The present volume joins other commentaries in the OBP Classics Textbook Series, which is designed to offer support and stimulation to student-readers. We would like to express our gratitude to Alessandra Tosi for her patience throughout a longer gestation period than she must have initially hoped for and Inge Gildenhard for supplying the illustrations. A special thanks goes to John Henderson, who twice, virtually overnight, supplied us per litteras with copious notes of nonpareil insight. We have incorporated a number of his notes into the Introduction and the Commentary, attributing these simply to ‘John Henderson’ (to be distinguished from A. A. R. Henderson, whose commentary on Metamorphoses 3 we occasionally cite as ‘Henderson 1979’). He tried his best to inject the project with an appropriate dose of Dionysiac spirit, and if readers don’t find the final product as tipsy as it ought to be, the blame’s on us.
* * *
Note on translations : unless indicated otherwise, translations of Greek and Latin texts are from the Loeb Classical Library, often somewhat modified.
Apollod. | Apollodorus, Bibliotheca (Library) | |
Ap. Rhod. | Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica | |
Apul. | Apuleius |
|
Met. | Metamophoses (or Golden Ass) | |
Arat. | Aratus | |
Phaen. | Phaenomena | |
Cat. | Catullus, Carmina (Poems) | |
Cic. | Cicero | |
Fam. | Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to his Friends) | |
Leg. | De Legibus (On the Law) | |
Nat. D. | De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) | |
Enn. | Ennius | |
Ann. | Annales (Annals) | |
Eur. | Euripides | |
Bacch. | Bacchae | |
Hdt. | Herodotus, Histories | |
Hes. | Hesiod | |
Op. | Opera et Dies (Works and Days) | |
Hom. | Homer | |
Il. | Iliad | |
Od. | Odyssey | |
Hor. | Horace | |
Carm. | Carmina (Odes) | |
Epod. | Epodes | |
Hyg. | Hyginus | |
Fab. | Fabulae | |
Hymn. Hom. | Homeric Hymns | |
Liv. | Livy, Ab urbe condita | |
Luc. | Lucan, Bellum Civile (Civil War) | |
Lucr. | Lucretius, De Rerum Natura | |
Mart. | Martial | |
Ep. | Epigrams | |
Ov. | Ovid | |
Am. | Amores | |
Ars | Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) | |
Fast. | Fasti | |
Her. | Heroides | |
Met. | Metamorphoses | |
Trist. | Tristia | |
Plaut. | Plautus | |
Cas. | Casina | |
Merc. | Mercator | |
Plin. | Pliny (the Elder) | |
NH | Naturalis Historia (Natural History) | |
Plut. | Plutarch | |
Caes. | Caesar | |
Prop. | Propertius, Carmina (Poems) | |
Sen. | Seneca (the Younger) | |
Oed. | Oedipus | |
Serv. | Statius | |
Ach. | Achilleid | |
Silv. | Silvae | |
Theb. | Thebaid | |
Suet. | Suetonis | |
Aug. | Divus Augustus (Life of Augustus) | |
Theoc. | Theocritus | |
Id. | Idylls | |
Val. Max. | Valerius Maximus | |
Val. Flacc. | Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica | |
Varr. | Varro | |
Ling. | De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) | |
Virg. | Virgil | |
Aen. | Aeneid | |
Ecl. | Eclogues | |
G. | Georgics |
Ovid, or (to give him his full Roman name) Publius Ovidius Naso, was born in 43 BCE to a prominent equestrian family in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a small town about 140 km east of Rome. He died in banishment, a resident of Tomi on the Black Sea, in 17 CE. Ovid was one of the most prolific authors of his day, as well as one of the most controversial.1 He had always been constitutionally unable to write anything in prose — or so he claims in his autobiography (composed, of course, in verse). Whatever flowed from his pen was in metre, even after his father had told him to put an end to such nonsense:
saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?
Maeonides2 nullas ipse reliquit opes’.
motus eram dictis, totoque Helicone3 relicto
scribere temptabam verba soluta modis.
sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
et quod temptabam dicere versus erat.
(Trist. 4.10.21–26)
My father often said, ‘Why try a useless
Vocation? Even Homer left no wealth’.
So I obeyed, all Helicon abandoned,
And tried to write in prose that did not scan.
But poetry in metre came unbidden,
And what I tried to write in verses ran.
