Romance, autobiography and history in Metamorphoses 13

Glaucus and Scylla - J.M.W. Turner

It's intriguing to find the artist of water and light offering this meditation on the tale of Glaucus and Scylla, the final tale of Metamorphoses 13.

According to at least one analysis, the tale's entire love triangle is depicted here -- Circe, daughter of Helios, is imaged in the sun seeing and lighting the scene from just above the horizon. She's staring at Glaucus, who's staring at Scylla, who's turning away from this strange new sea creature.

Ovid says,

she ran, and, with the swiftness of fear, came to the top of a mountain standing near the shore. It faced the wide sea, rising to a single peak, its wooded summit leaning far out over the water. Here she stopped, and from a place of safety, marvelled at his colour; the hair that hid his shoulders and covered his back; and his groin below that merged into a winding fish’s tail; she not knowing whether he was god or monster. (monstrumne deusne ille sit, ignorans)

Glaucus and Scylla gaze at each other, as the sun gazes on them. The eyes of the girl and the sea-god are locked -- what Ovid calls admiror -- 'to regard with wonder' -- but they are experiencing symmetrically opposed erotic reactions.

Glaucus will try telling her his autobiography to assuage her fears and attract her love, hardly an original ploy. Is there any woman alive who has not had to listen to too many hubristic males rehearsing their resumes and life stories?

This turn to autobiography is a prominent feature of book 13, so let's have a look at it.

Glaucus and Scylla: From the depths

The final scene of Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" involves a sea monster and a young girl:

Sicilian transformations

Aeneas's arrival in Trinacria is barely mentioned when Metamorphoses 13 launches a series of rich and strange tales involving love triangles, aversion, monsters, transformations from mortals to gods, or from modalities of earth to those of the deep sea.

Acis and Faunus

Acis, the beloved of Galatea, is the child of Faunus, an indigenous Italian deity -- he was blended with Pan, or another Greek figure back-formed from the Italian god. Acis is transformed, at his murder, into the river Acis, which flows by Mt. Aetna. Faunus was also believed to be the son of Picus, the original king of Latium, who was both the root of the Latin kings, and, after his transformation into a woodpecker, the leader of children expelled from the community in a practice known as the sacred spring (Ver sacrum).

Phorkys, Polyphemus and Scylla

The genealogies of both Polyphemus and Scylla lead back to the ancient Phorkys and Keto (aka Phorcys and Ceto). According to Theoi, Phorkys was depicted in ancient mosaic as a grey-haired, fish-tailed god, with spiky crab-like skin and crab-claw forelegs. His attribute was a torch:

Phorkys and Dynamene

Their children were dangerous sea-monsters: Skylla (the crab) a monster who devoured passing sailors, Thoosa (the swift) mother of the rock-tossing cyclops Polyphemos, Ladon (strong flowing) a hundred-headed sea-serpent, Ekhidna (viper) a she-dragon, the Graiai (grey ones) spirits of the sea-foam, and the Gorgones (terrifying ones) whose petrifying gaze probably created the dangerous rocks and reefs of the sea.

We met some of these creatures earlier in the tales of Perseus in Metamorphoses 4, particularly the Graiai and Medusa, both of whom were overcome by the Greek hero.

Now we're encountering Polyphemus and Scylla, who were successfully evaded by Odysseus, and are now encountered, indirectly, by Aeneas. He will hear of them in Book 14, and avoid them. But their stories rise up here, front and center, displacing the Roman hero nearly to the point of vanishing altogether.

We'll want to consider this suggestive coincidence of Trinacria, the triangular island, with these fatal love triangles, and novel transformations that mix the human, the god, and the monstrous.

Questions spurred by a hunt

Some of the questions coming up for me with the story of Meleager, Atalanta, Althea and the Calydonian Boar: What are yours?

