Reading Ovid

by Peter Jones

  Greeks and Romans were highly suspicious of ‘love/lust/sex’ because it tended to make one look such a fool. But most people are subject to it, some throughout much of their lives, and (as we have seen) Ovid had put it and its usually disastrous consequences at the centre of his early work. By also putting it at the centre of his Metamorphōsēs, he signals that this is going to be an epic with a difference – an epic where the ‘moving toyshop of the heart’ (Pope), in all its folly and feeling, is one of the main ingredients.

  ‘Neoteric’ is the term applied to Roman poetry influenced by Hellenistic Greek poets (‘Hellenistic’ means ‘Greek-like’,‘Greek-style’, and refers to the Greek world from 323 to 31 BC when Alexander had spread Greek culture far and wide). It derives from the Greek hoi neōteroi ‘the younger/modern/fashionable [poets]’, a term used by Cicero of trendy poets in Rome in the first century BC. Broadly, neoteric poetry is characterised by its sophistication, elegance, cleverness, miniaturism, contrived literary self-consciousness and allusiveness to other poetry. At the beginning of the Apollo and Daphne story, for example, Ovid consciously refers back to his Amōrēs (see Comment on 1.452–62); in his Narcissus story, Narcissus takes on all the characteristics of the ‘haughty lover’ of Ovid’s early poetry (see Comment on 10.351–61). In other words, grand, sonorous, noble Roman epic has, in Ovid’s hands, become transformed in terms of style, form and content.

  All this raises questions about the sense in which Metamorphōsēs can be said to be an epic at all. It looks epic in size, metre (hexameter is the traditional epic form) and some of its reflexes (e.g. the interventions of the gods, similes, speeches, catalogues, and so on). But if ‘epic’ is ‘great heroes fighting it out on the battlefield while the greatest of them all battles with his inner demons’ (like the Iliad), or ‘a great hero overcoming obstacles to return home’ (like the Odyssey), or ‘a great hero on a mission to found a nation with the help of the gods’ (like the Aeneid), Metamorphōsēs is automatically defined out of the equation (a constant problem with definitions of any sort). For example, Metamorphōsēs does not have a central hero on a mission of any sort (and the serious fighting tends to take place at weddings). The great hero Theseus simply sits down and listens to stories. Highly articulate and sexually charged women ruthlessly pursue their own desires (e.g. Byblis). The poem is highly episodic, one myth loosely strung together with the next, rather like an anthology (indeed, Metamorphōsēs has its basic origins in collections of myths made by earlier Greek poets). There is no sense of narrative direction. More than one-third of the poem is told through the mouth of someone other than the narrator Ovid. The often trivial or downright demeaning loves/lust of men and gods are a major feature: the sort of fun Ovid had with people-in-love in his earlier elegiac work keeps on breaking through. But nor is it exactly mock-epic: Ovid is not obviously laughing at the genre, but doing something quite different, and very Ovidian, with it. It is as if he wants to show that he can do ‘epic’ too, but that there is no point in doing a ‘Homer’ or ‘Virgil’. They had already been done. So he does an ‘Ovid’ instead, producing something quite unique in the process, characterised by an unmatched multiplicity and diversity of genres, subject-matter and styles.

  Irony and paradox

  One especial feature of life and language appeals to Ovid: its paradoxes. His characters constantly embark on courses of action designed to bring them happiness but doomed only to bring them misery. Sometimes it is their fault; sometimes they are led into it by the gods. amor is one obvious example, bringing with it both intense pleasure and intense pain. The irony of these situations is that both gods and humans think they are acting in their own interests when Ovid makes it transparent to the reader that they are not: by acting in certain ways, they lay themselves open to being acted upon (often reflexively, i.e. by themselves) in ways they did not, or could not, expect. Passage 8, Narcissus, offers the most obvious example. Ovid’s language constantly points up the paradoxes and ironies inherent in such situations.

