Some Motifs in Metamorphoses 11

Book 11 of Ovid's poem brings us some of the most vivid tales of the Metamorphoses -- from the savage dismemberment of Orpheus, to the twice-told folly of Midas, to the origins of Troy and of Achilles, to the harrowing seawreck of Ceyx and the dream of Alcyone that brings us to the cave of Somnus, before ending with the semi-frustrated suicide of Aesacus.

One would think Ovid is striving to yoke the strangest assortment of irrelevancies. But there are patterning motifs, and it's not a bad thing to notice these, as they can reveal the vestigia of the most careful artistry.

At least, it's best to look closely before assuming that Ovid has indulged in arbitrarily concatenating random tales.

A few examples of these patterns or motifs would include:

1. Audibility and inaudibility.

-- From the outset, we learn that Orpheus's voice could sway even stones. Clearly anyone within the sound of his voice is enchanted, yet the Bacchantes manage to destroy him. Ovid says they were able to drown him out with drums and flutes, breast beatings and howls, such that:

                            tum denique saxa

non exauditi rubuerunt sanguine vatis.

         Then, finally, the stones grew red, with the blood of the poet, to whom they were deaf.

-- Mt. Tmolus, before judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, brushes away the forests so he may hear:

The aged judge was seated on his mountain-top and shook his ears free of the trees.

-- The ears of Midas, on the other hand, are disfigured when he fails to hear properly (at least by Apollo's lights), preferring Pan's crude melodies to the splendor of Apollo.  

-- As Proteus advises Peleus on how to win Thetis, his novissima verba, his last words, sink with him into the sea. 

-- The voice of the captain of Ceyx's ship is drowned out as he tries to give orders to counter the gale. 

-- All sound is deadened in the muta quies of Somnus' Cimmerian cave. 

-- As Ceyx calls upon Lucifer, Aeolus, and Alcyone, his novissima verba are drowned with him in the stormy seas.

2. Uncontrollable violence:

-- The Bacchantes tear apart not only the birds and creatures, but the farmers' oxen and the poet.

-- The wolf who attacks Peleus's cattle does not kill from hunger, but boundless rage, instilled by Psamathe, the mother of Phocus, Peleus's younger brother. 

-- The storm that destroys Ceyx's ship and all its crew evokes the relentless attack of an army besieging a city.

3. Absence/presence:

-- The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone takes pains to describe a relationship of mutual reciprocity -- the two are in one (duas ut servet in una 387), thanks to the complementary symmetry of their love. Alcyone uses terms of presence and absence throughout her speech. Space and Time are their enemies, leading to paradoxes as when Alcyone rebukes him by saying "Am I dearer to you when absent?" 

-- The tale of Ceyx and Alcyone is bookended by mirroring descriptions of spatial expansion and contraction: We see his ship depart, little-by-little, from Alcyone as she stands on the shore. After the storm and her dream there's a dire reversal: Ceyx's corpse floats back, as she stands on the same shore. From immediacy to remoteness to absence and back again, Ovid is vividly conjuring the gradations of presence and absence. 

- The moment Ceyx is entirely outside the realm of sense perception, Alcyone is racked by the violence of excess imaginings, rushing in to fill the void of his absence.

-- The imaginative abundance in the void left by her missing husband is then rendered in the mode of the fantastic, in the cave of Somnus, an Underworld filled with images of all things. Somnus sleeps amid a synchronic infinity of simulacra.

4. Heads floating/drowning while speaking.

-- Ceyx, of course, calling upon Lucifer, Aeolus, and Alcyone.
-- Proteus, returning to his underwater home, speaking as he sinks under the waves.
-- The head of Orpheus floats down the Hebrus, singing.

5. Aggressors turned to stone

-- The snake that is about to attack the head of Orpheus, turned to stone by Apollo.
-- The wolf attacking Peleus's cattle, turned to marble by Psamathe at Thetis's behest.

6. Shape shifters

-- Thetis and Proteus
-- Hermes and Apollo seducing Chione
-- Autolycus
-- Morpheus, Icelos, Phobetor, Phantasos.

