I had better finish up Ovid’s Metamorphoses before I forget what was in it. It is full of memorable things, but I have limits. Books XI through XV, the last five, in this post.
Book X ended with the songs of Orpheus, so he has to begin
Book XI with Orpheus’s gruesome death, the sin that eventually leads to the
downfall of Morpheus the Sandman. That’s
Neil Gaiman, not Ovid. Then Ovid tells
the great King Midas stories, his “head more fat than wyse,” classic
fables. Arthur Golding shifts register
just a bit into a more fairy tale-like tone:
Then whither his hand did towch the bread, the bread was massy gold:
Or whither he chawed with hungry teeth his meate, yee might behold
The peece of meate betweene his jawes a plat of gold to bee.
In drinking wine and water mixt, yee might discerne and see
The liquid gold ronne downe his throte. (XI, 277)
It’s like children’s poetry.
There’s a terrific storm at sea and shipwreck in Canto
XI. The Romans, the elite Romans at
least, expressed in Seneca’s letters and many other texts, hated going to
sea. Or else loved reading descriptions
of storms. I just read Ovid rewrite the
storm scene in the first book of Tristia, written on his way to exile on
the Black Sea coast.
Ovid has been shaping Greek and Roman mythology into a more
or less coherent history, from creation to Augustus, from the first lines of Metamorphoses,
and in the last books the intersection of myth and history becomes firm – the Iliad,
the Aeneid, and the founding of Rome take us to the present of Emperor
Augustus. Ovid did not invent this
idea. The generations of heroes, for
example, with the parents of the Homeric heroes having their own stories like the
hunt for the Calydonian boar, was well established, but now Ovid is up to Homer
and Virgil and more human-scale stories.
Curiously, then, he skips the Iliad and writing around the Odyssey,
keeping Circe’s metamorphosized pigs and using the Cyclops mostly for his role
in the story of Acis and Galatea that for some reason early modern artists and
composers liked so much. Ovid’s version
is grotesque and ludicrous.
Ovid only borrows scraps from the Aeneid, giving five
lines to the story of Dido while keeping, of course, the transformation of the
ships of Aeneas into mermaids. As with
Homer, Ovid can assume his readers know this “history” inside and out.
More surprising is the featured singer in Canto XV. Where before, in Cantos V and X, we heard the
Muses and Orpheus, this time Ovid gives us Pythagoras, the pre-Socratic
philosopher, an actual person, probably, legendary but not mythic, the perfect
exponent of the great Ovidian themes:
… hear me out: nothing
endures in this world! The whole of it flows, and all is
formed with a changing appearance; even time passes,
constant in motion, no different from a great river,
for neither a river nor a transitory hour
is able to stand still. (Martin, XV, 527)
Metamorphosis is not an element of myth, but of existence,
of human life, as we transform from infancy to childhood to adulthood to old
age. It would be stranger to turn into a
tree or a flower, but it is still strange that I was once a baby.
None of this will surprise anyone who spent some time with
the pre-Socratic philosophers, or with Lucretius, last year.
I’ll end by noting Ovid’s last bout of hideous gore, perhaps
his goriest yet, when he has old Nestor tell the Homeric heroes about the famous
battle between the Lapiths and the drunken centaurs. Since it took place at a wedding no one was
armed, and all of the weapons were improvised, allowing Ovid all sorts of
creative, repulsive murders, each described with care, as in this violent
cooking simile:
His crushed brayne came roping out as creame is woont to doo
From sives or riddles [also sieves] made of wood, or as a Cullace [broth] out
From streyner or from Colender. (Golding, XII, 312)
Yuck!
Thanks to everyone who read along, whenever that was. This has been pure pleasure for me, whatever
my reluctance to write this dang thing.
