Reading Ovid

by Peter Jones

indūcō 3 draw X (acc.) over Y (dat.)

  praebeō 2 supply, provide

  rīm-a ae 1f. crack

  rot-a ae 1f. wheel

  319 rutil-us a um ruddy, glowing red

  populor 1 dep. ravage

  320 uoluō 3 roll/spin along

  in praeceps headlong

  tract-us ūs 4m. trail

  321 ut: ‘as’, introducing a simile

  interdum from time to time

  serēn-us a um clear

  323 quem: i.e. Phaethon

  dīuers-us a um different (part of). Here it is abl. of place with orbe

  324 excipiō 3/4 pick up, collect

  Ēridan-us ī 2m. river Eridanus (the Greek name for the Po, in northern Italy – Latin Padus – about 3,000 miles from Phaethon’s fatherland, Ethiopia)

  abluō 3 wash, bath

  325 Hesperi-us a um western, i.e. in Italy

  trifid-us a um three-pronged (of forked lightning)

  326 tumul-us ī 2m. tomb, burial

  signō 1 mark, carve

  carmen carmin-is 3n. epitaph

  327 sit-us a um located, placed

  328 quem: i.e. currus; teneō here means ‘hold on track’

  excidō 3 fall out (of the chariot), perish

  aus-um ī 2n. bold deed/exploit

  magnīs . . . ausīs: abl. of cause or ‘attendant circumstances’

  329 obduct-us a um veiled (obdūcō). Phaethon’s father was the Sun

  miserābil-is e pitiable

  aeger aegr-a um sick, ill, painful

  331 īsse: perf. inf. of eō, in acc. and inf. after ferunt

  332 malō: i.e. only the virtual destruction of the world!

  333 Clymenē: Greek nom., Phaethon’s mother

  quaecumque: ‘whatever [things/words]’ (n. pl.)

  334 lūgubr-is e grieving

  āmēns āment-is distraught, maddened

  335 laniō 1 tear

  sin-us ūs 4m. breast. Here it is acc. of respect, i.e. ‘laniāta in respect of her sinūs’ – the self-inflicted signs of grief, RL6(3)

  percēnseō 2 roam

  336 exanim-is is lifeless

  art-us ūs 4m. limb

  requīrō 3 look for. Since Clymene does not know Phaethon has been buried, she looks first for his limbs, then (given that flesh will not last long) for his bones, and finally finds his grave

  337 peregrīn-us a um foreign

  338 incumbō 3 incubuī lie down

  marmor -is 3n. marble

  339 perfundō 3 perfūdī bathe, flood

  aperiō 4 open (i.e. she bares her breast)

  foueō 2 fōuī cherish, warm

  Notes

  With Deucalion, the world was transformed by flood. Here it will be transformed by fire.

  150–60: leuem and iuuenālī, significantly juxtaposed (150), prepare us for two major themes of the Phaethon story: Sol’s chariot is light and will therefore need firm control, but Phaethon is a young man and will lack both the physical weight/strength to control it and the experience too. This combination of incapacities will prove fatal. At the moment, however, he is full of confidence, standing tall in the chariot (151), as charioteers did, and thrilling in anticipation at the touch of the reins (151–2: if he were in a modern sports-car he would be playing with the steering wheel and gears and going ‘vrrm vrrm’). There is pathos in the crunch of inuītō grātēs: Phaethon will soon be regretting his decision (182–4), as will Sol (329–32). What horse-power this chariot carries, too – horses with fiery names matched by their fiery whinnying, their desire to be off making them kick at the door-bars (153–5: note the urgent dactyls of 153 and the ps alliteration of pedibusque repāgula pulsant). Granny Tethys pulls back the bolts, and off they go: goddess of the sea she may be, but even she does not know the disaster that awaits (156: note the heavy, fateful spondees) in the immēnsī cōpia caelī (157) – where the chariot is to run riot, with devastating consequences. They’re off! Hooves and wings working, the horses soon cut through the low clouds clinging to the horizon into the clear sky (158–60: note the dashing dactyls of 158).

