Wonders and signs in Metamorphoses 15

The three short tales inserted between Hippolytus and the voyage of Aesculapius in Metamorphoses 15 pose interpretive challenges that have scholars such as Raymond Marks working to unlock their riddles. Here we just have time for a few comments.

The three tales -- two of them in anecdotal form -- form a cascade of similes having to do with wonder.

This strange event [the transformation of the mourning Egeria into aeternas undas] amazed the nymphs, and the Amazon’s son was no less astounded, than the Tyrrhenian ploughman when he saw a fateful clod of earth in the middle of his fields, first move by itself with no one touching it, then assume the form of a man, losing its earthy nature, and open its newly acquired mouth, to utter things to come. The native people called him Tages, he who first taught the Etruscan race to reveal future events.  No less astounded than Romulus, when he saw his spear, that had once grown on the Palatine Hill, suddenly put out leaves, and stand there, not with its point driven in, but with fresh roots: now not a weapon but a tough willow-tree, giving unexpected shade to those who wondered at it.
    No less astounded than Cipus, the praetor, when he saw his horns in the river’s water . .  .

The story of Tages packs a wondrous occurrence into a few lines -- a clod of earth autonomously gains a mouth and teaches the Etruscans how to read future events in signs. Barely is that noted than the spear of Romulus returns to its "roots" as well as sprouting leaves and branches. Then horns appear on the temples of Cipus, and an Etruscan priest finds huge import in them for both him and the Romans -- but Cipus deflects it through an alternate "interpretation" that frees both him and the city from the burden of kingship.

All three tales are concerned with self-instantiating signs that initiate, rather than reflect, an event. Instead of being the bearers of some definite meaning that precedes them, they suddenly put themselves there. If they seem to demand that meaning come, it only comes after they posit themselves. Their very status as "sign" depends on their working as wonders. Ovid, the poet of the new and strange, is thinking about the link between signs and wonders.

In the case of Tages, the notion of an autochthonous language -- arising from a ploughed field -- is at least consistent with what little we know of Etruscan today -- apparently an "isolate," it's unrelated to Indo-European, not part of our common linguistic ground. How does a unique language of signs occur? When a language self-originates how does anyone understand it? How does language, a shared thing, come to be?

Etruscan figures

Tages' power of speech is immediately reduced to a system of signs (the Etruscans were said to have recorded his teachings in secret books) that must be interpreted, as they speak not of the past or the present, but of the future. Meaning is to come, but the sign is here, and to make it speak, one must be versed in the sign system and in the methods of its decoding:

Observatio was the interpretation of signs according to the tradition of the "Etruscan discipline," or as preserved in books such as the libri augurales. A haruspex interpreted fulgura (thunder and lightning) and exta (entrails) by observatio. The word has three closely related meanings in augury: the observing of signs by an augur or other diviner; the process of observing, recording, and establishing the meaning of signs over time; and the codified body of knowledge accumulated by systematic observation, that is, "unbending rules" regarded as objective, or external to an individual's observation on a given occasion. Impetrative signs, or those sought by standard augural procedure, were interpreted according to observatio; the observer had little or no latitude in how they might be interpreted. Observatio might also be applicable to many oblative or unexpected signs. Observatio was considered a kind of scientia, or "scientific" knowledge, in contrast to coniectura, a more speculative "art" or "method" (ars) as required by novel signs.[356]

Even this brief glimpse of ostenta gives us a sense that the field of semiotics, the study of signs, did not begin with Pierce or de Saussure. The Etruscans were semioticians avant la lettre. Priests, poets, and seers have made the nuanced description, tabulation, and interpretation a matter of study and practice for millennia, much as the Greeks analyzed the large and various tropes and devices of rhetoric, and their role in cognition and persuasion, with keen and supple attention.

Cipus engages in an elaborate interpretive duel with the priest and his people to ward off the potential doom -- again, the question of kingship and succession -- hatched upon the dilemma of his horns. Karl Popper wrote two long volumes to work out a theory of knowledge whose political dimension is a not dissimilar struggle to oppose absolutism. Where signs demand elucidation, expect a contest of readings -- not just readings, but theories of reading. In the end, Cipus's Roman reading takes on the trappings of demagoguery to overcome the Etruscan seer's interpretation. The dilemma turns out to revolve around the portas, the gates of the city -- whether they shall be open and he shall enter like a victorious general, or closed to him, and implicitly, all future generals. Caesar and Ianus are not far off.

After Pythagoras's musings and the transformation of Hippolytus, which frame and wind around the life and death of King Numa, Ovid chooses to put the riddle of language -- of the sign -- before us. For the poet, signs are the materials of his craft -- for the vates, the seer, they carry the future, but only if they can be read:

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

As we near the final tales of the Metamorphoses, stories of gods and Caesar, the succession of Augustus and the fate of Rome, it is small wonder to find Ovid foregrounding the interplay of signs, power, and the act of reading.

