Throughout Metamorphoses 10, we need to remind ourselves that all the tales of the book after the story of Eurydice are sung by Orpheus to his attendant anthology of trees and creatures. Perhaps no tale is more Orphic than that of Pygmalion and the statue.
We note that the series of tales from Pygmalion to Adonis are "all in the family," as Pygmalion and the statue are the great-grandparents of Myrrha (via Paphos and Cinyras), and great-great ancestors of Adonis.
Orpheus's stories begin with Ganymede, plucked from Earth by Zeus on Mt. Ida, and end with Adonis gored by a boar. These songs frame the tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes, sung by a second narrator, Venus.
- Ovid sings of Orpheus and Eurydice.
- Orpheus in turn sings of Ganymede, Cyparissus and Hyacinth; of Venus transforming Pygmalion's work of art into a woman, of Adonis's mother's incest with her father, of the birth of Adonis, of Venus's love for Adonis.
- Venus sings of Atalanta to her beloved Adonis.
- Orpheus sings the death of Adonis.
- Ovid sings the death of Orpheus.
Characters in stories -- depicted representations -- are turning into singers of stories.
Thanks to Arline for our recent images of Ganymede and Pygmalion.
Metamorphoses 10 begins with the figure of Hymen, who leaves the surprisingly successful wedding of Iphis and Ianthe to attend the unfortunate marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Hymen and Eros
His hair is flaxen, his torch is sputtering, and his journey to Thrace is described by the verb digreditur -- to depart, but also to deviate, digress. He has come because he was called by Orpheus, whose call can move trees and beasts. All goes wrong.
There's very little in the available sources about Hymen, who is usually cited not as part of a story, but in close connection with the hymenios, the song sung at the procession of the bride to the house of the groom (as in Catullus's famous Hymn to Hymen). I.e., the god and the hymn calling upon the god are in some sense intermingled.
The god and his song were to accompany the bride to the house of the groom -- a rite of passage, a moving across a threshold from daughter/virgin to wife/mother. Eurydice doesn't make it.
While it might be over-reading to attach too much importance to this failure of Hymen, there are some interesting elements in his mythological background.
In some versions, he is the son of Apollo and a Muse, either Calliope, Urania, or Terpsichore. This would make him at least Orpheus's half-brother, since Orpheus is sometimes believed to be the son of Calliope and Apollo.
At least one story links Hymen not to marriage -- the achievement of an intentional union -- but to a homoerotic state of distraction:
Hesiod tells the story in the Great Eoiae . . . Magnes was the son of Argus, the son of Phrixus and Perimele, Admetus' daughter, and lived in the region of Thessaly, in the land which men called after him Magnesia. He had a son of remarkable beauty, Hymenaeus. And when Apollo saw the boy, he was seized with love for him, and would not leave the house of Magnes. Then Hermes made designs on Apollo's herd of cattle which were grazing in the same place as the cattle of Admetus. First he cast upon the dogs which were guarding them a stupor and strangles, so that the dogs forgot the cows and lost the power of barking. Then he drove away twelve heifers and a hundred cows never yoked, and the bull who mounted the cows, fastening to the tail of each one brushwood to wipe out the footmarks of the cows. He drove them through the country of the Pelasgi, and Achaea in the land of Phthia, and through Locris, and Boeotia and Megaris, and thence into Peloponnesus by way of Corinth and Larissa, until he brought them to Tegea. From there he went on by the Lycaean mountains, and past Maenalus and what are called the watch-posts of Battus. (Antoninus Liberalis.)
We met Battus in Metamorphoses 2 - he's turned to stone for trying to outwit Hermes. Battus is a pointer, an index, who promises to point to the truth, and in so doing, proves himself a liar, and so, via divine wit, becomes a literal touchstone. Orpheus will soon speak of how he is not interested in fictions, but only in speaking truth. Nothing is quite what it seems in Ovid.
Hymen, the deliverer of brides to grooms, here seems to be yet another of Apollo's loves, which sets in motion the digression of what is proper to the god, his cattle stolen by the new-born Hermes. That subject is elaborated beautifully in the Hymn to Apollo.
Are there any successful marriages in Metamorphoses 10?
For further digressive pleasure, consider Monteverdi's Orfeo with Jordi Savall:
The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.'[2]
The gigantic remains of such a figure at Mount Sipylus, though lacking inscriptions and much eroded, are consistent with later representations of a seated Cybele, with a supporting or attendant lion beneath each arm. At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess - identified by the Greeks as Cybele - took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[9] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[10]
No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult but the ubiquity of her Phrygian name, Matar ("Mother"), image and iconography in funerary contexts suggests her as mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown".[11] Her associations with hawks, lions, and the very stone of the wild, mountainous Anatolian landscape, suggest her as mother of the land and its wild, untrammeled nature, with power to dominate, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and control its potential threats to a settled, civilised life; thus, her enrollment as a protective goddess of the state by Anatolian elites, possibly concurrent with some form of ruler-cult.[12] At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".[13] Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, and ultimately subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and later, Roman.
The mountain is the scene of several mythic events in the works of Homer. At its summit, the Olympian gods gathered to watch the progress of the epic fight. But the mountain was the sacred place of the Goddess, and Hera's powers were so magnified on Mount Ida, that she was able to distract Zeus with her seductions, just long enough to permit Poseidon to intercede on behalf of the Argives to drive Hektor and the Trojans back from the ships.
Ovid wouldn't be Ovid if he didn't supply a story of male self-emasculation to counterbalance the marvel of Iphis' phallus at the end of Book 9. The mention of Attis in connection with the pine tree in the gathering of shadows (umbras) around Orpheus early in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses points to one exemplary counterweight:
This ancient god apparently didn't make its way to the Roman consciousness until the time of Augustus. Its savagery seized the imagination of Catullus in his #63:
. . . So when she (no longer he) sensed that her manhood was gone,
while still staining the soil of the earth with fresh drops of blood,
she impetuously took up in her snowy-white hands your light tambourine,
Cybele, took up your mysteries, O Mother.
Shaking the hollow ox-hide of the tambourine with delicate fingers,
tremulously she began to sing this exhortation. . .