  161–70: Now the trouble starts. Note leue (161) – so leue indeed that by 166 the chariot may as well be empty. This important moment is marked by a simile: like a ship without ballast being tossed about in the waves (note leuitāte 164), so the chariot without its usual cargo (165: note the metre) leaps about, jumping up and down. The horses have already realised something is not quite right (161–2); but now, feeling the chariot bucking about, they career away (167–8). The ‘camera’ turns to the terrified Phaethon. Vividly, Ovid depicts the fearful (pauet, 169) thoughts flashing through his mind (169–70). He had paid no attention, of course, to anything Sol had told him, such was his excitement at the prospect of showing off in the driving seat of his new toy. Never say Ovid did not understand a young man’s mind.

  171–7: So what would happen if the sun strayed wildly off its usual route? We are in Ovid’s favourite ‘what if?’ territory again, and he imagines the firmament responding like a living being: cold stars trying to cool down (171–2); the Serpent heating up (173–5); and Bootes lumbering away (176–7). Note the lightly ironical memorant (176) – Ovid teasing again, as if this were a real historical event of which an oral record survives.

  178–92: Back to Phaethon. He is now at a giddy height, and faster and further the world is receding (178–9: note how far terrās is away from iacentēs – a good verbal, and on the page visual, joke). His terror is evinced by his physical reactions (180–1); and we see into his mind as he repents of his foolish actions (182–4) in words that reconstruct the story of his folly: from wanting to know who he was, to succeeding in his request to Sol and picking up the reins. It was his divine birth that led him into all this; now he wishes he had, after all, been the son of a mortal. Another naval simile ensues, this time from the viewpoint of the steersman abandoning control of his ship in a storm and leaving his fate to the gods (185–6): Ovid again using an everyday image with which his readers would be well acquainted to make real the fantasies of space travel. quid faciat (187) re-introduces us to Phaethon’s thought-processes: he sees the vast space of the skies ahead and behind (cf. 157) and measures how far there is to go – but (Ovid comments) in vain (187–90, cf. 156). This story is going to have no happy ending; no ‘gods and prayers’ (186) will save him. He knows he does not know what to do; stupet (191) reinforces the idea of his paral-ysis; unlike the steersman of the simile (185), he can bring himself neither to abandon nor actively control the reins; if only he knew the horses’ names it might help, he seems hopelessly to be saying to himself (191–2). Here, as often, it is not clear whether Ovid is merely recounting the facts or inviting us to look into his character’s mind.

  193–209: Phaethon has looked in front and behind (190); now he looks up, surveys the canopy of the heavens and trepidus sees monsters everywhere, which he takes to be real (193–4, cf. 171–7). The sight of a gigantic Scorpio(n), covering two signs of the zodiac and apparently threatening him with its sting (195–9), is enough to make him drop the reins out of sheer terror (200). The horses, realising that even Phaethon’s (minimal) control over them has lapsed, bolt (201–2). Now the whole sky is open to them; they can go where they will, without let or hindrance (202–4; note the insistent nūllōque inhibente . . . quāque impetus ēgit . . . sine lēge), and so they do: incursant . . . rapiunt . . . āuia . . . modo/modo all emphasise the horses’ random swooping up and down among the fīxīs . . . stellīs (204–7), as does the great surprise of the duly anthropomorphised Moon (208–9; other heavenly bodies have reacted rather differently, as we have seen). Phaethon is now too close to the earth (207), and the consequence is that the clouds catch fire (209).

  210–16: Next, logically, the earth catches fire too, starting (naturally) with the mountain tops (210). The fire spreads, engulfing nature first – the very earth itself, cracked and parched, crops, trees (211–12), all providing material for their own destruction (213 – Ovid enjoys
the irony inherent in reflexive events, especially self-destruction); then cities, walls, whole peoples are consumed; and woods with the mountains (214–16). Ovid has in fact already described their conflagration (210), but he wants to roll out a catalogue of flaming mountains (Ovid adores catalogues: they are a regular feature of epic), and this gives him the cue. Note parua queror (214): the poet inserts himself into the third-person narrative to highlight a particularly dreadful moment, the destruction of cities and people. Ovid was an urban sophisticate; for him, the destruction of nature is parua by comparison.

