Nova Terra in Metamorphoses 8

Prof. Anderson is very helpful regarding a passage that is usually omitted from book 8 of the Metamorphoses -- it's the moment (roughly lines 600-610) when Achelous describes how, after he raped Perimele and her father threw her off a cliff, the river god intervened, praying to Neptune to try to keep her from drowning. As Anderson notes, the suppressed lines are borderline outrageous.

I've not found an English translation, but the text below comes from this French edition.

si pater Hippodamas, aut si minus impius esset,
debuit illius misereri, ignoscere nobis;}
adfer opem, mersaeque, precor, feritate paterna
da, Neptune, locum, uel sit locus ipsa licebit!"
{Hunc quoque complectar!" Mouit caput aequoreus rex
concussitque suis omnes assensibus undas.   605
Extimuit nymphe, nabat tamen. Ipse natantis
pectora tangebam trepido salientia mota
dumque ea contrecto, totum durescere sensi
corpus et inducta condi praecordia terra.}
dum loquor, amplexa est artus noua terra natantes


si son père eût été plus juste et moins barbare, il se fût laissé fléchir. Moins impie, il eût eu pitié d'elle, il eût pardonné mon amour. Protège cette infortunée, que la fureur d'un père a jetée dans les flots soumis à ta puissance. Daigne lui donner une île pour retraite; oui si tu le veux, qu'elle soit elle-même une île, et que mon onde amoureuse puisse l'embrasser dans son cours". Neptune incline sa tête, et l'humide élément tout entier s'émeut et se soulève. Périmèle frémit; elle nage pourtant; je la soutiens, je presse son sein palpitant. Soudain je sens son corps se durcir et s'étendre. Soudain la terre couvre ses membres flottants.

A rough translation from 606 ff:

The nymph was terrified, but nonetheless kept swimming. While I was holding her up and fondling her breasts, I sensed her body harden and be covered with earth. While I speak, new earth grasps her floating limbs.

==


"The erotic details of this line and the next," Anderson says in his note on 8.606, "surpass anything else that Ovid is known to have tried in the Metamorphoses. Achelous should hardly fondle the girls breasts in this crisis, when theoretically he is concerned only to save her. Such caresses would decidedly interfere with her swimming."

The word "theoretically" is interesting here. A river god should observe proper decorum when rescuing young nymphs. But do rivers -- natural entities -- observe such niceties? Does a river "understand" theoretical distinctions between rape and love, self-gratification and other-directed care? What grounds our readerly theories?

Nova terra

As Mussy noted the other day, the interconnections between the various tales Ovid tells are virtually innumerable. These missing lines offer, besides a necrophiliac confluence of erotic desire, death, and burial, an interesting link to a tale that will be alluded to in Book 9, from the story of the seven against Thebes.

It seems that Alcmaeon, a son of Amphiarius, one of the original Seven who died at Thebes, had to flee the Erinyes after killing his mother Eriphyle -- he was commanded to do so by his father, whom his mother had doomed, bribed by Polyneices, the son of Oedipus, who gave him the necklace of Harmonia (which we saw, or didn't see, in the tale of Cadmus and Harmonia).

After killing his mother, Alcmaeon

was pursued by the Erinyes and driven mad, fleeing first to Arcadia, where his grandfather Oicles ruled, and then to King Phegeus in Psophis, who purified him and gave him his daughter, Arsinoe in Apollodorus and Alphesiboea in Pausanias, in marriage. Alcmaeon gave her the necklace and robe of Harmonia.[5] According to Apollodorus, Alcmaeon's presence caused the land to be infertile, so he went to Delphi for assistance.[5] In Pausanias, it is his own madness which drove him to do so.[6] 

From there the two accounts generally agree with each other and with Thucydides. Alcmaeon is instructed by the oracle to find a land which did not exist at the time when he was polluted by killing his mother. Accordingly, he goes to a delta of the Achelous river, which was newly formed. There he marries Callirrhoe, the daughter of the river's god. She had heard of the famous necklace and robe of Harmonia, and asks Alcmaeon to get them for her. He complies, returning to Psophis and telling king Phegeus that he required the necklace and robe in order to be purified. Either Phegeus or his sons (Agenor and Pronous) discovers the truth from a servant, and they ambush and kill Alcmaeon.[7][8][9] In Apollodorus, Arsinoe, the daughter of Phegeus, chastises her brothers, who put her into a chest and sell her as a slave.[10] Meanwhile, Callirrhoe prays to Zeus that her sons will grow up instantaneously so that they might take revenge on her husband's murderers. Zeus grants this, and Amphoterus and Acarnan meet the sons of Phegeus at Agapenor's house, when they are on their way to Delphi to dedicate Harmonia's robe and necklace there. After killing them, Amphoterus and Acarnan continue to Psophis and killed king Phegeus and his queen, after which they are forced to flee to Tegea.[11]

The story of Perimele told by Achelous offers us the creation of new land at his delta. The prophecies of Themis at the center of Book 9 interweave several stories from the Theban cycle, including the acceleration of time that happened to the sons of Callirrhoe so that Alcmaeon's murder could be avenged. And including not only the necklace, but also the robe of Harmonia, a garment more fateful than the shirt of Nessus.

