Of wolf-bane and other poisonous substances

Ovid seems never to miss an opportunity to interweave some odd factoid, or bit of legend, into his narrative, introducing these elements seemingly at random. We recall in Book 4, after Perseus had put the head of Medusa on the ground, we are offered a fine description of how it turned living plants into coral, living rock.

In Metamorphoses 7, Ovid takes pains to describe organic modes of development at moments that don't seem to call for them. Here's Jason sowing the dragon's teeth, repeating Cadmus's famous act in Book 3, prior to the founding of Thebes. While Cadmus's warriors rose immediately from his toothy seeds, Ovid gives Jason's a more gradual, organic development:

 Then he took the dragon’s teeth from the bronze helmet, and scattered them over the turned earth. The soil softened the seeds that had been steeped in virulent poison, and they sprouted, and the teeth, freshly sown, produced new bodies. As an embryo takes on human form in the mother’s womb, and is fully developed there in every aspect, not emerging to the living air until it is complete, so when those shapes of men had been made in the bowels of the pregnant earth, they surged from the teeming soil, and, what is even more wonderful, clashed weapons, created with them. 7.123 ff

Later, as Medea arrives in Corinth, we learn in passing that the people of that city derived from rain-soaked mushrooms:

At last, the dragon’s wings brought her to Corinth, the ancient Ephyre, and its Pirenian spring. Here, tradition says, that in earliest times, human bodies sprang from fungi, swollen by rain. 7.391 ff

And when Medea is preparing to poison Theseus to secure the Athenian succession for her own son, we learn the origin of wolf-bane, from the slobber of the hound of hell:

Medea, seeking his destruction, prepared a mixture of poisonous aconite, she had brought with her from the coast of Scythia. This poison is said to have dripped from the teeth of Cerberus, the Echidnean dog. There is a dark cavern with a gaping mouth, and a path into the depths, up which Hercules, hero of Tiryns, dragged the dog, tied with steel chains, resisting and twisting its eyes away from the daylight and the shining rays. Cerberus, provoked to a rabid frenzy, filled all the air with his simultaneous three-headed howling, and spattered the green fields with white flecks of foam. These are supposed to have congealed and found food to multiply, gaining harmful strength from the rich soil. Because they are long-lived, springing from the hard rock, the country people call these shoots, of wolf-bane, ‘soil-less’ aconites. 7.405 ff

 These brief, gratuitous-seeming bits of lore and detail support the very Ovidian notion that underlying all appearances is change, and you neither know what something might turn into, nor can necessarily be sure what it came from. It certainly might come as news to some Corinthians that their ancestors were wet mushrooms. (Mycenae is also said to derive from  "μύκης" (mycēs) = mushroom.)

We might press further, and suggest that these three miniature tales of generation all share asexuality. Mushrooms grow from spores, which are more like bacteria than like seeds, and depend on the richness of surrounding soil to grow. They also do not need light. We might speculate that the same holds true for dragon's teeth and Cerberus' saliva (the description of which sounds awfully bacteriological) -- neither stores food nor needs the sun. Yet things emerge from them.

Are there further nuances? Are we, for example, to think to compare Jason's feat with that of Cadmus? Cadmus's tale is largely a denial of the womb -- after he fails to find his sister Europa, his city springs from males who instantly rise up, without the benefit of slow development (and his tale ends with Pentheus being killed by his mother). Jason's quest for the fleece succeeds in large part due to the mediation of Medea. It's worth noting that Cadmus founded a doomed city, while Jason, after returning with the fleece, went on to found nothing, and to lose his children to the very woman who "made" him what he was. Jason even receives his best-known epitaph from Euripides' witch:

 you, a coward, you will die a coward's death as you deserve,
struck on your head by a remnant of the wreck of the Argo
seeing a bitter end to your marriage to me.

Is there a further contrast between the slow generation of the warriors sown by Jason, and the inorganic use of natural materials drawn from all over the world, in Medea's magic, to do the most unnatural thing of all, to make the aged Aeson again young?

These might seem idle thoughts, but the second half of book 7, which approaches the center of the poem, concerns the marvelous generation of an entire people, thanks to the holy Aeacus (or Aeakos), son of Zeus and Aegina, and grandfather of Achilles. As we have observed, Ovid links his tales in strange ways.

