The Bavarian Commentary on the Metamorphoses

Medieval and Renaissance art and iconography would be very different had writers and artists of the time not encountered Ovid's work.

And along with that work came the interpretive work that transformed Ovid into Ovide Moralise and many other versions of grappling with the world of myth and poetry he gave us.

Now a scholar has published an edition of the earliest medieval commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Bavarian Commentary and Ovid: Clm 4610. 

Here's the blurb from Open Book Publishers about the publication of Robin Wahlsten Böckerman's edition:

The Bavarian Commentary and Ovid is the first complete critical edition and translation of the earliest preserved commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Today, Ovid’s famous work is one of the touchstones of ancient literature, but we have only a handful of scraps and quotations to show how the earliest medieval readers received and discussed the poems—until the Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 4610. This commentary, which dates from around the year 1100 is the first systematic study of the Metamorphoses, founding a tradition of scholarly study that extends to the present day.

Despite its significance, this medieval commentary has never before been published or analysed as a whole. Böckerman’s groundbreaking work includes a critical edition of the entire manuscript, together with a lucid English translation and a rigorous and stimulating introduction, which sets the work in its historical, geographical and linguistic contexts with precision and clarity while offering a rigorous analysis of its form and function.

 

The book is available in hardcover here, and also, with a blessed openness worthy of Open Book Publishers, as a free, downloadable pdf.

Elements of a symphony

Doubtless every reader of the Metamorphoses will come up with his/her own sampling of parts -- themes, motifs, structuring elements, poetic devices, salient features -- that work in concert to produce, if not wholes, at least larger parts.

Below are some that have captured our attention as we've threaded the labyrinth of the poem -- obviously incomplete, overlapping, ongoing:

1. Amor, quest, pursuit, chase, desire, possession, incorporation, motion, seeking. Eros and the stirring of the mind to know, to grasp. Apollo - Daphne, Pan - Syrinx, Atalanta - Hippomenes, Polyphemus - Galatea, Jupiter -> many.

2. Knowledge and Power, saying and doing, word and act, action and understanding, aiming and erring, science and magic. Minos and Daedalus, Ajax and Ulysses, Heracles and Pythagoras, Romulus and Numa, Glaucus and Circe.

3. Nature and Art, Convention and nature, speech and writing, cultivation vs. wildness, symbol and usus. Io, Orpheus, Arachne, Muses, Pierides, Pygmalion, Byblis vs. Iphis.

4. Order and Chaos, Love and War, Marriage and Alliance. Jupiter and Juno, Apollo and Coronis, Mars and Venus, Perseus and Andromeda, Pirithoos and Hippolyta, Minos and Pasiphae.

5. Dreams, visions, prophecies. Ceyx and Alcyone, Morpheus, Myscellus, Aesculapius, Tages and Cipus, Caesar's omens.

Assassination of Caesar

6. Paired tales, framed tales. Jupiter and Io, Pan and Syrinx; Philemon and Baucis, Erysichthon; Pomona and Vertumnus, Anaxarete and Iphis; Byblis and Caenis, Iphis and Ianthe.

7. Greece and Rome. Odysseus and Aeneas, Pomona and Anaxarete, Apollo and Aesculapius; Cadmus and Romulus; Phaethon and Augustus, Hippolytus.

8. Structure: Circle, Ring, Linear, Spiral, Rhizome. Cadmus, Theseus, Aeneas, Apollo and Aesculapius, Augustus.

9. Death and the new: Creation; mutation; magic; nova corpora, mutatas formas, terra nova. Persephone and Hades, Achelous and Perimele, Earth and Serpent, Orpheus, Arethusa, Quirinus, Virbius.

10. Ovid as meta-poet. Genres deformed, modes of irony, parody, tropes, modes of myth, epic, history, legend, defamiliarization, wit. The wedding of Perseus, battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, tales of Minyas, Trojan War.

11. Images of speech as system, potentially confusing, echoic world of sound. Gossip, chatter, redundancies, poetics. Fama, Morpheus, Apollo, Corvus and Coronis.

12. Eros and Polis, personal and political, desire and the human order. Io and Juno, Phaethon, Scylla and Minos, Pasiphae and Minos, Acoetes and Pentheus; Medea; Meleager, Atalanta and Althea.

13. Reading: determination and overdetermination, author and mimic; semantic drift, puns, homonyms, enigmas, wonders, and interpretive systems. Etruscan haruspicy, Cephalus and Procris, Corvus and Coronis.

14. Minding the gap: Unspoken relations between seemingly incongruous tales; discontinuity, allegory, irony.

Wonders and signs in Metamorphoses 15

The three short tales inserted between Hippolytus and the voyage of Aesculapius in Metamorphoses 15 pose interpretive challenges that have scholars such as Raymond Marks working to unlock their riddles. Here we just have time for a few comments.

The three tales -- two of them in anecdotal form -- form a cascade of similes having to do with wonder.