  227–38: Phaethon now begins to feel the effects of the infernos he has himself begun, and 227–34 are surely seen through his eyes. One would not have thought a chariot that was pulling the sun could be combustible, or that Phaethon would not have felt the sun’s heat already, but Ovid ignores any contradiction, perhaps because he could not think of a way round it (even he could hardly have imagined a heat-shield). First Phaethon sees, and then he feels (227–8). Ovid had presumably been in a forge and knew what it was like to breathe in hot air (229–30) – a homely, vivid image. The chariot begins to glow, ash and dust everywhere, all unendurable, scorching smoke, pitch black, where am I?, horses in charge, running where they will (231–4): it all makes a picture of terrifying confusion as Ovid switches dramatically between Phaethon’s thoughts and the surrounding heat, smoke, ash and darkness. Ovid now steps back to draw some aetiological conclusions: this is how Ethiopians (the usual name for black Africans) became black, and how Libya became a desert (235–8). The thought of moisture being sucked out of the earth leads him into another epic list, of rivers that dried up.

  260–71: The earlier cracks in the earth (211) are as nothing to what occurs when the rivers have all dried up: the light reaches down even to Hades (260–2)! This is another Homeric moment, based on the tumult which shakes the earth when the gods in the Iliad join battle with each other (‘in the underworld, Hades, lord of the dead, took fright and leapt with a cry from his throne. He was afraid earthshaker Poseidon might split open the ground above his head and expose to mortal and immortal eyes the horrible decaying chambers that fill the gods themselves with loathing’, Iliad 20.61–5, Rieu–Jones). Ovid also loves paradoxes, and as the sea contracts, sandy plains and mountains appear where once the seas had been (262–4). What would be the consequence of that, ruminates Ovid? Clearly, the fish would have to dive even deeper (265); dolphins would not dare to leap out of the water (265–6); seals would die and float lifeless on the surface (267–8). And what of the gods of the sea? Too hot for them, too, even for ‘grim-faced’ Neptune – three quick looks are quite enough for him (268–71).

  301–18: Ovid now faces a problem. The horses of the sun are running wild, and all nature is in turmoil. How is the situation to be resolved? He gets Mother Earth (Tellūs) to complain to Jupiter, though even that is nearly beyond her: her speech comes to a halt because she can endure the heat no longer, nor even speak any more (301–2), and therefore with-draws back deep into her underground caves (302–3). With a grandly resounding at pater omnipotēns, Ovid makes Jupiter swing into action: a very different picture of Jupiter from the cruelly deceitful, trivialised husband of the Io incident (though Jupiter will shortly revert to type). Calling on gods and Sol to witness the threat to the world (304–6), he climbs to the high position from which he controlled the weather to launch his bolts – only to find a complete absence of clouds and showers with which to dowse the flaming chariot (306–10). The relatives quās and quōs (309–10), coming before their antecedents, well express the bewilderment of Jupiter. What to do? He launches a lightning bolt, with accompanying thunder, which smashes the chariot and quenches its fire with his own superior fire (311–13). The startled horses at once leap apart and rip themselves free from it (314–15: do not enquire too closely what now happens to the sun), and the pieces fall to earth. Ovid envisages the bits lying scattered about the ground, horribly reminiscent to us of pictures of crashed aeroplanes (316–18).

  319–28: This is not, however, Phaethon’s fate. Ovid pictures the boy like a comet, hair flaming, in headlong descent (‘comet’ comes from Greek komētēs ‘long-haired’; but he should surely look more like a meteor, which does indeed look as if it could be falling, 322, unlike a comet). He lands nowhere near the chariot but in northern Italy (he has, of course, been travelling westwards with the Sun). Phaethon splashes down in the river Po, which tenderly takes him in and cleans him (324), before he is buried with a sympathetic, almost sentimental, inscription composed by the motherly Naiads (325–8). Nothing about the destruction of much of the known world? But Ovid is not often interested in pious lectures or distributing blame: there is little useful one can say, after all, about a young man who learned too late the folly of his ways and met a ghastly death, wreaking cosmic havoc in the process.

  329–39: If Ovid remains cool about the fate of Phaethon, he shows us the grief of his parents. Sol veils his face and refuses to shine for a day (329–31; note crēdimus and ferunt as Ovid goes into ironic ‘historical’ mode again). There is a typically amusing Ovidian paradox here: since the rising and setting of the sun mark the day, how can one tell that a day has passed? Still, it cannot have been all that bad, says the rational ‘historian’, because the earth was still on fire, so there was plenty of light about (331–2)! Clymene, saying all that can be said in the circumstances and exhibiting all the traditional signs of grief, roams the world in search of the remains and eventually finds the grave, where (again) her reaction is thoroughly typical. A son may have been guilty of folly, but he is still a son, and burial (the traditional job of the woman in the ancient world) was the least a mother could do for her beloved child.

