by Ovid
The flight of Medea: Ovid’s own invention, a travelogue of minor metamorphoses, none meriting further development, by which Medea gets to Athens and Theseus gets into the story.
To Corinth then she came: Ovid rather briskly summarizes the tragic events that follow Medea’s arrival in Corinth; when Jason abandoned her for the daughter of Creon, the Corinthian king, she poisoned the father and daughter and then slaughtered the children she had by her husband, from whose wrath she fled in her dragon-borne chariot. These events would have been familiar to Ovid’s audience from their treatment in Euripedes’ Medea and perhaps from the lost tragedy that Ovid wrote on this subject.
the song of praise they made up for the hero: Typically, the hero is praised by an enumeration of his glorious exploits; just as typically, Ovid ends his list with a metamorphosis.
King Minos threatens war: The Athenians are now threatened by the great maritime power of Cretan Minos. This episode may be Ovid’s own invention.
his son, Androgeos: slain at Athens, when King Aegeus either sent him to battle the Bull of Marathon or killed him in ambush; as punishment, Minos demanded seven Athenian youths and seven maidens to be sent him every nine years, as a sacrifice to the Minotaur.
shame keeps him from revealing the concession / by which he gained it: Ovid is apparently suppressing another aspect of the story, even more embarrassing to Cephalus. Other mythographers say that his wife in disguise seduced him into agreeing to commit a homosexual act in order to show him that he too was corruptible. Clearly something of that sort is implied here.
the swift beast: a giant, crop-devastating fox.
Book VIII: Impious Acts and Exemplary Lives
Nisus and Scylla: the first in a series of stories in which passions of one kind or another cause protagonists to behave in ways that offend against piety, considered as the duty owed to a member of one’s family—so Scylla betrays Nisus because of her passion for Minos, Icarus disobeys his father, Daedalus betrays his nephew out of envy, and Meleager and Althaea illustrate a situation in which there is no kind of action that isn’t a betrayal.
a tuft of purple: Ovid provides no reason for Nisus’ tonsorial distinction. In some versions of the story the lock is gold, which may provide us with a clue: grapes are purple and/or gold, and the Greek word bótrys means both a lock of hair and a cluster of grapes. Meleager, similarly, is protected by a fetish, a piece of wood, whose preservation guarantees his safety and whose loss means his destruction.
those singing walls: According to the legend, Apollo’s harp, placed on a stone while he was helping to build the walls of Megara, infused the stone with its own music; struck by a pebble, the stone resounds like a plucked harp string.
she who bore you: Europa was the mother of Minos.
the sacred cradle of the infant Jove: According to some legends, the infant Jove was hidden on Crete to protect him from the murderous designs of his father, Saturn.
That wife of yours is worthy, to be sure: Scylla aims low: Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos, became infatuated by a bull; she had Daedalus build her a hollow cow form, in which she was able to satisfy her desire. The offspring of their union was the Minotaur, half man, half bull, who lived in the labyrinth, which Ovid describes later.
twice it had been fed / on the blood of sacrificed Athenians: See note on VII. 656. The hero Theseus was sent with the Athenian contingent to be sacrificed to the Minotaur; after Ariadne fell in love with the Athenian, she betrayed her half brother to him, and he found his way through the labyrinth, guided by a thread that she provided. After slaying the Minotaur, Theseus carried Ariadne off to the island of Dia, where he abandoned her. There she was discovered by Bacchus, who made an honest woman of her and a constellation of her diadem.
Bacchus brought love and comfort: After her abandonment by Theseus, Ariadne was discovered on the island by Bacchus, in a scene frequently represented by artists.
his long exile: Daedalus was being punished for the murder of Perdix, described in ll. 328 ff.
the land that takes its name from Icarus: the island of Icaria, in the Aegean Sea.
