Links to upcoming readings

We're turning to a few shorter modes after completing Sophocles' Antigone - beginning with Pindar's First Olympian Ode, and Penelope to Ulysses, the first of the Heroides:

Ovid's Heroides

Latin only
The Latin Library 

English only:
Kline translation
Theoi Loeb Translation (Showerman) 

Odd: Perseus has a commentary on the Heroides, but not, seemingly, the actual text in either Latin or English.

Pindar's Odes on Perseus

Olympian Odes (Greek and English)

English only - Diane Arnson Svarlien

Printable copy - if this link works for you, it opens an easily printable copy of Pindar's first Olympian.

An anthropological conundrum

Ovid's account of the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs in Metamorphoses 12 is engaged in exploring what it means to be human. Theseus and his Lapith friends are not expecting the chaos that explodes at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

In looking at the centaurs through the eyes of the Greek heroes, we're seeing creatures that are biform, clearly not like us, yet just as clearly containing, somehow, fully the upper half of an entity that's uncannily, undeniably, us. They provoke urgent anthropological inquiry.

"Pindar recounts how the Centaurs from their very origins were associated with the negation of marriage," says Page duBois in Centaurs and Amazons.

Pindar, Pythian 2:

 Unnatural lust throws men into dense trouble; it befell even him [Ixion], since the man in his ignorance chased a sweet fake and lay with a cloud, for its form was like the supreme celestial goddess, the daughter of Cronus. The hands of Zeus set it as a trap for him, a beautiful misery. Ixion brought upon himself the four-spoked fetter, his own ruin. He fell into inescapable bonds, and received the message that warns the whole world. She bore to him, without the blessing of the Graces, a monstrous offspring—there was never a mother or a son like this—honored neither by men nor by the laws of the gods. She raised him and named him Centaurus, [45] and he mated with the Magnesian mares in the foothills of Pelion, and from them was born a marvelous horde, which resembled both its parents: like the mother below, the father above. 

duBois:

"As liminal creatures, the Centaurs may be understood most fully if their sexual nature is taken into account. They are not simply nature spirits, or river creatures, but also hybrid monsters whose existence in myth permitted speculation about boundaries and kinds."  

"As liminal beings . . . they tested the the boundaries between man and beast, between nature and culture." Centaurs and Amazons.

We might do well to remember that the Parthenon's metopes depicted four battles: the battle of the giants against the Olympians; the battle of the Amazons and Athenians; the battle of Lapiths (with Theseus) vs. Centaurs, and the war of Troy. The war rages around borderlines between what the Greeks understood to be their own kind, and the other, in various guises.

More from the duBois book:


 

Poetry at the Olympics, ancient and modern

Herb points us to a piece in the New York Times by Tony Perrottet about poetry and the Olympics, ancient and modern. A few snippets:

. . .the relationship between poetry and the Olympics goes back to the very origins of the Games. In ancient Greece, literary events were an indispensable part of athletic festivals, where fully clothed writers could be as popular with the crowd as the buff athletes who strutted about in the nude, gleaming with olive oil. Spectators packing the sanctuary of Zeus sought perfection in both body and mind. Champion athletes commissioned great poets like Pindar to compose their victory odes, which were sung at lavish banquets by choruses of boys. ...

   

Criticism could be meted out brutally: when the Sicilian dictator Dionysius presented subpar poems in 384 B.C., disgusted sports fans beat him up and trashed his tent. At other Greek athletic festivals, like those at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, the god of poetry and music, verse recital was featured as a competitive event, along with contests for the lyre and choral dancing... 

. . . the gold for literature in the 1924 Paris Olympics . . . went not to T. S. Eliot or Jean Cocteau but to one Géo-Charles, nom de plume of Charles Louis Prosper Guyot, for “Jeux Olympiques,” an evocation of the hammer-throwing and foot races?

(“The runners bend, tense flowers, . . . /A shot: A violent word! / And suddenly / Necks extended, forward / like stalks / faces like pale snatched / apples, / teeth and jaws rushing into / space.”)
Interesting that the article ends with a short poem by Emily Dickinson:

Fame is a bee. It has a song — It has a sting — Ah, too, it has a wing.

Pindar offered a complex fusion of athletic contest, myth, ethics and sheer joy in the beauty of the word that is unequaled. On the subject of fame and the sting of envy, intertwining an Olympian runner with his poetic challenge, he says this in the 8th Nemean (I came across it while researching Cinyras):

After all, men's longest-living happiness

is that which deity has sown for them:

happiness like that which gave vast wealth

 to Cinyras on sea-set Cyprus.

