Mendelsohn on McCarter's Metamorphoses

In this New Yorker review of Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Daniel Mendelsohn offers some thoughtful observations about Ovid's style and content:

Ovid announces the nature of his epic in its opening lines, where he asks the gods to “delicately spin out” a song so vast as to be “unceasing,” starting with the beginning of the world and ending in the poet’s own time. 

He opens with an evocation of the primal chaos from which all creation arose, shifting, as the poem progresses, to the establishment of Jove’s rule in heaven and the creation of the human race (which, as in the Bible, has to repopulate itself after a devastating flood). There follows a panoply of myths about the interactions of gods and humans, including the many instances of divine violence against mortals which lead to all those baroque mutations.. . . .

Apollo flaying Marsyas - Ribera
Ringling Museum

If there are any heroes in this violent and kaleidoscopic work, they are artists. The Metamorphoses returns again and again to the ingenuity of artists and musicians and poets, from sculptors like Pygmalion to the musician Marsyas, from inventors like Daedalus, who both creates and then must escape from the Labyrinth, to the semi-divine poet Orpheus, the preëminent representative in the Western tradition of poetic genius in both its positive and negative aspects. (He can charm trees and rocks, but famously fails to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead.) The long Orpheus sequence in Book 10—a mini-epic all its own—is characterized by a dizzying, almost Calvinoesque series of nested narratives. At one point, you realize you’re reading Ovid telling a story about Orpheus telling a story about Venus telling her lover Adonis a story about another pair of lovers.

As if eerily anticipating his own fate, the poet lingers on the tales of artists—and critics!—who suffer dreadful punishments for speaking uncomfortable truths to power. Marsyas is flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a musical contest; when the mortal Midas questions a decision in another contest, Apollo gives him an ass’s ears. Art and literature, Ovid seems to say, are powerful if dangerous means of confronting arbitrary authority. 

~ Daniel Mendelsohn, Should Ovid’s Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning?, New Yorker, 11.7.2022

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.

Baldwin on Love is not unlike Ovid on Amor

 Part of an excellent post on Popova's Brain Pickings:

James Baldwin on Love, the Illusion of Choice, and the Paradox of Freedom

We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies that die when their temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius or drops below 20, living on a planet that would be the volcanic inferno of Venus or the frigid desert of Mars if it were just a little closer to or farther from its star.

And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not. The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of freedom. But the closer the question moves to the core of our being, the more clearly and catastrophically the illusion crumbles — nowhere more helplessly than in the most intimate realm of experience: love. Try to will yourself into — or out of — loving someone, try to will someone into loving you, and you collide with the fundamental fact that we do not choose whom we love. We could not choose, because we do not choose who and what we are, and in any love that is truly love, we love with everything we are.

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) was a young man — young and brilliant and aflame with life, blazing against society’s illusion of stability and control — when he composed his stunning semi-autobiographical novel Giovanni’s Room (public library), making the paradox of freedom its animating theme.

Ovid's Medea

 Our Classics group is currently reading Euripides' Medea, and of course it brought to mind Ovid's fascination with the enchantress. 

Medea rejuvenating Jason's father Aeson

Ovid was drawn to the daughter of Aeetes. His only tragic drama was his lost Medea. A surviving fragment appears to be an ominous warning from Medea to Jason - and it's pure Ovid:

'servare potui; perderean possim rogas?’ 

‘I was able to save you; do you think I cannot destroy you?’

Medea dominates half of book 7 of the Metamorphoses. The character and her story develop into something of a travelogue featuring detailed descriptions of her search for the highly rarefied materials of her sorcery. That book can be found here in Tony Kline's translation.

While Medea puts the Dragon to sleep, Jason,
followed by Orpheus, takes the Golden Fleece

The images of Medea are from Greek Mythology Link, which has a rich "bio" of Medea. The top figure is from a 17th century French translation of the Metamorphoses. The lower one is by William Russell Flint.

This post reproduces what was posted to the Classics in Sarasota blog.