Meleager and Althaea: The story of the hunt for the Calydonian Boar possessed an attraction for poets and artists that Ovid seemed to have felt largely as a challenge to his gifts for irony and ridicule.
his chosen band / of youths assembled: another catalogue, of distinguished Greek heroes this time; their amazing incompetence makes an epic mockery of this grand beginning. Caeneus, who / was no more a woman: Her, or rather his, story will be told in Book XII; the father of Penelope’s beloved: Laertes, Ulysses’ father; the son of Oecleus, who was as yet / unruined by his wife: Amphiaraus, a seer whose wife, Eriphyle, betrayed him for a golden necklace; the pride of Arcady’s Mount Lycaeus: Ovid does not mention Atalanta’s name; its appearance in the next line and in 536 and 601 are my additions. Given that she will prove more competent than any of the heroes save Meleager, Ovid’s later description of her gender ambiguity is significant.
That son of Mars: not really; merely warlike.
the Threefold Sisters: the Fates.
O Gracious Ones!: The dreadful Fates were often addressed euphemistically, as a way of courting their favor or avoiding their wrath.
Baucis and Philemon: the exemplary lives of my title for this book.
berries from Minerva’s tree: olives.
Book IX: Desire, Deceit, and Difficult Deliveries
You may have heard the name of Deianira: Ovid actually goes out of his way not to mention her name at the end of the tale of her brother, Meleager, in Book VIII. Ovid’s placement of this tale is hardly fortuitous: there are intriguing similarities between Althaea’s behavior and Deianira’s. Both destroy the men they love, one consciously and deliberately, the other—perhaps—unconsciously.
that paternity you boast of: The father of Hercules is either Jove or Amphitryon, husband of Alcmena; if he boasts of his descent from Jove, he is admitting his illegitimacy, according to Acheloüs.
in my cradle, I whipped snakes: Juno had tried to murder the baby Hercules with a pair of snakes, which he killed.
Hercules reviews his career as a hero: Did I subdue Busiris: an Egyptian king who murdered strangers in his kingdom until Hercules slew him; Antaeus: a Giant; Hercules lifted him from the ground, thus separating him from the nourishment of his mother Earth; three-headed Geryon…and…fierce Cerberus: Geryon was a Spanish shepherd with a herd of red cattle, which Hercules captured; he dragged Cerberus, the watchdog of the underworld, up into daylight; Elis: site of the stables of King Augeias, filled with the dung of three thousand cattle, which Hercules cleaned out in a single day, as one of his twelve labors; Stymphalus: site of a lake full of monstrous, man-eating birds, driven away by Hercules’ arrows; In the Parthenian groves: Here Hercules captured the golden-horned, brass-hoofed deer of the goddess Diana; Hippolyte’s gold belt: a treasure captured from the Amazon queen; apples guarded by the sleepless dragon: Hercules went in pursuit of the golden apples of the Hesperides; the centaurs fell before me, / and the boar: These lines commemorate a battle in the cave of the centaur Pholos, while the hero was out stalking the Erymanthian boar; the Hydra who…regenerated heads to no avail: a victory in which Hercules was aided by his companion Iolaus; those horses fat with blood: Diomedes, king of Thrace, fed some mares of his on human flesh; in another version of the story, Hercules only kills the king; the Nemean lion: strangled by Hercules; this neck upheld the world: temporarily, while Atlas, whose job this usually was, went off to fetch him the golden apples of the Hesperides.
Jove’s cruel mate: Juno’s anger over her husband’s philandering has dogged the hero for his entire life, as he now realizes.
Erystheus: Thanks to Juno, he had gained mastery over Hercules and had imposed the twelve labors on the hero.
Alcmena’s tale: describes the first episode of Juno’s retributory anger.
the Sun’s weight pressed upon the tenth house: Alcmena has finished nine months of her pregnancy and
is entering the tenth; the sun is pressing on the tenth of the twelve signs of the zodiac, which it passes through in the course of a year.
The god…forced her: Apollo raped her.
Iolaüs, restored: nephew and companion of Hercules during the hunt for the Calydonian boar, now restored to life by Hebe, Hercules’ divine bride.
Themis broke in with a prophecy: and a very obscure one it is, briefly summarized as follows (the events refer to the legend of the Seven against Thebes): Capaneus will be struck by a Jovian thunderbolt; the two brothers, Polyneices and Eteocles, will slay each other; the still-living seer, Amphiaraus, will descend into the underworld and find the spirits that he once controlled; his son, Alcmaeon, will slay his mother, Eriphyle, who betrayed her husband; the son, pursued by Furies will flee until his second wife, Callirhoë, demands from him the necklace that was the bribe given to his mother to slay his father; he has already given it to his first wife, the daughter of Phegeius. When Alcmaeon returns to ask Phegeius for the necklace back, his father-in-law realizes what has happened and slays him. The remainder of the prophecy deals with Callirhoë’s revenge on Phegeius for the murder of her husband.
