Hand and Mind: Ajax vs. Ulysses

After Ajax has scornfully cast Ulysses as the son of Sisyphus (which was a rumor), that is, a sneaky cowardly fellow who can't be trusted, let alone rewarded with the greatest honor of the Trojan War (the arms of Achilles, the god-crafted, physical embodiment of his glory), Ulysses sums his view of why he, and not Ajax, merits the prize:

tibi dextera bello
utilis, ingenium est, quod eget moderamine nostro;
tu vires sine mente geris, mihi cura futuri;
tu pugnare potes, pugnandi tempora mecum
eligit Atrides; tu tantum corpore prodes,
nos animo; quantoque ratem qui temperat, anteit
remigis officium, quanto dux milite maior,
tantum ego te supero. nec non in corpore nostro
pectora sunt potiora manu: vigor omnis in illis. (13.361-69)

Here's a slightly modified version of Kline's translation:

Your right hand, useful in war, needs the guidance of my intellect (ingenium). You have power (vires) without mind (mente), mine is the care for the future. You can fight, but Atrides, with me, chooses the time to fight. You only display the flesh (corpora), I the spirit (animo: "mind," "soul"). By as much as he who steers the ship is superior to him who rows, by as much as the general exceeds the soldier, by that much I surpass you. No less is the head (pectora: "heart, mind") more powerful than the hand, in our body: the energy of the whole (vigor omnis) is within it.

If Ajax's speech was entirely pragmatic, Ulysses's vocabulary borders on the metaphysical. Part of the irony here is that neither the hand nor the mind is willing to acknowledge the necessity of belonging to a larger whole. Without the mind, a hand is merely an aimless instrument. Without the hand, the mind's strategic powers reside feckless in a vacuum. Execution requires both hand and mind, and the greatest honors are given to artists, athletes, surgeons, craftsmen, etc. who possess and use intelligent fingertips.

In Ovid's scene in Metamorphoses 13, hand and mind are at war -- so passionate are both to claim the honor of being the sole agent of victorious warcraft that the matter of agency is itself put in question. If we can't agree on which of the executants should be credited, then we can't authoritatively say who did what. When agency is suspended, so is the glory of having acted. The very thing that makes the prize shield and helmet so valuable -- kleos, glory -- has gotten lost, unassignable, thanks to the debate that was supposed to assign it.

Detail of Achilles' shield, Kathleen A. Vail

Another part of the irony lies in what has caused this fight: bella movet clipeus - "even his shield makes war," Ovid says. If Ulysses and Ajax have blurred agency, then it's quite possible for the shield to turn into the actual agent of their conflict. Something that is normally considered a tool of war is now its cause. This kind of reversal is a recurrent phenomenon in the Metamorphoses. 

We might argue that this sort of statement -- "the shield makes war" -- is merely a shorthand way of saying that the desires of the two men for the shield and what it represents caused them to fight (and, ultimately, resulted in the suicide of one of them). But it is agency itself that's been put in question. If one cannot decide whether the mind or the hand is acting, then it's equally plausible to say that the shield moved the war as it is to say their desire for the shield was the cause. Agent and instrument can be reversed like cause and effect. When we hear someone say that "_____ made me do it" -- (if you google that expression, the results are quite interesting), they are entering into a willing suspension, not of disbelief, but of will itself, i.e., of agency.

Ulysses plays with the notion of agency in his speech. While Ajax emphasized how he stood against Hektor while Ulysses was nowhere to be found, Ulysses himself  says things like:

Why does Ulysses dare to go through the sentries and commit himself to night; to enter not only the walls of Troy but also the heights of the citadel, past the sharp swords; and to snatch the goddess from her temple, and carry her captive through the enemy ranks? If I had not done it, the son of Telamon would have carried the seven-layered bull’s-hide shield on his left arm in vain. That night the victory over Troy was established: I defeated Pergama then, when I secured the possibility of her defeat.

For Ajax, the practical, direct model of cause and effect is the only model. For Ulysses, war is like a game of chess. A move might not directly cause the end, but indirectly it can be decisive. Once he and Diomedes have stolen the Palladium, "I defeated Pergama." There are actually many more steps before the war is done -- he will, for instance, have to persuade Philoctetes to return, the wounded hero who is destined to kill Paris with the arrows of Heracles. But Ulysses can elide all those intervening causes and effects, because his strategic actions "established" the fall of Troy.

