The impasse of Aeneas

Recently I had the pleasure of listening to Professor Elizabeth Vandiver's lectures on the Aeneid -- a most rewarding six hours -- and it prompted me to consider how such an imposing accomplishment, the epic of Rome given the imprimatur of Augustus himself, might change the game for Ovid.

The closing books of the Metamorphoses have much to do with Aeneas in the new land of Italy, so naturally this is where Ovid's poem most pointedly engages Virgil's epic.

Large accomplishments have a way of taking all the poetic oxygen out of the room. For 800 years or more, the Iliad had stood without a worthy epic successor. When Virgil came along, he was able to draw upon the untapped history and legends of another people, a "humble" tribe that was busy fashioning an empire.

Ovid could have chosen another historic theme, or written love lyrics, but Catullus and Propertius had that pretty well sewn up. Horace's mastery of the urbane poetry of comment, satire, and of the ode was incontestable.

What's a talented and ambitious latecomer to do?

Ovid was ambitious. His Heroides show unabashed delight in taking a range of characters from Homer and the tragedies, and breathing richly complex, recognizably human souls into them. Metamorphoses is a display of intricate art, poetic invention, psychological insight and masterful storytelling, yet it chooses to do without a single overarching epic narrative to give it an obvious thematic and imperial unity.

To appreciate the strangeness of Ovid's choice for his masterwork, it might help to consider it in relation to the Aeneid. For Virgil, to sing the saga of the translation of a people from Troy to Rome was to become the architect of his people's destiny. He poured his consummate study of Homer, Hesiod, the Greek tragedians, and the philosophers into a song that moves from the fires of Troy to Dido's Carthaginian pyre to the gloomy underworld of death and rebirth before immersing itself in a series of Iliadic battles that climax in the slaying of Turnus.

As Vandiver notes, the controversial end of the poem has split readers and scholars into symmetrically opposed interpretive camps: there are those who say Aeneas's killing Turnus was justified -- he is fulfilling a larger destiny, a mandate of Fate. Others believe that Virgil is portraying the pius father of Rome as overwhelmed by tragic, vengeful furor (his feelings for Pallas, whom Turnus had killed). The arguments on either side grow quite complex, as Vandiver explicates in her final lecture.

Aeneas kills Turnus

What does it mean that the song of Rome ends not, as does the Iliad, in a profound moment of tragic understanding, wonderment, and suspended bloodshed, but in a brutal act of violence?

Calibrating his epic to come to rest on a final act that lies open to two symmetrically opposed judgments is no playful ambiguity on Virgil's part. The ending presents the reader with the crucial need to decide whether to approve or condemn the hero whose poem the reader has just now "finished." If that necessary decision proves undecidable, then in a sense the reading of the song of "arms and the man" lingers in the air, never to be completed.

Virgil's epic arrives at an impasse borne of the enigmatic legacy of Greece: we inhabit a world in which our knowledge is partial, our will is hedged round with limits difficult to ascertain, our public and private loyalties are in conflict, and our loves are roiled by unmastered forces beyond both our consciousness and our powers.

At this point, a reader of Virgil might ask, "how did we get here?" What are the roots of this understanding of the world, this vision of the human? A return to origins, to the sources of the legacy of Greece and the history of Rome, might be just the thing. Research into how we became what we are, a quest for what we yet might become, seems called for: an inquiry into the nature of the new that is sufficiently provocative and searching to conceive nature anew.

Orphic shade

From the start of Metamorphoses 10, Orpheus is dealing with shadows. Overcome by Amor, he descends to win back Eurydice, and encounters the umbrarum dominum, Hades, the Lord of Shades. To die in Ovid's world is to become a shadow of who you were, the spent afterimage of your day in the sun.

After he loses Eurydice a second time, Orpheus mourns her. Upon a hill devoid of shade, he begins to play and sing. Ignoring the tradition that his voice attracted wild beasts, Ovid speaks only of trees -- not just any trees, but a mixed wood led by the Dodonian Oak, gather around the poet. Several of these trees are linked to other tales -- the pine, for example, to Attis. (Apollo's loves tend to end up as vegetation: Daphne, Dryope, Cyparissus and Hyacinthus, to name a few.) To sing, to be a poet, is to get out of the solar, too-bright world of action -- the world of Heracles -- to a lunar world of indirection, of words and music, where one can summon what is past.

The juxtaposition of the poet's descent to the Underworld and this silva, (Aristotle's term: hyle) this moving forest of shade, is Ovid's way of linking the realm of reflection, the contemplative life, with a series of images and psychological, poetic, and metaphysical themes -- time, desire, shadows, death, echoes, indirection, memory, representation. Representation, as the word implies, is the presence of a lack, an absence. Usually a grave presence, lacking in light and lightness. The capacity to bring things up, to re-present them, depends upon their absence thanks to time, space, unintelligibility, or death.