How significant is this? Perhaps not hugely so, but it's another instance in which a seemingly gratuitous tale turns out to be related, via back channels, as it were, to another tale, which is nested yet in other tales, making the reader move forward and back as connections, like roots, take hold beneath the surface layer of the narrative.

Another point: by bringing up the acceleration of the lives of Callirrhoe's sons, Themis, goddess of prophecy, underscores a recurrent feature of Book 9 -- as we'll note in more detail ahead, the temporal order is sometimes reversed, sometimes speeded up. Or, effects will occur before causes.

Just as Achelous and Neptune, gods of water, make new land, so the gods can also make new time, or cause time to slow or even disappear, even as the veil of time vanishes to one who, like Themis, sees future things.

Temple for two

Ovid's story of Baucis and Philemon told by Lelex in Book 8 has no known source, although it's possible the tale did exist. It has a kind of inevitability, given the code of hospitality, or Xenia, which was the superb Greek solution to dealing with strangers.

As we noted in our reading, the tale is full of warm, realistic detail, as Baucis hitches up her skirts to fix the table, or when she and old Philemon try to capture the goose, their "estate's" sole guardian.

It gets a bit eerie as they climb the steep hill -- there's no roar of wind or weather, no Achelousian sturm und drang. The old couple turn, look down, and see a wide blank of placid water where their town had been. And one house, their own.

As they mourn for their lost neighbors, the house metamorphoses into a temple. How different from the usual procedure in the ancient world! Normally you'd have a town, then a city, then the ability to finance the construction of a temple -- i.e., the economic possibility of temples was bound up with the wealth of cities, which itself depended upon agriculture, and even more, upon trade. And trade  depended for its existence upon civil relations with strangers. For the Greeks, the road to prosperity and to fine temples appears to be embedded in the code of Xenia.

Here, Philemon and Baucis's home becomes a shining temple of marble and gold at the moment the population vanishes. The logic of the story suggests that the appearance of the temple is another of these divine ratifying appearances (as with Ariadne, or Daedalus) that reveal what was already the case. From the moment the gods entered the humble home and were met with honorable hospitality, the house was, noumenally, a temple.

Ovid is not about to tell us that divinity lies within the individual's faith, hope, and love, and that the body of the pious person is a temple, as the Christians will claim. But the manifestation of a divine order of being that comes from the Xenia of one married couple is a step, and probably a reflection of the Zeitgeist of Ovid's time.

With this in mind, it might surprise us less to find an echo of this tale surfacing in the Acts of the Apostles, in Lystra, which was on the way to Phrygia, the ancient homeland of Baucis and Philemon:

14:8 And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked: 14:9 The same heard Paul speak: who stedfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, 14:10 Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked. 

14:11 And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. 

14:12 And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. Acts 14

How to use a river god

Returning to Athens from the hunt in Calydon, Theseus and his companions are warned not to attempt to cross the river Achelous. By Achelous.

Theseus visits Achelous

". . . do not commit yourself to my devouring waters. They are liable to carry solid tree-trunks along, in their roaring, and roll great boulders over on their sides. I have seen whole stables, near the bank, swept away, with all their livestock: and neither the cattle’s strength nor the horses’ speed was of any use. Many a strong man has been lost in the whirling vortices, when the torrent was loosed, after mountain snows. You will be safer to stay till my river runs in its normal channel, when its bed holds only a slender stream."

As Prof. Anderson notes, there's an interesting split here between the voice of the river and the rapacious waters it speaks of. Achelous expresses genuine concern for Theseus, but the root of the concern is about the superhuman force of his own waters. He speaks of his power as though it belonged to another. When humans do this, it often has a comical quality, because of the suggestion of compulsion -- e.g., a boxer who cannot stop throwing punches continually has to warn people to beware of his fists. The god asks the Athenian hero, whom he admires, to pause and use his hospitality rather than hubristically dare to cross at this time.

With a witty zeugma, Theseus agrees to use both Achelous' home and his counsel:

Adnuit Aegides, “utar” que “Acheloe, domoque
consilioque tuo” respondit; et usus utroque est.

Hercules and Achelous

The warning of Achelous speaks to the question of scale. For the ancients, the gods were powerful and immortal, but still capable of being imaginatively represented (as opposed to the god of the Old Testament, who forbids any attempt to depict him, yet nonetheless is anthropomorphized within certain kinds of stories). A river god is a mysterious flowing presence -- rivers are far better known for their endings than their often veiled beginnings -- and they possess powers to fertilize, nourish and destroy. A river seems not to be able to go from flood to calm at will, though as Achelous will go on to say, he can change into a bull and a serpent, as he did when he wrestled Hercules. (Similarly, Achilles in the Trojan war will fight Xanthus, aka Scamander.)