(tr. Melville)
Students of Latin may well be familiar with Naso senior’s banausic attitude: classics graduates, some wrongly assume, have similarly dismal career prospects. But eventually Ovid would shrug off paternal disapproval in pursuit of his passion. After dutifully filling certain minor offices, he chose not to go on to the quaestorship, thereby definitively renouncing all ambition for a senatorial career. In his case, the outcome was an oeuvre for the ages. For quick orientation, here is a time-line with the basics:4
Battle of Actium
Secular Games; Augustus adopts Gaius and LuciusAugustus dies; Tiberius accedes
Time-line | Historical Events | Ovid's Biography | Literary History |
50s BCE | Catullus, Lucretius | ||
44 | Julius Caesar murdered | ||
43 | Cicero murdered | Ovid born | |
30s | [Gallus Amores 1-4 (lost)], Horace Epodes |
||
35 | Virgil Eclogues Horace Satires 1 |
||
31 | |||
29 | Virgil Georgics | ||
27 | Octavian becomes 'Augustus' | ||
Early 20s | Livy 1-10 | ||
20s | Propertius 1-3, Tibullus, 1, Horace Odes 1-3, Epistles 1 | ||
19 | Virgil Aeneid, Tibullus 1-2 | ||
18 | Leges Iuliae (initial Augustan marriage legislation) | ||
17 | Horace Carmen Saeculare | ||
16 | Propertius 4 | ||
10s-0s | Amores 1-3, Heroides, Medicamina faciei femineae, Medea (a lost tragedy) | Horace Ars Poetica, Epistles 2, Odes 4 | |
2 BCE | Ars Amatoria 1-2 | ||
1 CE | Birth of Jesus | ||
2 | Ars Amatoria 3 and Remedia Amoris | ||
4 | Augustus adopts Tiberius | ||
8 | Scandal at court; Augustus relegates Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea | Finished just before the relegation (?): Metamorphoses 1-15, Fasti 1-6 | |
8-17 | Tristia 1-5, Epistulae ex Ponto 1-4, Ibis, Double Heroides | ||
14 | |||
Manilius Astronomica | |||
Ovid dies | Livy dies |
Ovid was born when the Republic, the oligarchic system of government that had ruled Rome for centuries, was in its death throes. He was a teenager at the time of the Battle of Actium, the final showdown between Mark Antony and Octavian that saw the latter emerge victorious, become the first princeps, and eventually take the honorific title ‘Augustus’ by which he is better known to posterity. Unlike other major poets of the so-called ‘Augustan Age’ — Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus — Ovid never experienced a fully functional form of republican government, the libera res publica in whose cause figures like Cato and even Cicero ultimately died. There is another important difference between Ovid and most of the other major Augustan poets: he did not have a ‘patronfriend’, such as Maecenas (a close adviser of the princeps who, in the 30s, ‘befriended’ Virgil, Horace and Propertius) or Messalla, the amateur poet and power-politician to whom Tibullus dedicates his poetry. Ovid came from a prominent family and was financially self-sufficient: this left him free — or so he must have thought — to let rip his insouciant imagination.
A consummate urbanite, Ovid enjoyed himself and was an immensely popular figure in the fashionable society of Augustan Rome. He was more than happy to endorse the myth that the founding hero Aeneas and thus the city itself had Venus in their DNA (just spell Roma backwards!). For him Rome was first and foremost the city of Love and Sex and his (early) verse reads like an ancient version of ‘Sex and the City’.
Eventually, though, Ovid ran afoul of the regime. In 8 CE, when he was fifty years old, Ovid was implicated in a lurid court scandal that also involved Augustus’ niece Julia and was relegated by the emperor to Tomi, a town on the Black Sea (the sea-port Constanța in present-day Romania).5 The reasons, so Ovid himself tells us, were a ‘poem and a mistake’ (‘carmen et error’, Trist. 2.207). He goes on to identify the poem as the Ars Amatoria — which had, however, been published a full ten years earlier — but declines to elaborate on the ‘mistake’, on the grounds that it would be too painful for Augustus. He maintained this reticent pose for the rest of his life, so what the error was is now anybody’s guess (and many have been made). In any event, despite Ovid’s pleas the hoped-for recall never came, even after the death of Augustus, and he was forced to pine away the rest of his life far from his beloved Rome. He characterizes Tomi as a primitive and dreary town, located in the middle of nowhere, even though archaeological evidence suggests that it was a pleasant seaside resort. And while his poetry continued to flow, it did so in a very different vein from the light-hearted exuberance that characterizes his earlier ‘Roman’ output; the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto explore the potential of the elegiac distich (a verse-form consisting of a six-foot hexameter and a five-foot pentameter in alternation: the metre of mourning as well as love) to articulate grief. But on his career trajectory from eros to exile, Ovid made forays into non-elegiac genres: tragedy (his lost play Medea) and, of course, epic. In the following section we will explore Ovid’s playful encoding, in a range of texts, of his longstanding epic ambition and its final realization in the Metamorphoses.
1 Introductions to Ovid abound. See e.g. Mack (1988), Holzberg (2002), Fantham (2004), Volk (2010), Liveley (2011). There are also three recent ‘companions’ to Ovid, i.e. collections of papers designed to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the poet and his works. See Hardie (2002b) (by far the best and most affordable), Weiden Boyd (2000) and Knox (2009).