At the starting line I lightly stand and draw my breath

before my race of words; for verbal novelties

            are rife: experiments

in poetry are full of risk. Words whet envy's appetite, and

envy always nibbles at good men and never tries to trim the bad.

-- from Pindar's Odes, a translation by Roy Arthur Swanson.

More on the Olympics here.

[Update:] NPR has a related story here.

Tantalos

Among the memorable characters in Metamorphoses 6 is Niobe, the daughter of Tantalos, the fabled king punished in the Underworld.

Tantalos is remembered in the 1st Olympian Ode of Pindar, which begins,

ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρυσὸς αἰθόμενον πῦρ

ἅτε διαπρέπει νυκτὶ μεγάνορος ἔξοχα πλούτου:

Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night,

stands out supreme of all lordly wealth.

Pindar, Olympian 1

εἰ δὲ δή τιν᾽ ἄνδρα θνατὸν Ὀλύμπου σκοποὶ

ἐτίμασαν, ἦν Τάνταλος οὗτος: ἀλλὰ γὰρ καταπέψαι

μέγαν ὄλβον οὐκ ἐδυνάσθη,κόρῳ δ᾽ ἕλεν

ἄταν ὑπέροπλον,

If indeed the watchers of Olympus ever honored a mortal man, that man was Tantalus. But he was not able to digest his great prosperity, and for his greed he gained overpowering ruin . . .

Tantalos, Ixion, Sisyphos

. . . he stole from the gods nectar and ambrosia, with which they had made him immortal, and gave them to his drinking companions. If any man expects that what he does escapes the notice of a god, he is wrong.

ἀθανάτων ὅτι κλέψαις

ἁλίκεσσι συμπόταις

νέκταρ ἀμβροσίαν τε

δῶκεν, οἷσιν ἄφθιτον

θῆκαν. εἰ δὲ θεὸν ἀνήρ τις ἔλπεταί τι λαθέμεν ἔρδων,

ἁμαρτάνει.

65

Beyond all expectation

Pindar: Pythian 12

τὸ δὲ μόρσιμον οὐ παρφυκτόν,—ἀλλ᾽ἔσται χρόνος
οὗτος, ὃ καί τιν᾽ ἀελπτίᾳ βαλὼν
ἔμπαλιν γνώμας τὸ μὲν δώσει, τὸ δ᾽ οὔπω.

What is fated cannot be escaped. But that time will come,

striking unexpectedly, and give one thing beyond all expectation,

and withhold another.

"et Pegasus huius origo fontis"

As usual, Ovid has woven a thick web of interrelating tales, motifs, parallels and symmetries in Metamorphoses 5. The more we read him, the more convinced I become that one must not only attend to the particular tales, but to larger patterns, as we saw in the story of Cadmus in Books 3 and 4.

In Book 5, it's at least worth considering the pairing of two stories that at first sight don't seem to have much to do with one another -- the tale of Perseus, Medusa and Andromeda comes first (a good summary can be found here), followed by Calliope's account of how the Muses triumphed over the Pierides with their song of the rape of Persephone.

Note that the link between the two tales is Athena -- she's with Perseus until his tale ends in Seriphos, then immediately hies to Helicon to see where Pegasus scuffed the ground bringing forth Hippocrene ("Horse Fountain") the sacred spring. There she meets the Muses. Athena, bearing Medusa's head on the Aegis, is desirous to see where the "child" of Medusa, the winged horse sprung from her blood, touched the earth.

"Volui mirabile factum cernere"

          I wanted to see the wonder made there. 

Urania, muse of astronomy, points out the place saying,  

"Vera tamen fama est,
et Pegasus huius origo fontis"

          But the tale is true, Pegasus is the source of this fountain.

Ovid is linking the terror of the Gorgon's visage and death to the fountain of the Muses, thus to art, song, beauty. And he's not alone. In the 12th Pythian Ode, Pindar follows the same pattern. In this Ode, which celebrates the victory of Midas in αὐλῳδία, an artistic contest of songs with flute accompaniment, Pindar first praises Akragas (Sicilian Agrigentum) as the "splendor loving" home of Persephone. He then turns to the story of Perseus and Medusa to speak of the origin of the song of flutes:

But when the virgin goddess had released that beloved man from those labors, she 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

The pattern is clear: Pindar says the "many voiced" music of flutes began in the horror of Perseus's murder of Medusa, and specifically in the hideous wails of her Gorgon-sister, Euryale. In moving from the Perseus-Medusa tale to that of Athena and the Muses, Ovid is retracing Pindar's poetic steps.