The sons of Aeolus: In the Odyssey, X. 7 ff., Homer describes the brother-sister marriages of the wind god’s offspring.
iron stylus…wax tablet: typical writing instruments of Ovid’s time; the wax could be easily erased and used again.
O Bacchus…your triennial rites: rites held every three years at Ismaria, in Thrace, and described more fully by Ovid in Book VI, “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela.”
Book X: The Songs of Orpheus
Orpheus and Eurydice: a marriage tale with a happy ending at the conclusion of Book IX is followed, at the beginning of Book X, with a marriage that ends quickly and unhappily. Ovid marks the end of his second set of five books with another poetic performance, the songs of Orpheus. Ovid’s attitude toward Orpheus seems less than reverent, but once we get into the songs themselves, the Thracian bard moves into the background and the characters he sings about command our interest.
summoned / by the voice of Orpheus: Hymen is the god of marriage, summoned to preside over the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice.
the Spartan Gates: a cave in the southern Peloponnese that was believed to be one of the entrances to the underworld.
that timid fellow: This and the two figures that follow are otherwise unknown.
Cybele…Attis…: A nature goddess originally worshiped in Phrygia, Cybele and her cult were brought to Rome in the second century. Attis was a Phrygian shepherd boy; Cybele fell in love with him, but he wished to marry another. After the goddess drove him into a frenzy, he castrated himself, and his spirit entered a pine tree.
the swollen claws / of the seashore-dwelling Crab: the constellation Cancer.
you will signal grief: as the cypress does even to this day.
unfortified Sparta: The bravery of the Spartans, said the Spartans, allowed them to do without walls.
The Propoetides and the Cerastae: otherwise unknown; they would seem to fit into the second part of Orpheus’ program, “girls seized by forbidden and blameworthy passions”(212), and Pygmalion’s avoidance of the female sex in the next story is credited to his observance of their misdeeds.
Cerastae: the word in Greek means “wearing horns.”
Pygmalion: Ovid’s tale of women made insensible is followed by a tale of an insensible figure given sensibility. Though other versions of this story were known in his time, Ovid’s telling of it is the one that has endured and flowered down to our own time. In later versions of the tale, the woman’s name is given as Galatea.
the three sisters: the Furies, also referred to as “the serpent-coiffed sisters” at l. 430.
Myrrha: The most fully developed expression of Orpheus’ second theme, Myrrha’s tale has its parallel with the story of Byblis, in Book IX.
Icarus…Erigone: example of a devoted father-daughter pair: after his death, she hanged herself. Both were constellated: he as Boötes, she as Virgo.
Venus and Adonis (1): Since the vocation of the goddess is inciting passion in others, it is perhaps not unseemly for her to be seen in passion’s grip, as she is in this tale. Within the story of Venus and Adonis, the inner story of Atalanta and Hippomenes (one of Ovid’s most exuberant narrative romps) gives us an instance of a woman who gets on well when she leads men to their deaths but gets into trouble when she cannot resist a passion for one of them.
reenacted / in ritual form, his death and my lamentation: The Adonia, a cult celebration of Adonis’ death, in which statues were carried through the streets of Rome, was celebrated in Ovid’s time.
change a young woman / to fragrant mint: Persephone had changed the nymph Minthe into the plant.
Book XI: Rome Begins at Troy
as Orpheus compelled the trees: through the magic of his song.
a raving mob of Thracian women: the Maenads, devotees of Bacchus; their enmity is depicted as a consequence of Orpheus’ post-Eurydicean attitude toward women.
a ferocious snake: an episode known only from Ovid’s treatment here; a typical ending to the story would emphasize the way in which the head of Orpheus, washing up on Lesbos, made that island preeminent for poetry. It may be that Ovid’s attitude toward Orpheus is revealed as much by the way he avoids a conclusion flattering to the legendary bard as by the extravagance of the mourning that precedes it.