Ovid and his book

From "The Unbearable Lightness of Ovid": Tom Hendrickson offers a careful description of the "books" Ovid, exiled, wrote of in Tristia:

Like many of those who now open the pages of the Tristia, I was looking for something specific rather than reading at my leisure when I stumbled across it in Pisa. I was doing research on ancient books, and the very first poem of the Tristia is addressed to the book itself and provides a lush description of the ancient bookroll as an aesthetic object. Ovid instructs his book to look mournful and unkempt, in keeping with his situation (1.1.5–12):

      
Nec te purpureo uelent uaccinia fuco — 
non est conueniens luctibus ille color — 
nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur,
candida nec nigra cornua fronte geras…
Nec fragili geminae poliantur pumice frontes,
hirsutus sparsis ut uideare comis.

Let no whortleberry veil you with crimson dye — 
That color is not fit for mourning — 
Let your title-slip be marked by no cinnabar, your papyrus with no cedar,
And may you not carry gleaming horns on your dark forehead…
Let your twin faces be smoothed by no delicate pumice,
So that you seem shaggy, with scraggly hair. (1.1.5–12)

Books in the Roman world were typically papyrus scrolls. They could be utilitarian tools, but they could also be luxury objects, works of art in their own right. The papyrus would be stained with cedar oil (cedro charta notetur), which kept it free from pests and rot, but which also gave it a heavenly color and scent. The edges of the scroll, which could become torn and ragged, would have to be frequently filed with pumice (fragili geminae poliantur pumice frontes), allowing book-owners to indulge in a kind of “care of the book” ritual. A center-rod, which might be made of precious materials, would be used to unroll the scroll. Here the center-rod sticking out of either end of the scroll must be ivory, since Ovid describes it as being like the gleaming horns on a cow’s dark forehead (candida … nigra cornua fronte). Each scroll would have a small title slip attached to the top and naming the author and work, here imagined to be written in scarlet ink (minio). The “crimson dye” (purpureo … fuco) refers to a slip-cover in which the book could be stored and transported in safety.

Some new essays on Ovid

In honor of Ovid's Bimillennium, a group of essays has been posted by In Medias Res, a magazine published by the Paideia Institute. They include readings of the Amores, the Heroides, the Medicamina faciei femineae (his work on make-up), and the Metamorphoses.

An intro with links to them by John Byron Kushner is here.

From Kusher's essay on Metamorphoses:

Ovid seems to be arguing against responsibility, and for sympathy. All of these desires — licit and illicit — come into our lives through our bodies, and it is not clear that we are to be held responsible for our bodies, or that we are our bodies, a theme Ovid plays with continually. Adonis coming into manhood is described as iam se formosior ipso est — more beautiful than himself (10.523). Marriage for Atalanta is described — quite powerfully, knowing how difficult marriage can be for us all — as teque ipsa viva carebis (“you will no longer have yourself, though you will be alive,” 10.566). 

In Latin our lives begin and end with passive verbs: nascimur and morimur (we are born, we die). And much of the in-between fits into the verb patimur, we suffer, which is the main material of the Metamorphoses, in its varied forms . . . 

After a helpful discussion of the long speech of Pythagoras, he notes:

For Ovid, to use E.J. Kenney’s phrase used by Feeney, “the Augustan settlement was not, as it had been for Vergil, the start of a new world, novus ordo saeclorum, but another sandbank in the shifting stream of eternity.”

Of course, Ovid being nothing if not Ovid, one thing will remain, through some unidentified agency, unchanged beyond that shifting stream -- his name:

parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis

astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum

Still in my better part far beyond the lofty stars

I shall be borne immortal; my name will be indelible.

The Classicist and the Ovid-citing supremacists

In an interview on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," the editor of the classics journal Eidolon takes on USian white supremacists who cite Ovid's Ars Amatoria as precedent and support for their view of male patriarchal power

Donna Zuckerberg, who also teaches at Stanford, talks about how she encountered threatening pushback for taking on this ham-handed appropriation of ancient authorities by contemporary ideologues, many of whom fetishize Nazism.

In the brief conversation with the program's host, Zuckerberg notes that she loves Ovid and allows that he's neither simple nor direct, in fact he's rather nuanced and complex. This nine-minute conversation, however, which isn't focused on the poet, leads to the categorizing of the book as a pick-up artist's manual -- the very trope the poet is using to expose the hilarious pretensions of matchbook-course experts on Amor.

