Plato's Ion and Ovid's usus

When Ovid calls himself vates, he is taking a term that had sacred connotations, but then had "fallen into "contempt," according to Lewis and Short, until Virgil had restored some of the luster of the oracle, the prophet. 

 In the Ars Amatoria, the term can't be so solemnly Virgilian:

Non ego, Phoebe, datas a te mihi mentiar artes,     
Nec nos aëriae voce monemur avis,
Nec mihi sunt visae Clio Cliusque sorores     
Servanti pecudes vallibus, Ascra, tuis:
Usus opus movet hoc: vati parete perito;
     Vera canam: coeptis, mater Amoris, ades!

Phoebus, I won't pretend that you've endowed me with arts,
     nor is my source the voice of high-flying birds,
nor did Clio and Clio's sisters appear to me,
     Ascra, as I tended my flocks in your valleys.
Experience is what inspires this work! Obey the skilled prophet:
     I'll sing truths. Be present, Mother of Love, for my project! 

                                                                         (AA I.25-30)

As suggestive as it might be to ponder this differentiation of human usus - experience - from divine inspiration -- Apollonian on one hand, Hesiodic on another -- we'll stipulate that the source of inspiration is the experience of Amor, and that this is sufficient to qualify the singer as a vates.

For now I simply offer one of Plato's great passages about poetic inspiration, quoted in this excellent post on Sententiae Antiquae:

Plato’s Ion 533d-534e

“ . . . talking well about Homer is not some skill (τέχνη) within you—as I was just saying—but it is a divine power that moves you (θεία δὲ δύναμις ἥ σε κινεῖ), just as in that stone which Euripides calls a ‘Magnet” but which most people call Herakleian. For this stone not only moves iron rings but it also imbues the rings with the same power so that they can do the same thing as the stone in turn—they move other rings and as a result there is a great chain of iron and rings connected to each other. But the power from that stone runs through them all. In this way, the Muse herself makes people inspired, and a linked chain of inspired people extend from her. 

"All the good poets of epic utter those beautiful poems not because of skill but because they are inspired and possessed—the good lyric poets are the same, just as the Korybantes do not dance when they are in their right minds, so too the lyric poets do not compose their fine lines when they are sensible, but when they embark upon their harmony and rhythm, they are in revelry and possessed. They are just like the bacchants who draw honey and milk from rivers when they are possessed, not when they are in their normal state of mind. The soul of the lyric poets does this too, which they themselves admit: for they claim, as I see it, that they bring to us their songs by gathering from the honey-flowing springs from certain gardens and glades of the Muses like bees—and they fly too! 

And they speak the truth. For a poet is an empty thing—winged, and sacred and not capable of composing before it is inspired and out of mind, when thought is no longer inside. Until one has gained this state, every person is incapable of composing or giving oracles. Because they compose not by skill—when they say many fine things about their subjects—but by divine dispensation, as you do about Homer, each is only capable of composing well in the arena where the Musa compels—one person composes dithyramb, one encomia, another dance songs, another epic and another iambic poetry. But each is useless in the other genres."

535e-536a

“Do you understand that the audience is the last of the rings which I was describing as transmitting through one another the power from the Herakleian stone and that you are the middle as the rhapsode and interpreter—that the poet himself is the first ring? The god moves the soul of all of these people wherever he wants, stringing the power from one into another.” 

English translation of Ovid from J.D. Hejduk's The Offense of Love

Figuring Pythagoras

Pythagoras turned geometrical philosophy into a form of liberal education by seeking its first principles in a higher realm of reality. Proclus.

In The Presocratic Philosophers, Kirk and Raven are clear that a teacher named Pythagoras did exist, flourishing around 530 BC:

"There can be no doubt that Pythagoras founded in Croton a sort of religious fraternity or order," they write, adding that Aristotle wrote about his circle as one of the "Italian schools" of philosophy.

Very little is known for certain about his teachings, or those of his successors, but the recurrent note is the unusual tension in his work, which appears to have interwoven three strands: (1) a highly abstract contemplative approach to theory, (2) a sense of the cosmos as a stable, orderly universe, and (3) a concern with catharsis, purification, which was especially linked with music. Kirk and Raven cite an ancient text:

 The Pythagoreans, according to Aristoxenus, practised the purification of the body by medicine, that of the soul by music.

The tension within what is considered characteristic of Pythagorean thought has to do with an effort to synthesize cold, rational, changeless mathematical clarity (space) with passionate and intense interest in things developing, moving, changing -- the marvel of the new (time).

         . . . nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe.  (177)

         Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago;

        there is nothing in the whole universe that persists. Everything flows, and is formed as a fleeting image.

If all we can possess are wandering (vagans) images, then, in truth, we can't hold on to truth. The philosopher here seems to be envisioning the world itself as something that can only be an image, and not a stable one -- the critique of knowledge as being ever contingent, limited, and mutable is no longer a critique of knowledge, but rather is in "fact" the world that we can know. The cave of Morpheus is less distant than we thought.

