The unheralded visitor: Somnus and Morpheus

There are three major scenes in Metamorphoses 11: the death of Orpheus, the tempest that destroys Ceyx's ship, and the house of Somnus. It is a measure of Ovid's confidence as a storyteller that he feels perfectly comfortable threading narratives so completely different in tone, in affect, in subject and style, even as he's sketching in the background of the Trojan War. (For some preliminary interpretive thoughts on what Ovid is up to, see the preceding post entitled History and Theater in Metamorphoses 11.)

Let's take a quick look at the third of these narratives, in which Iris visits the cave of Sleep:

Iris at the cave of Somnus

When the nymph entered and, with her hands, brushed aside the dreams in her way, the sacred place shone with the light of her robes. The god, hardly able to lift his eyes heavy with sleep, again and again, falling back, striking his nodding chin on his chest, at last shook himself free of his own influence and resting on an elbow asked her (for he knew her) why she had come, and she replied: 

‘Sleep, all things’ rest: Sleep, gentlest of the gods, the spirit’s peace, care flies from: who soothes the body wearied with toil, and readies it for fresh labours: Sleep, order a likeness, that mirrors his true form, and let it go, the image of King Ceyx, to Alcyone, in Trachin of Hercules, and depict a phantasm of the wreck. This, Juno commands.’ . . . (Kline)

Sleep does not wish to be disturbed; to wake is to undo sleep. Yet Iris's presence does that:

excussit tandem sibi se;
nevertheless he shook himself from himself

Excussit (<excutio) means to shake off, cast off, drive off, or to banish. To be Somnus is to be the negation of consciousness, to be most present when most absent. The moment he wakes, he vanishes, or becomes a kind of meta-somnus.

To this reader, the dependency of Somnus upon the condition of being Somnus is not unlike Alcyone's predicament, her all-consuming love for Ceyx. For Alcyone, the absence of Ceyx (dramatized through the gradual distancing of his ship) is a negation of her proper self. Alone, her untethered imagination is overrun by anxious and fearful images. When she learns, via the performance of Morpheus in her dream, of her husband's death, she at once says, 'nulla est Alcyone, nulla est':

‘Alcyone is nothing, is nothing: she has died together with her Ceyx.

Like Somnus awakening, she is bereft of what made her herself. She is nothing, and yet, like him, comments upon her own undoing.

Somnus returns to himself after waking (excitat: call out, summon forth, wake, arouse) Morpheus to act out the part of Ceyx informing Alcyone that he's actually dead. Morpheus goes beyond that simple role, though, as he strives to assure Alcyone that he really, really is Ceyx:

Non haec tibi nuntiat auctor  

ambiguus, non ista vagis rumoribus audis:
ipse ego fata tibi praesens mea naufragus edo.

No dubious author announces this news to you, nor do you hear it as a vague report: I myself, drowned, as you see me before you, tell my fate.

Attentive readers will note that in describing Ceyx's death, Morpheus copies the death of Orpheus:

My lips, calling helplessly on your name, drank the waves.

And in denying that his words are but vagis rumoribus, he's pretending to be a reliable author, not a murmur from the House of Rumor (Fama), which we'll visit in Book 12.

As often, Ovid's digressive fables turn back upon the poem they form part of. Like the waking Somnus, the fable of Morpheus theatrically performing the role of the veritable Ceyx telling the true story of his own death brings us once again to the questions of authorship and authority, true and false images, dream perceptions and waking visions that Ovid believes are germane to the status of any story, mythological or historical.

Going on the hypothesis that Ovid is concerned with the question "what does history look like?" at least allows us to see why a poem that seems so rich in narrative styles might raise the epistemological complications that come with suspending the border between perception and apperception, dreams and waking visions, unreliable rumors and ambiguous speech. As he notes, no clear boundary can be found between the realm of Somnus and the waking world of brilliant light -- no doors, no watchdogs, no geese, no grating hinges. The threshold can only be crossed when one cannot detect the crossing. One arrives at the couch of Somnus unheralded.

                                There is no noyse at all
Of waking dogge, nor gagling goose more waker than the hound
To hinder sleepe. Of beast ne wyld ne tame there is no sound.
No bowghes are stird with blastes of wynd, no noyse of tatling toong
Of man or woman ever yit within that bower roong.
Dumb quiet dwelleth there. Yit from the Roches foote dooth go
The ryver of forgetfulnesse, which ronneth trickling so
Uppon the little pebble stones which in the channell lye,
That unto sleepe a great deale more it dooth provoke thereby.
Before the entry of the Cave, there growes of Poppye store,
With seeded heades, and other weedes innumerable more,
Out of the milkye jewce of which the night dooth gather sleepes,
And over all the shadowed earth with dankish deawe them dreepes.
Bycause the craking hindges of the doore no noyse should make,
There is no doore in all the house, nor porter at the gate. (Golding trans.)

John Waterhouse: Sleep and his Half-Brother Death

Uncertain dreams: The Matter of Troy

With Book 11, Ovid turns -- if "turn" is the right word -- to Troy, the sacred mother city of Rome. As such, no detail related to it is without interest, and as is his wont, Ovid selects some of the city's more obscure, errant, seemingly arcane tales to introduce the setting that will frame the last five books of the Metamorphoses.