Reading a passage in which the Praeceptor avers that women love to be taken by force, Zukerberg verges dangerously close to taking the poet at face value in the very way she faults the supremacist readers for doing. Predicting a vein of unimaginative male discourse doesn't qualify one as a prophet, but neither does it convict one of the dastardliness foretold.

Zuckerberg knows Ovid is a complex poetic craftsman. The problem with those who cite his "authority" on male-female relations is that his examination of desire in all its self-contradiction makes it quite clear that both sexes are equally the playthings of Amor, and the games played, the intricate commerce of sexual relations, do not rely on any a priori assumptions about male power and female inferiority. Indeed, there would be nothing to talk about if Amor rested on a fixed hierarchy of the sexes.

Ovid teaches us by putting into lively verse an entire dictionary of memes and cliches about love. What people say -- including Trumpian lockerroom trash about women liking to be forced -- is part of the poet's subject. It doesn't make the poet a one-sided USian white supremacist.

One might argue that Ovid's lucidity about the impossibility of his own pretended enterprise -- that there is such a thing as an "art" of love -- is fundamentally incompatible with the meathead sensibility of one who would extract from his lively and witty text a reading as ponderously dull as that of these wannabe classicizing supremacists.

That sort of fatuity is as far from Ovid as it is from the author of Bouvard et Pecuchet and the Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Whether there is any common ground upon which to discuss the Ars Amatoria with the Bouvards of white USian Nazism is a question best left for another moment.

For her efforts, Zuckerberg earned threats of brutal violence to herself and her family. The gap between the literal and the literary reading of a text can be a perilous one, as this text's own author was to learn.

Styling the hunt for Amor

The moment Ovid's praeceptor of Love takes the podium, he's selling something -- starting with himself. The poet of the Ars Amatoria promises to dispense knowledge gained through long experience -- usus -- of love, to those seeking the guidance of a Chiron of Amor.

The cautious reader will be on guard. Who is this Tiphys et Automedon Amoris? What's he selling, and what's his angle?

The poet will keep us wondering. Sooner or later, it dawns on us that the lesson here is not "how to pick up girls," or various technical aides to "out-Hercules Hercules." Something else, very much other than the ostensible subject matter, is in play.

To enter this relationship with the praeceptor is not unlike entering a relationship with a lover -- at least, with one of those common types he depicts -- a creature of empty words, signs written in spilled wine on a messy dinner table, or composed in invisible ink - or, milk. Or the promise might be encrypted on his face through silent expressions. After all, he's a promise-making animal.

Motifs of writing, promising, hunting and gaming run through the Ars, next to, but not necessarily comporting with, another thread: the series of myths related to Minos, four of which -- Pasiphae, Ariadne, Daedalus/Icarus, and Procris -- receive expansive treatment. The shifts in tone between these moments of Euripidean solemnity and the wiseguy world of contemporary (in either sense) Rome make for a dislocating experience.

I'll teach you to hunt, says the Tutor:

The hunter knows where to spread nets for the stag,
     he knows what valleys hide the angry boar:

He's reticent on how, in this pursuit, one can swiftly go from hunter to prey.

The Tutor's pupil is advised to roam through the boulevards and valleys of Rome, amid an abundance of candidates for love. No single object of affection actually swims into view, nor is any particular relationship mapped. No specific human relationship gets to develop from initial acquaintance to happy (or otherwise) consummation and contentment. Ovid's praeceptor guides us as if we were armed with a metal detector. Moving rapidly over the terrain, we scan this one at the theater, then rub shoulders, thighs or feet with that one at the races.

The Tutor's charge moves through the crowded Roman spectacles. For him, the reason for being at the Circus or theater has nothing to do with devotion to sport or to Melpomene. And this is basic to the Tutor's lesson: When dealing with Amor, one is usually not interested in the ostensible subject that has drawn the crowd. One is not there for the play, unless it's the interplay with the lady who catches one's eye.