  5 Diana and Actaeon, Metamorphōsēs 3.138–252

  Background

  So distraught were the daughters of the Sun, the Heliades, at Phaethon’s death that they were turned into trees around his tomb and their tears into amber; while Cycnus (a grieving relative of Phaethon) was turned into a swan (Greek kuknos). The Sun was finally persuaded to return to his daily task, and Jupiter surveyed the damage to the world. While doing so, he had his way with the huntress Callisto, whom a furious Juno turned into a bear, but Jupiter re-transformed into a constellation. Various stories about gods’ affairs, some told by a crow and a raven, ensue, and Book 2 ends with Jupiter, disguised as a bull, riding off with Europa.

  Book 3 opens with Europa’s father Agenor, who came from Phoenicia (Lebanon), ordering his son Cadmus to find Europa or go into exile. Cadmus chose the latter and consulted Apollo at Delphi, who told him to found a city (Thebes) in Greece, in Boeotia. Defeating a terrifying serpent there (which had killed all his companions), Cadmus was told by Athena/Minerva to sow its teeth in the ground. From these sprang armed warriors, who fought among themselves until the last five still standing agreed to stop and join Cadmus in founding the city. Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Mars and Venus, and all seemed set fair for him. But Ovid goes on ‘Yet a man should await his final day, and no one be called happy until he dies and his last rites are paid.’ At this point, the story of Actaeon begins.

  There were many myths associated with Thebes and Cadmus’ family, the most famous probably being that of Pentheus and the Bacchant women, immortalised in Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae (c. 407 BC). Ovid gives his version of this myth at the end of Book 3. This selection, however, offers the four preceding stories in their entirety – Diana and Actaeon, Juno and Semele, Tiresias, and Echo and Narcissus. They are glossed as separate stories, the only Latin omitted being a catalogue of dogs (3.207–27). They give a good idea of how inventively Ovid runs one story into another and develops broadly thematic subject-matter.

  3.138–42: Actaeon was an innocent victim

  †prīma^ nepōs – inter tot rēs tibi, Cadme, secundās –

  ^causa fuit luctūs, †aliēnaque cornua frontī

  †addita, uōsque, canēs, satiātae sanguine erīlī.

  140

  †a
t bene sī quaerās, fortūnae crīmen in illō,

  nōn scelus, inueniēs. quod^ enim ^scelus †error habēbat?

  3.143–54: Actaeon calls for an end to the day’s hunting

  mōns erat, †īnfectus uariārum caede ferārum.

  iamque diēs medius †rērum contrāxerat umbrās,

  et sōl †ex aequō mētā distābat utrāque,

  145

  cum iuuenis^ †placidō* per dēuia lūstra uagantēs

  †participēs operum compellat ^Hyantius *ōre:

  †‘līna madent, comitēs, ferrumque cruōre ferārum,

  fortūnaeque^ diēs habuit ^satis. †altera^ lūcem

  cum †croceīs ^inuecta rotīs ^Aurōra redūcet,

  150

  prōpositum †repetēmus opus. nunc Phoebus utrāque^

  distat idem ^mētā, †finditque uapōribus arua.

  †sistite opus praesēns, nōdōsaque tollite līna.’

  iussa uirī faciunt, †intermittuntque labōrem.

  3.155–62: A valley sacred to Diana is described

  †uallis erat, piceīs et acūtā dēnsa cupressū,

  155

  nōmine †Gargaphiē, succīnctae sacra Diānae,

  †cus in extrēmō est antrum^nemorāle^ recessū,

  arte †^labōrātum nūllā: simulāuerat artem

  ingeniō nātūra suō. nam †pūmice uīuō

  et leuibus tōfīs nātīuum †dūxerat arcum;

  160

  †fōns^ sonat ā dextrā, tenuī ^perlūcidus undā,

  margine †grāmineō patulōs ^incīnctus hiātūs.

  3.163–72: Diana is bathing there with her nymphs

  hīc dea siluārum, †uēnātū fessa, solēbat