  Style

  Ovid is a highly rhetorical poet. This simply means: (i) that he takes extraordinary care over every single word – words are there to be enjoyed; (ii) that he composes in a language rich in figures of speech that particularly favours repetition, balance, contrast and climax (see the Glossary of technical literary terms for some of the most common); and (iii) that he is looking to invent plausible ways of arousing his readers’ emotions, especially by making his characters act and speak in ways that will persuasively reproduce (in his readers’ eyes, he hopes) their states of mind. In other words, Ovid sees a connection between painting persuasive characters and touching his readers’ hearts. The technical rhetorical term for ‘thinking up ways of making the action and characters sound as plausible as possible’ is inuentio. The word is most obviously applicable to pleading cases at law, but Ovid is its literary master.

  Whereas Virgil dwells on his subject, repeating ideas in different forms in the same line, Ovid gets on with it. The story is what counts; what people say or do next is his main interest. The result is that, to generalise, there is a consistent emotional profundity to Virgil that one does not find in Ovid.

  By the same token, there is a speed in Ovid one does not regularly find in Virgil (see e.g. Study section to passage 16). Comparisons between the two show that Ovid’s grammar is simpler; metrically he uses more dactyls and fewer elisions; and sense-breaks tend to recur at the main caesuras (see on Metre (12) below). In this sense, Ovid’s surface style is more ‘Homeric’ than Virgil’s.

  There is another very Homeric feature of Ovid’s work: the simile. Homer started this trend; there are about three hundred similes in the Iliad, about eighty in the Odyssey. In Metamorphōsēs, about the same length as the Odyssey and one-fifth shorter than the Iliad, there are over two hundred and fifty. For an example of how Ovid uses similes, see Comment on 1.490–503.

  Some assessments

  Because it is almost impossible to pin Ovid down, it may be helpful to offer some general assessments made of Metamorphōsēs and various features of it by scholars of the past fifty years.

  L. P. Wilkinson (1955, 155) suggests we:

  approach the Metamorphoses with no preconception about what we are to get out of it, taking each episode as we find it, letting the ‘most capricious poet’, as Touchstone called him, lead us through romance, burlesque, splendour, horror, pathos, macabre, rhetoric, genre-painting, debate, landscape-painting, antiquarian interest, patriotic pride – wherever his own fancy leads him.

  Brooks Otis (1966, 323) summarises as follows:

  Virgil is an author who enters into his readers’ and characters’ feelings in order to enhance the majesty of his epic and Roman theme, to suggest the symbolic relevance of even the most incredible scenes. Ovid, instead, exhibits all the incongruities and absurdities, all the unpalatable truth behind the epic décor, all the scandal of myth, in order to shock, amuse or, sometimes, even enrage. Ovid’s approach to epic was thus subject to very severe limitations: wherever he could treat epic or heroic material in a light, satiric or humorous way, he was almost uniformly successful in realizing his essentially comic or critical aims . . . But when he tried to treat heroic themes in a serious or a Virgilian way, he met an absolute check, and fell into the worst sort of bathos. His misfortune was that his epic plan and purpose could not be made to fit his peculiar abilities and deficiencies. His poem is thus a combination of true comedy, real pathos and false heroics, of intentional and unintentional humour, of conscious and unconscious grotesquerie, of brilliant design and disastrous mistake. No wonder it has been so often, so usually misunderstood!

  O. S. Due (1974, 164–5) argues:

  Metamorphoses are not really an epic poem. They are a descriptive poem. And what is described is the innumerable aspects of man, and not least of woman, and of their behaviour as individuals in this fantastic world. Ovid’s gods reveal nothing about religion, and his Kings nothing about the state. Ovid’s animals are not zoo
logical but psychological phenomena. This vast gallery of virgins, mothers, wives, young men, fathers, and husbands, heroes, nymphs, gods, monsters, and plain people, with their different human characters, good and bad or both, and their strange experiences, happy or more often unhappy, in their imaginary world broaden the reader’s human knowledge as they pass before his eyes. Ovid does not point a moral. Any moral would narrow the import of the description: life may be just, but is far from always just, it is often comic or pathetic or stark or cruel or grotesque and macabre. It is always fascinating and interesting – as interesting and fascinating as our own lives and that of our neighbour when looked upon with fresh eyes . . . Man is what all revolves around, his shortcomings, his passions, his aggressions, his pretensions, and his love, a mixture of heroism, tragedy, comedy, romance and elegy, true as only life itself.