The serpent's titanic curse

That there is something profoundly foreign, obscure and disquieting in Greek art which no longer allows one to speak simply of "griechische Heiterkeit", "Greek serenity", according to the classical formula, this is exactly what Nietzsche undertook to show since The Birth of Tragedy, by making apparent, under the beautiful appearance and the measure characterising apollinian civilisation, the barbaric and titanic nature of its dionysiac foundation, and thus bestowing a fundamental importance to this oriental god that is Dionysus for the definition of what constitutes what is proper to the Hellenic [le grec]. -- Francoise Dastur, "Holderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece"

Contemporary scholarship is still wrestling with Dionysus and his enigmatic place in the otherwise stately, ordered pantheon of the Olympians. Masks of Dionysus (Myth and Poetics) collected essays addressing not only the interpretive challenges of the mythical god, but also his place in Greek tragedy, in art, and in ancient cultic rites. Entire books have focused on "the Dionysian" in modern thought, whether Nietzsche's or those influenced by his thinking. One example: The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung's Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Paul Bishop. Not only is the Dionysian still hot, it's also pricey -- each of these works of scholarship retails new for over $200.

The enigmatic aspects of the god are in full view in Ovid's treatment of the House of Cadmus and Thebes in Metamorphoses 3-4. Here is Cadmus, at the end of his human life, turning back to reflect on all the tragedies, the patterns, the portents and the horrors of his family tree:

Driven to wandering, at length his [Cadmus'] journey carried him and his wife to the borders of Illyria. Now, weighed down by age and sadness, they thought of the original destiny of their house, and in talk reviewed their sufferings. Cadmus said ‘Surely that snake, my spear pierced, must have been sacred, when, fresh from Sidon, I scattered the serpent’s teeth, a strange seed, over the earth? If that is what the gods have been avenging with such sure anger, may I myself stretch out as a long-bellied snake.’ Metamorphoses 4.563ff

Cadmus is looking back upon his experiences at the origin of Thebes, and is thinking he might need to revise his understanding. No longer was this a natural serpent that he had to overcome. Rather, it was sacred -- like Diana, whom Actaeon stumbled upon -- and he recalls the voice that came from nowhere after he'd killed it:

“Quid, Agenore nate, peremptum
serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens.” Meta. 3.97-98

Cadmus is testing a new hypothesis -- that he was not a valiant hero, a bringer of civilization, a warrior whom the gods loved:

And, so speaking, he did extend into a long-bellied snake, and felt his skin hardening as scales grew there, while dark green patches checkered his black body. He lay prone on his breast, and gradually his legs fused together thinning out towards a smooth point. Still his arms were left to him, and what was left of his arms he stretched out, and, with tears running down his still human cheeks, he said ‘Come here, wife, come here, most unfortunate one, and while there is still something left of me, touch me, and take my hand, while it is still a hand, while the snake does not yet have all of me.’ (Kline trans.)

His metamorphosis signals confirmation: instead of founding of a city beloved of the gods, Cadmus had set in motion a series of catastrophic events that were saying, if anyone other than Tiresias (separator of knotted serpents) had the wit to hear it, that Thebes and the line of Cadmus were doomed to divine vengeance because they were accursed. His city would perish. This might help us understand why in this story of the founding of Thebes, we never see the city, only the wild mountain that stands between it and Athens.

The exact elements of the transgression are overdetermined. Was it that he forgot about Europa? Or followed the wrong sow? Or killed Mars's serpent? Was it that he misread the oracle? Or sowed the teeth, bringing new beings into the world without going through natural sexual processes? The absence of sex and natural birth (Juno's domain) marks the stories of the spartoi, of Actaeon, Semele, and Narcissus. (Tiresias on the other hand knows more about sex than Zeus).

And Pentheus -- did martial rigor blind him to the story of Acoetes, and to the child-god of the thyrsus and the dance rave? In resisting the new rites of the god, his own half-cousin, was he perpetuating the curse when he harked back to the origin of his people as children of the serpent father, ignoring the fact that these toothy seeds were sown in Earth? Did he forget the lesson of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who regenerated the human race by interpreting the oracle to say that Earth was our general mother?

Pentheus's repression of the Earth and the mother comes back with cruel vengeance when he is pulled to pieces by the Maenads. Did the unnatural "birth" of Thebes have to come to fruition in this unnatural end to its young King, taken for a wild beast by his own mother? And does the brutal dismemberment crown the mortal king's end with an ironic grimace by uncannily mirroring the dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus, whose birth overcame his own and his mother Semele's total destruction?

Nor do the relevant questions end there. What does Book 3 say about Ovid, who -- instead of singing the epic tale of the founding of Rome or some other saga that would have celebrated the manly imperial triumphs of the Caesars -- chooses this unnatural tale to present as his first epic narrative? He'll follow up in Books 4 and 5 with the story of Perseus as told by Perseus, which, as Prof. William S. Anderson will show in his careful reading, provokes glaring questions for anyone who expects an epic tale of martial triumph. Is Metamorphoses in some sense Ovid's "barbaric and titanic" anti-epic?

To Bacchus

This ode by Horace, composed before Ovid's text, offers another Roman view of the figure of Dionysus. The translation is by A.S. Kline.