What can it mean that music and Pegasus find their origins linked to the Gorgon raped by Neptune and beheaded by Perseus? If nothing else, we might be reminded of Nietzsche's insight, in his Birth of Tragedy, that the bright Apollonian gleam of appearance had its source in gazing upon the tragic realm of Dionysus.

So while reading Book 5, it might reward our time to have a look both at Pindar's Pythian 12 and also at the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which provided a great deal of poetic antecedent matter for Ovid's muse.

Pindar's Third Pythian (updated)

By chance I happened to look at Pindar's Third Pythian Ode the other day, and realized it offers the opportunity to see how a Greek poet -- indeed, their greatest lyric poet -- handled some of the same material Ovid has been weaving together in books 2 and 3 of the Metamorphoses.

Pindar was claimed by Thebes, and Books 3 and 4 of the Metamorphoses are concerned with the Theban cycle. So admired was he that when Alexander the Great reduced Thebes to rubble, he made an exception of Pindar's house. Perhaps the conqueror was hoping that Pindar's spirit would return to sing of his conquests - after all, according to legend, that spirit did return after his death to share some verses about Persephone with a relative.

Horace defined the way admirers of the Greek poet have seen him ever since:

Julus, whoever tries to rival Pindar,

Flutters on wings of wax, a rude contriver

Doomed like the son of Daedalus to christen

Somewhere a shining sea.

A river bursts its banks and rushes down a

Mountain with uncontrollable momentum,

Rain-saturated, churning, chanting thunder –

There you have Pindar's style...

Anyway, in the Third Pythian, Pindar interweaves the tale of Apollo and Coronis with those of Cadmus and Harmonia, Chiron and Aesclepius, Semele and Dionysus, and even Achilles' parents, Peleus and Thetis:

But she made light of Apollo, in the error of her mind, and consented to another marriage without her father's knowledge, although she had before lain with Phoebus of the unshorn hair, [15] and was bearing within her the pure seed of the god. She did not wait for the marriage-feast to come, nor for the full-voiced cry of the hymenaeal chorus, such things as unmarried girls her own age love to murmur in evening songs to their companion. Instead, [20] she was in love with what was distant; many others have felt that passion. There is a worthless tribe among men which dishonors what is at home and looks far away, hunting down empty air with hopes that cannot be fulfilled. Such was the strong infatuation [25] that the spirit of lovely-robed Coronis had caught. For she lay in the bed of a stranger who came from Arcadia; but she did not elude the watcher. Even in Pytho where sheep are sacrificed, the king of the temple happened to perceive it, Loxias, persuading his thoughts with his unerring counsellor: his mind, which knows all things. He does not grasp falsehood, and he is deceived [30] by neither god nor man, neither in deeds nor in thoughts. Knowing even then of her sleeping with Ischys, son of Elatus, and of her lawless deceit, he sent his sister, raging with irresistible force, to Lacereia, since the girl lived by the banks of Lake Boebias. [35] A contrary fortune turned her to evil and overcame her. And many neighbors shared her fate and perished with her; fire leaps from a single spark on a mountain, and destroys a great forest. But when her kinsmen had placed the girl in the wooden walls of the pyre, and [40] the ravening flame of Hephaestus ran around it, then Apollo spoke: “I can no longer endure in my soul to destroy my own child by a most pitiful death, together with his mother's grievous suffering.” So he spoke. In one step he reached the child and snatched it from the corpse; the burning fire divided its blaze for him, [45] and he bore the child away and gave him to the Magnesian Centaur to teach him to heal many painful diseases for men. 

The doomed house of Thebes, from Cadmus to Pentheus to Laius to Oedipus, hangs over the poet's ruminations:

But a secure life was not granted either to Peleus son of Aeacus or to godlike Cadmus; yet they are said to have attained the highest prosperity of all mortal men, since [90] they heard the Muses of the golden headbands singing on the mountain and in seven-gatedThebes, when Cadmus married ox-eyed Harmonia, and Peleus married the famous daughter of wise Nereus.

Like lightning, Pindar's words to the tyrant Hieron of Syracuse illuminate the torrent of myth:

Do not crave immortal life, my soul, but use to the full the resources of what is possible.

A few updates:

More from Pindar on this story can be found here:

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/04/27/koronis-death-and-the-birth-of-asclepius/

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/07/30/koronis-death-and-the-birth-of-asclepius-2/

See also:

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/04/25/asclepius-two-mothers/

And also the expression "nail the eyes of crows," which according to Sententiae Antiquae, was "a proverbial expression, which meant in effect that you could beat someone at their own game."

Birth of Asclepius death of Coronis