reveals how this act was viewed by those within the world

  • Balanced = some do not agree with it! Problematises the action further as emphasises that this is not immediately accepted even within the mythical landscape

• Asks the question whether we should expect a greater morality from the gods?

  • Or is the difference only in their power & lifespan…

• Quote from the Bacchae 1348 - ‘it does not befit the gods to be like mortals in their anger’ - is this true?

  • Often times the gods act worse than man… = the flaying of Marsyas in B6

  • VERY grotesque! ‘why do you tear me from myself?’ (god’s punishments are often fragmenting the human form / mind)

  • Rape and disfigurement of Philomela - ‘if the gods above see this, if the power of the gods mean anything…’ = are they arbitrators of morality

• sunt superis sua iura (9.495) (Byblis loves her brother)

Juno’s wrath (3)

• But now Juno is still not happy as now she has another rival in the form of Semele who is now pregnant with mighty Jove

  • She is about to reproach but ‘what have I ever gained by reproaches. Tis she must feel my wrath’

  • She is queen of the heaven, the sister and wife of Jove - ‘at least his sister’ (feels very threatened)

  • ‘So great is her trust in her beauty’ (form?)

  • I am no daughter of Saturn if she go not down to the Stygian pool …

• Juno also obsessed with her status!!

  • ‘at least his sister’ → very threatened by the minor ‘paelices’

  • Especially since shown that she does not often get pregnant = punishes those who can

  • Gods very much not better than mortals when it comes to insecurities

Semele’s death (3)

• Goes to home of Semele as an old woman, as Beroe, the Epidaurian nurse of Semele

  • Gossip over many things but then come to Jove - ‘Many, pretending to be gods, have found entrance into modest chambers’ → should get proof of his love, be embraced like he does for Juno

  • Semele wants equal status to wife

  • Figure of Beroe → old woman like Allecto disguises herself when talking to Turnus in B7, BUT also the name of the Trojan woman Iris impersonates in B5 (both destroyed in flames)

• Semele thus asks Jove for a boon = choose what you want! Swear it on the Styx

  • Asks to see him like he is seen by Saturnia

  • He groans and ascends to heaven in deepest distress → takes up the thunder and lightning, but puts down the bolt of the 100-handed ones, for lighter one made by the Cyclops

  • She is consumed and the baby is snatched and (‘if report may be believed’) sewed up in his father’s thigh

  • Jupiter as unable to control his power BUT also controlled by the Styx (its godhead is more powerfult han the gods!)

    • Could also see this as a metaphor for the violence of male sexuality so large it annihilates the women (sexual fantasy)

Identity and change

• Semele is transformed by both Juno and Jupiter (toy between the two)

  • When Juno persuades her to ask Jupiter this fatal question, the verb ‘formarat’ is used (which has been used before for transformation)

  • Semele also wishes to change her status - from paelex to coniunx (to become Juno)

  • This insecurity leads to a psychological transformation which provides the groundwork for the physical transformation into ash and dust

• But also see this with others who are destroyed because of their struggle to change their identity

  • Byblis and Myrrha battle with defining themselves (as family or as lover!)

    • And the crux of the issue is their decision to choose ‘lover’ over ‘family’ (daughter and sister)

  • Scylla faces this problem as enemy or lover, and Althaea as mother or sister (and kills her to choose one)

• The focus of these stories is never truly the physical transformation but is a conclusive tool to suppress the character’s suffering too much

  • Focus is the moral quandry!

Who enjoys sex more (3)

• Bacchus is watched over by Ino and then the nymphs of Nysa

• Now while these things happened, chanced (‘as the story goes’) that Jove was jesting with Juno that women enjoy sex more

  • Ask Tiresias who once hit two snakes while they were mating and thus changed into a qoman for 7 years

  • In 8th, sees the same serpents and strikes them again to become a man → takes the side of Jove

  • Juno was so grieved that she blinded the man and in turn the Almighty Father (‘for no god may undo what another god has done’) gave him the power to know the future

  • (Though mentioned, this story does not take precedent in larger narrative, as it could do to argue that women would enjoy being raped)

• Tiresias was famed for his prophecies, and first to ask was Liriope who had been raped by Cephisus and bore a boy, Narcissus

  • He will only grow to be old, ‘if he never know himself’

• Seemed empty until he reached 16 (many had sought him through these years, but he was too prideful in his form)

  • Once as driving the frightened eer into nets, a nymph tried to speak to him

Echo (3)

• Echo, ‘who could neither hold her peace when others spoke, nor yet begin to speak til others had addressed her’

  • She was not yet only voice, but still could only repeat the last words she heard

• Juno was the cause because when Jove was in company with the nymphs, she would delay the goddess long enough for the nymphs to flee

  • Juno realises → removes her ability to speak independently

• So now spots Narcissus wandering through the fields = enflamed and followed by stealth (like sulphur smeared on a torch catches light)

  • She cannot address him but waits for him to talk first (thus ‘Is anyone here? / Here!’)

