Writers and storytellers

I wanted to make a few notes while our substantial discussion of the tale of Iphis and Ianthe today was still fresh in mind.

Clearly, Ovid placed this tale next and subsequent to the tale of Byblis and Caunus because he was interested in that juxtaposition. There are a few basic ways in which the two stories are, for all their apparent differences in tone, subject and style, intimately complementary.

The story of Byblis is the tale of a writer possessed by Eros. The tale is the gradual unfolding to consciousness -- first her own, then her brother's -- of her tabooed desire for her twin. The letter, despite elaborate efforts of argument and pathos, fails, and she laments the failure:

She grew pale, hearing that she had been rejected, and her body shook, gripped by an icy chill. But, when consciousness returned, so did the passion, and, she let out these words, her lips scarcely moving: ‘I deserve it! Well, why did I rashly reveal my wound? Why was I in such a hurry to commit things, which were secret, to a hasty letter? I should have tested his mind’s judgment before by ambiguous words. I should have observed how the winds blew; used other lesser sails, in case those breezes were not to be followed; and crossed the sea in safety, not as now, under full canvas, caught by uncertain gusts. So I am carried onto the rocks, swamped, overwhelmed by the whole ocean, and my sails have no means of retreat.’

If we were in doubt about her calling to the republic of letters, this revisionary view, and strategic rethinking of her way of revealing her heart, complete with elaborate Odyssean simile, should lay those doubts to rest. The failure to conquer her brother, her reader, only propels her to a more labored manner of grandiloquence. She now begins to conceive a theatrical encounter in which she would act out before his eyes the plot that failed as narrative. Essentially she's covered the poetic territory from lyric to epic to tragic drama in short order. Byblis of Byblos is nothing if not a producer of biblia.

"Would God that namelesse I myght pleade"

In Book 9, as Prof. Anderson notes, Ovid introduces the act of writing into the scene of Byblis in love with her twin brother. It is an opportunity for Ovid once again to capitalize on a mirroring effect -- just as the girl loves an image of herself, so the depiction in writing of a writer writing offers a reflection upon its own production.

As the girl moves from discovery to confession to excuse to a vow to "conquer" her brother's love, she dramatizes the full gamut of rhetorical arts and strategies. It's a portrait, or meta-portrait, of the author as one who both seeks to find a way to name (nomine) the secrets of the heart and to conquer (vincere) the reader.

Writing is naming, re-writing and seduction, Ovid seems to say. Writers may seem to be impassioned Rousseaus nakedly revealing the insupportable wounds of the heart, but what author is not at the same time concerned to succeed with his/her public? Writing can both say and do, and these do not necessarily always coincide. The intricate interplay of passion, desire, deletion, search for the mot juste, plot, strategy, pathos and calculation is fully exhibited in the scene where Byblis writes on her wax tablet:

in latus erigitur cubitoque innixa sinistro'viderit: insanos' inquit 'fateamur amores!ei mihi, quo labor? quem mens mea concipit ignem?' et meditata manu componit verba trementi.dextra tenet ferrum, vacuam tenet altera ceram.incipit et dubitat, scribit damnatque tabellas,et notat et delet, mutat culpatque probatqueinque vicem sumptas ponit positasque resumit. quid velit ignorat; quicquid factura videtur,displicet. in vultu est audacia mixta pudori.scripta 'soror' fuerat; visum est delere sororemverbaque correctis incidere talia ceris:'quam, nisi tu dederis, non est habitura salutem, hanc tibi mittit amans: pudet, a, pudet edere nomen,et si quid cupiam quaeris, sine nomine vellemposset agi mea causa meo, nec cognita Byblisante forem, quam spes votorum certa fuisset.

So raysing up herself uppon her leftsyde shee enclynd,  And leaning on her elbow sayd: Let him advyse him whatTo doo, for I my franticke love will utter playne and flat. Alas to what ungraciousnesse intend I for to fall?What furie raging in my hart my senses dooth appall?
In thinking so, with trembling hand shee framed her to wryght The matter that her troubled mynd in musing did indyght. Her ryght hand holdes the pen, her left dooth hold the empty wax. She ginnes. Shee doutes, shee wryghtes: shee in the tables findeth lacks. She notes, she blurres, dislikes, and likes: and chaungeth this for that.
Shee layes away the booke, and takes it up. Shee wotes not what  She would herself. What ever thing shee myndeth for to doo Misliketh her. A shamefastnesse with boldenesse mixt theretoWas in her countnance. Shee had once writ Suster: Out agen The name of Suster for to raze shee thought it best. And then
She snatcht the tables up, and did theis following woords ingrave: The health which if thou give her not shee is not like to have Thy lover wisheth unto thee. I dare not ah for shame I dare not tell thee who I am, nor let thee heare my name. And if thou doo demaund of mee what thing I doo desyre,
Would God that namelesse I myght pleade the matter I requyre, And that I were unknowen to thee by name of Byblis, till Assurance of my sute were wrought according to my will.   

Metamorphoses Book 9, Golding translation

The image of the wax tablet comes from an interesting page on the history of writing.

