Pursuing Pythagoras

The appearance of Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15 is a remarkable instance of Ovid's poetic risk-taking. This time he quite deliberately blurs the boundaries of poetry and philosophy, even as the long speech of the ancient sage raises more interpretive difficulties than can be addressed here.

What, for example, to make of a voice of wisdom that seems to skate through a curious set of topics as diverse as hyperbolical vegetarianism, metempsychosis, the Eternal Flux, the Four Ages of Man, the elements, geologic changes, physical changes, autogenesis, the Phoenix, transfers of power, and the sanctity of life? The subtopics are even more varied; these are just the headers from Kline's translation.

The voice of the wise man is at times serene, and at other moments heated -- urgent in its call for an understanding of life that would find the eating of animal flesh inhuman. To him, meat-eaters appear to be the moral equivalent of Thyestes or Polyphemus.

Nowhere does this voice sound more enigmatic than when, in introducing his claims of godlike knowledge, Pythgoras assures us that his lips are being moved by the Delphic god:

Et quoniam deus ora movet, sequar ora moventem 

rite deum Delphosque meos ipsumque recludam 

aethera et augustae reserabo oracula mentis. 

Magna nec ingeniis investigata priorum 

quaeque diu latuere, canam;

‘Now, since a god moves my lips, I will follow, with due rite, the god who moves those lips, and reveal my beloved Delphi and the heavens themselves, and unlock the oracles of that sublime mind. I will speak of mighty matters, not fathomed by earlier greatness, things long hidden.'

It's hard to overstate how strange this statement is.

Heracles and Cadmus: Vestem and Vestigia

Professor Anderson's attentive eye noticed more than one interesting thing about this passage in Book 9 -- it's the moment Heracles is finally separated from his maternal portion once and for all:

interea quodcumque fuit populabile flammae,
Mulciber abstulerat, nec cognoscenda remansit
Herculis effigies, nec quicquam ab imagine ductum
matris habet, tantumque Iovis vestigia servat.             265
utque novus serpens posita cum pelle senecta
luxuriare solet, squamaque nitere recenti,
sic ubi mortales Tirynthius exuit artus,
parte sui meliore viget, maiorque videri
coepit et augusta fieri gravitate verendus.

Meanwhile, Mulciber had consumed whatever the flames could destroy, and no recognisable form of Hercules remained, no semblance of what came to him from his mother: he only retained his inheritance from Jove. 

As a snake enjoys its newness, sloughing old age with its skin, gleaming with fresh scales; so, when the Tirynthian hero had shed his mortal body, he became his better part, beginning to appear greater, and more to be revered, in his high majesty. 

Anderson first notes that exuit (exuo) has the sense of "to take off," as with clothes, though what here is being removed is the body, i.e., everything that resembled the man Hercules. As the child of a god and a woman, Hercules is composed of a mortal vestem as well as the immortal vestigia Iovis; the passage is distinguishing between the phenomenal, tangible body and a noumenal, immortal part.

Doffing the body the way the body doffs clothing will remind us that it was the vestem of Nessus, the clothing, that killed the hero. What serves as metaphor here at the moment of apotheosis is cut from the same cloth as a key literal plot element of the story that preceded it.

Anderson goes on to note that while the serpens luxuriates in his new skin and gleaming scales, this is hardly a metaphor of transcendence, one that would intimate a higher mode of existence beyond the body. In fact, the reptilian image of the snake shedding its old skin and delighting in the new is but another metaphor of external covering vs. internal reality, isn't it? The new Hercules, instead of being freed from the limitations of earthly, bodily metaphorics, instead moves from clothing to skin -- where we might expect "spirit," or "numen," we get more body. We're still in the language of the phenomenal world.