On the stage, one beholds those seized, nay, cursed -- like Phaedra -- with uncontrollable, fated desire. But in the audience, one plays the field: the object of desire glances from lady to lady, rapidly aroused by others' desire:

Sed cur fallaris, cum sit nova grata voluptas      

Et capiant animos plus aliena suis? 

But why should you be disappointed, when a new pleasure's most fun,
   and the heart craves someone else's things more than its own?  I.346-7

Moments before, the Tutor's song had risen to dramatic apostrophe, intoning the names of tragic lovers:

Cui non defleta est Ephyraeae flamma Creüsae,
     Et nece natorum sanguinolenta parens?
Flevit Amyntorides per inania lumina Phoenix:
     Hippolytum pavidi diripuistis equi.

Who hasn't wept at the burning of Ephyrean Creusa
    and the mother drenched in the blood of her murdered sons?
Phoenix, son of Amyntor, wept from blinded eyes;
    maddened horses, you tore apart Hippolytus!  I.335-38

But now, amid the many ladies in the amphitheater, the displacing power cannot rest on any one, because there is always an other - a nova. Desire runs through the crowd, not coming to rest with the mad horses of Hippolytus, but looking out upon prosaic country sights: big, bovine numbers:

Fertilior seges est alienis semper in agris
     Vicinumque pecus grandius uber habet.

The grass is always greener in someone else's field,
     and the neighbor's cattle have got the fatter udders. 1.349-50

What prompts the hunt? Why do we love?

According to the Tutor, at its extremes, Amor is excessive obsession with a single, immutable target that destroys lives and dynasties; and, or: desire displaces any possible target to infinity. What's our goal here? Some one, some thing, to have and to hold and put finis to the hunt? Or are we perpetually trapped, needing the hunt in order to experience desire?

To ask whether we desire love, or love desire, is to grapple with the Tutor's lesson. With Amor, there is always the sense that our interests might be other than they appear (we're attending Phaedra, but we're here for the chicks). Lovers -- including the praeceptor -- are not what they, we, seem, thanks to love.

It's compounded in the negotiation of the hunt and courtship, as both parties face this difficulty. How to know what -- or whom -- the other actually desires?

To the extent that the Ars is about knowing whom to trust (hence whom to love), it's about reading. The lesson throughout this ever-changing poem involves making sense of its signals. Put another way, the "content" (logos) of the poem -- i.e., the ostensible subject matter of the "art" of Love -- is pretext. If you wish to win that lover who is right for you, attend not to what I say (logos), but to how I say it (lexis, modus).

Nec tibi conveniet cunctos modus unus ad annos:     
     Longius insidias cerva videbit anus.
Si doctus videare rudi, petulansve pudenti,     
    Diffidet miserae protinus illa sibi.
Inde fit, ut quae se timuit committere honesto,     
    Vilis ad amplexus inferioris eat.

 A single style won't work for you for every age;
    the seasoned doe will spot a trap further away.
If you seem learned to the simple, or aggressive to the chaste,
    she'll lose confidence in herself at once, poor thing.
Thus it happens that one who's afraid to entrust herself to
    a decent man goes cheap to a worse one's embrace. 1.765-770.

English translations are from J.D. Hejduk's The Offense of Love.

Love for sale: Ovid's love doctor

Aeacidae Chiron, ego sum praeceptor Amoris 

As Chiron to that son of Aeacus, I am the tutor of Love* (AA 1.17)

From the start, the Tutor of the Ars Amatoria has used car salesman written all over him. This praeceptor - not to be confused with Ovid -- declares his mastery, promises the reader success in the ways of love, then proceeds to deliver "wisdom" so tenuous, trivial, inconsistent and derelict that even the dullest of pupils would have second thoughts about further lessons.

Book 1 ends with the praeceptor pulling into port:

Pars superat coepti, pars est exhausta laboris.     Hic teneat nostras ancora iacta rates. 

Part of the task I've undertaken is done, part remains;
here let the anchor be cast and hold my ship.

Our Chiron wannabe, who began by claiming expertise in the arts of Love on a par with Tithys' command of the Argo, here drops anchor. While translators tend to translate rates as "boat" or "ship," it might be closer to "raft." The Tutor's epic persona, and all his appointments, are looking a bit shopworn and degraded at this point.