  Philip Hardie (2002a, 4–8, passim) summarises modern approaches, which seem to concentrate on finding in Ovid support for various literary and linguistic theories:

  What formerly was seen as superficial wit and an irredeemable lack of seriousness has been reassessed in the light of a postmodernist flight from realism and presence towards textuality and anti-foundationalism. ‘Parody’, a term often used in dismissive acknowledgement of Ovid’s entertainment value, has moved to the theoretical centre of studies of allusion and inter-textuality. Ovid exults in the fictiveness of his poetry, that written in the first person singular quite as much as self-evidently tall tales like that of the beautiful girl Scylla changed into a hideous sea-monster (Met. 13.732–4). At the heart of the Metamorphoses we come across a debate on the truth or fiction of stories of metamorphosis, conducted by fictional characters at the dinner-table of a river-god, himself a shape-shifter (Met. 8.611–19).

  The later twentieth-century novel saw a significant shift from the prevailing nineteenth-century realist tradition that concealed its own devices, back towards the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century self-conscious novel, defined by Robert Alter as ‘a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality’. The line of Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot may be traced back directly to the ancient prose novel, but also to Ovid . . .

  Ovid has often been accused of mocking and trivializing love, and in effect bringing about the death of love elegy. This might seem strange for a poet described by Chaucer as ‘Venus’ clerk’ (House of Fame 1487). Recent theorizations of desire offer opportunities to move beyond the stereotype of Ovid the cynical realist. The teasing revelation that the elegist’s object of desire, Corinna (Ovid’s girl-friend in Amōrēs), may be no more than an effect of the text confronts us with an awareness of our own investment of desire in the process of reading. ‘Reading about desire provokes the desire to read.’ Ovid complains that he has prostituted his girl-friend to the reader in his poems (Am. 3.12.5–8). In the Metamorphoses Ovid offers virtuoso experiences of a Barthesian ‘plaisir du texte’. An episode like the story of Mercury’s enchantment of Argus (Met. 1.668–723) thematizes the model of reading as seduction.

  Peter Brooks puts Freudian theories of desire to work in analyses of the workings of texts, both in the dynamic of desire and repetition that structures narrative plots, and in the inscription of meaning on desired bodies within such narratives, the ‘semioticization of desire’. Ovidian narrative repetition lends itself readily to the former kind of analysis; with regard to the latter a body like that of Daphne, in the archetypal erotic narrative of the Metamorphoses (1.452–567), is transformed into a multiply determined site of signification, the deposit of a desire whose satisfaction is for ever deferred . . .

  After-life

  Ovid’s influence on writers, artists and composers from the twelfth century onwards was very great indeed. For some in the Middle Ages, he was the rakish man of the world, the secular antidote to the puritan teachings of the Church. The Church responded by moralising him (Ovide moralisé was the title of a fourteenth-century 70,000-line poem), finding in him a thinker, philosopher and theologian whose fictional myths conveyed deep and familiar truths. For example, Daedalus and Icarus were taken to represent Christ’s ascension to heaven, with a warning to man not to aspire too high. Arthur Golding’s Epistle (1567), which introduces his translation of Metamorphōsēs, gives an idea of the general approach. In all the myths, he says, are:

  pithy, apt and plain

  Instructions which import the praise of virtues and the shame

  Of vices, with the due rewards of either of the same.

  As, for example, in the tale of Daphne turned to bay

  A mirror of virginity appear unto us may;

  Which, yielding neither unto fear, nor force, nor flattery,

  Doth purchase everlasting fame and immortality.