But the use of serpens will remind us that Heracles has been entwined by snakes since Hera sent them into his cradle. The earthly career of Heracles, like that of Cadmus, is rounded by the serpent -- except that here, at the moment of death, the emphasis is upon not something repeated, but on novus -- the thing made new. The differences become more marked if we now look back at that earlier scene in Book 4:

Cadmus and Harmonia's serpentine metamorphosis replicates the baleful necklace given them at their wedding. Indeed, Cadmus even reaches for her colla adsueta:

His tongue flickered over his wife’s face, he slid between her beloved breasts as if known there, and clasped her, and searched about for the neck he knew so well.

Harmonia in turn is drawn to the neck of the serpent:

she stroked the gleaming neck of the crested serpent, (lubrica permulcet cristati colla draconis)

And as Harmonia looks desperately for some sign of the former Cadmus, the human one, she says:

‘Cadmus, wait, unhappy one, tear away this monstrous thing! Cadmus, what is it? Where are your feet? Where are your hands, shoulders, face, colour, everything – while I speak? Why do you not change me as well, you gods, into this same snake’s form?

She asks where the form, the phenomenal appearance, of her husband is:

“Cadme, mane, teque, infelix, his exue monstris!
Cadme, quid hoc? ubi pes, ubi sunt umerique manusque 

 et color et facies et, dum loquor, omnia? 

cur nonme quoque, caelestes, in eandem vertitis anguem?”

Indeed, she uses exuo, the same verb used at 9.268 (quoted above) to describe Heracles shedding his body. But here instead of a metamorphosis in which one thing is distinguished and torn from something ontologically other (Heracles' form from his substance), Harmonia discovers that she can no longer tell where her husband ends and the serpent begins. Her response is to pray to become the same snake (eandem anguem).

Why do you not change me as well, you gods, into this same snake’s form?

Where Heracles' skin-shedding snake metaphor stresses renewal -- a fundamental distinguishing break with the old and a new beginning, the metamorphosis of Cadmus and Harmonia stresses the merging of the couple so completely in the form of serpents as to lose virtually all humanity, their house (Thebes) doomed over and over to cycle through the curse of Hephaestus.

For Heracles the emphasis is on the advent of a difference, the presence of the novus, something that might break the fate of Thebes.

So, a provisional interpretative thought: the speech of Themis brought into focus a comparative look at two great mythic cycles, Thebes and Heracles, and seemed to underscore how the two respective stories end up mirroring each other like two sides of a serpentine necklace. Here the apotheosis of Heracles suggests a further twist -- that perhaps one of the two heroes is not entirely entrapped in endless repetition. While on Earth, for all his violent temper and madness, Heracles was on the way to becoming a hero with transformative powers. By solving every task he was ever given, he signaled a potential to expand the human. No longer a static creature residing within fixed limits, this son of Jove scorned every limitation, every fearsome challenge, even death.

If Cadmus is the tragic figure whose descendents, like Oedipus, discover that they cannot escape the antics of Fate, Heracles is inaugurating the thought of a dynamism suspending all bounds. Ultimately he bows to Fate, as all mortals do. But his scorn in the face of all challenges, including the realm of Hades, signals a power that works to transform the world it is given -- one whose labors resonate with unearthly terror and laughter.

Apotheosis of Hercules, Versailles

Nova Terra in Metamorphoses 8

Prof. Anderson is very helpful regarding a passage that is usually omitted from book 8 of the Metamorphoses -- it's the moment (roughly lines 600-610) when Achelous describes how, after he raped Perimele and her father threw her off a cliff, the river god intervened, praying to Neptune to try to keep her from drowning. As Anderson notes, the suppressed lines are borderline outrageous.

I've not found an English translation, but the text below comes from this French edition.