Part of the joy of reading Ovid is in getting a feeling for what he's up to. In the Ars, his persona proudly vaunts his ability to dare verba. 

Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi;     Cum dare non possem munera, verba dabam. 

I'm a prophet for paupers, because I loved as a pauper;     since I wasn't able to give gifts, I gave words.

As translator Julia Dyson Hejduk notes, dare verba was an idiom signifying "to trick." In the service of Love, all is fair, and all moves from, and with, the magical dazzle of empty words, signifiers, promises, cheap talk.

What is Ovid on about here, dabbling in the nature of love and language, faith and folly, myth and streetsmarts mingling in the Tutor's endless gab? Indeed one work that seems most like the Ars is Erasmus's Praise of Folly. In both, the inspiring divinity is both all powerful and all silly, all the time.

There's also the roaming eye of the flaneur, prowling and probing the high and hidden places of the city; there's the gaze of the social order, the ploys of the hunter, the threadbare experience -- usus -- of the one who spills the secrets of Amor and Roma with a saucy air.

There's nothing for it but to dive into the Tutor's wordstream -- to play the reader -- and target -- of his ploys.

*Translations are from The Offense of Love, Julia Dyson Hejduk, whose fidelity to the texts of the Ars, the Remedia Amoris, and Tristia is virtually line by line, and whose notes are invaluable for us grateful modern clods.

A few versions of Ars Amatoria online and in print

Update: Thanks to Jean, we now have an addition to our list of translations of the Ars: J.D. Hejduk's The Offense of Love - see below among the print selections.

Ars Amatoria is sure to be a distinct pivot away from Dante's Paradiso, where the Sarasota classics group has been lingering, or loitering, for the past two and a half years.

Ovid's poem, completed around 2 A.D., was a sort of instructional manual to the realm of relations between the sexes.

the word ars in the title is not to be translated coldly as 'technique', or as 'art' in the sense of civilized refinement, but as "textbook", the literal and antique definition of the word. (Ars Amatoria)

The text is available in various formats online and in print -- see below. If anyone knows of another that should be added to the list, please let me know, or leave the info in a comment.


Ars Amatoria Online

A.S. Kline

Sacred Texts

J. Lewis May (Wikisource)

Riley - prose translation with notes (Gutenberg)

Perseus - Dual Language
Hyperlinked Latin, English, and notes


Print

Applebaum - Dover edition, English only, no notes

J.D. Hejduk's The Offense of Love looks to be a smart translation of the Ars, the Remedia Amoris, and Tristia. Amazon offers no access to the Ars translations, but offers the texts in print and Kindle formats. However, Google Books presents English text and well done notes:



James Mitchie Dual language, no notes

Rolfe Humphries - English prose, notes

Circe

Crewman of Odysseus turning into a beast

A new tale of Circe, told from the point of view of the daughter of Helios, is just out. It's by Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles.

The scope of the tale as told by Miller reckons with the reality of status as an immortal. Odysseus's visit to her isle, while memorable, is but a blip:

"In Ms. Miller’s version, Circe’s encounter with Odysseus is only a slice of her story, which unfolds over thousands of years and begins in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios. Her family members, who treat her with cruelty or indifference, become infamous in their own right: Her sister Pasiphae marries King Minos and gives birth to the Minotaur, a bullheaded, man-eating monster; while her brother Aeetes grows up to rule Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, and fathers Medea, who later murders her children." NYT

Myths as the ancients told them were galaxies filled with tales, stretching through generations, with cities and kings rising and falling. Miller seems alive  to that scale of things. Her blog, enriched by her Greek and Latin, is titled "Myths."

And, as noted in reading the Metamorphoses, Ovid's wit is urbane and literary. In his telling, the myths are changed, at points with parodic effect. Understandably, Miller doesn't draw upon his version of the enchantress.

deliberately omitting a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Circe punishes a king who spurns her advances by turning him into a woodpecker. 

Madeline Miller

Ovid's exile to the remotest margins of the Roman empire revoked

From The Guardian

Rome city council overturns banishment of ‘one of the greatest poets’ more than 2,000 years after Augustus forced him to leave

More than 2,000 years after Augustus banished him to deepest Romania, the poet Ovid has been rehabilitated. 