  • She leaps out to embrace him but he flees (swearing he would first die than give himself to her, she responds that she gives herself to him)

• She flees in shame and spends her time in lonely caves

  • But love remains, yet her body wrinkles and fades until only her voice remains (bones into stone)

  • Now voice echoes through the mountains! But never seen

Echo of Trauma

• ‘rememory’ - a memory that refuses to disappear

  • Event inaccessible in the moment of occurrence but then possesses the survivor after a gap of time

  • PTSD - post is key here! Quality of belated response to original experience (temporal delay)

  • And ‘immune to the vicissitudes of time’

• Echo - responds later, only in fragments of the sound and can only repeat that

  • She cannot tell her own story nor organise a cohesive narrative for herself

  • Reliant on others for speech (BUT she does succeed in a tragic manner)

  • Almost negating Juno’s punishment of her

• Even Ovid will become an echo (a line on people’s lips)

• But still ends with Echo dislocated from her body, remains only as voice (anthesis to other’s suffering which is everything but their voice)

• Also shows a woman who is nothing but an appendage of her man

Revenge on Narcissus (3)

• Narcissus had mocked her like he had others (nymphs and men)

  • One of the scorned youth then lifted his hands to pray that he love yet not gain that which he loves

  • Thus there was a clear pool of silvery water, to which no shepherds came nor any beast = the boy lies down, and when he goes to slake his thirst, another thirst arises for the boy he sees

  • Like statue carved from Parian marble

  • Worthy of Bacchus, worthy of Apollo = admires for which he is admired

• ‘while he seeks, is sought’ = provides vain kisses to the pool, plunges arms in to embrace

  • If turns around, the object of love will vanish

  • No thought of food or rest but gazes on the false image

Realisation! (3)

• Monologue - asks the woods if anyone has ever loved more cruelly than he, and cannot seek what charms him (‘so serious is the lover’s delusion’)

  • Weeps that the boy in the water wants to be kissed as much as he, and when he smiles, he smiles back

  • = ‘Oh I am he! I have felt it, I know now my own image’

  • And wishes to be parted from his own body like Echo was!

  • ‘Instills corporality into a reflection’ (much like Pygmalion!)

  • ‘So near yet so far’ erotic frustration

• Beats his own breast when he sees the boy disappear as he troubles the water (warmed like wax melting or frost in the sun)

End of Narcissus (3)

• After such time, nothing of the boy Echo loved remains

  • When she sees him, she simply feels pity and as the boy says Alas, she replies too (and responds the sound of the beaten chest)

  • Farewell to farewell and then he dies, but even in the underworld, he spends his time gazing on his image in the Stygian pool

• His sister nymphs and the dryads lament for him = Echo gives back their sounds of woe

  • But when they go to find his body for the pyre, all they can find is a flower, yellow centre surrounded by white petals

• Tiresias’ name is propogated by this tale BUT Pentheus scoffs at him

  • Mocks his lack of sight but Tiresias warns that the day will come with Liber, son of Semele, comes (happy he is blind to them)

  • Tells him he will be torn to shreads if he does not accept them AND this WILL come to pass

  • Yet Pentheus as he speaks is flinging him forth = words did come true and prophecies accomplished

Bacchus arrives (3)

• The god has come and the fields resound with the wild cries of revellers yet Pentheus is aghast - ‘what madness, ye sons of the serpent’s teeth, ye seeds of Mars, has dulled your reason?’

  • Compares magic, women’s shrill cries, wine-heated madness / men who have no fear for drawn swords, trumpets, glittering spears

  • And the elders sailed here over sea = bravery!