si pater Hippodamas, aut si minus impius esset,
debuit illius misereri, ignoscere nobis;}
adfer opem, mersaeque, precor, feritate paterna
da, Neptune, locum, uel sit locus ipsa licebit!"
{Hunc quoque complectar!" Mouit caput aequoreus rex
concussitque suis omnes assensibus undas.   605
Extimuit nymphe, nabat tamen. Ipse natantis
pectora tangebam trepido salientia mota
dumque ea contrecto, totum durescere sensi
corpus et inducta condi praecordia terra.}
dum loquor, amplexa est artus noua terra natantes


si son père eût été plus juste et moins barbare, il se fût laissé fléchir. Moins impie, il eût eu pitié d'elle, il eût pardonné mon amour. Protège cette infortunée, que la fureur d'un père a jetée dans les flots soumis à ta puissance. Daigne lui donner une île pour retraite; oui si tu le veux, qu'elle soit elle-même une île, et que mon onde amoureuse puisse l'embrasser dans son cours". Neptune incline sa tête, et l'humide élément tout entier s'émeut et se soulève. Périmèle frémit; elle nage pourtant; je la soutiens, je presse son sein palpitant. Soudain je sens son corps se durcir et s'étendre. Soudain la terre couvre ses membres flottants.

A rough translation from 606 ff:

The nymph was terrified, but nonetheless kept swimming. While I was holding her up and fondling her breasts, I sensed her body harden and be covered with earth. While I speak, new earth grasps her floating limbs.

==


"The erotic details of this line and the next," Anderson says in his note on 8.606, "surpass anything else that Ovid is known to have tried in the Metamorphoses. Achelous should hardly fondle the girls breasts in this crisis, when theoretically he is concerned only to save her. Such caresses would decidedly interfere with her swimming."

The word "theoretically" is interesting here. A river god should observe proper decorum when rescuing young nymphs. But do rivers -- natural entities -- observe such niceties? Does a river "understand" theoretical distinctions between rape and love, self-gratification and other-directed care? What grounds our readerly theories?

Nova terra

As Mussy noted the other day, the interconnections between the various tales Ovid tells are virtually innumerable. These missing lines offer, besides a necrophiliac confluence of erotic desire, death, and burial, an interesting link to a tale that will be alluded to in Book 9, from the story of the seven against Thebes.

It seems that Alcmaeon, a son of Amphiarius, one of the original Seven who died at Thebes, had to flee the Erinyes after killing his mother Eriphyle -- he was commanded to do so by his father, whom his mother had doomed, bribed by Polyneices, the son of Oedipus, who gave him the necklace of Harmonia (which we saw, or didn't see, in the tale of Cadmus and Harmonia).

After killing his mother, Alcmaeon

was pursued by the Erinyes and driven mad, fleeing first to Arcadia, where his grandfather Oicles ruled, and then to King Phegeus in Psophis, who purified him and gave him his daughter, Arsinoe in Apollodorus and Alphesiboea in Pausanias, in marriage. Alcmaeon gave her the necklace and robe of Harmonia.[5] According to Apollodorus, Alcmaeon's presence caused the land to be infertile, so he went to Delphi for assistance.[5] In Pausanias, it is his own madness which drove him to do so.[6] 

From there the two accounts generally agree with each other and with Thucydides. Alcmaeon is instructed by the oracle to find a land which did not exist at the time when he was polluted by killing his mother. Accordingly, he goes to a delta of the Achelous river, which was newly formed. There he marries Callirrhoe, the daughter of the river's god. She had heard of the famous necklace and robe of Harmonia, and asks Alcmaeon to get them for her. He complies, returning to Psophis and telling king Phegeus that he required the necklace and robe in order to be purified. Either Phegeus or his sons (Agenor and Pronous) discovers the truth from a servant, and they ambush and kill Alcmaeon.[7][8][9] In Apollodorus, Arsinoe, the daughter of Phegeus, chastises her brothers, who put her into a chest and sell her as a slave.[10] Meanwhile, Callirrhoe prays to Zeus that her sons will grow up instantaneously so that they might take revenge on her husband's murderers. Zeus grants this, and Amphoterus and Acarnan meet the sons of Phegeus at Agapenor's house, when they are on their way to Delphi to dedicate Harmonia's robe and necklace there. After killing them, Amphoterus and Acarnan continue to Psophis and killed king Phegeus and his queen, after which they are forced to flee to Tegea.[11]

The story of Perimele told by Achelous offers us the creation of new land at his delta. The prophecies of Themis at the center of Book 9 interweave several stories from the Theban cycle, including the acceleration of time that happened to the sons of Callirrhoe so that Alcmaeon's murder could be avenged. And including not only the necklace, but also the robe of Harmonia, a garment more fateful than the shirt of Nessus.