Adding up all this that can never be known yields a sum that is known never to change:

     summa tamen omnia constant. (250)

     the total sum is constant. 

Ancient sources attribute the term Kosmos to Pythagoras -- the idea that there is order in the universe. Given such order, it seemed inevitable to the Greeks that there would be harmony. Pythagoras is believed to have originated the thought of "the music of the spheres." And according to other ancient sources, he was the first to use the term "philosopher."


The figure of Pythagoras brings together the difficult polarities of art and music, the realm of theory and the power of voice, Apollo and Dionysus. According to ancient comment, Pythagoras' initial effort to yoke these contraries broke apart after his death into two separate schools -- one tending toward the mystical, one toward the mathematical. It is this complication, this callida iunctura within Pythagoras, that would have appealed to Ovid. Here was a philosopher who sang the world as if the play of poetic making were not something said about the world, but rather something in and of the world about which philosophers attempt to speak.

If one were to believe the Pythagoreans, with the result that the same individual things will recur, then I shall be talking to you again sitting as you are now, with this pointer in my hand, and everything else will be just as it is now, and it is reasonable to suppose that the time then is the same as now. Porphyrius, Vita Pythagorae. 

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.

Poetry at the Olympics, ancient and modern

Herb points us to a piece in the New York Times by Tony Perrottet about poetry and the Olympics, ancient and modern. A few snippets:

. . .the relationship between poetry and the Olympics goes back to the very origins of the Games. In ancient Greece, literary events were an indispensable part of athletic festivals, where fully clothed writers could be as popular with the crowd as the buff athletes who strutted about in the nude, gleaming with olive oil. Spectators packing the sanctuary of Zeus sought perfection in both body and mind. Champion athletes commissioned great poets like Pindar to compose their victory odes, which were sung at lavish banquets by choruses of boys. ...

   

Criticism could be meted out brutally: when the Sicilian dictator Dionysius presented subpar poems in 384 B.C., disgusted sports fans beat him up and trashed his tent. At other Greek athletic festivals, like those at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, the god of poetry and music, verse recital was featured as a competitive event, along with contests for the lyre and choral dancing... 

. . . the gold for literature in the 1924 Paris Olympics . . . went not to T. S. Eliot or Jean Cocteau but to one Géo-Charles, nom de plume of Charles Louis Prosper Guyot, for “Jeux Olympiques,” an evocation of the hammer-throwing and foot races?

(“The runners bend, tense flowers, . . . /A shot: A violent word! / And suddenly / Necks extended, forward / like stalks / faces like pale snatched / apples, / teeth and jaws rushing into / space.”)
Interesting that the article ends with a short poem by Emily Dickinson:

Fame is a bee. It has a song — It has a sting — Ah, too, it has a wing.

Pindar offered a complex fusion of athletic contest, myth, ethics and sheer joy in the beauty of the word that is unequaled. On the subject of fame and the sting of envy, intertwining an Olympian runner with his poetic challenge, he says this in the 8th Nemean (I came across it while researching Cinyras):

After all, men's longest-living happiness

is that which deity has sown for them:

happiness like that which gave vast wealth

 to Cinyras on sea-set Cyprus.

At the starting line I lightly stand and draw my breath

before my race of words; for verbal novelties

            are rife: experiments

in poetry are full of risk. Words whet envy's appetite, and

envy always nibbles at good men and never tries to trim the bad.

-- from Pindar's Odes, a translation by Roy Arthur Swanson.

More on the Olympics here.

[Update:] NPR has a related story here.

Orphic shade

From the start of Metamorphoses 10, Orpheus is dealing with shadows. Overcome by Amor, he descends to win back Eurydice, and encounters the umbrarum dominum, Hades, the Lord of Shades. To die in Ovid's world is to become a shadow of who you were, the spent afterimage of your day in the sun.

After he loses Eurydice a second time, Orpheus mourns her. Upon a hill devoid of shade, he begins to play and sing. Ignoring the tradition that his voice attracted wild beasts, Ovid speaks only of trees -- not just any trees, but a mixed wood led by the Dodonian Oak, gather around the poet. Several of these trees are linked to other tales -- the pine, for example, to Attis. (Apollo's loves tend to end up as vegetation: Daphne, Dryope, Cyparissus and Hyacinthus, to name a few.) To sing, to be a poet, is to get out of the solar, too-bright world of action -- the world of Heracles -- to a lunar world of indirection, of words and music, where one can summon what is past.

The juxtaposition of the poet's descent to the Underworld and this silva, (Aristotle's term: hyle) this moving forest of shade, is Ovid's way of linking the realm of reflection, the contemplative life, with a series of images and psychological, poetic, and metaphysical themes -- time, desire, shadows, death, echoes, indirection, memory, representation. Representation, as the word implies, is the presence of a lack, an absence. Usually a grave presence, lacking in light and lightness. The capacity to bring things up, to re-present them, depends upon their absence thanks to time, space, unintelligibility, or death.