This strange event [the transformation of the mourning Egeria into aeternas undas] amazed the nymphs, and the Amazon’s son was no less astounded, than the Tyrrhenian ploughman when he saw a fateful clod of earth in the middle of his fields, first move by itself with no one touching it, then assume the form of a man, losing its earthy nature, and open its newly acquired mouth, to utter things to come. The native people called him Tages, he who first taught the Etruscan race to reveal future events.  No less astounded than Romulus, when he saw his spear, that had once grown on the Palatine Hill, suddenly put out leaves, and stand there, not with its point driven in, but with fresh roots: now not a weapon but a tough willow-tree, giving unexpected shade to those who wondered at it.
    No less astounded than Cipus, the praetor, when he saw his horns in the river’s water . .  .

The story of Tages packs a wondrous occurrence into a few lines -- a clod of earth autonomously gains a mouth and teaches the Etruscans how to read future events in signs. Barely is that noted than the spear of Romulus returns to its "roots" as well as sprouting leaves and branches. Then horns appear on the temples of Cipus, and an Etruscan priest finds huge import in them for both him and the Romans -- but Cipus deflects it through an alternate "interpretation" that frees both him and the city from the burden of kingship.

All three tales are concerned with self-instantiating signs that initiate, rather than reflect, an event. Instead of being the bearers of some definite meaning that precedes them, they suddenly put themselves there. If they seem to demand that meaning come, it only comes after they posit themselves. Their very status as "sign" depends on their working as wonders. Ovid, the poet of the new and strange, is thinking about the link between signs and wonders.

In the case of Tages, the notion of an autochthonous language -- arising from a ploughed field -- is at least consistent with what little we know of Etruscan today -- apparently an "isolate," it's unrelated to Indo-European, not part of our common linguistic ground. How does a unique language of signs occur? When a language self-originates how does anyone understand it? How does language, a shared thing, come to be?

Etruscan figures

Tages' power of speech is immediately reduced to a system of signs (the Etruscans were said to have recorded his teachings in secret books) that must be interpreted, as they speak not of the past or the present, but of the future. Meaning is to come, but the sign is here, and to make it speak, one must be versed in the sign system and in the methods of its decoding:

Observatio was the interpretation of signs according to the tradition of the "Etruscan discipline," or as preserved in books such as the libri augurales. A haruspex interpreted fulgura (thunder and lightning) and exta (entrails) by observatio. The word has three closely related meanings in augury: the observing of signs by an augur or other diviner; the process of observing, recording, and establishing the meaning of signs over time; and the codified body of knowledge accumulated by systematic observation, that is, "unbending rules" regarded as objective, or external to an individual's observation on a given occasion. Impetrative signs, or those sought by standard augural procedure, were interpreted according to observatio; the observer had little or no latitude in how they might be interpreted. Observatio might also be applicable to many oblative or unexpected signs. Observatio was considered a kind of scientia, or "scientific" knowledge, in contrast to coniectura, a more speculative "art" or "method" (ars) as required by novel signs.[356]

Even this brief glimpse of ostenta gives us a sense that the field of semiotics, the study of signs, did not begin with Pierce or de Saussure. The Etruscans were semioticians avant la lettre. Priests, poets, and seers have made the nuanced description, tabulation, and interpretation a matter of study and practice for millennia, much as the Greeks analyzed the large and various tropes and devices of rhetoric, and their role in cognition and persuasion, with keen and supple attention.

Cipus engages in an elaborate interpretive duel with the priest and his people to ward off the potential doom -- again, the question of kingship and succession -- hatched upon the dilemma of his horns. Karl Popper wrote two long volumes to work out a theory of knowledge whose political dimension is a not dissimilar struggle to oppose absolutism. Where signs demand elucidation, expect a contest of readings -- not just readings, but theories of reading. In the end, Cipus's Roman reading takes on the trappings of demagoguery to overcome the Etruscan seer's interpretation. The dilemma turns out to revolve around the portas, the gates of the city -- whether they shall be open and he shall enter like a victorious general, or closed to him, and implicitly, all future generals. Caesar and Ianus are not far off.

After Pythagoras's musings and the transformation of Hippolytus, which frame and wind around the life and death of King Numa, Ovid chooses to put the riddle of language -- of the sign -- before us. For the poet, signs are the materials of his craft -- for the vates, the seer, they carry the future, but only if they can be read:

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

As we near the final tales of the Metamorphoses, stories of gods and Caesar, the succession of Augustus and the fate of Rome, it is small wonder to find Ovid foregrounding the interplay of signs, power, and the act of reading.

A practice of reading

Over the dozen or so years that our "classics group" has been meeting in Sarasota, we've evolved a practice that has worked well for grappling with major works up close.We don't really have a name for it, but it goes something like this:

1. We take turns reading aloud from a text. Often we have different translations. After a section of a text is read, anyone is welcome to comment. Things they notice about the wording, or the action, or the tone, or setting, or rhythm, or characterization. Or how this segment relates to something that has come before. Often the comments tend to focus the group's attention on details that might otherwise have been overlooked. Different perspectives come into play as different readers offer observations, ask questions, or suggest some interpretive approach.

 2. After we feel we've said as much as it occurs to us to say about a particular passage, we go on to the next. In most cases, we go through whatever we're reading from beginning to end without skipping a word. We have found it rewarding to do this.