  • Wishes that Thebes could fall and fire roar and thus they would die with honour

  • But now will fall by a boy, ‘whose weapons are scented locks, soft garlands, purple and gold inwoven in embroidered robes’

  • Will force him to confess his father’s name is borrowed → tells his slaves to find the plotter (ignores Cadmus and Athamas and counsellors, more eager by their warning)

    • Just like a river which if obstructed foams and boils as it goes

• Slaves come back covered in blood, have not seen Bacchus but have found this companion of him = one of Etruscan stock, a votary of Bacchus

Acoetes’ speech (3)

• Pentheus can hardly restrain himself from punishment, but asks the man who he is first

  • He fearlessly replies that he is Acoetes from Maeonia

  • Father was a poor fisherman and left him nothing but the waters, but so that he may not alway stay on the same rocks, he learns to steer ships (+ read the stars)

  • And while making for Delos, driven to Chios and land on shore → reddening sky, goes to test the wind and on return Opheltes brings forth a young boy as beautiful as a girl

  • Acoetes believes the wine-drunk (and sleepy) boy is divine and asks him to be gracious upon him, but Dictys tells him not to pray for them (tries to resist their entrance until Lycabas, exiled from Tuscany, hurls him off)

  • Bacchus rouses by the outcry and asks where they are going, Proreus asks him where he wants and is told Naxos (friendly land)

  • → Acoetes begins to sail that way, but told by all to take the left tack

Bacchus’ punishment (3)

• Acoetes decides then that he doesn’t want to man the ship → Aethalion suggests they don’t need him and thus steers away from Naxos

  • The god now in mockery begins to weep that these are the not the shores you promised (‘and what glory will you gain if you, grown men, deceive a little boy?’)

  • Acoetes is crying too → laughing until the ship suddenly stops and although the men double their strokes, ivy now twines and clings about the oars

  • Tigers, lynxes and panthers appear (images) and men leap off the ship

  • And now Medon’s body darkens, and as Lycabas queries this, his jaw spreads open and skin scaled

  • Libys, still trying to ply the oar, sees his hands shrink to fins, another’s arms vanish and tail curved like moon

  • = play like troupe of dancers

• As the sailors have been turned into dolphins, out of the twenty, Acoetes is the one remaining

  • Is terrified but the god speaks words of cheer, and tells him to take them to Naxos

  • = from then on part of the rites and Bacchanalian throng

Who is this?

• Interestingly, we are provided a messenger speech like one in tragedy

  • Stranger who provides cautionary tale to warn Pentheus

  • Very Euripidean and what is done in Bacchae!

• In Bacchae, this figure is in fact Bacchus and the audience knows = playing with the gap in knowledge and thus see the dramatic irony

  • However, here, we are never told if Acoetes is Bacchus, as we never see Bacchus himself in the Theban sequence…

• And thus ends quite jarringly as waiting for the reveal that it was Bacchus…

• Do however hear that his only inheritance is fishing → requires deception & luring of the ignorant fish (to be ‘hunted’)

  • From Homeric Maeonia & learns the arts of the stars → cleverer than he seems

• (+ homeric hymn 7 with tale of the dolphins!)

Pentheus punished (3)

• Back to Pentheus - dismisses this long ramble, and orders them to torture Acoetes

  • While instruments prepared, doors fly open and chains drop

  • Pentheus is fixed in purpose, and thus heads to Cithaeron alone (like horse is made eager by the brazen trumpet on the battle field, so did the air with drums and singing stir Pentheus)

• Midway up the mountain, was open plain = spying on the rites with profane eyes until own mother spots him and hurls the thyrsus to smite her son

  • Tells sisters that a boar has come to their land and must be rent

  • Pursue the frightened wretch, cursing his folly and confessing he has sinned

  • Calls out for aunt to aid him, to be moved by Actaeon’s spirit but she tears off his right arm, and Ino his left

  • He holds mangled stumps up to his mother in prayer, but she tears off his head (body torn faster than leaves in winter off a tree = condition of morality)

• = warning and now Thebans throng to the rites and bow down before his shrine

The leaves simile

• The account of the sparagmos is compared to dead leaves seized from branches by the wind

  • Often viewed as a distasteful simile (absurdely inappropriate - Bomer)

  • And the beheading only really seen in PPP avulsum

• Simile often associated with inevitability of death

  • And constant regeneration of life → Homer B6 where Glaucus describes generation of men as generation of leaves

  • BUT nothing regen here - Pentheus will not continue the house of Thebes

• But primary intertextual point is Virgil

  • B6 - shades on bank to leaves that fall at first frost

  • autumni frigore both times!