7. Humans turned to birds

-- Daedalion - suicide
-- Ceyx and Alcyone
-- Aesacus - suicide

 8. Bloodguilt

-- Bacchantes for death of Orpheus
-- Peleus for Phocus
-- Aesacus for Hesperie

9. Fateful elements of the Trojan story

-- Laomedon refuses to pay Apollo and Poseidon and calls them liars (flood attacks city)
-- Laomedon refuse to give Heracles the horses of Tros for saving Hesione
-- Peleus and Thetis
-- Phocus is the grandfather of Epeius, builder of the Wooden Horse.
-- Hermes and Chione beget Autolycus.
-- Storm and shipwreck (water as army attacking city: ship of state)
-- Aesacus and the line of Trojan kings.

Note on method:

These motifs are not meant to be an exhaustive survey. They're simply those that came forward during our reading of this book. While suggestive, they are not necessarily the most important or thematically central elements. But they are there, and that's part of what is entailed in close reading, a first step. The next step would move to looking at how they interrelate, what themes resonate, and then, later on, looking at how the patterns of Book 11 relate to the larger tapestry of the total work.

A few notes on Midas

According to Hyginus, Fab. 46, Zeus killed Erechtheus with a thunderbolt at the request of Poseidon, who was enraged at the Athenians for killing his son Eumolpus.

Ovid says in passing that Midas, along with Eumolpus, was tutored by Orpheus:

King Midas, to whom, with Athenian Eumolpus, Orpheus of Thrace had taught the Bacchic rites.

If one looks into Eumolpus a little, it is immediately clear he's a major culture hero -- son of Poseidon, a teacher of Heracles (as Theocritus notes in Idyll 24), and a bridge between Silenus, Dionysus and Orpheus, and the Eleusinian Mysteries.* As Wikipedia notes,

Triptolemos,Demeter, Persephone

The Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter signals Eumolpus's importance:

She to Triptolemus taught, and to Diocles, driver of horses,
Also to mighty Eumolpus, to Celeus, leader of peoples,
Cult of the holy rites, to them all her mystery telling. HH Dem. 474-476

As a son of Poseidon, Eumolpus is also linked to the pre-Athena days of Athens - before the contest by which the city chose Athena over the sea God, as depicted by Athena in Book 6.

The point here is that Midas, although he has come down to us in fables as the prototypical fool, is linked with Eumolpus as learning Bacchic rites directly from Orpheus. Midas recognizes Silenus, the tutor of Bacchus, and entertains him for 10 days, then returns him to his ward, who allows him any wish.

Bacchus and Midas: Poussin

We then get two familiar stories about Midas -- the golden touch and the ears of the ass -- and we might consider why, in the course of describing the dissemination of the Orphic tradition, Ovid puts them together here. Midas seems to indicate a decline, a possibly errant or degenerate path of the Orphic tradition -- quite different from what Eumolpus taught at Eleusis.

In part, this would be Ovid's way of indicating differences between the central Greek tradition and that which perhaps got bowdlerized in Anatolia. If so -- and this is just speculation -- is Ovid suggesting something about the background of Troy, something in the roots of Rome? How might this relate to the tale of Peleus and Thetis, both of whom bring into play their own complex histories?

Peleus and Thetis: Leonard Porter 

*The Eumolpidae: (Greek: Ευμολπιδαι) were a family of priests at Eleusis who maintained the Eleusinian Mysteries during the Hellenic era. As hierophants, they popularized the cult and allowed many more to be initiated into the secrets of Demeter and Persephone. The legendary genealogy of the Eumolpidae cast them as descendants of Eumolpus, one of the first priests of Demeter at Eleusis, through his second son, Herald-Keryx.

Silenus' stammering song

The familiar figure of Silenus as a staggering drunk (Ovid's word is titubantem) surrounded by a merry band of satyrs and bacchantes is only part of the story. It is Silenus seen from one angle, but not from another. But for the purposes of this figure, we should keep in mind the peculiarities not so much of metamorphosis as of anamorphosis. He is and is not what he seems.

