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"?

A few notes on Midas

According to Hyginus, Fab. 46, Zeus killed Erechtheus with a thunderbolt at the request of Poseidon, who was enraged at the Athenians for killing his son Eumolpus.

Ovid says in passing that Midas, along with Eumolpus, was tutored by Orpheus:

King Midas, to whom, with Athenian Eumolpus, Orpheus of Thrace had taught the Bacchic rites.

If one looks into Eumolpus a little, it is immediately clear he's a major culture hero -- son of Poseidon, a teacher of Heracles (as Theocritus notes in Idyll 24), and a bridge between Silenus, Dionysus and Orpheus, and the Eleusinian Mysteries.* As Wikipedia notes,

Triptolemos,Demeter, Persephone

The Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. Of all the mysteries celebrated in ancient times, these were held to be the ones of greatest importance.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter signals Eumolpus's importance:

She to Triptolemus taught, and to Diocles, driver of horses,
Also to mighty Eumolpus, to Celeus, leader of peoples,
Cult of the holy rites, to them all her mystery telling. HH Dem. 474-476

As a son of Poseidon, Eumolpus is also linked to the pre-Athena days of Athens - before the contest by which the city chose Athena over the sea God, as depicted by Athena in Book 6.

The point here is that Midas, although he has come down to us in fables as the prototypical fool, is linked with Eumolpus as learning Bacchic rites directly from Orpheus. Midas recognizes Silenus, the tutor of Bacchus, and entertains him for 10 days, then returns him to his ward, who allows him any wish.

Bacchus and Midas: Poussin

We then get two familiar stories about Midas -- the golden touch and the ears of the ass -- and we might consider why, in the course of describing the dissemination of the Orphic tradition, Ovid puts them together here. Midas seems to indicate a decline, a possibly errant or degenerate path of the Orphic tradition -- quite different from what Eumolpus taught at Eleusis.

In part, this would be Ovid's way of indicating differences between the central Greek tradition and that which perhaps got bowdlerized in Anatolia. If so -- and this is just speculation -- is Ovid suggesting something about the background of Troy, something in the roots of Rome? How might this relate to the tale of Peleus and Thetis, both of whom bring into play their own complex histories?

Peleus and Thetis: Leonard Porter 

*The Eumolpidae: (Greek: Ευμολπιδαι) were a family of priests at Eleusis who maintained the Eleusinian Mysteries during the Hellenic era. As hierophants, they popularized the cult and allowed many more to be initiated into the secrets of Demeter and Persephone. The legendary genealogy of the Eumolpidae cast them as descendants of Eumolpus, one of the first priests of Demeter at Eleusis, through his second son, Herald-Keryx.

Orpheus in Hades: Myth of death, death of myth

As Metamorphoses 10 begins, Ovid makes clear that Orpheus is putting aside all the wiles of rhetoric when he makes his plea to Hades:

‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which, all, who are created mortal, descend; if you allow me, and it is lawful, to set aside the fictions of idle tongues, and speak the truth."

Speaking plainly, he makes these assertions:

• Death will claim all, including Eurydice.
• Love overcame me -- I can't accept her death.
• Did Love not overcame Hades when he carried off Proserpina? 
• I won't return to life without her.

Even as he claims to be speaking without embellishment, the singer is accompanying himself on the lyre, and casts a deep spell. The land of death seems to experience a second death, a stasis new to that realm:

Talia dicentem nervosque ad verba moventem
exsangues flebant animae; nec Tantalus undam
captavit refugam, stupuitque Ixionis orbis,
nec carpsere iecur volucres, urnisque vacarunt
Belides, inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo.

The bloodless spirits wept as he spoke, accompanying his words with the music. Tantalus did not reach for the ever-retreating water: Ixion’s wheel was stilled: the vultures did not pluck at Tityus’s liver: the Belides, the daughters of Danaüs, left their water jars: and you, Sisyphus, perched there, on your rock. 

The stillness that comes over, the immobilizing hush, is the contemplative moment, the timeless mode of the lyric. Ovid is situating lyric poetry in a close relationship with amor and mors.  For as long as Orpheus sings of love, the hard line between life and death, time itself, seems to be suspended. Myrrha will later ask to be situated in such a state. "Deny me both life and death," she begs.