  • In Ovid seized as they cling on → don’t want to leave…

  • Shades stretch forth their arms as Pentheus cannot BUT is like the young men who die before the faces of their parents (only mother is the one to do so)

  • Underworld mapped onto the upper

• BUT also Turnus - another young man who stretches arms in supplication against ‘foreign’ newcomer (murra madidus)

  • frigore & membra & dextramque precantis / -em

  • Aeneas as the bacchant who ignores plea for parent

Opening of book 4

• Everyone had been celebrating the festival, save Minyas’ daughter Alcithoe

  • She even denies that Bacchus is Jove’s son! And her sisters do too

  • The priest has bidden all to celebrate, including slaves and mistresses who ought take up the thyrsus

• ‘the matrons and young wives all obey, put by weaving and work-baskets, leave their tasks unfinished’

  • And call on the god by all of his names → catalogue

  • And now Ovid himself is addressing him, ‘for thine is unending youth, eternal boyhood’

  • Orient under your sway and Pentheus and Lycurgus and the sailors were destroyed

  • Even that old man drunk with wine is part of your band - ref to Cadmus in Bacchae?

• ‘Oh be thou with us, merciful and mild’ all shout save the daughters of Minyas, who are rather ‘spinning wool, thumbing the turning threads or keep close to the loom’

  • Characterises the other women as ‘deserting their tasks’ and themselves as keeping to Pallas !

Story-telling? (4)

• Should tell stories to pass the time → function of story-telling is to pair otium with negotium

• And weaving while they do so = weaving as metaphor for composition !!

  • Metatextual

• Also see this idea of storytelling is aiding with struggle in 14

  • On the way back from the underworld, the Sibyl speaks for herself, explaining how she became the prophet

  • See Ovid providing minor characters from epic their space to tell their own tales → yielding narrative control

    • Very little on Dido and what Aeneas sees in the underworld

    • + Ovid spends time on Achaemenides (Virgilian creation) but adds his own - Macaraeus to explain about Circe (even better than Virgil)

  • But also ‘mollit sermone laborem’ → stories as softing, calming, peaceful

  • Much like what Ovid seems to be doing with his work

• Slightly different to Mercury’s story in B1 where the function is to soften and calm BUT only to then allow Mercury to commit a violent act

• YET HERE the Minyades should not be telling these tales (worshipping Bacchus), ‘intempestiva’ → untimely

First sister speaks (4)

• The first sister thinks of what she will tell, either of Dercetis of Babylon (fish), or her daughter (dove) or a nymph who changed boys to fish and became one herself OR the mulberry tree, now black

• And she tells the tale as she spins her wool!

• → tale of Pyramus and Thisbe

  • Both beautiful, live next door, not allowed to marry, find chink in wall and talk there (and even address the wall), then one time decide to leave together and meet at Ninus’ tomb (with tree of white berries)

• Thisbe leaves first, and arrives, yet here comes a lioness from the slaughter of cattle

  • Thisbe flees but leaves cloak which gets bloodied by the interested lioness

• Pyramus now comes, sees the footprints of a lion and then cloak smeared in blood

  • Laments that he was the cause of death and decided to kill himself (only a coward wishes for death) → stabs his side and the blood leaps like broken pipe (fruit of the tree darkens with the blood, roots too)

• Thisbe returns, confused by new colour and then sees the body (recoils like sea ruffled by breeze)

End of Pyramus and Thisbe’s tale (4)

• Thisbe sees that the body is of her lover, and begins to smite her chest and tear her hair

  • Kisses his wounds and tells him to lift his head, which he does, looks at her and then dies

  • Then sees own cloak and empty scabbard = will follow him in death but asks parents to bury them together, and for the tree to mark their double-death

• Falls on the sword, ‘and her prayers touched the gods and touched the parents; for the colour of the mulberry fruit is dark red when it is ripe’

• END of tale, before Leuconoe now begins

  • She tells the tale of the Sun’s love

  • Began when he sees (who sees all) the affair of Mars and Venus and tells Vulcan (net of bronze, finer than woolen thread or spider’s web)

  • Enter the bed, and Lemnian opens the doors to them trapped (some wish to be the disgraced one)