Numa's quest for the rule of wisdom

The story was told that the founders of Crotona and Sybaris both consulted the Oracle at Delphi at the same time and were given the choice of wealth or health; Archias the founder of Sybaris chose wealth, while Myskellos chose health. (1, 2)

With the deaths of Romulus/Quirinus and Hersilia/Hora, the foundations of the Roman "thing" are set. Romulus can depart, and become a new god with an Etruscan name, because the young state was strong enough not to depend upon the particular strengths and talents of a single leader.

Ovid has Mars speak that judgment:

Mars, removing his helmet, addressed the father of gods and men in these words: ‘The time has come, lord, to grant the reward (that you promised to me and your deserving grandson), since the Roman state is strong, on firm foundations, and does not depend on a single champion: free his spirit, and raising him from earth set him in the heavens.

'tempus adest, genitor, quoniam fundamine magno
res Romana valet nec praeside pendet ab uno,
praemia, (sunt promissa mihi dignoque nepoti)           810
solvere et ablatum terris inponere caelo.'

Ovid's re-vision of the war god, who removes his helmet (perhaps recalling Homer's tender description of Hector removing his helmet when it scared his young son) -- Mars' thoughtful and attentive memory, his care for his son, is bold but doesn't draw attention to itself. It's interesting that it is the king who is to be "freed" -- when the res Romana is strong enough, the people can let the king go -- a reversal of the usual vision of top-down power structures.

Book 15 begins with a question -- the first word, Quaeritur, underscores the state of uncertainty, rich with the potential for disaster, that comes with the power vacuum after the death of a king (it was in the air.) The question of succession is felt with urgency: Romulus is dead, who shall succeed, and how shall he lead?

Quaeritur interea qui tantae pondera molis
sustineat tantoque queat succedere regi:

This being a poem by Ovid, the quest for a ruler worthy to succeed Romulus is not simply a matter of history or of political science. Instead we get a richly suggestive antipasto involving Hercules, on his return from his 10th labor, visiting Croton, then returning in the dreams of Myscellus several hundred years later, prodding the young man to leave his home city and travel to Italy, where his city will shelter Pythagoras who in turn will host Numa. Dreams, signs, harbingers, become a strong motif in book 15.

If it seems somewhat unconventional to fashion the story of Numa by mixing the legend of the greatest action hero with the history of ancient Crotona we can say it has the strangeness of Ovidian storytelling.

Pythagoras

Instead of telling the succession of kings in the literal historical register of "first came x, followed by y," Ovid chooses to portray the event of Numa's reign as the moment when the provincial Sabine-Roman people acceded to the scientific and philosophical breadth and power of Pythagoras, the sage whose work in math and music bespoke a truly cosmopolitan consciousness. They were able to do this because the animo maiora capaci of Numa wanted to go beyond the particulars of Sabine customs, to discover universal laws upon which to base future Roman rule.

Mixing the question of political succession with the cattle drive of Hercules and the mind of Pythagoras is Ovid's way of telling not one story, but several at once. It gives the narrative a certain drunken swagger, yoking (as in Horace's callida iunctura) mythic energy to analytic insight. For Ovid, the quest for a good successor necessarily involves a questioning of "the known" -- one's own unique rules. What does it mean to go from one's narrow home, with its age-old ways and insular rejection of the larger world, to a broader realm in which an attentive mind can compare, contrast, and derive general norms from myriad particulars? To succeed in transitioning from a strong tribal leader to the enduring stability of the res Romana, one needs science, knowledge, a mind that has meditated upon the changing world and arrived at a sense of what abides, what matters and holds true not for the few, or the many, but for all.

Heracles fights Geryon, whose shield bears the image of Medusa

If Plato's philosopher wished to eject poets from the idea Republic, Ovid's ideal ruler seeks out a philosopher. The possibility of this occurs through moments of hospitality -- of Croton, who hosted Heracles, and of Myscellus's city Crotona, famed for taking in the self-imposed exile Pythagoras -- and foreshadowings -- Ovid has Crotona's founding driven both by Heracles; the legend of Myscellus invoked oracular pronouncements.

Hospitality here, as in the Odyssey, involves a civil openness to the other, broadening the mind by bringing it into contact with more of the world. The burden of the beginning of the last book of the Metamorphoses -- its quest -- is to prepare both the ruler and the people to be free. They first must accede to expansive human wisdom, which is what Numa, after broadening his views at Crotona, brought back to Rome. The quest for a stable structure of imperial rule, the poet suggests, finds solid ground not in war, but in the moment after Mars removes his helmet, when a people can choose: do they stubbornly reject all customs and races and religions who are not themselves and enslave themselves to some swaggering strong man, or do they find the philosophic latitude to "entertain" what's new and strange -- a path that can lead to enlightened freedom from kingship?

Political Science examines the conditions for what sort of governance can be had, by what sort of people, with what sort of leader. Ovid's "analysis" is oblique and fantastical -- it is, after all, a poem. In yoking the ultimate action hero to the wide-ranging mathematical and musical rigor of Pythagoras, the poet is bringing the farthest reaches of human power and human thought into proximity. The curiosity of Numa and the hospitality of Crotona are propitious augurs for the balance of knowledge and power necessary if Roman rule is to succeed.