2 Maeonides means ‘a native of Maeonia’, a region in Asia Minor, from which Homer was in antiquity believed to have hailed: hence Maeonides = Homer.
3 Mount Helicon in Boeotia is said to be the place where the Muses do dwell; hence toto Helicone relicto = ‘all Helicon abandoned’ = ‘having abandoned the writing of poetry’.
4 A good way to get a sense of his life and career is to read his highly spun autobiography Trist. 4.10, which begins with a charming couplet addressed to you: Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum, | quem legis, ut noris, accipe posteritas … (‘That you may know who I was, I that playful poet of tender love whom you read, hear my words, you of times to come …’)
5 Technically speaking, Ovid suffered the punishment of relegatio (‘deportation’) rather than the more severe penalty of exilium (‘exile’) — the poet himself stresses the distinction at Trist. 2.137. This meant that Ovid retained citizenship and many of the rights that went with it, and his property was not confiscated. His (third) wife Fabia did not accompany him to Tomi, but seems to have remained faithful to him.
When the first edition of the Metamorphoses hit the shelves in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city.6 His official debut, the Amores (‘Love Affairs’) lured his tickled readers into a freewheeling world of elegiac love, slaphappy hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery.7 His subsequent Heroides (‘Letters written by Heroines to their absent Hero-Lovers’) were also designed to appeal to connoisseurs of elegiac poetry, who could here share vicariously in stirring emotional turmoil with abandoned women of history and myth: Ovid, well attuned to female plight, provided the traditional heroes’ other (better?) halves with a literary forum for voicing feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing resentment for the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei (‘Ointments of the Face, or, How to Apply Make-up’). Once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos (‘teacher of love’) presented in his Ars Amatoria (‘A — Z of Love’) his male (and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true ‘jouissance’ (the French term for orgasmic bliss, for the sophisticates among you) in the act of reading a work, which is, as one critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’.8
After these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, Ovid’s ancient readers, by then all hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote he offers in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris (‘Cures for Love’), a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid. To cut a long story short: by the time the Metamorphoses were published, Ovid’s devotees had had ample opportunity to revel in the variety of his literary output about the workings of Eros, and each time, the so-called elegiac distich provided the metrical form. Publius Ovidius Naso had become, apart from a brief flirtation with the genre of tragedy (the lost Medea, written in Latin iambic trimeters), a virtual synonym for the composition of erotic-elegiac verse. But picking up and un-scrolling any one of the fifteen books that contained the Metamorphoses, a reader familiar with Ovid’s literary career is in for a shock. Here are the first four lines of the work, which make up its proem:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
(Met. 1.1–4)
My mind compels me to sing of shapes changed into new bodies: gods, on my endeavours (for you have changed them too) breathe your inspiration, and from the very beginning of the world to my own times bring down this continuous song.
A mere glance at the layout (no indentations in alternate lines!) suffices to confirm that Ovid has definitively changed poetic metiers (as the ‘change’ of verse between formas and corpora makes a ‘new’ syntactical role for the opening phrase In nova).9 In his newest work the foreshortened pentameters, which until now had been a defining characteristic of his poetry, have disappeared. Instead, row upon steady row of sturdy and well-proportioned hexameters confront the incredulous reader. Ovid, the celebrated master of the distich, the notorious tenerorum lusor amorum (‘the playboy of light-hearted love-poetry’ as he calls himself), the unrivalled champion of erotic-elegiac poetry, has produced a work written in ‘heroic verse’ — as the epic metre is portentously called.
But once the initial shock has worn off, readers familiar with Ovid’s earlier output are bound to experience a sense of déjà vu (as the French say of what they have seen before). Ovid, while devoting his previous career to versifying things erotic, had always shown an inclination towards epic poetry. Already in the introductory elegy to the first book of the Amores, the neophyte announced that he was writing elegies merely by default. His true ambition lay elsewhere; he had actually meant to write an epic:
Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus — risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.
(Am. 1.1.1–4)
About arms and violent wars I was getting ready to compose in the weighty hexameter. The material matched the metrical form: the second verse was of equal length to the first — but Cupid (they say) smiled and snatched away one of the feet.10
As can be gathered from pointed allusions to the Aeneid (which begins Arma virumque cano: ‘I sing of arms and the man’) at the opening, the poem Ovid set out to write before Cupid intervened would have been no routine piece of work, but rather an epic of such martial grandeur as to challenge Virgil’s masterpiece. Ovid’s choice of the hexameter for the Metamorphoses signals that he has finally realized his long-standing ambition to compose an epic. But already the witty features of the proem (starting with its minuscule length: four meagre lines for a work of fifteen books!) indicate that his embrace of the genre is to be distinctly double-edged. And, indeed, his take on epic is as unconventional as his efforts in elegiac and didactic poetry had been. Just as the Amores spoofed the more serious output of his elegiac predecessors Propertius and Tibullus and his string of didactic works (the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei) spoofed more serious ventures in the genre such as Virgil’s Georgics (a poem on farming), so the Metamorphoses has mischievous fun with, while at the same time also outperforming, the Greco-Roman epic tradition from Homer to Virgil. It is arguably the most unusual epic to have come down to us from antiquity — as well as one of the most influential.