When the mind dismisses a cause that has to occur because it is only "a" cause, not THE cause, there's a contempt for the hand that's at least equal to the hand's blindness to the role of the mind. Mind and hand are mutually necessary, but also, it seems, incapable of sharing honor and responsibility. They are jealous of their own rights and agencies to the exclusion of each other (Ajax ultimately excludes himself from existing). With the obliteration of agency, instead of history we have mystery.

This framing of the problem of agency might be worth keeping "in mind" as we look at Ovid's approach to the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome, the new Troy.

Rings within rings: an instance of chiastic structure

(Edited to clarify and added the Rubens)

At the end of Metamorphoses 12, Achilles falls to the arrow of Paris, guided and prompted by Apollo, who was stirred to action by Poseidon.

Ovid writes:

Now Achilles, grandson of Aeacus, the terror of the Phrygians, the glory and defence of the Pelasgian name, the invincible captain in battle, was burned: one god, Vulcan, armed him, and that same god consumed him. Now he is ash, and little if anything remains of Achilles, once so mighty, hardly enough to fill an urn. But his fame lives, enough to fill a world. That equals the measure of the man, and, in that, the son of Peleus is truly himself, and does not know the void of Tartarus. (Kline).

Of course the word "fame" is actually gloria:

Iam timor ille Phrygum, decus et tutela Pelasgi
nominis, Aeacides, caput insuperabile bello,
arserat: armarat deus idem idemque cremarat;
iam cinis est, et de tam magno restat Achille                       615
nescio quid parvum, quod non bene conpleat urnam,
at vivit totum quae gloria conpleat orbem.
haec illi mensura viro respondet, et hac est
par sibi Pelides nec inania Tartara sentit. 

In addition to the distinction between the mortal remains of Achilles - barely enough to fill an urn - and his glory, which lives to fill the entire world (orbem, the realm of Fama), we note a favorite construction of classical authors, the chiasmus:

 armarat deus idem idemque cremarat;

armed by a god, the same god consumed him.

Rubens: Vulcan Presents Arms of Achilles to Thetis

The chiastic structure of the line: A - B : B - A plays out the mystery of the relation of human and divine in a demigod like Achilles -- he is both protected from injury and incinerated by the same god, in this case Hephaestus, or Vulcan. The sounds replicate the sense -- idem means "the same," and the same word is twice used. Armarat . . . cremarat reflect each other in syntax, meter, and sound.

The concentric shape of the line is not unlike the shape of the west pediment of the Parthenon, which tells the contest of Athena and Poseidon for the city of Athens, which forms a major feature of Metamorphoses 6 (click to enlarge the image:)

The pediment's balanced, formal symmetry places the chief figures in the center, with each half reflecting the other in geometric structure and sense.

It never hurts to look for chiastic structure, also known as ring structure, in classical works. The savage wedding of book 12 appears to reflect the brutal wedding feast of Perseus in Books 4 and 5. Achilles' glory fills the orbem at the end of book 12, reminding us of the world (orbem) of Fama at the book's beginning.

We might look at the death of Achilles in some detail, and ask: in this book that pays its strange Ovidian homage to Homer, to the epic, and to the Trojan War, why is there so little focus on the actual work of war between human actors who fight and one dies at the hands of the other?

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.

Self-similar image

Letters and Lovers: Paris and Helen

With Byblis and Caunus in Metamorphoses 9, Ovid returns to the epistolary mode of his Heroides. Several of the letters are in pairs, with a lover's overture followed by a response from the beloved. The snippet below is taken from the pair which Ovid composed for Paris and Helen. Paris is visiting the palace of Menelaos at Sparta. Menelaos is away, leaving Helen to entertain his Phrygian guest.

Paris writes:

Don’t think I divided the waves with my ship carrying goods –

the wealth I have the gods can keep.

Nor have I come just to visit the towns of Greece:

my kingdom’s cities are far richer.

I seek you, whom lovely Venus drives towards my bed:

I wished for you before you were known to me.

Your face was in my mind before I saw you with my eyes:

news of your fame first brought me the wound.

Paris to Helen, from Ovid, Heroides

A prose version of Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris is here.

Wax writing tablet and styluses