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.

Circe and Pomona, Greece and Rome

Book 14 of the Metamorphoses offers the suggestive juxtaposition of Circe and Pomona, so different in their modes of work, and in their relationship to desire. Circe seems to find certain men sexually irresistible. If they reject her passion, her speedy exercise of dark powers compels their understanding that amor does not necessarily consort with iustitia.

Pomona, on the other hand, appears uninterested in the opposite sex, and is one of numerous figures in the later books (Galatea, Glaucus, the Cumaean Sybil, Picus, Anaxarete) to reject would-be suitors, who are characterized as agrestis -- coarse, rude, uncivil, not unlike the Apulian shepherd.

The two female figures are worth pondering with respect to desire, knowledge, and power.

Circe is queenly, full of knowledge of the powers of nature and the techniques to abstract them. Here's Macareus describing her coven of pharmacists:

Circe

pulchro sedet illa recessu
sollemni solio pallamque induta nitentem
insuper aurato circumvelatur amictu.
Nereides nymphaeque simul, quae vellera motis
nulla trahunt digitis nec fila sequentia ducunt:                 265

gramina disponunt sparsosque sine ordine flores
secernunt calathis variasque coloribus herbas;
ipsa, quod hae faciunt, opus exigit, ipsa, quis usus
quove sit in folio, quae sit concordia mixtis,
novit et advertens pensas examinat herbas.

‘She sat in a lovely inner room on her sacred throne, wearing a shining robe, covered over with a gold-embroidered veil. Nereids and nymphs were with her, who do not work wool with nimble fingers, nor, then, spin the thread: they arrange herbs, scattered without order, separating flowers and grasses of various colours, into baskets. She herself directs the work they do: she herself knows the use of each leaf, which kinds mix in harmony, examines them, and pays attention to the weighings of the herbs.'

Circe comes across here as a kind of Faustian queen bee capable of combining materials gathered by drone labor with arcane techniques to produce unnatural results. We might here see one aspect of Ovid's critique of the legacy of Greece.

Pomona on the other hand holds herself aloof, but is all activity. She does not speak, but this doesn't necessarily place her in the line of mute, victimized female figures in literature, as some have suggested. She prohibits access, she shuns men - this virgin in the orchard is no weak sister.

For that matter, it would be somewhat diminishing to regard her strictly as a human female (as it would to regard Perseus or Vertumnus as mere males). Her powers come from attention to living things, from amor and studium:

Pomona 

                                         nulla Latinas
inter hamadryadas coluit sollertius hortos
nec fuit arborei studiosior altera fetus;                       625
unde tenet nomen: non silvas illa nec amnes,
rus amat et ramos felicia poma ferentes;
nec iaculo gravis est, sed adunca dextera falce,
qua modo luxuriem premit et spatiantia passim
bracchia conpescit, fisso modo cortice virgam             630
inserit et sucos alieno praestat alumno;
nec sentire sitim patitur bibulaeque recurvas
radicis fibras labentibus inrigat undis.
hic amor, hoc studium, Veneris quoque nulla cupido est;
vim tamen agrestum metuens pomaria claudit               635
intus et accessus prohibet refugitque viriles.

No other hamadryad of the wood nymphs of Latium tended the gardens more skilfully or was more devoted to the orchards’ care, hence her name. She loved the fields and the branches loaded with ripe apples, not the woods and rivers. She carried a curved pruning knife, not a javelin, with which she cut back the luxuriant growth, and lopped the branches spreading out here and there, now splitting the bark and inserting a graft, providing sap from a different stock for the nursling. She would not allow them to suffer from being parched, watering, in trickling streams, the twining tendrils of thirsty root. This was her love, and her passion, and she had no longing for desire. Still fearing boorish aggression, she enclosed herself in an orchard (pomaria), and denied an entrance, and shunned men.

Neither a boss nor a hunter, Pomona is a nurturing semi-divine spirit that enhances growth and variety through natural means. Ignoring vim agrestum -- rude sexual force -- she embodies the "art that nature makes," as Perdita puts it in The Winter's Tale. This is Ovid's version of the warm, Italic integration of amor and studium, nature and art.

Pomona at Plaza Hotel

Orpheus: the poet as unnatural auctor

The more time one spends with the Metamorphoses, the more intriguing it becomes. Unlike books that move with linear, consequential momentum from beginning to middle to end, Ovid's poem, if it moves, does so in a way that seems to call for analogies with mirrors, or perhaps fractals.

It becomes difficult to find a "way in" to the heart of this labyrinthine poem because there seem a nearly unlimited number of entrances, each opening onto a limitless series of paths that open onto -- you get the idea -- a Borgesian library, a book, liber, that's also a maze. But where does it begin? Does it have a center? an end? Where's Ariadne when we need her?