How significant is this? Perhaps not hugely so, but it's another instance in which a seemingly gratuitous tale turns out to be related, via back channels, as it were, to another tale, which is nested yet in other tales, making the reader move forward and back as connections, like roots, take hold beneath the surface layer of the narrative.

Another point: by bringing up the acceleration of the lives of Callirrhoe's sons, Themis, goddess of prophecy, underscores a recurrent feature of Book 9 -- as we'll note in more detail ahead, the temporal order is sometimes reversed, sometimes speeded up. Or, effects will occur before causes.

Just as Achelous and Neptune, gods of water, make new land, so the gods can also make new time, or cause time to slow or even disappear, even as the veil of time vanishes to one who, like Themis, sees future things.

The serpent's titanic curse

That there is something profoundly foreign, obscure and disquieting in Greek art which no longer allows one to speak simply of "griechische Heiterkeit", "Greek serenity", according to the classical formula, this is exactly what Nietzsche undertook to show since The Birth of Tragedy, by making apparent, under the beautiful appearance and the measure characterising apollinian civilisation, the barbaric and titanic nature of its dionysiac foundation, and thus bestowing a fundamental importance to this oriental god that is Dionysus for the definition of what constitutes what is proper to the Hellenic [le grec]. -- Francoise Dastur, "Holderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece"

Contemporary scholarship is still wrestling with Dionysus and his enigmatic place in the otherwise stately, ordered pantheon of the Olympians. Masks of Dionysus (Myth and Poetics) collected essays addressing not only the interpretive challenges of the mythical god, but also his place in Greek tragedy, in art, and in ancient cultic rites. Entire books have focused on "the Dionysian" in modern thought, whether Nietzsche's or those influenced by his thinking. One example: The Dionysian Self: C.G. Jung's Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Paul Bishop. Not only is the Dionysian still hot, it's also pricey -- each of these works of scholarship retails new for over $200.

The enigmatic aspects of the god are in full view in Ovid's treatment of the House of Cadmus and Thebes in Metamorphoses 3-4. Here is Cadmus, at the end of his human life, turning back to reflect on all the tragedies, the patterns, the portents and the horrors of his family tree:

Driven to wandering, at length his [Cadmus'] journey carried him and his wife to the borders of Illyria. Now, weighed down by age and sadness, they thought of the original destiny of their house, and in talk reviewed their sufferings. Cadmus said ‘Surely that snake, my spear pierced, must have been sacred, when, fresh from Sidon, I scattered the serpent’s teeth, a strange seed, over the earth? If that is what the gods have been avenging with such sure anger, may I myself stretch out as a long-bellied snake.’ Metamorphoses 4.563ff

Cadmus is looking back upon his experiences at the origin of Thebes, and is thinking he might need to revise his understanding. No longer was this a natural serpent that he had to overcome. Rather, it was sacred -- like Diana, whom Actaeon stumbled upon -- and he recalls the voice that came from nowhere after he'd killed it:

“Quid, Agenore nate, peremptum
serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens.” Meta. 3.97-98

Cadmus is testing a new hypothesis -- that he was not a valiant hero, a bringer of civilization, a warrior whom the gods loved:

And, so speaking, he did extend into a long-bellied snake, and felt his skin hardening as scales grew there, while dark green patches checkered his black body. He lay prone on his breast, and gradually his legs fused together thinning out towards a smooth point. Still his arms were left to him, and what was left of his arms he stretched out, and, with tears running down his still human cheeks, he said ‘Come here, wife, come here, most unfortunate one, and while there is still something left of me, touch me, and take my hand, while it is still a hand, while the snake does not yet have all of me.’ (Kline trans.)