Rome city council on Thursday unanimously approved a motion tabled by the populist M5S party to “repair the serious wrong” suffered by Ovid, thought of as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature along with Virgil and Horace. 

Ovid Banished from Rome - Turner

Best known for his 15-book epic narrative poem Metamorphoses and the elegy Ars Amatoria, or the Art of Love, Publius Ovidius Naso was exiled in 8 AD to Tomis, the ancient but remote Black Sea settlement now known as the Romanian port city of Constanța. 

He remained there until his death a decade later. Although ordered directly by the emperor, scholars have long speculated over the motive for Ovid’s exile; the poet himself attributed it to “carmen et error”, a poem and a mistake. 

Experts believe the cause was probably a combination of three factors: that Ovid’s erotic poetry was considered offensive, his attitude to Augustus was too disrespectful, and that he may have been involved in an unspecified plot or scandal. 

La Republicca reported that M5S, which holds a majority of the seats on the council, demanded that “necessary measures” be adopted to revoke the order in what the capital’s deputy mayor, Luca Bergamo, described as an important symbol.

“It is about the fundamental right of artists to express themselves freely in societies in which, around the world, the freedom of artistic expression is increasingly constrained,” Bergamo told councillors.
Ovid was indisputably “one of the greatest poets in the history of humanity,” the deputy mayor said, and moreover the real reasons for his mysterious banishment by the emperor “were never placed on the historical record”. 

Sulmona, the Abruzzo town where the poet was born (then Sulmo), formally acquitted him of any wrongdoing. Dante, the great Renaissance poet, was similarly pardoned in 2008 by Florence – from where he was exiled on pain of death in 1302. 

Ovid’s many poems and letters in exile, collected in Tristia and The Black Sea Letters, have been described by critics as a “clinical presentation” of the condition of exile, “demonstrating its debilitating effect upon a man’s morale, his talents and perhaps his psychology”.

Coally prattling birds

The appearance of the gaggle of pole -- jackdaws, or grey crows (cornacchie grige) - in Paradiso 21 is a strangely unsolemn moment in an otherwise almost forbiddingly sober canto. Jackaws are usually not associated with contemplation - and the variously active groups of birds described in the simile seem busy, but not intent upon higher things:

And as accordant with their natural custom
  The rooks together at the break of day
  Bestir themselves to warm their feathers cold;

Then some of them fly off without return,
  Others come back to where they started from,
  And others, wheeling round, still keep at home; 

Such fashion it appeared to me was there
  Within the sparkling that together came,  (21:34-41)

Robert Hollander notes that these birds have "black wings, silver eyes, and large red beaks encircled by yellow," and adds that according to Benvenuto, they love solitude and choose the desert for their habitation.

Thanks to Dren, we now know our black birds have a holiday tie-in, via Ovid, no less. He shared this piece from the Washington Post that offers a bit of philological archaeology. It turns out that while we all sing "four calling birds," during the Twelve Days of Christmas, the original line involved "coally birds," an adjective derived from, and sounding like, "coal."

The OED finds the word in Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses - the tale of Coronis and the raven who told Apollo of her infidelity.

As thou thou prating Raven white by nature being bred,
Hadst on thy fethers justly late a coly colour spred.

Indeed, we might have Ovid to thank for Golding's bringing the word into print, and giving it the opportunity to be mistaken for "calling birds," thus helping perpetuate the derangement of language which happens to be a prominent theme in the second book of the Metamorphoses. (See, for example, here.)

The moment of reading

From the Washington Post:

“Not far from the walls of Enna, there is a deep pool,” begins Ovid’s version of the rape of Persephone. “While [Persephone] was playing in this glade, and gathering violets or radiant lilies, while with girlish fondness she filled the folds of her gown, and her basket, trying to outdo her companions in her picking, [Pluto], almost in a moment, saw her, prized her, took her: so swift as this, is love.” [Metamorphoses 5]

The Greek myth has been recounted for thousands of years in hundreds of languages, scores of countries and countless works of art. It’s considered a cultural touchstone for Western civilization: a parable about power, lust and grief. 