  In Phaeton’s fable unto sight the poet doth express

  The natures of ambition blind and youthful wilfullness,

  The end whereof is misery, and bringeth at the last

  Repentance when it is too late, that all redress is past . . .

  Tiresias wills inferior folk in any wise to shun

  To judge between their betters, lest in peril they do run.

  Narcissus is of scornfulness and pride a mirror clear

  Where beauty’s fading vanity most plainly may appear.

  And Echo in the selfsame tale doth kindly represent

  The lewd behaviour of a bawd and his due punishment.

  The piteous tale of Pyramus and Thisbe doth contain

  The heady force of frantic love, whose end is woe and pain . . .

  Chaucer saw in Ovid a fellow-spirit, the great story-teller embracing all genres and styles, but did not take him as in any way authoritative. Nor did the Elizabethans who, fascinated by sex, generation and death, found in Ovid the perfect combination of sensuousness and wit: Ovid was there to be used, not revered. His influence is strong, for example, in Shakespeare (via Golding’s translation). As Francis Meres famously put it in his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598):

  As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweet wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private frinds, &c.

  Until the eighteenth century, virtually all art was based on the Bible, Virgil, Homer and Ovid, but artists, like writers, did not necessarily set out to reproduce Ovid’s words in pictures (see Study section on passage 18, Venus and Adonis). They had patrons, who actually commissioned the art, to satisfy. These patrons might want anything from high-class decoration, full of Cupids and naked women, to didactic interpretation of famous mythic moments. The two were not necessarily exclusive, and a prestigious poet like Ovid could be mined to supply both. Operatic composers too like Handel (e.g. Semele, 1744), Gluck (e.g. Orphée et Euridice, 1774) and Offenbach (e.g. Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858) have found Metamorphōsēs a rich source. Richard Strauss’s Daphne (1938), partly inspired by the famous Bernini statue of Daphne turning into a tree in the Villa Borghese, ends with Daphne’s on-stage transformation to the accompaniment of suitably metamorphic music. The simple story-lines of Ovid’s tales, full of sharply focussed human characters in emotionally dramatic situations, all worked out in highly rhetorical fashion, fitted the medium to perfection, and (if required) a moral lesson could always be tacked on at the end. As Norman Vance says:

  the brilliant artifice of opera, offering spectacle and dramatic feeling, found Ovid indispensable . . . the operatic qualities of Ovid were as well suited to comedy as tragedy, for his narratives offered a sometimes evasive, even equivocal tone or quality of feeling which could be rendered sympathetically, or comically subverted according to taste. (quoted from Martindale 1988, 229–30)

  This is an enormous subject that cannot be usefully taken further here. To get some idea of its range, however, and to witness the richness of the tradition, look up e.g. ‘Daphne’ in J. D. Reid, The Oxfor
d Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts 1300–1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). It names 272 artists, writers and composers who have dealt with the story, many more than once (e.g. Froissart [d. 1410] evoked the subject in four poems, Poussin [d. 1665] produced five paintings and sketches, Handel [d. 1759] two compositions, Ossip Zadkine [d. 1967] three sculptures, and so on). Narcissus attracts about the same number of entries; Orpheus nearer 800 . . . Wilkinson (1955, 366–438), Martindale (1988) and Christopher Allen in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Hardie, 2002a, 336–67) offer fine introductions to this endlessly rich topic.

  Glossary of technical literary terms

  Technical literary terms are used throughout the book (cf. the Grammar to Reading Latin, 314–20 – see p. 20 below). These include:

  Aetiology: an explanation of something’s origin (humans were made from stones, ‘as a result of which we are a hard race’, inde genus dūrum sumus, 1.414).

  Anaphora: a figure of speech in which a sequence of phrases or clauses begins with the same word(s) (ō soror, ō coniunx, ō fēmina sōla superstes,‘O sister, O wife, O sole remaining female’, 1.351).

  Antithesis: the choice or arrangement of words to produce a strong contrast (e.g. ‘such hard pride in so tender a form’, in tenerā tam dūra superbia fōrmā, 3.354).