Ceyx and Alcyone, Richard Wilson

We don't actually realize we're headed toward Troy right away. First there's the matter of Orpheus, who just sang most of Book 10's tales of love and death, now becoming the content of Ovid's tale of Orpheus's own savage demise. Is there something for the reader to think about in making the death of the arch-poet, the artist of art about art, a prelude to the story of Troy? Then there's Peleus and Thetis, Ceyx and Alcyone, Somnus, Aesacus and Hesperia. What are they to Hecuba?

Other questions naturally will arise as we follow Ovid's peculiar concatenations. Both Apollo and Dionysus do things as a result of Orpheus's death -- Apollo turns to stone the snake that's about to attack Orpheus's briny head; Bacchus turns the Maenads to oaks. Bacchus leads into the story of Midas, twice foolish. The second tale of Midas then follows Apollo, who gave the king his his ass's ears, as he hies to the country of Laomedon, the Troad. (Good zoomable map of ancient Greece and Troy here, and a large pdf map here.)

Greece and Troad

The first ten books of Ovid's poem glancingly touched on the fates of several cities and kingdoms -- Thebes, Crete, Aegina, Sicily, Colchis (home of Medea), Athens, Mycenae,  Miletus, Smyrna (Myrrha),Trachis (Ceyx's kingdom). Now we're amid the earliest tales of Troy, and they'll lead to Carthage, Latium and Rome. This itinerary of course moves in a way that is more dreamlike than "historical."

So it's fitting that along with a rip-roaring storm and shipwreck, Book 11 offers a fairly close-up view of the house of Sleep (Somnus):

There is a deeply cut cave, a hollow mountain, near the Cimmerian country, the house and sanctuary of drowsy Sleep. Phoebus can never reach it with his dawn, mid-day or sunset rays. Clouds mixed with fog, and shadows of the half-light, are exhaled from the ground. No waking cockerel summons Aurora with his crowing: no dog disturbs the silence with its anxious barking, or goose, cackling, more alert than a dog. No beasts, or cattle, or branches in the breeze, no clamour of human tongues. There still silence dwells. But out of the stony depths flows Lethe’s stream, whose waves, sliding over the loose pebbles, with their murmur, induce drowsiness. In front of the cave mouth a wealth of poppies flourish, and innumerable herbs, from whose juices dew-wet Night gathers sleep, and scatters it over the darkened earth. There are no doors in the palace, lest a turning hinge lets out a creak, and no guard at the threshold. But in the cave’s centre there is a tall bed made of ebony, downy, black-hued, spread with a dark-grey sheet, where the god himself lies, his limbs relaxed in slumber. Around him, here and there, lie uncertain dreams, taking different forms, as many as the ears of corn at harvest, as the trees bear leaves, or grains of sand are thrown onshore.

With the uncertain dreams, this book also features highly competent shape-shifters -- there's Thetis and Proteus along with Morpheus (along with Icelos and Phobetor). As Ovid approaches the beginning of what we might call the "linear" history of Troy that leads to the Roman Empire, the path is filled with winds and amorphous dreams, grand liars (Laomedon) and gods who have a far greater repertoire of shapes than Achelous had. We'll want to think about why.

Hermes: spellbinder and unbinder

Ovid puts the story of Hermes and Argus within the story of Jupiter, Hera and Io at the end of Metamorphoses I:

Lewis Hyde offers a book-length meditation on the figure of Hermes / Mercury in his Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Here he's talking about Hermes as the boundary-crosser, "poised on the threshold . . . ambiguous, androgynous":

It is this double motion that makes Hermes at once an enchanter and a disenchanter. In his enchanting phase, he often begins by going after the border guards, for if they have their wits about them he cannot operate. Earlier we saw how he cast a lazy forgetfulness over the watchdogs guarding Apollo's cattle. In speaking of shame, we saw how he mesmerized Argus with song and story, then sealed the giant's sleeping eyes with a magic wand. Hermes drops the sentinels who watch the peripheries into a stupor, and impermeable boundaries become porous.

This is only the beginning of his enchanting /disenchanting power . . .. He carries his charges into the underworld or out of it, into dreams or into wakefulness, into mythologies or out of them.

Among those guided across borders by Hermes Hyde includes Persephone, the suitors killed by Odysseus, and Odysseus himself as he approaches Circe's home. He also enables Priam to safely cross the battleground at Troy to reach Achilles and reclaim the body of Hektor.

For Hyde, Hermes is neither simply an enchanter or a disenchanter, but both at once:

Hermes of the Dark is the weaver of dreams, the charmer who spins a compelling tale, the orator who speaks your mother tongue with fluid conviction.. . . Hermes of the Light translates dreams into analytic language; he rubs the charm from old stories until they seem hopelessly made up and mechanical. He walks you inland until you stop dreaming in your mother tongue. (Trickster 208-209)

As modern analogues of Hermes, Hyde suggests Picasso, Nabokov, or Freud, ". . .'explaining' Moses while simultaneously retelling the old story of Oedipus in a manner so compelling that, decades after his death, Ivy League literary critics can't get it out of their heads."

One might also think of the loom of Penelope, woven by day, unwoven by night -- the only trick suspending the final act of the suitors, whom Hermes guides to Hades.

John Flaxman: Hermes conducting the souls of the dead suitors

to the land of the dead