 3. That sums up our "method." It has worked well, and has led to a few effects:

• Nearly always, the voice most often heard, the voice that one leaves the room having mostly attended to, is the voice of the poet.

• By beginning from what we are observing in the readings before us, attention tends to remain focused on the work rather than to be dispersed through association to topics far afield.

• Even when we do move from the particular to the general, we always find our way back to the text -- it leads the way.

• What we share, always and foremost, is the text we are reading. Secondary literature, the essays of critics of the text, might come into the discussion, but they neither govern nor shape discussions. The work and our attentive reading of it takes precedence over received ideas or overworked commonplaces of literary tradition.

The upshot has been that time and time again, we've gained a nuanced appreciation for authors whom we thought we "knew," but whom we were happily disabused of thinking we understood. Speaking just for myself, I know I've learned a tremendous amount from the bafflement that confronts me at every turn in texts that have fascinated readers for centuries. This phenomenon of bafflement is well delineated by Paul de Man here. Our literary exercises have left me with a richer sense of the complex talents, interrelationships, and imaginative powers of a wide range of authors.

By getting to know each text in some detail, we've begun to discover the ways in which each might owe a debt to its predecessors, or how one poet can challenge a whole set of authors whom he nonetheless draws upon for inspiration and technique. Consider with what care Dante has situated a vast array of authors in his Commedia, for example. From a slightly more elevated perspective, we've begun to discern the elements and bases of the two mighty trunks of the Western tradition -- the Greco-Roman and the Hebraic -- and have been amazed at the contemporaneity of the poetic voices we've heard, and their capacity to surprise, entertain, and enlighten.

I guess we've gotten used to the idea that the smartest, most interesting, wisest voice in the room almost invariably comes from the book before us, so we've learned something about how to listen, to interpret, and to relate to other voices we've come to know.

Call it close reading, slow reading, reading aloud, or just reading, it's a remarkable thing to have experienced, over and over, for so many years. May it long continue.

Cryptic Crossroads: Deucalion's Dilemma

Deucalion's speech to Pyrrha is remarkable for several reasons. In it one hears a note that will return at various moments in later centuries. The flood, reaching its maximum, has erased everything -- all life, and all landmarks, except the muddy peak of Parnassus.

when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha,

Ovid's concision here is remarkable -- in a few words, he conveys the isolation and uncertainty of human beings in a vast world which is now not merely empty, but deeply silent and contingent:

And even now there is no certain assurance of our lives; even yet do the clouds terrify my mind.

terrent etiam nunc nubila mentem.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread, Pascal will say, echoed a few hundred years later in the "nothingness" of the Existentialists.

What Deucalion does is orient his whole being away from this vast unspeaking solitude and toward the only thing in it that offers the possibility of a familiar reflection, a response -- humanity itself.

It falls to Deucalion in his speech to find in Pyrrha the locus, or symmetric other of his own being:

Wife, cousin, sole surviving woman, joined to me by our shared race, our family origins,

The Latin underscores the symmetry of their yoke:

deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt

then by the marriage bed, and now joined to me in danger,

The touchstones of what is familiar are, for him, this woman bound to him by genes and by marriage, by origins and race, by bed (one thinks of the bed of Odysseus and Penelope) and by shared experience, in this case, of danger. These are the elements of human bonds, the roots of our familiarity to one another. Into them is woven speech, the memory of shared history. It's in this that Deucalion locates, again with elegant parallel clauses, the reason and core of his being:

si te quoque pontus haberet,

te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.

if the sea had you,

I would follow you, and the sea would have me too

(Hear a trace of Milton's Adam , who gives up a world for Eve?)

These humans are unlike the animals, or the demi-gods that Zeus worried about when he said, in justifying his decision to exterminate the human race:

Mine are the demigods, the wild spirits, nymphs, fauns and satyrs, and sylvan deities of the hills. Since we have not yet thought them worth a place in heaven let us at least allow them to live in safety in the lands we have given them.

Ovid's polytheistic world is full of varied creatures who seem at home in it. They live, play, don't fall afoul of just laws, and deserve Zeus's protection from violent, godless brutes like Lycaon. Humans born of the blood of the giants failed to find a niche in which they could live in harmony with all else.

Deucalion here is at a fatal ontological crossroads. His father was Prometheus, but he can't "make" men by breathing upon their shapes as his father had done. Nor can he expect to find any giant's blood. He's at a loss how to proceed, but happens to be at the temple of his grandmother, Themis, at Delphi, the omphalos of the world. It's she who'll tell him how to make a new beginning of yet a third skein of humans, from the bones (ossa) of Earth. Strangely, Deucalion and Pyrrha -- so richly intertwined by blood and marriage bed and shared danger, so fully necessary to each other that neither would choose to remain in this vast world without the other -- neither make love nor gestate progeny. They reverently throw stones.

What we must note is, they only throw stones after construing the cryptic speech of the Oracle in a way that doesn't involve the literal bones of their literal mothers -- which would be a desecration. The continuation of the human race here rests upon an act of reading -- close reading -- that metamorphoses from the literally unspeakable into a figural divination of meaning.