Speaking matter-of-factly and without false or ambiguous words, Orpheus asks Hades and Proserpina for the usum of Eurydice -- the use, the loan of her, for a short natural time, before she (and all who live) permanently enter the nether world. We owe Hades a life, and according to this figural logic, our time is borrowed, on loan, from one who never fails to collect in full. Orpheus asks to borrow time:

Per ego haec loca plena timoris,
30per chaos hoc ingens vastique silentia regni,
Eurydices, oro, properata retexite fata.
Omnia debemur vobis, paulumque morati
serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam.

I beg you, by these fearful places, by this immense abyss, and the silence of your vast realms, reverse Eurydice’s swift death. All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later, we hasten home. 

To "reweave" the Fates is to rewrite what the Fates have already woven: retexite is linked to the root sense of text as something made, via techne, art. The fate of Eurydice is a text that Orpheus asks Hades to edit.


When Heracles asked more time for Iolaus in Book 9, we saw how Hebe managed to add some years to the sons of Alcmaeon and subtract them from a rejuvenated Iolaus. Orpheus, using his music, almost succeeds in recapturing his lost love, then he bends his eyes back to look directly upon the one thing he must not directly look upon, according to the condition (legem) imposed with the prospect of her return: the original referent of that fatal text. The rewrite fails.

As he mourns the loss of the usum of his irreplaceable bride, Orpheus turns away from all women. The story thus explains how the arch poet became the "auctor" of human homoeroticism:

Ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem
in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam
85aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores.

Indeed, he was the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.

Much if not all of Book 10, the stories of Apollo and Cyparissus, Hyacinthus, Attis and Adonis, all flow from this linking of death and unyielding mourning to homoeroticism. The tale of Orpheus, linked with Proserpina, brings us back to Ovid's thinking about art, which began with the songs of the Muses in book 6. This counterweight lends a symmetry to the central five books of the Metamorphoses.

Ovid on sources

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser

In the Metamorphoses of Ovid, Rukeyser's apothegm is apt -- at least until one remembers that the audience for his stories is often in the position of Athena in Book 5. She has arrived on Helicon to see the marvel of Hippocrene, the spring that upwelled from Pegasus's ungula striking the mountain's rock. Ungula can mean hoof, claw, or talon - a suitably ambiguous term for the extremities of a winged horse.

The Muses welcome Athena and suggest that if she did not have a larger part to play, she'd have been welcome in their "chorus." Art, Ovid is suggesting, is an ally of Wisdom. The Muses then go on to describe their terror at the assault of Pyraneus, followed by Calliope's tale of the goddesses' contest with the Pierides.

Athena here is in the position of hearing, after the fact, a story about a contest of stories (or songs), told by the winners of that contest. And if we think about it, we don't often hear stories told by losers, especially in the case of war. The dead tell few tales.

So just as Perseus gave us his version of how he killed Medusa, or Acoetes his tale of the appearance of Bacchus on his ship, the Muses tell of their victory over the nine daughters of Pierus. Big surprise, the competing story told by the Pierides is an alternate version of theogonic events -- a tale in which Typhoeus, the last monster born of Earth, frightens the Olympians, who rush to Egypt to hide themselves inside goats, rams, crows, cats, cows, ibis and fish. In other words, the Pierides tell a myth of the origin of how certain Olympians became associated in Egypt with certain creatures, but in "explaining" that origin, they are also alleging that the Olympian gods are (1) weaker than Earth-born Typhoeus, (2) scaredy cats, (3) associated with certain natural beings not because those beings manifest something of their nature or power, but because as gods of the sky without real power, they wish to hide from the Earth's hundred-headed giant, and (4), as William S. Anderson notes in his commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses Books 1-5 (Bks 1-5),

the biased "art" of the Pierid involves slighting the metamorphosis by special verbs and reduction of the gods to epithets. First, then, Apollo is literally inside a raven and Bacchus inside a goat.

This should tell us something about Ovid's view of art and poetry. For him, metamorphosis underlies poetic and artistic creation. The Muses will go on to tell of several metamorphoses, but here their rivals are telling another kind of tale, in which greater force is all that matters, and what fools worship as gods are in fact shameful weaklings hiding inside creatures. This is not poetic -- no transformation is happening, no metaphor, just a deconstruction of cow-eyed Juno into Juno cowering inside a cow. A literal, denotative world devoid of wonder results from a loss, not of gods, but of confidence in the courage and power of gods. Literal language is the language of ninny gods.

The dramatization of the contest of the Muses vs. the Pierides then is Ovid's way of distinguishing false from true art, real inspiration from fake afflatus. This is what it means for art to be linked with Athena. Without her, you get tales told by idiots:

the one who had first declared the contest sang, of the war with the gods, granting false honours to the giants, and diminishing the actions of the mighty deities.

According to his Muses, you must begin with the true source -- it arose from the strike of a winged thing on Helicon, from Pegasus, child of Medusa.

Klimt, Pallas Athena