  • Venus does not forget! And so ‘what now avail, o son of Hyperion, they beauty and brightness and radiant beams?’ (voice of narrator) → new fire shall hold you, for Leucothoe

The Sun’s affair (4)

• Venus punishes the Sun by making him fall for Leucothoe, who he shall watch alone and rise early and set late for

  • Beams fail entirely, not for eclipse but because of love’s pallor

  • And no longer will your past lovers seem fair to thee (inc. Clytie)

  • Leucothoe’s mother Eurynome was most beautiful until she grew up (in land of spices = Persia)

• Horses are grazing after tiring day (on ambrosia)

  • When the Sun is entering the bedroom of his love, in form of Eurynome (finds Leucothoe, with 12 attendants whom he dismisses)

  • Then declares ‘Lo, I am he who measure out the year, who behold all things, by whom the earth beholds all things…’ → she is terrified and drops her distaff and spindle

  • He changes back and although terrified, the girl is overcome by radiance and suffers the god, without protest

  • ‘vim passa’ - even if she did so without complaint or force, the phrasing suggests the act itself constitutes violence

The Sun grieves (4)

• Clytie is jealous = tells the story especially to the father, who then buries her daughter alive (ignores her cries that, ‘he overbore my will’)

  • Father kills daughter for lost virginity (much like Perimele raped by Achelous too)

  • He tries to make space for her head but she is already dead

• The Sun is traumatised by the sight (worst since Phaethon’s death), and tries to warm her limbs

  • ‘But since grim fate opposed all efforts’ → sprinkled body with nectar and she becomes a shrub of frankincense that cleaves the mound

• Clytie could excuse her grief by love and her tattling by grief, but is now maddened that the god still sperns her

  • She thus ignores her fellow nymphs and sits upon the ground, naked without food or water (only tears and dew)

  • Limbs grow fast to the soul, and her pale limbs become plant and her blushing face a flower, like a violet (which turns to the Sun even though her roots hold fast)

• = storyteller finishes (some say such could not happen and the others declare that gods can do anything, ‘But Bacchus is not one of these’)

Alcithoe’s last story (4)

• Alcithoe is called up and the sisters are silent

  • And as she ‘runs her shuttle swiftly through the threads of her loom’, she announces that she will pass over the well-known love of Daphnis (changed to stone), nor of Sithon (both man and woman), how the Curetes spring from showers neither

• ‘charm your minds with a tale that is pleasing because new’

  • How the fountain of Salmacis is of ill-repute! Renders men soft and feeble

• Son of Mercury and Venus borne and nursed in Ida’s caves but when 15 he leaves and wanders to Lycian and Carian lands

  • Finds pool clear to the bottom, where nymph dwells (does not hunt, nor shoot or sprint)

  • Chided for only living in ease, but she ignores her sisters and bathes, combs her hair and looks at herself in the water

• But is now collecting flowers as she did when she sees the boy (arranged robe and composed herself) → youth, you could be a god! And if so, Cupid

  • Very happy your family and especially wife if you have one

  • If so, let us have an affair and if not, let me be the wife

Salmacis is sperned (4)

• The boy blushes at the proposition, for he knew not what love is

  • A blush like apples hanging in sunny orchards, or painted ivory, moon eclipsed

  • The nymph begs for a sister’s kiss at least and tries to throw arms around his neck but he rebukes her so she leaves

• But now hides in the thicket and watches

  • Boy as if unwatched dips toes in water and so cool that he dives in without clothes

  • Naked form attracts her and her eyes shone like the sun reflected on surface of glass

• She jumps out in triumph and holds onto him, touching his unwilling breast

  • And enwraps him like a snake snatched by an eagle entangles its flapping wings

  • Or like ivy on trunk or octopus holding its enemy beneath the sea

• She then prays that they never be separated → the two bodies begin to merge (like branch grafted to tree)

End of the Minyas’ tales (4)

• The boy now sees himself neither man nor woman, yet also both

  • Limbs enfeebled and voice no longer of a man

  • And prays to his mother and father that whoever touches this pool be also weakened by the water = changed the water for their ‘two-formed child’

• Alcithoe has finished speaking and still did the daughters of Minyas ply their tasks

  • Despising the god and profaning the holy day

  • Suddenly hear drums and flutes and cymbals, myrrh and saffron enters and ‘past all belief’ the weft turned green and the cloth changed to ivy

  • See the sound of drums coincide with Ovid taking back narrative control = punishment now for speaking when they shouldn’t

• Now the day has ended, time just before night with a little light

  • And house begins to temble!