. . . mihi vitamque necemque negate  (10.486)

Orpheus says he's just speaking the truth:

All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later, we hasten home. Here we are all bound, this is our final abode, and you hold the longest reign over the human race.

Yet the very story he alludes to, sung by Calliope in Book 5, concerns a negotiation in which Hades submits to an arrangement whereby Proserpina will never finally be his. Is Orpheus simply stating a fact, as he claims, or is this an example of what rhetoricians call captatio benevolentiae -- the "buttering up" that turns the ear of an audience (or judge) into a receptive, well-disposed receptacle? Fact? Or "captivating" flattery?

Why does Orpheus, while he's pretending to dispense with lies, readily concede the finality of death from the moment he opens his mouth, even as he denies that same finality when he says he is suspended upon an "if"?

if the story of that rape in ancient times is not a lie, you also were wedded by Amor.

Book 10, then, in which Ovid and Orpheus and Venus will have much to say about love, death, and art, finds the poet/lover in direct confrontation with death. Orpheus' claim to be speaking mere truth is complicated first by the question, unanswered, of whether Calliope's story is a lie. We really can't say we possess truth if we remain in suspense about whether something is a lie. When a Muse remembers, does she remember whether her story took place, or is she just remembering the story?

And even as he states the "fact" that death is that country from whose bourne no traveler returns, the poet is uttering a song of such charm that it halts the business of death in its tracks. Whatever else Orpheus's lyrics do, they move. They move trees, beasts, hearts. The quest of Orpheus is to find out whether the boundary between life and death can be set in motion, mis en jeu. The challenge turns out to be less determining that it moves than resisting the impulse to verify its motion.

An anemone for Adonis

Reni

[Parts of this have been edited for readability with a bit added.]

Metamorphoses 10 closes with the pathos of the immortal goddess Venus losing her beloved Adonis. Thus end the tales of Orpheus, with the death of Venus's young lover mirroring the singer's loss of Eurydice at the beginning of this book.

Orpheus's Venus creates the anemone from Adonis's blood with nectar - from the Greek, nektar, said to derive from "overcoming death." The mention of the pomegranate - punica granatum - recalls the seeds eaten by Proserpina, whose tale, sung by Calliope, closed the first five books of the poem.

The linking of Orpheus, Venus, Adonis, and Proserpina is probably quite intentional.

The myth of Proserpina, the most extensive Latin version of which is by Claudian (4th century AD), is closely connected with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. In Virgil's writings; it is Proserpina, as Queen of Hades, who allows Orpheus to enter and bring back to life his wife Eurydice after she is killed by a venomous snake.[5] Proserpina played her cetra to quiet Cerberus,[6] but Orpheus did not respect her order never to look back, and Eurydice was lost. (WP: Proserpina)

See also the Orphic Hymn to Adonis:

Rejoicing in the chace, all-graceful pow'r,
Sweet plant of Venus, Love's delightful flow'r:
Descended from the secret bed divine,
Of lovely-hair'd, infernal Proserpine.

Here's the ending of Book 10:

Add caption

When, from the heights, she saw the lifeless body lying in its own blood, she leapt down, tearing her clothes, and tearing at her hair as well, and beat at her breasts with fierce hands, complaining to the fates. “And yet not everything is in your power” she said. “Adonis, there shall be an everlasting token of my grief, and every year an imitation of your death will complete a re-enactment of my mourning. But your blood will be changed into a flower. Persephone, you were allowed to alter a woman’s body, Menthe’s, to fragrant mint: shall the transformation of my hero, of the blood of Cinyras, be grudged to me?” So saying, she sprinkled the blood with odorous nectar: and, at the touch, it swelled up, as bubbles emerge in yellow mud. In less than an hour, a flower, of the colour of blood, was created such as pomegranates carry, that hide their seeds under a tough rind. But enjoyment of it is brief; for, lightly clinging, and too easily fallen, the winds deflower it, which are likewise responsible for its name, windflower: anemone.’

punica granatum

questaque cum fatis "at non tamen omnia vestri
iuris erunt" dixit. "luctus monimenta manebunt          
semper, Adoni, mei, repetitaque mortis imago
annua plangoris peraget simulamina nostri;
at cruor in florem mutabitur. an tibi quondam
femineos artus in olentes vertere mentas,
Persephone, licuit: nobis Cinyreius heros        
invidiae mutatus erit?" sic fata cruorem
nectare odorato sparsit, qui tinctus ab illo
intumuit sic, ut fulvo perlucida caeno
surgere bulla solet, nec plena longior hora
facta mora est, cum flos de sanguine concolor ortus,              
qualem, quae lento celant sub cortice granum,
punica ferre solent; brevis est tamen usus in illo;
namque male haerentem et nimia levitate caducum
excutiunt idem, qui praestant nomina, venti.'