Timolus: The mountain god is both god and mountain.
The perfidy of Laomedon: Laomedon’s deceit was seen as the source of Troy’s later woes. The subsequent flood, the required sacrifice, and the delivery of the maiden by the hero all have their parallels in the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.
his butchery of Phocus: Peleus, son of Aeacus, acting out of envy of his half brother, murdered Phocus with a discus; with his brother Telamon, he was banished from Aegina. Phocus was the son of the Nereid Psamathe, who was moved to vengeance against Peleus.
The wolf of Psamathe: The grieving nymph is using the cattle of Peleus as a sacrifice to ease the transition of her son Phocus to the underworld.
Her starry husband: Ceyx is the son of Lucifer, the morning star.
Juno could no longer bear to be / petitioned: Ceyx is dead, and so his wife, Alcyone, even though innocently unaware of it, will be in a state of ritual pollution until his funeral rites have taken place.
Aesacus: Ovid’s introduction to this slightly comic version of the previous tale reminds us that this is a story, after all. The narrator’s voice is more intrusive than the poet’s was. In the story’s reference to the manner of the nymph’s death, it reminds us of Eurydice’s demise in Book X and the consequent death of Orpheus at the beginning of Book XI.
Ilus and Assaricus: legendary Trojans.
Book XII: Around and About the Iliad
Iphigenia on Aulis: Typically, Ovid begins his account of the Trojan War by emphasizing the effect of the metamorphosis of Aesacus on his father and brothers; Paris is first mentioned as having failed to appear for the unnecessary funeral service, and then, almost as an afterthought, as having caused the war that ensues. Ovid follows this with a second metamorphosis, that of the serpent turned into the serpent-shaped stone, and follows this with a brief account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which also ends in a metamorphosis of a kind, since at the last moment, a deer is substituted for the maiden.
Iphigenia: daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; her story is told in some detail by Ulysses in Book XIII, ll. 265 ff.
Cycnus: This is the third Cycnus to be turned into a swan. His story goes untold in the Iliad.
Caeneus: The transformation of Caenis to Caeneus and the miracle of his invulnerability allow Ovid the opportunity to tease his audience with some unheroic notions about the mutability of gender, as he does earlier, in the second episode of mock-heroic combat: the boyish maiden Atalanta performs more accurately than most of the assembled heroes of the Calydonian boar hunt. The story, told by Nestor, the aged Greek h
ero of the Trojan War, provides a bridge to the third mock-heroic episode, which he also narrates.
The Lapiths and the centaurs: This episode, briefly referred to in the Iliad and the Odyssey, was a favorite for poets and artists.
very nearly spoiled / the services by ruining the omen: The times for weddings were carefully chosen in order to assure a favorable omen for the event; any departure from ritual, such as prematurely offered congratulations, might offend the gods and bring misfortune to the couple.
he saw a bird / on golden wings: The tale ends with a necessary though somewhat extraneous transformation.
Tlepolemus, indignant: the anger of Hercules’ son over Nestor’s omission of any account of his father’s deeds in this battle allows Nestor the chance to tell his own story of how Hercules slew eleven of his brothers, including Periclymenus, slain after he had taken the form of an eagle.
Achilles…overcome by an unheroic/…adulterer: The death of Achilles at the hand of the very unheroic Paris allows Ovid once again to question the heroic ethos and to raise again, in the next two lines, the issue of gender and courage.
His very shield…now instigates a battle: The death of Achilles now leads us into Book XIII, which begins with the struggle over his arms.
Book XIII: Spoils of War and Pangs of Love
Ajax versus Ulysses: The debate between these two Greek heroes, representing brawn versus brains, rude strength versus mental agility, does not occur in Homer, though many of the events referred to by the characters take place in the Iliad, and the protagonist of the Odyssey recalls meeting Ajax in the underworld, where he attempts to placate the spirit of the fallen hero, to no avail. The liveliness of the debate itself reminds us that Ovid studied law before he presented himself as a poet; indeed, the last point that Ajax makes is one that Ovid borrowed from one of his own teachers of rhetoric.