Byblos and Adonis

Port of Byblos

BYBLOS

bĭbˈləs, ancient city, Phoenicia, a port 17 mi (27 km) NNE of modern Beirut, Lebanon. The principal city of Phoenicia during the 2d millennium b.c., it long retained importance as an active port under the Persians. Byblos was the chief center of the worship of Adonis. Because of its papyruses, it was also the source of the Greek word for book and, hence, of the name of the Bible. Excavations of Byblos, especially since 1922, have shown that trade existed between Byblos and Egypt as early as c.2800 b.c. A syllabic script found at Byblos dates from the 18th to the 15th cent. b.c.

Adonis

Adonis ( Earths "lord"), in Greek mythology, the god of beauty and desire, is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central figure in various mystery religions. His religion belonged to women: the dying of Adonis was fully developed in the circle of young girls around the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, about 600 BCE, as revealed in a fragment of Sappho's surviving poetry.[1]

Death of Adonis

Writing oneself into difficulty

Near the conclusion of Tristia 2, Ovid laments at some length his exile at the command of Augustus. In addition to saying, essentially, "why me?" he mentions his Metamorphoses along with the Fasti as poems deserving of honor, not banishment:

And I also sang bodies changed to new forms,
though my efforts lacked the final touch.
If only you might calm your anger for a while
and order some of it read while you’re at leisure,
a few lines, where having started from the world’s
first origin, I bring the work, Caesar, to your times!
You’ll see how much you yourself have inspired my spirit,
how in song my mind favours you, and yours.  555 ff

Byblis before Ovid

First, a correction. The story of Byblis and Caunus was known prior to Ovid. A discussion of the tale is found in Parthenius of Nicaea's Erotica Pathemata (Of the Sorrows of Love), and it points to a few earlier sources where the story can be found in one form or another. 

Parthenius was brought to Rome in 72 BC, and is believed to have tutored Virgil. So while he apparently died in 14 AD, his work was probably produced much earlier.

Thanks to Theoi, the Erotica can be found here. What's striking is how devoid of literary elaboration these tales are in Parthenius' dry hands. Here, for example, is his story of Byblis and Caunus:

XI. THE STORY OF BYBLIS 

From Aristocritus39 History of Miletus and the Foundation of Caunus40 by Apollonius of Rhodes 

There are various forms of the story about Caunus and Byblis, the children of Miletus. Nicaenetus41 says that Caunus fell in love with his sister, and, being unable to rid himself of his passion, left his home and traveled far from his native land: he there founded a city to be inhabited by the scattered Ionian people. Nicaenetus speaks of him thus in his epic: –

Further he42 fared and there the Oecusian town founded, and took to wife Tragasia, Celaeneus’ daughter, who twain children bare: first Caunus, lover of right and law, and then fair Byblis, whom men likened to the tall junipers. Caunus was smitten, all against his will, with love for Byblis; straightway he left his home, and fled beyond Dia: Cyprus did he shun, the land of snakes, and wooded Capros too, and Caria’s holy streams: and then, his goal once reached, the built a township, first of all the Ionians. But his sister far away, poor Byblis, to an owl divinely changed still sat without Miletus’ gates, and wailed for Caunus to return, which might not be. 

However, most authors say that Byblis fell in love with Caunus, and made proposals to him, begging him not to stand by and see the sight of her utter misery. He was horrified at what she said, and crossed over to the country then inhabited by the Leleges, where the spring Echeneïs rises, and there founded the city called Caunus after himself. She, as her passion did not abate, and also because she blamed herself for Caunus’ exile, tied the fillets of her head-dress43 to an oak, and so made a noose for her neck. The following are my own lines on the subject: –

She, when she knew her brother’s cruel heart, plained louder than the nightingales in the groves who weep for ever the Sithonian44 lad; then to a rough oak tied her snood, and made a strangling noose, and laid therein her neck: for her Milesian virgins rent their robes. 

Some also say that from her tears sprang a stream called after her name, Byblis.

Ovid clearly went to town on this story, reversing the "poles" so that Byblis is the afflicted lover, introducing all the paraphenalia of writing, developing the passion and her means of relating it to her brother through several phases involving elaborate arguments, duplicities, and reversals.

So a question we might want to ask as we explore Byblis: Why does Ovid use this tale to give us, as Anderson notes, the first detailed description of a writer at work of which we have any record? Is there a reason why the art and craft of writing enter the Metamorphoses precisely at this point?

Note that the "Sithonian lad" of Parthenius is poor Itys, whom we last saw in the tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus in Book 6.

Letters and Lovers: Paris and Helen

With Byblis and Caunus in Metamorphoses 9, Ovid returns to the epistolary mode of his Heroides. Several of the letters are in pairs, with a lover's overture followed by a response from the beloved. The snippet below is taken from the pair which Ovid composed for Paris and Helen. Paris is visiting the palace of Menelaos at Sparta. Menelaos is away, leaving Helen to entertain his Phrygian guest.