Alcibiades made much of Socrates as a Silenus in the Symposium, and Virgil gives us a Silenus in the sixth Eclogue who, while sleeping off his wine, is captured by two boys:

The boys Chromis and Mnasyllos
saw Silenus lying asleep in a cave,
his veins swollen as ever with yesterday’s wine:
nearby lay the garlands fallen just now from his head,
and his weighty bowl hung by its well-worn handle.
Attacking him, they tied him with bonds from his own wreaths
(for the old man had often cheated them both of a promised song).
Aegle arrived, and added an ally to the fearful pair,
Aegle, loveliest of the Naiads, and as he opens his eyes
she’s painting his face and brow, with crimson mulberries.
Laughing at the joke, he says: ‘Why fasten me with chains?
Free me, boys: it’s enough your power’s been shown.
Hear the songs you desire: she’ll have another present,
you your songs.’ And at once he begins.

Then you might have seen Fauns and wild creatures dance
to the measure, then the unbending oaks nodded their crowns:
no such delight have the cliffs of Parnassus in their Phoebus,
Rhodope and Ismarus are not so astounded by Orpheus.
For he sang how the seeds of earth and air and sea and liquid fire
were brought together through the great void: how from these first
beginnings all things, even the tender orb of earth took shape:
then began to harden as land, to shut Nereus
in the deep, to gradually take on the form of things:
and then the earth is awed by the new sun shining,
and rain falls from the clouds borne on high:
and woods first begin to rise, and here and there,
creatures roam over the unknown hills.

The shift from outside to inside, from external figure to voice (carmen), morphs into a song that speaks of origins, the source of things. The crude, Pan-like pastoral of the shepherds rises, taking on philosophic scope, numinous tone. If any Roman poem could be said to render Virgil's idea of Silenus' song, it's Metamorphoses.

The juxtaposition of Silenus, Orpheus, Bacchus and Midas in Book 11 is not accidental, nor random, nor trivial. In citing Virgil, Ovid is also "siting," situating, his own poem -- its manner, style, and aspirations. One sense of titubantem is "stammering, hesitating, faltering" -- a demi-god, awakened from his drunken dreams, fully sensual, yet he sings of something high, clothed in rude garb. Silenus may stagger, but as Alcibiades says,

. . .once I caught him when he was open like Silenus' statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike -- so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing -- that I no longer had a choice: I just had to do whatever he told me.

Silenus

Rubens offers a memorable Silenus (thanks Arline) - more later - 

The original Silenus resembled a folklore man of the forest with the ears of a horse and sometimes also the tail and legs of a horse.[1] The later Sileni were drunken followers of Dionysus, usually bald and fat with thick lips and squat noses, and having the legs of a human. Later still, the plural "Sileni" went out of use and the only references were to one individual named Silenus, the teacher and faithful companion of the wine-god Dionysus.[2] 

A notorious consumer of wine, he was usually drunk and had to be supported by satyrs or carried by a donkey. Silenus was described as the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Dionysus, and was said in Orphic hymns to be the young god's tutor. This puts him in a company of phallic or half-animal tutors of the gods, a group that includes Priapus, Hermaphroditus, Cedalion and Chiron, but also includes Pallas, the tutor of Athena.[3] 

When intoxicated, Silenus was said to possess special knowledge and the power of prophecy. The Phrygian King Midas was eager to learn from Silenus and caught the old man by lacing a fountain from which Silenus often drank. As Silenus fell asleep, the king's servants seized and took him to their master.

Notes on Marsyas, Midas and the Phrygian mode

We said we did not require dirges and lamentations in words.
We do not.
What, then, are the dirge-like modes of music? Tell me, for you are a musician.
The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lydian, and similar modes.
These, then, said I, we must do away with. But again, drunkenness is a thing most unbefitting guardians, and so is softness and sloth.
Yes.
What, then, are the soft and convivial modes?
There are certain Ionian and also Lydian modes that are called lax.
Will you make any use of them for warriors?
None at all, he said, but it would seem that you have left the Dorian and the Phrygian. (Plato Republic 424b-c.)