Speaking matter-of-factly and without false or ambiguous words, Orpheus asks Hades and Proserpina for the usum of Eurydice -- the use, the loan of her, for a short natural time, before she (and all who live) permanently enter the nether world. We owe Hades a life, and according to this figural logic, our time is borrowed, on loan, from one who never fails to collect in full. Orpheus asks to borrow time:

Per ego haec loca plena timoris,
30per chaos hoc ingens vastique silentia regni,
Eurydices, oro, properata retexite fata.
Omnia debemur vobis, paulumque morati
serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam.

I beg you, by these fearful places, by this immense abyss, and the silence of your vast realms, reverse Eurydice’s swift death. All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later, we hasten home. 

To "reweave" the Fates is to rewrite what the Fates have already woven: retexite is linked to the root sense of text as something made, via techne, art. The fate of Eurydice is a text that Orpheus asks Hades to edit.


When Heracles asked more time for Iolaus in Book 9, we saw how Hebe managed to add some years to the sons of Alcmaeon and subtract them from a rejuvenated Iolaus. Orpheus, using his music, almost succeeds in recapturing his lost love, then he bends his eyes back to look directly upon the one thing he must not directly look upon, according to the condition (legem) imposed with the prospect of her return: the original referent of that fatal text. The rewrite fails.

As he mourns the loss of the usum of his irreplaceable bride, Orpheus turns away from all women. The story thus explains how the arch poet became the "auctor" of human homoeroticism:

Ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem
in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam
85aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores.

Indeed, he was the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.

Much if not all of Book 10, the stories of Apollo and Cyparissus, Hyacinthus, Attis and Adonis, all flow from this linking of death and unyielding mourning to homoeroticism. The tale of Orpheus, linked with Proserpina, brings us back to Ovid's thinking about art, which began with the songs of the Muses in book 6. This counterweight lends a symmetry to the central five books of the Metamorphoses.

Heracles and Cadmus: Vestem and Vestigia

Professor Anderson's attentive eye noticed more than one interesting thing about this passage in Book 9 -- it's the moment Heracles is finally separated from his maternal portion once and for all:

interea quodcumque fuit populabile flammae,
Mulciber abstulerat, nec cognoscenda remansit
Herculis effigies, nec quicquam ab imagine ductum
matris habet, tantumque Iovis vestigia servat.             265
utque novus serpens posita cum pelle senecta
luxuriare solet, squamaque nitere recenti,
sic ubi mortales Tirynthius exuit artus,
parte sui meliore viget, maiorque videri
coepit et augusta fieri gravitate verendus.

Meanwhile, Mulciber had consumed whatever the flames could destroy, and no recognisable form of Hercules remained, no semblance of what came to him from his mother: he only retained his inheritance from Jove. 

As a snake enjoys its newness, sloughing old age with its skin, gleaming with fresh scales; so, when the Tirynthian hero had shed his mortal body, he became his better part, beginning to appear greater, and more to be revered, in his high majesty. 

Anderson first notes that exuit (exuo) has the sense of "to take off," as with clothes, though what here is being removed is the body, i.e., everything that resembled the man Hercules. As the child of a god and a woman, Hercules is composed of a mortal vestem as well as the immortal vestigia Iovis; the passage is distinguishing between the phenomenal, tangible body and a noumenal, immortal part.

Doffing the body the way the body doffs clothing will remind us that it was the vestem of Nessus, the clothing, that killed the hero. What serves as metaphor here at the moment of apotheosis is cut from the same cloth as a key literal plot element of the story that preceded it.

Anderson goes on to note that while the serpens luxuriates in his new skin and gleaming scales, this is hardly a metaphor of transcendence, one that would intimate a higher mode of existence beyond the body. In fact, the reptilian image of the snake shedding its old skin and delighting in the new is but another metaphor of external covering vs. internal reality, isn't it? The new Hercules, instead of being freed from the limitations of earthly, bodily metaphorics, instead moves from clothing to skin -- where we might expect "spirit," or "numen," we get more body. We're still in the language of the phenomenal world.

But the use of serpens will remind us that Heracles has been entwined by snakes since Hera sent them into his cradle. The earthly career of Heracles, like that of Cadmus, is rounded by the serpent -- except that here, at the moment of death, the emphasis is upon not something repeated, but on novus -- the thing made new. The differences become more marked if we now look back at that earlier scene in Book 4:

Cadmus and Harmonia's serpentine metamorphosis replicates the baleful necklace given them at their wedding. Indeed, Cadmus even reaches for her colla adsueta:

His tongue flickered over his wife’s face, he slid between her beloved breasts as if known there, and clasped her, and searched about for the neck he knew so well.