  • See sisters are seeking hiding places, away from the light, therefore they can’t see their transformation (and will never)

  • Membrane covers arms and thin wings (bats!) and can only squeak when they try to speak

Juno’s revenge (4)

• Especially now is Bacchus acknowledged through the city, and Ino now tells of her foster-child everywhere (proud of him, her hersband and her children)

• And Juno looks on in anger, in awe that her rival’s son has had the power to change sailors’ bodies, make a mother tear her son apart and turn the daughters into bats = ‘shall naught be given to Juno save to bemoan her wrongs still unavenged? Does that suffice me? Is this my only power?’

  • And thus decides to sting Ino with the same madness as he had done prior

  • Juno’s monologue begins ‘secum’ as it does in Aeneid 1 (and after city has accepted Bachus, like in B7 before wrath rises again)

• Sloping path, with deadly yew trees which leads to Hades

  • Styx sluggishly moves along and spirits pass by here

  • City has a thousand entrances and is large enough for any throng

  • The ONLY proper city we see described! The real ‘urbs aeterna’…

• Juno has left her abode in heaven and endures to go (‘so much did she grant to her hate and wrath’)

  • Threshold groans under her weight and Cerberus howls

Juno meets the Furies (4)

• The goddess summons the Furirs, sisters born of Night

  • They sit before the closed steel gates of the Accursed Land

  • See Tityos stretched over 9 acres, Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion on wheel and the Danaids (here Belides)

  • Juno looks to Ixion and then Sisyphus before asking why he suffers but Athamas dwells proud in palace with wife who scorns my godhead!

• Explains cause and piles promises, prayers and orders onto them until Tisiphone shakes locks and confirms she will do what Juno wishes

  • Juno leaves happy, and Tisiphone takes up torch steeped in gore, robe red with blood, waist with snake (Grief and Dread etc come with)

• She stands in the palace’s doorway and the very doorposts shrank away, and when they try to leave, she blocks them

  • Throws snakes at their chest, adds poison (inc. froth of Cerberus’ jaw) & then whirls the torch to kindle fire

End of Juno’s revenge (4)

• The Fury leaves accomplished and straightaway Athamas cries to lay down the nets here, he has seen a lioness

  • Pursues wife like prey → takes up his son Learchus laughing and stretching arms in glee and hurls him like a sling into a rock

  • Mother, stung either with grief or madness, now runs out the house with Melicertas and shouts ‘Ho, Bacchus!’ to which Juno laughs

  • Much like Amata! Who also takes child to the woods, roused by Allecto (sister of Tisiphone) by Juno

• She has now climbed onto a high cliff - ‘for madness made her strong’ - and she leaps into the sea

  • Venus watches and pities her and so asks Neptune to save them and make them sea gods to which he agrees = become Palaeomon and mother Leucothoe

  • Like Venus in Aeneid 5 asking Neptune to grant Trojans safe voyage (both times mention she comes from the sea)

  • + will end with apotheosis (Aeneas, Ino)

• But now the Theban women have followed Ino to the rock and mourn her death too, and reproach Juno for her cruelty = Juno does not endure these insults and turns the women to stone (monimenta of her savagry)

  • Some othes into birds who skim the water - trying to find Ino?

Cadmus’ doom (4)

• Cadmus is of course unaware that his daughter and grandson have become gods

  • Thus overcome with grief and in awe of the portents he has seen he flees the city he had founded as if it wasn’t his own evil fate following him

  • Driven thus to Illyria and talking with wife about the start - ‘was that a sacred serpent which my spear transfixed long ago when, fresh come from Sidon, I scattered his teeth on the earth, seed of a strange crop of men?’