Apropos of Persephone

Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother

First—hell is not so far underground—
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is "loud" (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).

The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals—losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes—but just at night—
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame—lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don't remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details—
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.

My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with tortuous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many—
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils—
Without sex or seed—all underground—
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)

I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing, nothing at all—
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.

He does not understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True—
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he'd be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn't forbid it.

From Archaic Smile: Poems by A.E. Stallings. Stallings, it was just announced, is a new MacArthur Fellow (Fellow-ess?). She has also translated Lucretius, of whom we were just speaking.

The above text found here.

A few questions for Calliope

Corinth

The second part of book 5 offers Calliope's tale of the subjection of Typhoeus, the rape of Persephone, the liquification of Cyane, the compromised restoration of Persephone, and the tale of Arethusa.

Even without getting overly involved in the Eleusinian Mysteries, it's clear that with this complex tale from the Muse of epic, Ovid is both composing a work of high art and moving to address the question of art -- what it's for, what it needs in order to flourish, and how it is to be interpreted.

Here are some questions that came to me, I'll be interested in yours:

- In contrast to the magpies, the Muse begins with a paean to Ceres, the goddess normally associated with things more basic than fine art -- the culture of the Earth, planting, harvesting, eating This is the mode of the Georgic (ge + ergon, earth + work, energy):

“Prima Ceres unco glaebam dimovit aratro,
prima dedit fruges alimentaque mitia terris,
prima dedit leges: Cereris sunt omnia munus.
Illa canenda mihi est. Utinam modo dicere possem
345carmina digna dea: certe dea carmine digna est.

‘“Ceres first turned the soil with curving plough, first ripened the crops and produce of the earth, first gave us laws: all things are Ceres’s gift. My song is of her. If only I could create a song in any way worthy of the goddess! This goddess is truly a worthy subject for my song.

As we noted last week, this is a remarkable place to begin, and we will need to think about why Ceres (Demeter) is here being linked to the origin of laws.

- The key figures in Calliope's tale are all female (except for Dis) - Cyane tells us she was wedded according to custom; Persephone is seized and is, by the way, the only god in the Greek pantheon to suffer a kind of mortality; Arethusa aims to escape being seized and goes underground, away from Greece, to return to Earth in Sicily. What could be some of the reasons the virgin Muses are so concerned with these virgins, even as they celebrate the great Mother?

- What do we make of the role Sicily plays in Calliope's tale? Is Ovid saying something about the relation of Italian culture to that of the Greeks?

- The wrath of Ceres is a potent element of the story, and its appeasement seems to be essential to the possibility of human life. Why is she so angry? What's at stake for her, and for mankind, in her being reconciled to the new condition of her child?

- What do we make of the minor metamorphoses in the tale - of the loutish boy turned by Ceres into stellio, a starry gecko (Askalabos), and the boy who gave away Persephone's eating the pomegranate seeds, who became a screech owl (Askalaphos)? Why does Ovid seed his tale with these seemingly irrelevant moments? Is it happenstance that the boy figures are so similarly named (we've seen this before) that they appear to have gotten merged in at least one version of their stories?

- In his commentary, Prof. William S. Anderson offers a detailed 14-part outline of the song of Calliope, then adds:

This structural scheme indicates that the Muse does not know how to produce an effective narrative; she cannot refrain from getting herself involved in secondary tales of metamorphosis, which distract us from the supposedly main narrative and present unattractive qualities of both Ceres and Proserpina...

- Anderson, ever the alert reader, is leading to a question we all should be asking ourselves: why does Ovid do what he's doing? Is this song a carmine digna, worthy of Ceres? What does it tell us about his view of the Muse, of poetry, and of his place in the line of poets and their Muses?