6 The following is adapted from Gildenhard and Zissos (2000b).
7 You can read the first book of the Amores on-line in another OBP edition. See http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/348
8 Sharrock (1994) vii.
9 Initially, the reader might be inclined to take the first four words (In nova fert animus: ‘my mind carries me on to new things’, with the adjective nova used as a noun) as a self-standing syntactic unit; only after reaching the opening of line 2 do we realise that nova in fact modifies corpora and the phrase goes with the participle mutatas (‘forms changed into new bodies’).
10 By removing one of the feet from the second verse, Cupid in effect changed the genre of the poem Ovid was composing from epic (in which all verses are hexametric — i.e. contain six feet) to elegy (in which every second verse contains five feet).
In the process of laying out a vast body of mythic tales, both well known and recondite, Ovid’s Metamorphoses produces something like a ‘reader’s digest’ of Greek and Latin literature. Whichever authors came before him — Homer, Euripides, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, Ennius, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, you name them — he worked their texts into his own, often with a hilarious spin or a polemic edge. In Ovid, the literary heritage of Greece and Rome begins to swing. His poetics — his peculiar way of writing poetry — is as transformative as his choice of subject matter. In the Metamorphoses, one intertextual joke chases the next as Ovid puts his predecessors into place — turning them into inferior forerunners or footnotes to his own epic mischief. To appreciate this dimension of his poem requires knowledge of the earlier literature that Ovid engages with. In the set text, Ovid’s partners in dialogue include, but are by no means limited to, Homer, the author of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, Euripides, pseudo-Theocritus, Pacuvius (a 2nd-century BCE Roman tragic playwright whose work survives only in scant fragments), and Virgil. Even this partial enumeration, consisting as it does of authors and texts that have come down to us more or less intact as well as those that have all but vanished, points to an occupational hazard for anyone interested in literary dialogue: so much ancient literature that Ovid and his readers would have known intimately is lost to us. Literary critics (including the present writers: see below, §5a) will inevitably tend to stress the intertextual relationships between texts that have best survived the accidents of transmission (in our case: the Odyssey, Euripides’ Bacchae, the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, the pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 26, and Virgil’s Aeneid). So it is worth recalling that, as far as, say, tragic plays about Bacchus and Pentheus are concerned, Ovid would have had at his disposal not only Euripides’ Bacchae, but a number of other scripts that are lost to us or have only survived in bits and pieces, notably Pacuvius’ Pentheus. This does not invalidate the exercise of comparing Euripides and Ovid — far from it. Even if it is salutary to bear in mind that we are almost certainly seeing only part of the full network of intertextual relationships, we should take solace from the fact that, as John Henderson points out, ‘plenty of ancient Roman readers were in the same boat as us: Ovid catered for all levels, from newcomers to classical studies to impossibly learned old-stagers. And the main point remains, that, just as verse form always brings change to a tale, so too a myth can never be told in anything but a new version — stories forever mutate’.
The ‘reader’s digest’ effect of the Metamorphoses works in tandem with its cosmic scope, totalizing chronology and encyclopaedic ambition to endow it with a unique sense of comprehensiveness. More fundamentally still, Ovid’s epic codified and preserved for evermore one of antiquity’s earliest and most important ways of making sense of the universe: myth. As a result, it has become one of the most influential classics of all time: instances of reception are legion, as countless works of art that engage with the mythic heritage of antiquity found their ultimate inspiration in Ovid’s poetry. The Metamorphoses has been called ‘the Bible of artists and painters’ and ‘one of the cornerstones of Western culture’.37 It is virtually impossible to walk into any museum of note without encountering artworks that rehearse Ovidian themes; and his influence on authors, not least those of the first rank — from Dante to Petrarch, from Shakespeare to Milton — is equally pervasive.38 ‘Bible’ and ‘cornerstone’, though, with their implications of ponderous gravity and paradigmatic authority, are rather odd metaphors to apply to Ovid’s epic: they capture its importance through the ages, but unwittingly invert why the Metamorphoses has continued to resonate with so many creative geniuses (as well as the average reader). After all, Ovid’s intense exploration of erotic experience in all its polymorphous diversity and his vigorous celebration of transformative fluidity (or, indeed, eternal flux) in both nature and culture make of the poem a veritable counter-Bible, offering a decidedly unorthodox vision of the universe and its inhabitants.
