A brief break

The blog is taking a break this week as we are on a brief trip.

Ophiucus

The clasp of time

Heracles and Iolaus battle the Lernaean Hydra

At the exact center of Metamorphoses 9, the sudden appearance of a rejuvenated Iolaus startles Alcmene, the mother of Hercules, and Iole, the daughter of Eurytus.

nam limine constitit alto
paene puer dubiaque tegens lanugine malas,
ora reformatus primos Iolaus in annos.

There, on the steep threshold, stood Iolaüs, Hercules’s nephew and companion, alive again, with the look of his early years, a hint of down on his cheeks, almost, again, a child.

The marvel on the threshold gives rise to the abrupt speech of Themis, which manages in one mouthful to pull together several threads of the tale of Theban cycle and link them with the usually unrelated story of Heracles:

Seeing things whole: Cadmus and Serpent, once more time

There's much to observe in Book 3 -- given the famous tales of Actaeon and Diana, Semele and Jove, Tiresias, Narcissus and Echo -- each one is fascinating in itself, and enriched in context with each of the others. Before we get to those tales, one more comment on Cadmus and the Serpent. When the serpent rises up, look what he can see:

Ille volubilibus squamosos nexibus orbes
torquet et inmensos saltu sinuatur in arcus,
ac media plus parte leves erectus in auras
despicit omne nemus, tantoque est corpore, quanto
45si totum spectes, geminas qui separat arctos.
Perseus text.

The snake winds his scaly coils in restless writhings, and, shooting upwards, curves into a huge arc. With half its length raised into thin air, it peers down over the whole wood, its body as great, seen in its entirety, as that Dragon that separates the twin constellations of the Bear. Kline.

The coiled serpent rises, arcs, then looks down (despicit), and takes in omne nemus - the entire grove. Then, as if seen from below by a man, we get a description of the entire serpent - if you looked upon (spectes) the total body of it (corpore...totum), it would seem as big as Hydra, the dragon constellation between the Great Bear (formerly known as Callisto) and the Little Bear (Arcas). Hydra, the longest constellation in the sky, takes more than six hours to rise completely.

So along with the other interesting elements of this tale is this sudden mirroring of gazes, each of which takes in a totality -- the serpent takes in the entire forest, the narrator, extrapolating, gives us the totality of the serpent in the form of a very large constellation.

It seems worth mentioning because at several points in the book much will hinge on how much of a thing one can see, and what happens when one has the fortune, or misfortune, to see more of certain thing than one ought, or, less.

Cadmus gets to see what it's like to see the whole after he's killed the serpent:

Dum spatium victor victi considerat hostis...

Ovid might be playing with considerat here - the word for "considering, studying, looking closely" was often parsed as con + sideris - "to observe the stars," as sidera means stars. This etymology, though disputed, was popular.

So we have Cadmus con-sidering the serpent, now dead and on the earth, bleeding. The serpent is seen, as it were, via two modes of consideration: once by an ideal viewer who sees its totality as if it were the constellation Hydra, and once by Cadmus, who sees the entire body of the serpent as inert corpse.

Nothing got past Ovid. This book will be about totalities, Gods being seen and not seen, humans making judgments about what they see and to what extent they see. Much more will be involved, but here, at the outset, the moment Cadmus can consider, take the measure of, the creature he's killed, he hears the voice of (his) Doom and it is asking him why he's looking at what he's looking at:

Dum spatium victor victi considerat hostis,
vox subito audita est; neque erat cognoscere promptum
unde, sed audita est: “Quid, Agenore nate, peremptum
serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens.”

While the conqueror stares at the vast bulk of his conquered enemy, suddenly a voice is heard. It is not easy to imagine where it comes from, but it is heard. ‘Why gaze, son of Agenor, at the serpent you have killed? You too shall be a serpent to be gazed on.’

Quid spectas? Why do you gaze? What are you looking at? These questions haunt Book 3, as does the baleful prophecy: "that which you hunt, that which you see as your worst nightmare, and try to kill? At the end of your seemingly blessed life, that will be you."

The Question of Cadmus

I assert that a great treasury of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid's long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered.

~ Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 299, quoted by Trypohonpoulos, The Celestial Tradition (linked here).

Pound chooses an interesting verb to say how Ovid's Metamorphoses manages to hold, or contain, "verity": it is registered, which etymologically derives from re + gerere, or, "to carry back," i.e., to record, to make a matter of public record.

But how clear, how publicly available, is this record?

In Book 3, Ovid begins the Theban Cycle which will end in Book IV with the destruction of the children of Cadmus.

One thing that strikes us right off is to what extent Ovid's narrative - let's just take the Cadmus episode as an example - provokes questions. First, the opening picks up the end of Book 2 - Jupiter's bearing off Europa - describing an act of revelation:

Iamque deus posita fallacis imagine tauri
se confessus erat Dictaeaque rura tenebat,

And now the god, dispensing with the deceptive image of the bull, confessed who he was, and made for the fields of Crete.