    • Pray I to be a serpent! Gods protect them → as he spoke, he began to change

    • Skin hardened and body darkened and spots scattered, and tail grew and pointed

• Cadmus now addresses his wife, asking her to come hold his hand while he still has one

  • Wants to say more but suddenly tongue cleft in two, words fail him and ‘whenever he tried to utter some sad complaint, it was a hiss’

  • She replies, as she smites her naked chest, asking where his feet, his shoulders and everything are going and then asks to change too → snake licks her face (as if he knew her) and then suddenly two snakes and they hide in the woods, ‘mild creatures, remembering what once they were’

Story changes to Perseus (4)

• Though changed, found comfort in their divine grandchild whom India now worshipped

  • Acrisius, born of same stock, did not allow Bacchus into Argos

  • ALSO opposed his own grandchild but regretted this too (Perseus, borne to Danae by golden rain)

  • What is this transition??? 5 generations along

• Now Perseus was flying over the land with the head of Medusa (when blood dripped, snakes formed in Libya)

  • Driven by storms here and there, passes the cold bears thrice, but does not trust himself to fly while asleep so alights to the borders of the West

• Atlas’ land! Thousand herds and flocks, and a tree of pure gold

  • Perseus asks Atlas for hospitality to rest, and urges that he is the son of Jove and has also achieved great deeds

    • Emphasises that he not only is the son of god but also achieved much on his own

    • Contrast to Nileus in 5, lying about his father, whom he kills before can finish

  • Atlas is reminded of omen that a son of Jove will despoil his golden tree → had girded tree with great wall and forbid all enter

Perseus’ story continues (4)

• Thus, Atlas orders Perseus to leave, declaring his is lying about his great deeds

  • He adds force to his threats and when Perseus realises he cannot beat Atlas, he pulls out Medusa’s head and turns him into a great mountain, with arms for ridges and a head for a peak

  • The gods then extend him further until he becomes a mountain to hold up the sky

• And now when Aeolus has trapped the winds in their prison and morning star has risen, Perseus binds wings to his feet, girts hooked sword and flies over the Ethiopians’ land

  • He spots Andromeda bound on the cliff, and would have thought her a statue save her flowing hair and tears

  • In love, he asks her who she is to which she doesn’t respond at first (she is a maiden!) but then does not want to seem to be hiding faults = her mother’s boasts

• She has not finished speaking when the monster leaps out of the water rising up high

  • Her parents weep but do not provide aid, only grief

Perseus saves the day (4)

• Perseus says that there is little time to help

  • Starts to boast about his deeds (son of Jove, victor of Gorgon, dares to ride the winds) and then asks to be their son-in-law and promises kingdom as dowry

  • The monster comes as fast as a swift ship driven by stout rowers, and now as far from cliff as the space through which a sling can send a whizzing bullet

• Youth now springs up into the sky and the monster can attack only his shadow in the water

  • Like the bird of Jove swoops down on a serpent from behind, Perseus too buried his sword in the right shoulder

  • Turns like wild-boar when hounds have bitten him in the waves

  • Slashes where the body changes into a fish

• BUT the winged shoes are becoming drenched and thus heavy, so hangs off rock and stabs the creature again and again

  • Cassiope and Cepheus rejoice and the maiden comes forward, ‘she the prize as well as the cause of his feat’

Perseus’ tales (4)

• Perseus now lies Medusa’s head on some soft twigs and leaves but they harden by the head

  • Sea nymphs are in awe and test it on other twigs which they toss in the sea = corals!!

• Now Perseus builds three altars of turf to three gods (Mercury, Jove and Minerva)

  • A bull to the greatest god

  • And then seeks Andromeda but no further dowry = proper wedding!

  • In which Perseus, full on feasting and music, wishes to know the region and in turn they ask of his Gorgon’s head → ALL indirect speech! And only 20 lines

• Hero tells how beneath Atlas was a cave of two sisters who shared one eye between them (which Perseus stole)

  • Then comes to Gorgons’ home and looks upon the gorgon in the reflection of the shield and kills her while she sleeps (Pegasus and brother born!)

  • ‘he ceased, while they waited still to hear more’

• Another asks why she has snakes for hair and now we go into direct speech → ‘since what you ask is a tale well worth the telling, hear then the cause’ !

  • Once beautiful and her hair the most, but then raped in Minerva’s temple by Neptune → snakey form (and aegis from this too!)

  • Perseus sees himself as a Callimachean aetiological poet, not an epic one!!