It is a fundamental principle of narration, as John Henderson reminds us, that ‘a tale tells on its teller — all these stories came into Ovid’s mind-and-repertoire, and these are his versions, so “about” Ovid’. And (he adds) ‘tales mean to have designs on those on the receiving-end, and now that includes us, and that means you. There are many reasons why the Metamorphoses (plural) keep bulldozing their way through world culture, but this (singular) is what counts the most. As Horace put it: de te fabula narratur’.39
37 Brown (1999) 1.
38 For specific examples in the set text, see Comm. on 568–71 (Shakespeare) and 664 – 65 (Seneca); 670–72 (Marlowe).
39 For the cautionary tale of how some classical students took the Euripidean Bacchus all too close to heart, see Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
While some themes can be encountered virtually anywhere in the Metamorphoses, others cluster in certain parts and generate a distinctive narrative ethos. The first two books, for instance, have attracted the label ‘Divine Comedy’: they feature various sexual adventures of the Olympian gods — mostly rapes of mortal women. All cry out for a feminist critique, even if — or, better, because — the narrative tone remains fairly light throughout. With the beginning of Book 3, Ovid’s literary universe takes on a darker complexion. The first protagonist of the book is the Phoenician prince Cadmus, whose appearance is a carryover from the concluding rape/abduction tale of the previous book. At the behest of his father Agenor, Cadmus attempts to track down his sister Europa, whom Jupiter had carried off at the end of Book 2 — a veritable mission impossible. Unsuccessful in his search and forbidden by his father to return home empty-handed, Cadmus heads into voluntary exile. His wanderings bring him to Boeotia where he founds Thebes, a city in which tragic and ultimately hellish energies are unleashed.40
Considered from the perspective of the ancient literary tradition, it is hardly coincidental that Ovid’s epic takes a ‘tragic’ turn as it turns to Theban myth. For in Attic drama, as Froma Zeitlin has demonstrated in a seminal essay, ‘Thebes consistently supplies the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.41 The city indeed epitomizes what Greek tragedy is all about. Judging from the surviving scripts of Athenian playwrights, daily life in ancient Thebes featured incessant civil strife, repeated autochthonous disaster, miscellaneous forms of sexual perversion (rape, sodomy, incest), and even the occasional human dismemberment (sparagmos) — in short, the entire range of transgressions that upset the normal order of things. To quote Zeitlin again: ‘Thebes, we might say, is the quintessential “other scene”, as Oedipus is the paradigm of tragic man and Dionysus is the god of the theatre. There Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, the self, the family, and society, but there they are displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens’.42 Ovid’s version of Thebes fully lives up to the anticipation of calamity evoked by the city’s longstanding tragic associations. As the fates of Cadmus and Harmonia, Actaeon, Semele, Narcissus, Pentheus, and Ino and Athamas show, the myths that Ovid here incorporates into his epic world have lost none of the sinister and fateful character that they had acquired on the tragic stage. These dramatis personae embark once more on a literary destiny within a tragic dystopia that inexorably leads them to their doom.
There is, indeed, a striking coherence to Met. 3.1–4.603, the narrative stretch that begins with Cadmus’ exile and ends with his and his wife Harmonia’s transformation into snakes (stories concerning the city’s founder and his offspring are in italics):
3.1 - 137 | Foundation: Cadmus, his companions, the dragon of Mars, the Spartoi | |
3.138 - 252 | Actaeon, son of Autonoe | |
3.253 - 315 | Semele (birth of Bacchus) | |
3.316 - 38 | Teiresias (and his sex-changes) | |
3.339 - 510 | Echo and Narcissus | |
3.511 - 733 | Pentheus, son of Agave (including the inset tale of Bacchus and the Tyrrhenian sailors) | |
4.1 - 415 | The daughters of Minyas and Bacchus | |
4.55 - 388 | Tales of the Minyeides: | |
4.55 - 166 | Pyramus and Thisbe | |
4.169 - 270 | The Love Affairs of the Sun | |
4.276 - 388 | Salmacis and Hermaphroditus | |
4.416 - 562 | Ino and Athamas with Learchus and Melicertes | |
4.563 - 603 | Cadmus & Harmonia: exile and transformation into snakes |
Met . 3.1–4.603 has been termed Ovid’s Thebaid, insofar as it is the city of Thebes (and its environs) that provides a unifying thematic and topographical focus. Even when the narrative veers off — as in the case of Tiresias, Echo and Narcissus, and the daughters of Minyas (the ‘Minyeides’) — Thebes remains an important point of reference. So, for example, the Minyeides, who reside in the near-by city of Orchomenos, while in many ways forming a self-contained narrative unit within Ovid’s Thebaid, are unable to escape the tragic forces that emanate from Thebes. Not unlike Pentheus, they fall victim to the powers of Bacchus, whom they unwisely choose to disregard.