1. Prof. William S. Anderson notes that the boar hunting scene is closer to farce than to heroic spectacle, with vignettes of great heroes falling on their faces, scrambling to do pole vaults, and hurling errant projectiles, not without tragic consequences. This might remind us of the bloody massacre at the wedding banquet of Perseus and Andromeda, and goes to the recurrent observation that Ovid seems to tote epic paraphernalia out of the closet only to do strange, poetically subversive things with it. Couple this with the fact that many of the characters whose conflicts and emotions are explored in detail through these tales are women: Arachne, Niobe, Medea, Scylla and Althea, for example. Is Ovid, writing in a cosmopolitan urban setting, consciously broadening the scope of this large-scale poem to attract new segments of readers?

2. Why does Meleager, a young, strong and almost immortal man, choose to invite heroes from all over Greece to participate in the hunt?

Althea with the brand of Meleager

3. Why does the hunting party object to the presence of Atalanta? Why do they object to Meleager's awarding her the spoils of the hunt? Why does he so honor her?

4. Why does Meleager kill both of his mother's brothers? What do they do that provokes his wrath?

5. How is this tale of a powerful, seemingly random natural aggressor wreaking havoc complicated by framing it with the divine elements of the Fates (Parcae), Diana, and the Furies (Poenae), and the fateful acts of his parents, Oeneus and Althea?

6. What to make of the parallel between the "smoldering" feelings Meleager feels for Atalanta and the consuming flames of Althea's act? Why is Althea moved to destroy her son? What is at the core of her almost epic inner conflict?

7. The staging of the hunt, notable for heroes throwing erring projectiles, can certainly remind us of Cephalus and his unerring spear (iaculum). What other relationships might suggest themselves between the tale of Meleager and other preceding tales -- Minos and Daedalus, Minotaur and Pasiphae, Scylla and Nisus?

8. How to take the epic magnitude of the expression of grief that overwhelms Calydon after the death of Meleager and his parents? Especially the sisters:

Not though the god had given me a hundred mouths speaking with tongues, the necessary genius, and all Helicon as my domain, could I describe the sad fate of his poor sisters. 8.533-35

[update] 9. Who is hunting whom?

Prophetic resonance: Scylla, Minos, and Megara

The other day, as we were reading aloud the story of Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, and the siege of Megara, a few strange features of the tale stood out.

The horns of a new moon had risen six times and the fortunes of war still hung in the balance, so protractedly did Victory hover between the two, on hesitant wings. There was a tower of the king, added to walls of singing stone, where Apollo, Latona’s son, once rested his golden lyre, and the sound resonated in the rock. In days of peace, Scylla, the daughter of King Nisus, often used to climb up there, and make the stones ring using small pebbles. In wartime also she would often watch the unyielding armed conflicts from there, and now, as the war dragged on, she had come to know the names of the hostile princes, their weapons, horses, armour and Cretan quivers. Above all she came to know the face of their leader, Europa’s son, more than was fitting. (Kline)

We were reminded of Helen and Priam, looking out upon the opposing armies before Troy. Unlike Helen, Scylla is not the cause of the war, but she does have knowledge of the vulnerable purple hair of her father, King Nisus. Knowledge, in her case, is power -- she has the means of ending this uncertain siege.

Minos and Scylla

Sieges often depend upon walls, and the walls of Megara were special. They were built for Alcathous, son of Pelops, by Apollo. Alcathous had built temples to both Apollo and Artemis after killing the Cithaeronian Lion and winning the hand of the princess of Megara. During construction, Apollo lay down his golden lyre, making the walls where it rested resonant -- saxo sonus eius inhaesit. Scylla had been drawn to this place before the war, tossing little stones to hear it ring. It's here that she now falls in love with King Minos, who's trying to sack Megara as part of his war on Athens precipitated by the death of his son, Androgeos. (Other cities had charmed walls -- the Cadmea was raised by the music of Amphion).