Paris writes:

Don’t think I divided the waves with my ship carrying goods –

the wealth I have the gods can keep.

Nor have I come just to visit the towns of Greece:

my kingdom’s cities are far richer.

I seek you, whom lovely Venus drives towards my bed:

I wished for you before you were known to me.

Your face was in my mind before I saw you with my eyes:

news of your fame first brought me the wound.

Paris to Helen, from Ovid, Heroides

A prose version of Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris is here.

Wax writing tablet and styluses

A deadly feast for the eyes: Pelops, Tereus and lethal inscriptions

The ivory prosthesis Pelops reveals as he mourns for his sister sets him apart from all men as the son of Tantalos, returned after horrible dismemberment. Here's the brief passage in Book 6 in which Pelops mourns for Niobe, his sister:

even then one man, her brother Pelops, is said to have wept for her and, after taking off his tunic, to have shown the ivory, of his left shoulder (umero). This was of flesh, and the same colour as his right shoulder, at the time of his birth. Later, when he had been cut in pieces, by his father, it is said that the gods fitted his limbs together again. They found the pieces, but one was lost, between the upper arm and the neck. Ivory was used in place of the missing part, and by means of that Pelops was made whole (integer).

The positioning of this Pelops vignette is worth thinking about. It immediately precedes Ovid's tale of Philomela that ends with a father, Tereus, dining on his own son, who has been killed, dismembered and prepared for a "sacred feast" by Procne, the child's mother and Tereus' wife.

The glimpse of Pelops' ivory shoulder "fits" the themes of Book 6 in so far as his restoration is a collective work of art of the gods, bringing back the beloved boy, as Ovid says, integer -- thanks to the prosthetic addition, necessary thanks to Demeter's distraction.

This integrity of the reconstituted Pelops (presented more as a work of restoration than a resurrection) stands in clear contrast to the disintegration that immediately follows -- the Grand-Guignol tale of the Thracian king who violates the trusts of office and family, mutilating and imprisoning Philomela in order to suppress her power to tell the world of his vile rape.

Yet she doesn't remain silent, despite the loss of her tongue. Thanks to ingenium and sollertia -- her inwit and cunning -- the girl creates an artificial thing, an image, that fills the void of her tongue. Supplementary and not dependent on presence, the image is external to her; it can be transported without being seen, yet speaks ventriloquially to the one it is intended for. It's a metamorphic prosthesis of her voice that makes her "whole."

Look at what happens when the image of Philomela's voice reaches the eyes of her sister:

miserabile legitet (mirum potuisse) silet. Dolor ora repressitverbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguaedefuerunt; nec flere vacat, sed fasque nefasqueconfusura ruit, poenaeque in imagine tota est.

The wife of the savage king unrolls the cloth, and reads her sister’s terrible fate, and by a miracle keeps silent. Grief restrains her lips, her tongue seeking to form words adequate to her indignation, fails. She has no time for tears, but rushes off, in a confusion of right and wrong, her mind filled with thoughts of vengeance.

The "voice" of Philomela is so potent it takes away Procne's power of speech -- it partakes of the unspeakable. Kline's translation says Procne's mind is filled with "thoughts of vengeance," but Ovid chooses to continue the sense of the visual, and says poenaeque in imagine tota -- Procne's mind is consumed and confused by the deranging power of this image, much as is Tereus's mind the first time he beheld Philomela:

Quid quod idem Philomela cupit patriosque lacertis            VI.475 blanda tenens umeros, ut eat visura sororem, perque suam contraque suam petit ipsa salutem. Spectat eam Tereus praecontrectatque videndo osculaque et collo circumdata bracchia cernens omnia pro stimulis facibusque ciboque furoris accipit;

Moreover Philomela wishes his request granted, and resting her forearms on her father’s shoulders, coaxing him to let her go to visit her sister, she urges it, in her own interest, and against it. Tereus gazes at her, and imagining her as already his, watching her kisses, and her arms encircling her father’s neck, it all spurs him on, food and fuel to his frenzy. (Kline)

With a poet as careful as Ovid, could it be by chance that "shoulders," "neck," and "food" are interwoven here? Inscribed in Tereus' vision of the girl pleading with her dad are key words linked to the sacrilege of Tantalos, the horrific violation of divine proprieties, the curse Tereus is to reenact with his son, Itys. Both Tereus and Procne are driven to frenzy by what they see. Amor -- the fire that sets Tereus ablaze for Philomela -- simultaneously images his doom.

In this, the only tale of Book 6 in which the key players are human, there's no saving grace, no restoration. As each character in turn undergoes a loss of balance, of moral center, in which every human bond vanishes, the void is filled with theatricality (Tereus's pleas, Procne's bacchantes, the feast).

Why does Ovid place this tale of human degeneration next to story of divine regeneration? No divinity is pulling the strings, no Juno or Hermes is causing Tereus, Procne and Philomela to do what they do.

In this tale, humans cannot cast blame upon some supernatural being for their actions, any more than Lykaon could for his heinous crime of inviting Jupiter to dine on a human in Book I. This time, no one can say, "the devil made me do it."