Horace Odes Book II:XIX (Latin Text and notes here)

To Bacchus

I saw Bacchus on distant cliffs - believe me,
O posterity - he was teaching songs there,
and the Nymphs were learning them, and all
the goat-footed Satyrs with pointed ears.

Evoe! My mind fills with fresh fear, my heart
filled with Bacchus, is troubled, and violently
rejoices. Evoe! Spare me, Liber,
dreaded for your mighty thyrsus, spare me.

It’s right to sing of the wilful Bacchantes,
the fountain of wine, and the rivers of milk,
to sing of the honey that’s welling,
and sliding down from the hollow tree-trunks:

It’s right to sing of your bride turned goddess, your
Ariadne, crowned among stars: the palace
of Pentheus, shattered in ruins,*
and the ending of Thracian Lycurgus.

You direct the streams, and the barbarous sea,
and on distant summits, you drunkenly tie
the hair of the Bistonian women,
with harmless knots made of venomous snakes.

When the impious army of Giants tried
to climb through the sky to Jupiter’s kingdom,
you hurled back Rhoetus, with the claws
and teeth of the terrifying lion.

Though you’re said to be more suited to dancing,
laughter, and games, and not equipped to suffer
the fighting, nevertheless you shared
the thick of battle as well as the peace.

Cerberus saw you, unharmed, and adorned
with your golden horn, and, stroking you gently,
with his tail, as you departed, licked
your ankles and feet with his triple tongue.

*In Euripides Bacchae, Pentheus' palace is shattered by an earthquake.

Cithaeron, fateful mountain of Book 3

When we were reading the Cadmus episode, a lot of questions were provoked by this curious tale, told with great economy, leaving many things open, undecided - such as, can we say with certitude that Cadmus was doing the will of the gods every step of the way? Was that will so clear and unambiguous, both in its expression, and in the means of its execution? For example, when Cadmus was told to follow an unyoked cow, how do we know he followed the right cow? Such questions linger, and without some clairvoyant Tiresias to help us out, appear to remain unanswerable.

Interpretive issues are not quite so dire with Echion's descendent, the young King Pentheus. We see him roughly shove blind old Tiresias aside; there's nothing ambiguous in his rejecting the new god, or in pouring his wrath upon Acoetes. There's nothing undecided whatsoever in his views, though what these views are based on is far from obvious.

A few things to ponder: Before he's even heard Acoetes' tale, Pentheus is already adamantly opposed to Dionysus. He harks back to the founding of Thebes - to the paternal, martial heritage of the Serpent and of Cadmus, saying "this is where we came from, this is who we Thebans are."

Note: This is what leaders do. They interpret the nation's past to bring clarity to the present. But this turning tends to collapse origin and end -- "this is where we came from, this determines our character, and our character determines how we shall act." In our beginning is our end. Except in this particular case, the origins are peculiar to say the least - combining the act of sowing with the violence of armed soldiers, and lacking, among other things, a standard sexual conception, a human mother, and the normal course of childrearing.

This turn to the historical roots of the city of course takes us right back to Cadmus's journey, his battle with Mars' serpent, and the dragon teeth -- a riddling tale, far from easy to read. (Why does Pentheus so strongly emphasize the Serpent as the Father of the people? We have noted that his father Echion, one of the spartoi, had no mother.)

Speaking of Thebes, why is it that Ovid carefully leaves out any scene-setting that evokes the city? In all of book 3, purportedly the book about the founding of that mighty city, there is not a single detail that says "city." All the action takes place in remote places, at secret pools (Cadmus-Actaeon-Narcissus) or secret rendezvous with Zeus (Semele). Once Pentheus enters, he too is not situated by any word or descriptive item as being in a city. And we know where he'll end his life -- in an open field on Cithaeron, the mountain that marks the border between Boeotia and Attica. Which happens to be the mountain where Actaeon was dismembered, where Echo was heard, and where the baby Oedipus will be exposed. Some say that the cave where Dionysus was born was on Cithaeron. Book 3 is not a book of the city, but of a fateful mountain in the wilderness, where even certain mortals were said to be nympholeptoi -- possessed by the Sphragitides, nymphs who lived in a grotto on Cithaeron (these nympholeptoi were said to possess oracular power).

One might also ask: Why does Ovid give so much space to Acoetes? We learn much of his life, all of it well worth attending to, given that he's the first ordinary mortal - or common man - in the Metamorphoses. Does it seem like a tale that one would easily make up? Or, that a hearer might easily ignore?

Finally, what about Dionysus, whom we never "see" except through the words of Acoetes? What to make of his first appearance as a tipsy youth, and of how he changes even as he's changing those who thought to possess him? What is it about him that might account for, on one hand, the maenads' madness, and on the other, the fury of Pentheus?

Does the dismemberment of Pentheus by his mother seem a fit end to this tale of a royal house born from no maternal womb?