Harmonia in turn is drawn to the neck of the serpent:

she stroked the gleaming neck of the crested serpent, (lubrica permulcet cristati colla draconis)

And as Harmonia looks desperately for some sign of the former Cadmus, the human one, she says:

‘Cadmus, wait, unhappy one, tear away this monstrous thing! Cadmus, what is it? Where are your feet? Where are your hands, shoulders, face, colour, everything – while I speak? Why do you not change me as well, you gods, into this same snake’s form?

She asks where the form, the phenomenal appearance, of her husband is:

“Cadme, mane, teque, infelix, his exue monstris!
Cadme, quid hoc? ubi pes, ubi sunt umerique manusque 

 et color et facies et, dum loquor, omnia? 

cur nonme quoque, caelestes, in eandem vertitis anguem?”

Indeed, she uses exuo, the same verb used at 9.268 (quoted above) to describe Heracles shedding his body. But here instead of a metamorphosis in which one thing is distinguished and torn from something ontologically other (Heracles' form from his substance), Harmonia discovers that she can no longer tell where her husband ends and the serpent begins. Her response is to pray to become the same snake (eandem anguem).

Why do you not change me as well, you gods, into this same snake’s form?

Where Heracles' skin-shedding snake metaphor stresses renewal -- a fundamental distinguishing break with the old and a new beginning, the metamorphosis of Cadmus and Harmonia stresses the merging of the couple so completely in the form of serpents as to lose virtually all humanity, their house (Thebes) doomed over and over to cycle through the curse of Hephaestus.

For Heracles the emphasis is on the advent of a difference, the presence of the novus, something that might break the fate of Thebes.

So, a provisional interpretative thought: the speech of Themis brought into focus a comparative look at two great mythic cycles, Thebes and Heracles, and seemed to underscore how the two respective stories end up mirroring each other like two sides of a serpentine necklace. Here the apotheosis of Heracles suggests a further twist -- that perhaps one of the two heroes is not entirely entrapped in endless repetition. While on Earth, for all his violent temper and madness, Heracles was on the way to becoming a hero with transformative powers. By solving every task he was ever given, he signaled a potential to expand the human. No longer a static creature residing within fixed limits, this son of Jove scorned every limitation, every fearsome challenge, even death.

If Cadmus is the tragic figure whose descendents, like Oedipus, discover that they cannot escape the antics of Fate, Heracles is inaugurating the thought of a dynamism suspending all bounds. Ultimately he bows to Fate, as all mortals do. But his scorn in the face of all challenges, including the realm of Hades, signals a power that works to transform the world it is given -- one whose labors resonate with unearthly terror and laughter.

Apotheosis of Hercules, Versailles

Ovid and Reversibility

One thing we learn from Ovid is that something that seemed immovable, assured, irreversible, can rather suddenly be turned upside down. We noted the other day the swiftness with which the gods act: before Arachne can finish challenging Athena to come and compete in a contest, "venit," says the crone, and the goddess is before her.

The gods waste no time. Apollo, in responding to Leto's plea to chasten, teach, or destroy Niobe, cuts his mother short. Desine, he says - "leave off talking" - and the arrows begin to fly.

Similarly with Breughel's rendering of the boorish Lycian peasants who deny a goddess water -- which, as she notes, is a public resource. Before our gaze can take in Breughel's scene, one of the peasants has already turned into a frog. Sudden, strange metamorphoses veer from the orderly, normative world of realism toward Breughel, Bosch, and Kafka.

Every time in Metamorphoses 6 that a mortal oversteps some boundary, however you wish to characterize it -- human/divine, mortal/immortal, imagination/reality, public/private, copy/original, one/all, student/teacher -- there is a sudden comeuppance, a kind of electric contraction, or syncope; what results is an enigmatic determination of the overreaching character.

The case of Marsyas is a little different -- there was an agreement that either Apollo or the satyr would submit totally to the will of the other. Yet the suddenness with which Ovid tells the story -- moving right to the "innards," as it were, is at one with the speed of the other actions.

What each of these four metamorphoses shares with the others is both this sense of instantaneous finality, and also a clear reversal of the fortune and place of the character undergoing the transformation. Marysas, for example, is literally turned upside-down, the very thing he was unable to do with his tibia in response to Apollo's reversed cithara.

To each of these characters it's revealed that things are, in reality, quite the opposite of how they imagined them to be -- but this discernment (certamen, as we have seen) is not something necessarily conveyed by words, discursively, to the character's understanding. Rather, it's what is experienced and made palpable in the flash of metamorphosis. Arachne, for example, experiences the violence of being pounded with the shuttle, rather than triumphing in her claim of being the more potent spinner. She ends without hands -- a small, nearly sense-less belly that nonetheless makes webs. For Ovid's reader, she becomes a fixed talisman, a legible reminder of her singular truth. Poetic justice.