Clearly, then, Thebaid is an appropriate label for Met. 3.1–4.603; no less appropriate, though, would be Cadmeid (‘an epic poem about Cadmus and his offspring’), inasmuch as Ovid chronicles the fates of Cadmus and Harmonia, along with their four daughters and five grandsons:
Cadmus and Harmonia | ||||
Daughters | Autonoe | Semele | Agave | Ino |
Grandsons | Actaeon | Bacchus (father: Jupiter) | Pentheus (father: Echion) | Learchus and Melicertes (father: Athamas) |
Twice Cadmus himself comes into focus: his heroics get the Theban narrative going at the beginning of Book 3; and his despairing exit from the city together with his wife and the transformation of the couple into snakes brings this particular narrative unit to a close. This ‘frame’ is worth a more detailed look since it defines the thematic terms for the episodes it encloses, including the set text.
The opening sequence treats events up to the foundation of the city: Cadmus’ arrival in Boeotia, the slaughter of his companions by the dragon of Mars, Cadmus’ revenge-killing of the beast, his sowing of its teeth at the behest of a divine voice, the rise of the Spartoi and their mutual slaughter, which leaves only a handful of survivors — Thebes’ citizen population.43 Ovid skips over the actual foundation (and the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia), restricting himself to what amounts to a tragic prologue for the subsequent narrative:
Iam stabant Thebae, poteras iam, Cadme, videri
exilio felix: soceri tibi Marsque Venusque
contigerant; huc adde genus de coniuge tanta,
tot natos natasque et, pignora cara, nepotes,
hos quoque iam iuvenes; sed scilicet ultima semper
exspectanda dies hominis, dicique beatus
ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet.
Prima nepos inter tot res tibi, Cadme, secundas
causa fuit luctus …
(Met. 3.131–39)
And now Thebes stood; now you could seem, Cadmus, a happy man even in exile. Mars and Venus had become your parents-in-law; add to this children of so distinguished a wife, so many sons and daughters and, pledges of your love, grandchildren, these too now at the brink of manhood. But of course man’s last day must ever be awaited and no-one ought to be called happy before his death and funeral rites. Among such favourable circumstances, Cadmus, the first cause of grief was one of your grandsons …
After recounting the wretched fates of Cadmus’ children and grandchildren, Ovid returns to the royal couple: his Theban history ends with Cadmus and Harmonia heading off into self-imposed exile and eventually transforming into snakes (Met. 4.563–603). Cadmus himself prays for this metamorphosis as he recalls how it all began, thus bringing the narrative full circle:
Nescit Agenorides natam parvumque nepotem
aequoris esse deos; luctu serieque malorum
victus et ostentis, quae plurima viderat, exit
conditor urbe sua, tamquam fortuna locorum,
non sua se premeret, longisque erroribus actus
contigit Illyricos profuga cum coniuge fines.
iamque malis annisque graves dum prima retractant
fata domus releguntque suos sermone labores,
‘num sacer ille mea traiectus cuspide serpens’
Cadmus ait ‘fuerat, tum cum Sidone profectus
vipereos sparsi per humum, nova semina, dentes?
quem si cura deum tam certa vindicat ira,
ipse precor serpens in longam porrigar alvum’.
dixit, et ut serpens in longam tenditur alvum.
(Met. 4.563–76)
Cadmus was unaware that his daughter (Ino) and little grandson (Melicertes) had been changed to gods of the sea. Overcome with grief and the sequence of calamities and because of the many portents he had seen, the founding father left his city, as if the fortune of the site rather than his own were oppressing him. Driven on through long wanderings, at last the exile and his wife reached the borders of Illyria. At that point, heavy with woes and years, while they went over the early calamities of their house and their own troubles in conversation, Cadmus said: ‘Was that a sacred serpent which my spear transfixed back when, recently departed from Sidon, I scattered his teeth, a novel type of seed, on to the earth? If the care of the gods is avenging him with such unerring wrath, I pray that I, too be stretched into snaky form as a serpent’. And as he spoke he was stretched into a snaky form as a serpent …
A nexus of verbal correspondences correlates the beginning and end of Ovid’s Cadmeid. At 3.131–42, Cadmus’ apparent good fortune is quantified via his abundant progeny: he might seem enviable, the poet portentously observes, in view of his numerous daughters (natas), sons (natos), and grandchildren (nepotes). This initial plurality contrasts sharply with the singulars of the phrase natam parvumque nepotem at 4.563. The words refer to Cadmus’ daughter Ino and grandson Melicertes, the only members of his family not yet visited by catastrophe — though Cadmus believes himself to have just witnessed their hellish destruction as well. For him they are the final link in the long chain of misfortunes which began with the gruesome demise of Actaeon (prima … causa fuit luctus, 3.138–39), continued through Book 3 (including Pentheus) and came to its bitter end with the lethal madness of Ino and her husband, recounted at 4.481–542. It is precisely this long sequence of dreadful calamities (luctu serieque malorum, 4.564) which drives Cadmus from the city that he himself founded (exit | conditor urbe sua, 4.565–66).