In Book 6, Ovid is most obviously concerned with art -- continuing the theme of Book 5 involving "gifts" of the Muses and gods, gifts that can carry lethal consequences. The power of images, image making, and music, the hubris of makers, and the fate of the artist are in play in what happens to Arachne, Niobe, and to Marsyas, and later to Tereus, whose hideous crime is revealed in Philomela's purple web.

The first two stories take place in or near Lydia, Lycia and Phrygia, the latter of which is linked to the power of flute music via the figures of Marsyas and Midas, and was home to the Phrygian mode, as Lydia was of the Lydian.

Marsyas

According to Hyginus, Marsyas was the son of a shepherd-satyr who happened upon the flute (aulos) that Athena had discarded after inventing it. She'd played it for the gods, and was mocked by Hera and Aphrodite because of how it made her cheeks puff out. Angered, she went to Phrygia, saw her reflection as she played, and threw it away, cursing anyone that played it. Marsyas found it, practiced it (perhaps with tutoring from Pan), and this led to his fateful competition with Apollo, and its gruesome result, described by Ovid.

Pindar, as we've noted previously, told how Athena created the many-voiced song of flutes so that she could imitate with musical instruments the shrill cry that reached her ears from the fast-moving jaws of Euryale (Medusa's sister, who was mourning her murder).

Here's another version, which incorporates the tale that it wasn't only the earliest flute music that Athena created, but the first flute -- both linked to Medusa:

Athena also took two ribs from Medusa’s corpse to create a flute, but she could never understand why Aphrodite and Hera broke out laughing when she tried to master playing it. She eventually saw a reflection of herself as she looked trying to blow through them and cast the flutes to earth as she cursed the person who found them. The satyr Marsyas discovered them and learned to play them excellently, but he got involved in a musical contest with the god Apollo that was judged by Midas, the king of Phrygia. Apollo won by playing his lyre upside down, but Marsyas lost his life after trying to do the same thing with the Medusa flute.

Ovid gives Marsyas these haunting words:

“Quid me mihi detrahis?”

"Why do you draw me from myself?"

This is a dry witticism, but with tragic overtones here in Book 6. Later, the Romans transformed Marsyas into a figure of Republican speech -- "parrhesia" -- speech without covering veils.

Among the Romans, Marsyas was cast as the inventor of augury[21] and a proponent of free speech (the philosophical concept παρρησία, "parrhesia") and "speaking truth to power." The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome stood for at least 300 years in the Roman Forum near or in thecomitium, the space for political activity.[22] He was depicted as a silen,[23] carrying a wineskin on his left shoulder and raising his right arm. The statue was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and was associated with demonstrations of the plebs, or common people.

In the fora of ancient cities there was frequently placed a statue of Marsyas, with one hand erect, in token, according to Servius, of the freedom of the state, since Marsyas was a minister of Bacchus, the god of liberty. Theoi

And later still -- perhaps thinking about this extension of the satyr to public life, Dante transformed the figure of Marsyas yet again, in his vibrant invocation to Apollo in Paradiso I:

Enter into my bosom, thou, and breathe

As at the time when Marsyas thou didst draw

Out of the scabbard of those limbs of his

====

Afterward, in course of time, an unmusical license set in with the appearance of poets who were men a native genius, but ignorant of what is right and legitimate in the realm of the Muses. Possessed by a frantic and unhallowed lust for pleasure, they contaminated laments with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, actually imitated the strains of the flute on the harp, and created a universal confusion of forms. (Plato, Laws 700a-701c.)

Midas

Phrygia is also credited as the source of the earliest Greek music, the warlike Phrygian mode (you can listen to a version of it here), and the aulos. Here, Marsyas's flute (aulos, or tibia) is made of antlers:

Phrygia developed an advanced Bronze Age culture. The earliest traditions of Greek music derived from Phrygia, transmitted through the Greek colonies in Anatolia, and included the Phrygian mode, which was considered to be the warlike mode in ancient Greek music. Phrygian Midas, the king of the "golden touch", was tutored in music by Orpheus himself, according to the myth. Another musical invention that came from Phrygia was the aulos, a reed instrument with two pipes. Marsyas, the satyr who first formed the instrument using the hollowed antler of a stag, was a Phrygian follower of Cybele. He unwisely competed in music with the Olympian Apollo and inevitably lost, whereupon Apollo flayed Marsyas alive and provocatively hung his skin on Cybele's own sacred tree, a pine.