Hesiod conveys something of the fertile variety of rivers in his catalog in the Theogony. The power to remember the names of all the Earth's streams is beyond any mortal:

And Tethys bore to Ocean eddying rivers, Nilus, and Alpheus, and deep-swirling Eridanus, Strymon, and Maeander, and the fair stream of Ister, and Phasis, and Rhesus, and the silver eddies of Achelous, Nessus, and Rhodius, Haliacmon, and Heptaporus, Granicus, and Aesepus, and holy Simois, and Peneus, and Hermus, and Caicus' fair stream, and great Sangarius, Ladon, Parthenius, Euenus, Ardescus, and divine Scamander. Also she brought forth a holy company of daughters1who with the lord Apollo and the Rivers have youths in their keeping—to this charge Zeus appointed them—Peitho, and Admete, and Ianthe, and Electra, and Doris, and Prymno, and Urania divine in form, Hippo, Clymene, Rhodea, and Callirrhoe, Zeuxo and Clytie, and Idyia, and Pasithoe, Plexaura, and Galaxaura, and lovely Dione, Melobosis and Thoe and handsome Polydora, Cerceis lovely of form, and soft eyed Pluto, Perseis, Ianeira, Acaste, Xanthe, Petraea the fair, Menestho, and Europa, Metis, and Eurynome, and Telesto saffron-clad, Chryseis and Asia and charming Calypso, Eudora, and Tyche, Amphirho, and Ocyrrhoe, and Styx who is the chiefest of them all. These are the eldest daughters that sprang from Ocean and Tethys; but there are many besides. For there are three thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters, children who are glorious among goddesses. And as many other rivers are there, babbling as they flow, sons of Ocean, whom queenly Tethys bare, but their names it is hard for a mortal man to tell, but people know those by which they severally dwell. Theogony 337 ff

Parada also has an annotated list of River Gods.

The house of Achelous

Grottoes were all the rage in 16th Century Italy, and humanists of the time turned to Ovid for the loci classici.

The cave of Achelous in Book 8 is clearly one such scene, where the river god offers Theseus and his companions hospitality:

[Theseus] entered the dark building, made of spongy pumice, and rough tufa. The floor was moist with soft moss, and the ceiling banded with freshwater mussel and oyster shells.

Another is the grotto of Diana in Book III:

There was a valley there called Gargaphie, dense with pine trees and sharp cypresses, sacred to Diana of the high-girded tunic, where, in the depths, there is a wooded cave, not fashioned by art. But ingenious nature had imitated art. She had made a natural arch out of living pumice (pumice vivo) and porous tufa. On the right, a spring of bright clear water murmured into a widening pool, enclosed by grassy banks. Here the woodland goddess, weary from the chase, would bathe her virgin limbs in the crystal liquid. Kline.

Vallis erat piceis et acuta densa cupressu,
nomine Gargaphie, succinctae sacra Dianae.
Cuius in extremo est antrum nemorale recessu,
arte laboratum nulla: simulaverat artemingenio natura suo; nam pumice vivo                          160
et levibus tofis nativum duxerat arcum.
Fons sonat a dextra, tenui perlucidus unda,
margine gramineo patulos succinctus hiatus.
Hic dea silvarum venatu fessa solebatvirgineos artus liquido perfundere rore. III.156 ff

This is the arched grotto and pool where Actaeon met his fate.

A grotto of Diana was included in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli:

Villa d'Este pools, fountains gardens

Ovid hints that when one creates a cave of tufa and pumice, one imitates nature imitating art.

Grotte du Grand Roc, Dordogne

Mono Lake, CA

More Italian grottoes:

Grotto of Boboli Gardens, Firenze

Im park der Villa d'Este, Carl Blechen

More images of Italian fountains, some by Bernini, can be found here.

Some motifs in Metamorphosis 8

If Book 7 of the Metamorphoses addresses foedera -- faith, trust, and the ultimate investments individuals and nations place in bonds with others -- Book 8 seems preoccupied with a set of perspectives on vulnerability, strategies of defense, and the infamy of treachery, the betrayal of foedera.

One word for the moral repugnance of traitorous acts is the adjective foedus:

foedus m (feminine foeda, neuter foedum); first/second declension (physically) filthy, foul, disgusting, loathsome, ugly, unseemly, detestable, abominable, horrible (mentally) disgraceful, vile, obscene, base, dishonorable, shameful, infamous, foul

In the tale of Scylla and Nisus, not all the arma of Crete, but rather one young girl's amor brought down her father's city. Look for parallels as the book moves on to the tales of Minos, Daedalus, and Meleager. What do the various unexpected deaths have to tell us about vulnerability?

Aetolia and Achelous

The book is also rich in at least two other motifs: rivers and forgetting. The second half is largely taken up by a conversation with Achelous, the largest river of Greece, the one that defines Aetolia and Acarnania.

We'll be hearing about the nymphs who forgot him:

At the mouth of the Achelous River lie the Echinades Islands. [They] were once five nymphs. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to honor Achelous in their festivities, and the god was so angry about this slight that he turned them into the islands.

Achelous