Arachne’s story (6)

• Arachne surpasses her fellow humans in art, but wishes to also surpass the gods

  • Emphasis on her humble beginnings but ALSO from Maeonia (Homer)

  • Her father’s name Idmon means ‘Skillful’

  • And ‘parva parvis’ → connotes Callimachean flavour to her tapestry

• Denies that she was taught by Pallas and says they should hold a contest

  • Minerva disguises herself, urging her to apologise but Arachne denies again

• Contest of tapestries

  • Minerva creates a tapestry of the power of the gods (in corners, see whenever mortals have lost to gods)

  • BUT Arachne decides to reveal the amor of the gods (not the maiestas) → Europa, Asterie, Leda, Antiope, Alcmena, Danae…

  • Like the text itself! An ekphrasis of the poem → should we feel as if this is the truth then?

• Minerva rips it up (‘resented Arachne’s success’)

  • And strikes her on the brow before she transforms her into a spider

Niobe’s story (6)

• Niobe suffers because she demands to be worshipped herself, rather than Phoebus and Diana (who aren’t even present)

  • Immediately flagged as a dirum factum

  • She enters surrounded by attendants, much Diana does (comitum → 2.246, 3.186)

  • Described as celeberrima (used of goddesses in B1,1,5,10)

  • Very proud of her divine-adjacent identity (aunts are the Pleiades, grandfather is Atlas, and father-in-law is Jupiter)

• Yet her decision will destroy not only that which is most important to her, but will also fix her in her grief

  • ‘and there in her sorrow her body grew rigid…there wasn’t a sign of life in her features’ YET ‘her weeping goes on’

  • Exists ONLY as her grief

• + see in this book Marsyas also destroyed (flayed) but is a demigod… (not only mortals suffer)

The Virgilian episode (13-14)

• Ovid spends around 900 lines on the material of the Aeneid from 13.600ish to 14.600ish

• Yet, even still he plays with what the reader will expect

  • Framed by familiar text yet constantly plagued with interruptions!

  • 3.1-79 takes only 4.5 lines! Reductive parody

    • And uses much else of the text to allow connections to unfold between episodes

    • Opens with Aeneas carrying his father, who is labelled sacra, then onus and lastly praedia that Aeneas chose over wealth (emphasis on the weight of the father, over the bond!)

  • 640 - Anius, king of Delos and guestfriend of Anchises tells the story of his daughters turned into doves (not in Aeneid)

    • Begins ‘human beings are subject to so great inconstancy in their affairs’ → universal flux

    • And see how duty was conquered by fear (the daughters handed over by brother), alternative to Aeneas and Anchises

  • 735 - tale of Galatea, Acis and Polyphemus (NOT)

  • 916 - Glaucos tells his story (NOT)

  • 14.129 - the Sibyl talks of her relationship with Apollo (yes but not story)

    • Aeneas exclaims as he did that he will build her a temple but she replies ‘I’m not goddess! Do not consder a human being worthy of sacred incense’ (Augustus?)

    • And story of how Apollo provided something that she did not want (not as god of prophecy but of suffering)

  • 167 - Achaemenides about the cyclops (yes but not so long)

  • 223 - Macareus about Odysseus (and see Circe’s servant talk about Picus) (NEITHER)

• → 594 of the lines are direct speech!!

  • And not by the crucial members of the narrative like Aeneas or Anchises or deities BUT minor mortal characters who didn’t get enough / any time in the Aeneid

Is this actually about Odysseus?

• The Aeneid elements provide ‘a bare frame for pleasant amatory episodes’

  • But is Aeneas the only man after Troy? Does Ovid have to tell his story

• Also hear of tales from the Odyssey!

  • Summary of travels from Polyphemus to Circe (between Achaemenides and Macareus)

    • Cyclops, then Aeolus, Laestrygonians, meeting with Circe

  • Also hear of Scylla and Ulysses in the Scylla / Glaucus / Circe narrative

    • And when Aeneas’ ships turn into nymphs, then mention that are happy Ulysses’ ships was wrecked

  • And more vague allusions like sailing past Ithaca (regnum fallacis (polutropon) Ulixi)

    • And head to Phaeacia, like Odysseus 7

• And similarities between the stories

  • Circe’s interactions with the male protagonists of Glaucus and Picus recall hers with Odysseus (rejected!)

  • And companions into beasts (O+P)

  • And parallels between Diomedes’ tale about his men wearied (like Odysseus’ men on way to land of the dead 10)

  • Acmon - can endure no longer! Eurylochus with cattle of the sun

• And at the end, Vertumnus tells Pomona that if she chose to marry she would have mroe suitors than the timid wife of proud Ulysses!