His metamorphosis signals confirmation: instead of founding of a city beloved of the gods, Cadmus had set in motion a series of catastrophic events that were saying, if anyone other than Tiresias (separator of knotted serpents) had the wit to hear it, that Thebes and the line of Cadmus were doomed to divine vengeance because they were accursed. His city would perish. This might help us understand why in this story of the founding of Thebes, we never see the city, only the wild mountain that stands between it and Athens.

The exact elements of the transgression are overdetermined. Was it that he forgot about Europa? Or followed the wrong sow? Or killed Mars's serpent? Was it that he misread the oracle? Or sowed the teeth, bringing new beings into the world without going through natural sexual processes? The absence of sex and natural birth (Juno's domain) marks the stories of the spartoi, of Actaeon, Semele, and Narcissus. (Tiresias on the other hand knows more about sex than Zeus).

And Pentheus -- did martial rigor blind him to the story of Acoetes, and to the child-god of the thyrsus and the dance rave? In resisting the new rites of the god, his own half-cousin, was he perpetuating the curse when he harked back to the origin of his people as children of the serpent father, ignoring the fact that these toothy seeds were sown in Earth? Did he forget the lesson of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who regenerated the human race by interpreting the oracle to say that Earth was our general mother?

Pentheus's repression of the Earth and the mother comes back with cruel vengeance when he is pulled to pieces by the Maenads. Did the unnatural "birth" of Thebes have to come to fruition in this unnatural end to its young King, taken for a wild beast by his own mother? And does the brutal dismemberment crown the mortal king's end with an ironic grimace by uncannily mirroring the dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus, whose birth overcame his own and his mother Semele's total destruction?

Nor do the relevant questions end there. What does Book 3 say about Ovid, who -- instead of singing the epic tale of the founding of Rome or some other saga that would have celebrated the manly imperial triumphs of the Caesars -- chooses this unnatural tale to present as his first epic narrative? He'll follow up in Books 4 and 5 with the story of Perseus as told by Perseus, which, as Prof. William S. Anderson will show in his careful reading, provokes glaring questions for anyone who expects an epic tale of martial triumph. Is Metamorphoses in some sense Ovid's "barbaric and titanic" anti-epic?

Follow up Links: Dolphins, Zagreus, Thebes, Mycenae

Bell Idol (Thebes)

The dolphin story we were all trying to think of was the tale of Arion, from Herodotus:

. . . the Greek writer Herodotus tells the story of Arion, a lyre-player from Methymna employed by Periander, King of Corinth. Arion is a talented and innovative musician whose performances around the Mediterranean have made him extremely rich. Sailing home from a lucrative tour of Italy to his native Corinth, his crew turn on him, threatening to throw him overboard and take his money. Arion tries to bargain for his life but the crew will have none of it and give him a choice: either lie kills himself or they throw him over the side. Arion, for reasons that Herodotus doesn't really explain, asks if he might sing one last song. The crew agree - after all, why turn down a free farewell concert from the best singer in the known world? As the last note dies away, Arion leaps into the sea.

The ship sails on, but instead of drowning, Arion is rescued by a school of dolphins that have been beguiled by the beauty of his music and carry him to shore. He makes his way back to Corinth and tells his story to King Periander, who cannot believe it. The plot is eventually uncovered when the ship arrives and the crew swear that they left Arion alive and well in Italy.

This image of dolphins rescuing sailors or carrying humans recurs again and again in myth and folklore.

The full excerpt from Dolphins by Chris Catton, is quite rich, with much more about dolphins both in relation to Apollo and to Dionysus.

Here's a bit on Dionysian Mysteries, and another on Dionysus Zagreus.

The Greek Bacchoi claimed that, like wine, Dionysus had a different flavour in different regions; reflecting their mythical and cultural soil, he appeared under different names and appearances in different regions.

And since Metamorphoses Book IV relocates the setting, here's a locator map:

Ovid begins his tale of human cities in Book III with Cadmean Thebes, but in Book IV, after the "batty" daughters of Minyas, as we begin the the saga of Perseus, we're moving toward Mycenae.

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.