We thus start and end with Cadmus in exile; but the two exiles could hardly be more different. At the beginning of Book 3 Cadmus is in his prime, about to perform the deeds which brought him heroic renown, i.e. the killing of the dragon of Mars and the founding of Thebes. In Book 4, by contrast, we encounter a man broken down by age and suffering who is desperately trying to come to terms with the series of misfortunes that has plagued his family. Ovid underscores the bleak transformation of Cadmus from the active protagonist of Book 3 into the despairing and gloomy figure we meet in Book 4 through pointed verbal play. Most strikingly, in assuming the shape of his erstwhile victim Cadmus fulfils the prophecy uttered immediately after his triumphant slaying of Mars’ serpent:
Dum spatium victor victi considerat hostis,
vox subito audita est; neque erat cognoscere promptum,
unde, sed audita est: ‘quid, Agenore nate, peremptum
serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens’.
(Met. 3.95–98)
While the victor surveys the size of his vanquished foe, suddenly a voice is heard; it was impossible to recognize from where, but it was heard: ‘Why, son of Agenor, do you gaze upon the serpent you killed? You too will be gazed upon as serpent’.
Through its startling prediction, the unattributed voice implicitly proclaims the dreadful law that in a tragic universe each source of good fortune contains the seeds of its own undoing. Like the serpent in this early scene, at 4.565 Cadmus is described as defeated (victus). In the later passage, moreover, Cadmus has, through bitter experience, come to understand the typically Theban proximity of victory and disaster at which Ovid already signalled, both overtly through the prophecy of Cadmus’ ultimate transformation into the very shape of his conquered enemy, and more subtly through the collocation of victor and victi at 3.95. Cadmus’ final realization that he killed a sacred beast closes down Ovid’s Theban narrative by returning it to the point at which it all began. In a traumatic reversal, the very objects that once promised a prosperous future for Thebes, the teeth of the dragon — compare 3.103 vipereos dentes, populi incrementa futuri with 4.571–73, where Cadmus ponders the possibility that the vipereos dentes he used come from a sacred beast — in hindsight turn out to bear within them the burden of a curse that was bound to blight developments from the outset. Cadmus’ wish to be transformed into a serpent arises from the painful realization that only a metamorphic ‘return’ to the origin of his city will put an end to his agony: it is a culminating illustration of the fact that Thebes is ever unable to differentiate itself from its troubled beginnings.44
In the course of the narrative arch that Ovid traces in his Theban history, we thus get a tragic conflation of human and beast and an equally tragic inversion of victor (‘conqueror’) and victus (‘conquered’) as Cadmus rises from a condition of exile to become king of his own city, and progenitor of a prosperous family, before being reduced again to his original status as a childless outcast. Yet the transformation of Cadmus into a snake might also elicit the cleansing laughter of a Satyr play after a day of tragic performances.45 In this respect also it might be seen as a fitting Ovidian conclusion to the Theban saga. As Cadmus’ wish to assume the shape of a dragon is incrementally realized, his horrified wife bemoans his vanishing human features and, more importantly, the unbearable zoomorphic divide that now sunders the couple (Met. 4.576–94). No sooner said than remedied: she promptly undergoes the same metamorphosis and joins her husband on the ground. While at the end of Euripides’ Bacchae, the prophetic anticipation of Cadmus’ transformation into a dragon sets up new horrors since he is to lead a foreign army against the Greeks (Bacch. 1330–43), Ovid’s snakified Cadmus and Harmonia are truly peaceful creatures (cf. 4.602–03). In the Metamorphoses at least, the tragic energy of Thebes is spent.46
40 See Comm. on 513–14 for a fuller account of these preliminaries.
41 Zeitlin (1990) 131.
42 Zeitlin (1990) 144.
43 For details of these developments, see Comm. on 513–14.
44 See again Zeitlin (1990) passim.
45 See Bömer (1976), 183 for the possibility that Ovid constructed the scene with actual Satyr plays in mind.
46 Cadmus’ grandson Bacchus, however, provides the jumping-off point for the next mythic nucleus, centred on Perseus (4.604–10); and neither Bacchus nor ‘Cadmean’ Thebes will ever wholly recede from the background: they are on the map, permanent stock, and Ovid revisits Theban myths elsewhere in the Metamorphoses, notably in Book 6 (with the tale of Niobe and her sons and daughters), Book 9 (the Hercules saga) and in Book 13 with the daughter of Anius and the Theban cup that travels on to Rome. As John Henderson puts it, ‘on the overarching grand scale, the Metamorphoses diagrams the formulaic triangulation of (tragically self-obliterating) Thebes vs. (tragically re-generating) Troy vs. (redemptively renaissant and self-perpetuating) ROME’.