This note from Theoi adds context to the differences between Apollo's instrument and that of Marsyas which we were talking about:

The fable evidently refers to the struggle between the citharoedic and auloedic styles of music, of which the former was connected with the worship of Apollo among the Dorians, and the latter with the orgiastic rites of Cybele in Phrygia.

For an ambitious article that pursues this line of thought, see: Seeing Sound: The Displaying of Marsyas.

This from Pausanias:

The Phrygians in Kelainai (Celaenae) hold that the river [Marsyas] passing through the city was once this great flute-player, and they also hold that the Song of the Mother [Rhea-Kybele], an air for the flute, was composed by Marsyas.

Aelian:

"Note that at Kelainai (Celaenae) if someone plays a Phrygian tune in the vicinity of the Phrygian's [Marsyas'] skin, the skin moves. But if one plays in honour of Apollon, it is motionless and seems deaf."

Nonnus:

"Foolish one, who taught you to strive with your betters? Another Seilenos (Silenus) there was [Marsyas], fingering a proud pipe, who lifted a haughty neck and challenged a match with Phoibos; but Phoibos tied him to a tree and stript off his hairy skin, and made it a windbag. There it hung high on a tree, and the breeze often entered, swelling it out into a shape like his, as if the shepherd could not keep silence but made his tune again. Then Delphic Apollon changed his form in pity, and made him the river which bears his name [the Marsyas which flows into the Maiandros river]. Men still speak of the winding water of that hairy Seilenos, which lets out a sound wandering on the wind, as if he were still playing on the reeds of his Phrygian pipe in rivalry."

Much more Midas here.

. . . a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions. (Rep. 424b-c)

Art, violence, hubris

A few questions implicit in Book 6 (Standard disclaimer: I don't know the answers, though I have some suspicions).

- What is Arachne's main offense - her art, or her attitude toward Athena?

- Does Arachne's image somehow reflect her attitude?

Perhaps a better question:

- When we compare the images woven by Athena and Arachne, how do they differ? Are we able to see different models of art?

Three kinds of certamen (that is, contest - from cerno, to separate, discern) make up the early stories of Book 6: "Athena vs. Arachne;" "Leto, Apollo, Diana vs. Niobe," and "Apollo vs. Marsyas."

- Does the story of Tantalos, king of Lydia, and Pelops, his son, relate to these tales? (Tantalos is the father of Niobe, and Pelops mourns her).

With respect to Phrygia:

The earliest traditions of Greek music derived from Phrygia, transmitted through the Greek colonies in Anatolia, and included the Phrygian mode, which was considered to be the warlike mode in ancient Greek music. Phrygian Midas, the king of the "golden touch", was tutored in music by Orpheus himself, according to the myth. Another musical invention that came from Phrygia was the aulos, a reed instrument with two pipes. Marsyas, the satyr who first formed the instrument using the hollowed antler of a stag, was a Phrygian follower of Cybele. He unwisely competed in music with the Olympian Apollo and inevitably lost, whereupon Apollo flayed Marsyas alive and provocatively hung his skin on Cybele's own sacred tree, a pine.

Marsyas, Amphion (husband of Niobe), Orpheus and Midas are all associated with Phrygia, and are linked via the power of music.

- What do we make of the brutal fate of Marsyas? And his metamorphosis - with the tears of his mourners - into a river?

- Do the differences between cithara and flute say something about what's at issue between Apollo and Marsyas?

- How does the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela fit into the theme of art as established and anticipated in Book 5 with the story of Athena, Medusa, Pegasus and the Muses?

- What is Ovid saying in this book about the nature of art, of "creation and imitation, god and man, master and pupil," and the powers of image and of music?