In book 10 we're noticing that Orpheus, who once had sung of "heavy" matters such as the gigantomachy, changes his tune after losing his bride to Hades, twice. The comparisons of the defeated poet to a nameless fellow frightened by Cerberus, and to Olenus, a man who refused to live without his beloved, proud Lethaea, suggest that Ovid might not entirely dissent from the judgment of Phaedrus in Plato's Symposium that Orpheus proved a coward frightened by both death and love.

What happens is that after encountering death, Orpheus's poetry changes:

‘Begin my song with Jupiter, Calliope, O Muse, my mother (all things bow to Jupiter’s might)! I have often sung the power of Jove before: I have sung of the Giants, in an epic strain, and the victorious lightning bolts, hurled at the Phlegraean field. Now there is gentler work for the lyre, and I sing of boys loved by the gods, and girls stricken with forbidden fires, deserving punishment for their lust. (Kline)

For "epic strain," the Latin text has plectro graviore; for "gentler work for the lyre," Ovid has leviore lyra. This is the poet as Orphic musician, the tools of his trade standing for the genre, the kind of song, he will sing. The image picks up the continuous play of lightness and heaviness that we've noted on several occasions.

What's interesting here is that, Orpheus, the famed "father of songs" (ἀοιδᾶν πατὴρ, Pindar calls him), goes backwards, reversing the Virgilian progression that moved inexorably from slender piping pastorals to laborious Georgics to the epic founding of empire.

Is it possible that Ovid is offering, via allegory, some autobiographical datum? Some suggestion that his own poetic career will be different from his mighty predecessor's? Hard to tell.

In turning away from the war of gods, Orpheus also turns away from heterosexual love and marriage, the stable union upon which the web of human life and fortune is built. There will be no children from these aberrant affairs, (unless we consider Paphos and Adonis, and we will have to do just that).

Somehow latent in this turning away, Orpheus also becomes, not a father, but the Thracian auctor of the male love of young boys. Is literary authorship somehow a strange begetting? Does the literary mode in which Ovid works -- this very poem we are reading -- somehow involve the "unnatural"? Is it purely by chance that the term genre derives from the root of gender?

gender (n.) c.1300, "kind, sort, class," from O.Fr. gendre (12c., Mod.Fr. genre), from stem of L. genus (gen. generis) "race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species," also (male or female) "sex" (see genus) and used to translate Aristotle's Greek grammatical term genos.

Nietzsche famously noted that unnatural acts often accompanied the Greek sense of prophetic wisdom:

This is the recognition I find expressed in the terrible triad of Oedipean fates: the same man who solved the riddle of nature (the ambiguous Sphinx) must also, as murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break the consecrated tables of the natural order. It is as though the myth whispered to us that wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural crime, and that whoever, in pride of knowledge, hurls nature into the abyss of destruction, must himself experience nature's disintegration. "The edge of wisdom is turned against the wise man; wisdom is a crime committed on nature" [see Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 316–17]: such are the terrible words addressed to us by myth. (Birth of Tragedy 9)

In considering Ovid's thinking about authorship and artistic creation, some of this might be worth keeping in mind. Let me offer one quick speculative example of how Ovid's view of the lighter side of literariness might have developed.

Before he wrote Metamorphoses, Ovid's great work was the Heroides, which we've glanced at more than once. These are letters written by literary characters such as Paris to Helen, Deianeira to Heracles, or Ariadne to Theseus. These letters carry arguments of love and passion, and are filled with psychological insight. They offer the verisimilitude of actual lovers in actual situations, and Ovid could certainly have felt pride of authorship in having produced such superb works of art. But Ovid makes these literary figures themselves into authors. Could he call himself their creator? How could he, given that every one of his epistolary "authors" is in fact a character in a poem created by an author other than Ovid? He did not "originate" these characters, yet in bringing them to life, often in greater psychological depth and circumstantial detail than can be found in their original settings, Ovid seems to be mirroring, detailing, or engendering the artistic beings he found in other people's books. (Same often said of Shakespeare).

I defy you to read Paris to Helen and then read Homer's Iliad without finding Paris infused with the character discovered in Paris's letter. It is as if Ovid begets a Paris of his own upon Homer's Paris -- an unnatural birth in which a character sort of begets itself (self-similarity) through the fertile womb of two poets' imaginations. Pygmalion and Myrrha are not far away.

When we think of how often characters in the Metamorphoses -- and in Greek myth in general -- are seeking their true fathers (Phaethon), or act under false assumptions about who bore them (Oedipus), we become more mindful of a key enigma underlying Ovid's world -- the ambiguity of origin. If we don't know where we came from, can we know where we'll end? If the genetic link of father-child, artist-work, cause-effect is missing or undone, then beginnings, endings, and middles are fraught with new difficulties. Where for Yeats "the center cannot hold," for Ovid a more basic question is whether one could ever have held there to have been a center.

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