The set text abounds with colourful characters, many of whom make only fleeting appearances. There is the heterogeneous crowd of Thebans who, having fallen under the spell of Bacchus, rush to perform his rites (3.529–30): men (viri), married women (matres), unmarried women (nurus), common people (vulgus), aristocrats (proceres). There are Pentheus’ relatives who vainly attempt to bring him to his senses, chief among them his grandfather Cadmus (avus) and his maternal uncle Athamas (3.564–65). There are the henchmen whom Pentheus sends out to capture Bacchus and who return, blood-spattered, with someone identifying himself as Acoetes (3.572–76). Within Acoetes’ inset narrative, we encounter a gang of wicked shipmates, many of whom are named (and some briefly delineated) with mock scrupulousness: Opheltes, Dictys, Libys, Melanthus, Alcimedon, Epopeus, Lycabas, Proreus, Aethalion, and Medon.54 In the grim denouement on Mount Cithaeron, Pentheus’ mother Agave and her sisters Autonoë and Ino, together with a miscellaneous crowd (turba) of fellow-maenads, lay violent hands on him. Ovid also reports in the episode’s concluding verses that all the women of Thebes (designated Ismenides, after a local river) flock to Bacchus’ altars to venerate his godhead (3.733–34). We may also add the old (senes) and young men (iuvenes) of Thebes whom Pentheus tries to rally against Bacchus (3.3.538–42), as well as a fleeting reference to the Bacchus-defiant Acrisius, king of Argos (3.559–60). Amidst this kaleidoscopic assortment of dramatis personae, four principal figures stand out: Tiresias, Pentheus, Bacchus, and Acoetes. Or perhaps we should say three, since the last two may in fact be one and the same figure.
The prophet Tiresias is a quintessential Theban character found in numerous texts in both Greek and Latin literature. Thebes is his ancestral home: Tiresias’ paternal grandfather, so tradition has it, was one of the five surviving Spartoi who comprised Cadmus’ first citizen cohort, though Ovid, in line with his cursory treatment of the foundation sequence, omits details of his genealogy. He makes his earliest literary appearance in Odyssey 11, as the seer whom Odysseus seeks out in the Underworld in order to receive advice on his homecoming. But many of Tiresias’ most memorable appearances are in Attic drama, where his special insight into the workings of the universe ensured him a stellar career. In four surviving scripts — Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, and Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Bacchae — he unerringly predicts the tragic doom of his royal interlocutors (and perhaps even helps to move events along, since his predictions are typically met with suspicion, denial, or even wrath). If Homeric epic and Attic tragedy foreground his privileged access to divine knowledge late in life (or even after death), other texts put the emphasis elsewhere, not least to explain how Tiresias acquired the gift of foresight in the first place. Here another aspect of his mythical CV comes to the fore: his unusual proclivity for sex changes. Tradition has it that the perambulating Tiresias once struck copulating snakes with his staff, whereupon he mysteriously morphed from male to female — only to return to his original sex when he did likewise several years later. Given his ‘ambisextrous’ past, one can see why Jupiter and Juno turned to him as uniquely qualified to settle their ambrosia-induced quarrel over which of the two sexes derives more pleasure from the act of love-making. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jupiter insisted on women’s greater sexual gratification, whereas Juno no less adamantly asserted the contrary. Upon being summoned, Tiresias adjudicated the dispute in Jupiter’s favour, and was promptly struck blind by the infuriated Juno. Forbidden by cosmic law to undo the punishment inflicted by his wife, the well-pleased Jupiter granted Tiresias the gift of prophecy in recompense. Our earliest witness for this tale is pseudo-Hesiodic Melampodia, a fragmentary epic poem probably dating to the 6th century BCE.55
Ovid draws on this tradition and the more sober tragic antecedents in fleshing out Tiresias’ biography in the Metamorphoses, thereby making of him ‘an emblematic figure of both divine wisdom and sexual ambiguity’.56 Tiresias initially floats into the narrative in his role as ‘sexpert’. When first encountering him midway through Book 3, we get the tale of copulating snakes, sex changes, and erotic expertise, with the ensuing loss of sight and gain of fore-sight (Met. 3.316–38). Shortly thereafter, Tiresias proves his surpassing vatic ability by correctly, if riddlingly, foretelling the fate of Narcissus (an ingenious stand-in for Thebes’ most famous son, Oedipus, who does not appear in propria persona in Ovid’s Theban History).57 The seer warns Narcissus’ mother Liriope that the beautiful boy will only reach old age ‘if he does not come to know himself’ (si se non noverit, 3.348). Ovid frames the episode of Narcissus — who does come to know himself — with two references (one proleptic, one retrospective) to Tiresias’ unquestioned and well-deserved renown throughout Greece.58 This quasi-universal acceptance of Tiresias as a prophetic authority serves as cue for the Pentheus-episode: the Theban king is the odd-man-out, whose ill-considered mockery of Tiresias sets the stage for his tragic downfall (MetOedipus the KingBacchaeBacchauguror