Syracuse

- Finally, how does all this relate to Book 5 as a whole, to the story of Perseus and Medusa, and for that matter, to the developing "plot" of the Metamorphoses as a whole, at least so far?

Two by Bernini

Medusa

The Rape of Persephone

. . . that faire field of Enna . . .

There's something about the Persephone myth that brings out an intense response from later poets, especially Dante, who imaged his Matilda in the garden of Eden as an eternally inviolate Proserpina, and of course Milton in Paradise Lost IV:

Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis [ 270 ]
Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world;

Shelley took some pains to render Dante's lines from Purgatorio 32:

A solitary woman! and she went _40
Singing and gathering flower after flower,
With which her way was painted and besprent.
'Bright lady, who, if looks had ever power
To bear true witness of the heart within,
Dost bask under the beams of love, come lower _45
Towards this bank. I prithee let me win
This much of thee, to come, that I may hear
Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna's glen,
Thou seemest to my fancy, singing here
And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden when _50
She lost the Spring, and Ceres her, more dear.

Ovid may have seen Enna and the Lake that he says opened to allow Dis's chariot, bearing Ceres' daughter, access to the Underworld. Enna had been an essentially impregnable fortress from ancient times, due to its unusual situation:

Enna is situated near the center of the island; whence the Roman writer Cicero called it Mediterranea maxime, reporting that it was within a day's journey of the nearest point on all the three coasts. The peculiar situation of Enna is described by several ancient authors, and is indeed one of the most remarkable in Sicily. The ancient city was placed on the level summit of a gigantic hill, so lofty as almost to deserve to be called a mountain, and surrounded on all sides with precipitous cliffs almost wholly inaccessible, except in a very few spots which are easily defended, abundantly supplied with water which gushes from the face of the rocks on all sides, and having a fine plain or table land of about 5 km in circumference on the summit, it forms one of the most remarkable natural fortresses in the world.

Wikipedia goes on to say of Enna:

In historical times it became renowned in Sicily and Italy for the cult of the goddess Demeter (the Roman Ceres), whose grove in the neighborhood was known as the umbilicus Siciliae ("The navel of Sicily"); the origin of the toponym Henna remains obscure.

Ovid's Lake "Pergus," where spring was forever until it wasn't, was near Enna:

The neighborhood of Enna is celebrated in mythological story as the place whence Proserpine was carried off by Pluto.[1] The exact spot assigned by local tradition as the scene of this event was a small lake surrounded by lofty and precipitous hills, about 8 km from Enna, the meadows on the banks of which abounded in flowers, while a cavern or grotto hard by was shown as that from which the infernal king suddenly emerged. This lake is called "Pergus" by Ovid [2] and Claudian,[3]

Root: πέρθειν

Never underestimate Ovid's wordplay. Here's an etymology of Perseus - note that, as in Book 5, Perseus leads to Persephone:

Because of the obscurity of the name Perseus and the legendary character of its bearer, most etymologists pass it by, on the presumption that it might be pre-Greek. However, the name of Perseus’s native city was Greek and so were the names of his wife and relatives. There is some prospect that it descended into Greek from the Proto-Indo-European language. In that regard Robert Graves has espoused the only Greek derivation available. Perseus might be from the ancient Greek verb, "πέρθειν" (perthein), “to waste, ravage, sack, destroy”, some form of which appears in Homeric epithets. According to Carl Darling Buck (Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin), the –eus suffix is typically used to form an agent noun, in this case from the aorist stem, pers-. Pers-eus therefore is a sacker of cities; that is, a soldier by occupation, a fitting name for the first Mycenaean warrior.

The origin of perth- is more obscure. J. B. Hofmann^[1] lists the possible root as *bher-, from which Latin ferio, "strike". This corresponds to Julius Pokorny’s *bher-(3), “scrape, cut.” Ordinarily *bh- descends to Greek as ph-. This difficulty can be overcome by presuming a dissimilation from the –th– in perthein; that is, the Greeks preferred not to say *pherthein. Graves carries the meaning still further, to the perse- in Persephone, goddess of death.

Persephone opening the liknon of the Mysteries (pinax from Locri, Magna Graecia