We are told that the father of gods and men shows himself as he truly is, and we fully expect Ovid to continue his tale of Jupiter and Europa. But in fact any apotheosis is immediately suspended (if not simply dropped); the narrative peels off and follows Cadmus's hopeless search for his sister, which leads to his exile and the founding of Thebes. Instead of seeing God Himself, which the Europa story was leading to, we get cows, serpents, a crop of armed warriors (the spartoi), and ultimately, the tale of Pentheus and Dionysus.

Cadmus can't find his sister and can't return home. He consults the oracle at Delphi, and is told to follow a cow that shows no sign of servile labor. Almost immediately seeing such a cow, he follows it to a place where no cities exist, no farming occurs. He sends his men for water so he can sacrifice to Jupiter, and they encounter the giant serpent of Mars.

Let's pause there. Cadmus is on a mission to find his sister, but can't succeed ("for who can snatch the robberies of Jove?"). He is advised by Apollo to follow a free cow, and such a cow presents itself almost right off -- how does Cadmus know it's the right cow, we might ask? Wasn't his sister seduced and carried off by a ringer bull? Cadmus doesn't ask. The cow leads to virgin land, and his men find the spring and cave of the serpent, which rises up and kills them. Cadmus discovers the slaughter and kills the serpent. Athena advises him to sow the teeth in the virgin soil, and up rise armed warriors who tell him to stay out of their civil war (civilibus bellis), and who then proceed to kill each other until only five remain. At which Cadmus and they found the city of Thebes.

Can Thebes say the gods had a hand in its origin? It would seem so -- Apollo provides a clue, Mars's serpent is slain, Athena offers her advice, Cadmus succeeds in building a strong and powerful city. And yet we should not forget that Thebes is doomed. Why would the gods conspire to help this man found a doomed city?

Perhaps we should ask: Are we sure that all here happens with the gods' full OK? Let's tick off a few questions:

• Did Cadmus choose the right cow, or just the first one that looked right?
• Why does Cadmus, arriving at what he believes is his destination, proceed to sacrifice to Jupiter? (Jupiter stole his sister, didn't he? Apollo helped him get here.)
• When Cadmus sees the serpent, why does he kill it, instead of considering that perhaps it belonged there, might be a sacred creature, and ought not be harmed or disturbed?
• Whose voice asks Cadmus quid spectas (why do you gaze)? and foretells that he too will become a serpent?
• Athena counsels Cadmus to sow the dragon's teeth, but did she tell him to found Thebes with the survivors? What if the "curtain" of warriors that arise is actually art -- a performance, a "show," for his benefit?
• If it is a "show," is he supposed to immediately take and use what's left of its materials? Or, as Deucalion and Pyrrha discovered when told to throw their mother's bones behind them, is he supposed to at least wonder whether the oracle was capable of a deeper interpretation?

Whatever conclusions a reader might come to, it seems worth noting that the way Ovid "registers" his treasure of verity, he doesn't spell everything out. The narrative promises then withholds (as with the face of Jupiter, although we'll see the results of viewing him undisguised with Semele shortly); it tells of a world of divine utterances that are not always obvious or easy to read; it gives us charged images -- unyoked cows, warriors who are compared to crops of corn -- but doesn't always tell us what we should "do" with them.

And, it combines vastly heterogeneous stories into an intricate composition where they echo, reflect, invert, and connect with one another - as we'll see with Aktaeon, Narcissus, Semele, Tiresias, Pentheus et al. (Hint: look for thematically relevant motifs of seeing, of the eye, of blindness, and of foreseeing.)

So long as we're asking questions, what has all this -- the founding of Thebes, the curse on the house of Cadmus - to do with Dionysus? Why does a story that begins by diverging from the unmasking of Jupiter culminate in a tragic tale that turns on a blindness to Dionysus?

The registry of Ovid is a treasure indeed.

Apollo and the Serpent

Ovid's brief account of Apollo slaying the giant she-dragon (drakainan) at Delphi (Meta. I. 416.ff) serves to introduce the story of the pursuit of Daphne.

Delphi, the center (omphalos) of the Earth, is linked to Themis, a Titaness who had the gift of the oracle prior to Apollo. She is also the goddess of Justice, the second wife of Zeus, and the mother of Prometheus.

Another prime source lurking in the background of the scene of the slaying of the serpent is the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. This amazing poem is well worth reading for its own sake (there are actually two hymns - one to Delian Apollo, the other to Pythian (Puqwn) Apollo, that are yoked).

According to this poem, the dragoness at Delphi raised Typhaon "to be a plague to men." This Typhaon was a monster that Hera bore, in spite, after Zeus birthed Athena, unassisted by his wife, the goddess of childbirth.

The hymn makes much of the fact that one of Apollo's epithets, "Pythian," relates to the word for the serpent. Not because it was a python, but because the Greek word putho means "rot" - which is what the remains of the serpent did after it was killed by far-shooting Apollo. From its decomposition came vapors that were believed to put the sibyl into a prophetic trance. From the word came the Pythian games, the original Olympics in honor of Apollo, that included music and poetry as well as athletic competition.