Two odd features of this tale:

1. Instant closeness to the distant other, distance from one's own: From her perch on the parapet of Megara, Scylla seems like any adolescent watching TV. The consequential reality of the war doesn't enter her mind. She's completely conquered by Minos, whom she's only seen from afar, and around whom she's constructed a story. Minos has no idea of her existence until she appears at his camp with her father's purple lock. Like Medea, she betrays her father, city, and people, but unlike Jason's helper, she has no opportunity to make his pledge of commitment a precondition of her fateful act. Her decisive act precipitates out of a flight of fantasy.

O ego ter felix, si pennis lapsa per auras
Gnosiaci possem castris insistere regis 

O I would be three times happy if I could take wing, through the air,
and stand in the camp of the Cretan king

When Minos shrinks from her in revulsion, she feels betrayed.

It's clear that Scylla has been so charmed as to lose all grounding in her historical, ethical and material reality. Her fascination with Minos (who, astride his white horse, wearing royal purple, from a distance might resemble her father's regal head) draws her from realities into a Quixotic dream.

She fancies that she is equal to the great deeds of other heroines:

Another girl, fired with as great a passion as mine, would, long ago, have destroyed anything that stood in the way of her love.

Ciris

Horrified by her action, the king of Crete calls Scylla an infamy, a monster (infamia, monstrum). He's about to discover further infamy, closer to home, and "another girl," his own daughter, who will open the heart of the labyrinth to Theseus.

Both stories -- Scylla and Nisus, Minos and Ariadne -- link victory not to martial prowess, but to the destructive power of wounding amor that finds the vulnerabilities of mighty walls and daedal defenses. (Ovid never tires of turning pitched battles into love tales.)

The narrator doesn't share insight into the motives of Amor, but:

2.  An end uncannily near its beginning: More speculatively, the extreme infatuation of Scylla seems bound up with the lyrical place where it takes hold. It's as if this girl, moved by the echoes of Apollo's lyre, could not but fall for this shining king. The question, then, might be: As the god of prophecy, Apollo must have known that setting down his lyre on the walls would end in the fall of the city. In helping Alcathous to restore the defenses (which had been once before brought down by Crete), did Apollo "happen" to build into their fabric a fatal charm? One that leads to another sacking by Cretan force? An echo?

Regia turris erat vocalibus addita muris,

15

in quibus auratam proles Letoia fertur

deposuisse lyram: saxo sonus eius inhaesit.

There was a tower of the king, added to walls of singing stone, 

where Apollo, Latona’s son, once rested his golden lyre, 

and the sound resonated in the rock

The walls of Megara, it seems, have been vibrating with fatal song since they were rebuilt. That they are vocalibus -- speaking, sonorous, singing, crying -- suggests that inherent in their fabrication, clinging to it, was the song of their destruction, the "thing spoken":

fate late 14c., from L. fata, neut. pl. of fatum "prophetic declaration, oracle, prediction," thus "that which is ordained, destiny, fate," lit. "thing spoken (by the gods)," from neut. pp. of fari "to speak," from PIE *bha- "speak" (see fame). The Latin sense evolution is from "sentence of the Gods" (Gk. theosphaton) to "lot, portion" (Gk. moira, personified as a goddess in Homer), also "one of the three goddesses (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) who determined the course of a human life." Related: Fated; fating. The native word was wyrd.

What will be sung was woven in the warp of the world when it began. For Ovid, it's the song he's singing to us. (For us, it's the song we hear through the meta -ana- morphosis of interpretation.) It was put there by the god of poetry and prophecy, who so happened to set his fatal lyre down, the way Perseus set down the head of Medusa, and created coral.

Sea Eagle, or Haliaeetus 

Beginning and end are very close here -- like your DNA and you -- almost "the same," yet not entirely, and not harmoniously. As Minos sails to his destiny, the Sea-Eagle swoops down to tear the treacherous child who betrayed the sleeping king. She clings (haeret) to the bark of Minos, then drops in terror into endless flight.