This quality of the world -- for something, or someone, to suddenly become other to themselves, and to have their entire sense of things reversed -- is germane to what Ovid is telling us in the Metamorphoses. It requires us to entertain the possibility that nothing is fixed, nothing is certain, nothing is what it seems. This is not the same as saying all is random, accident, chaos. There's an order in this world, but it's an order in which error is the comfortable, everyday norm -- to err is human -- while the undoing of error, instead of restoring the errant one to some healing condition of insight, is often worse than error. You might happily live in Lycia, the land of the Chimaera, thinking you're the greatest spinner who ever was. Unless the web you're spinning is a noose, and, like the open door that Kafka's seeker can never enter, it's just for you.

For Ovid, art involves imagination, which morphs into illusion and error; to be disabused of that error by Athena is not necessarily redemptive, though it can leave a painful admonishing residue for others to sift through.

Ovid's direct style strikes us as oddly modern, even contemporary, but so does his world. His 21st century readers live in a moment in which basic certitudes are dissolving before their eyes. Recent reversals in science challenge some of our most cherished truths. We have all heard about the ghostly neutrinos that appear to be moving faster than the formerly fastest thing, light.

But there are other earth-shakers. Here, for example, is the physicist Brian Greene, talking about how the notion of the Multiverse is transforming basic assumptions:

We're all used to that gravity is attractive: You let go of something, it falls to the Earth. Earth pulls things toward it. But there's a kind of gravity that does the reverse. Repulsive gravity pushes outwards. And we believe that in the early, early universe, repulsive gravity was in operation, and that repulsive push is what drove everything apart.

Another physicist, Michael Murphy, relates disturbing findings that constants of nature are turning out to be not quite constant (podcast here). Then there's quantum entanglement.

It seems we no longer live in Newton's, or Einstein's, predictable nature grounded in immovable laws and certitudes. Those thinkers were more like Virgil, who dared to posit a universal plan, and to tell us what it was.

The recent spate of usurpatory thinking is very different from Newtonian physics and Virgil. The inconstant speedy multiverses of today's science might feel more at home in the syncopated world of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Variations upon Fate in Book 6

In Book 6, Ovid takes up not simply art per se, but art in relation to wisdom -- as we have seen in the tale of Arachne and Athena. And while the enigmatic end of that tale is still being mulled, we should note that Ovid now seems to break with the theme of "art" in the narrow sense, as he turns to Niobe.

After reading that tale, we might be in a better position to say whether Ovid has dropped his exploration of art and wisdom, or has in fact broadened it. The vast system of Greek myth gave Ovid great latitude -- by moving from the poor country girl (who could equal Athena in spinning) to the daughter of Tantalos, the most powerful queen of her day and sister of Pelops, Ovid seems to be asking us to expand our sense of what the theme, the substance of Book 6, really is.

We move, on one level, from a humble artificer to a noblewoman at the peak of her fortune, from the girl who, like a human parody of Clotho, spun her own fate, to the queen who, presuming to be absolutely in possession of her great good fortune, lived to watch the sudden severance of those lives she thought she had the measure of -- clipped by the shears of Atropos.

Tantalos, Niobe's progenitor, foreshadows her tragic end: As his daughter, she's heir to the strange fortune of her father, who was the most favored of mortals before becoming the most accursed of them.

It would take us farther afield than is reasonable, but the grouping of Tantalos, Sisyphus, Ixion and Tityos is worth exploring when we can, and not only because of their egregious eternal punishments. Tantalos, Sisyphus and Ixion were all unusually favored and gifted. They just went too far (not unlike Prometheus) -- Sisyphus got the better of Hades, Ixion tried to outwit Zeus, and Tantalos has a most peculiar story vis a vis the entire dynasty of the Olympians.

As Pindar says:

If indeed the watchers of Olympus ever honored a mortal man,

that man was Tantalus.

I hope to explore some of the features of the Tantalos figure in another post (I'll link to it here when it's up). It's enough now to note that Ovid, in moving from Arachne to Niobe to Marsyas, is touching on the making of images, of self image, and of voiced music -- before he turns to the tale of Procne and Philomela. The first three tales concern mortals vying with immortals -- as Tantalos and Co. had done. The next tale -- that of Tereus, Procne and Philomela -- concerns mortals alone. Yet as we'll see, the making of image, of self-image, and of voice return in that tale, horrifically.

My point is simply to remember that the tales of Book 6, mostly set in Asia Minor, take place in the land of one of the most enigmatic ancient characters, the son of Zeus and Pluto. Pindar's 1st Olympian continues:

If indeed the watchers of Olympus ever honored a mortal man,

that man was Tantalus.

But he was not able to digest his bliss,

and for his greed he gained overpowering ruin,

which the Father hung over him: a mighty stone.

Always longing to cast it away from his head,

he wanders far from the joy of festivity.

He has this helpless life of never-ending labor,

a fourth toil after three others,

because 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.

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.