Now, however, it could be getting a treatment it’s never had before: a trigger warning. 

In an op-ed in the student newspaper, four Columbia University undergrads have called on the school to implement trigger warnings — alerts about potentially distressing material — even for classics like Greek mythology or Roman poetry.  More...

Regardless of cultural shifts and chance mutations of public sensibility, it remains necessary to read the text with attention, thought, and contextual awareness. Without this moment, the joys and discomforts of any work of literature might be matters of pleasure or pain, but do they offer human or historical truth or ethical imperatives? Without a reading, can there be "a treatment"?

Greek warriors as Roman lovers

When a love poet invokes the great epic heroes, the substance and rhetoric of eros is always in play. In a very Ovidian manner, Propertius begins his bit of amorous braggadocio with Zeus's fathering of Heracles:

“Jupiter slept with Alcmene two nights, and for two nights the heavens missed their king. He did not on that account languidly resume his thunderbolt: no lovemaking defrauded him of his virility. When Achilles left the embrace of Briseis, did the Phrygians then flee his missiles less? Did the Mycenaean ships fear the war less because Hector had just come from Andromache’s bed? Hector could have burnt those ships, Achilles could have leveled those walls: in this I am Achilles, in this am I Hector.”

Iuppiter Alcmenae geminas requieverat Arctos,

et caelum noctu bis sine rege fuit;

nec tamen idcirco languens ad fulmina venit:

nullus amor vires eripit ipse suas.

quid? cum e complexu Briseidos iret Achilles,

num fugere minus Thessala tela Phryges?

quid? ferus Andromachae lecto cum surgeret Hector

bella Mycenaeae non timuere rates?

ille vel hic classis poterant vel perdere muros:

hic ego Pelides, hic ferus Hector ego.

via Sententiae Antiquae 

Deianeira to Heracles

Update: a follow-up post on the letter is here.

Next time, we'll have a look at Deianira's letter to Heracles from Ovid's Heroides. A few sources:

Grant Showerman's translation (used in the Loeb edition).


The Perseus site: English and hyperlinked Latin, as well as notes.


The Latin Library has the Latin text on one page.


Tony Kline's translation.

Ovid and Postmodernism

A conference on Ovid and Postmodernism at Oxford.

It is by now a critical commonplace to demonstrate the affinity between Ovidian and postmodern concerns: a playful insistence on the rhetorical nature of ‘reality’; on the instability of meaning; on the permeability of borders and on the arbitrariness of time. Our project takes as its starting point the appeal of Ovid’s preoccupations with desire, transition, transgression, power, violence, subversion and alienation to the cultures of the late twentieth / early twenty-first century world. It seeks to discover what recent engagements with both the poet’s biography and his rich and varied corpus have contributed to our still-evolving conceptualizations of postmodernism.

• How has Ovid changed the politics of classical scholarship in the last forty years?
• What can a reception history of the postmodern Ovid tell us about the history of postmodernism itself?
• Is Ovid just ‘play’ or does he speak seriously to politically aware (feminist, ‘minority’ and/or postcolonial) concerns about postmodern relativism and its denial of agency?

via rogueclassicist

Metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses

The winds - a Metamorphoses comic.

Links to upcoming readings

We're turning to a few shorter modes after completing Sophocles' Antigone - beginning with Pindar's First Olympian Ode, and Penelope to Ulysses, the first of the Heroides:

Ovid's Heroides

Latin only
The Latin Library 

English only:
Kline translation
Theoi Loeb Translation (Showerman) 

Odd: Perseus has a commentary on the Heroides, but not, seemingly, the actual text in either Latin or English.

Pindar's Odes on Perseus

Olympian Odes (Greek and English)

English only - Diane Arnson Svarlien

Printable copy - if this link works for you, it opens an easily printable copy of Pindar's first Olympian.

Another first for Ovid

Ovid's Heroides as fan fiction:

Sappho and Phaon

Ovid, in my opinion, is first author to truly take the time to write his version of a “fan fiction.” A fan fiction is when a “fan” of a show, book, or series takes the time to write an alternative ending or even a sequel to the already established lore.

via rogueclassicism