Ovid living on

A Conference from March of this year addressing the afterlife of Ovid.

A Digital Model of Ancient Rome

made by Matthias Rascher

Aristotle on Pythagoras

Given the prominence offered Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15, it might be worth noting that Aristotle's early work in the dialogue form, entitled Protrepticus, was preoccupied with the work of that early school of philosophy. The link goes to a new reconstruction of Aristotle's piece, apparently composed while he was still a student at Plato's Academy.

In this snippet from the dialogue, a character named Heraclides is speaking of Pythagoras:

He took a philosophical view of many of the truths of mathematics, and made them part and parcel of his own projects, even the ones handed down to him by others, and made them fit in a suitable arrangement, he conducted the appropriate investigations about them, and produced the same agreement always in all respects, so that it never violates its logical consequence.

And he fashioned them into a starting point for his instruction, which was capable of guiding his listeners, if any of them by sufficient experience could understand the terms sufficiently. Indeed, in the purity, subtlety, and precision of his demonstrations, surpassing every similar type of theoretical observation of other things, he both employs great clarity and sets out from evident facts; and the most beautiful thing in it turns out to be its being high-minded and aspiring to the primary causes, and it both fashions its teachings for the sake of practical affairs and also lays hold of the things in a pure way, the mathematical theorems at times even combining with the theological ones. [68.2]

via rogueclassicism. 

On to Hippolytus

More to say about Ovid, but for now, we're over here reading Euripides' Hippolytus.

Blog for latest project: Hippolytus

As our group has turned to Euripides' Hippolytus, blogging about that text will occur on the somewhat spiffed-up old Sarasota Classics Blog. So far, it has two posts:

Some words in Euripides' Hippolytus 

Troezen, Argos and the Peloponnese

The eyes of Argus: Three illustrations

Mercury, Argus, and Io - Rubens

Hera decorating peacock with Argus's eyes - 17th c.

Io, Argus and Hermes - Velazquez

A colorful Kinyras

A retelling of the tale of Kinyras, whom we know as Cinyras - we met this king of Cyprus in Metamorphoses 10; it's one of the tales sung by Orpheus. Cinyras was tricked into having sex with his daughter Myrrha, from which union comes Adonis.

This "graphic article" was produced by two classic scholars, Glynnis Fawkes and John Franklin, drawing upon research for a forthcoming book.

This excerpt of the book is on The Appendix. It seems Kinyras belonged to a rich set of stories, many of which we no longer have.

Theologica tripertita

Here's something related to Ovid's Fasti that came up in some of the scholarship. Varro (116-17 BC) was a hugely productive intellectual of early Rome, and apparently was the source of the later formalization of the liberal arts into the trivium and quadrivium:

Varro . . . turned out more than 74 Latin works on a variety of topics. Among his many works, two stand out for historians; Nine Books of Disciplines and his compilation of the Varronian chronology. His "Nine Books of Disciplines" became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. The most noteworthy portion of the Nine Books of Disciplines is its use of the liberal arts as organizing principles.[1] Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro's list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical "liberal arts of the medieval schools".[1]

The article below discusses Varro's notion of "tripartite theology" -- cosmic, political, fabulous. From in Religions of the Ancient World, ed. by Sara Iles Johnson.

Varro was very interested in the calendar, (the structuring form of Fasti), and in working out the chronology of Roman history:

Pre-Julian Calendar

After Metamorphoses

Ovid finished Metamorphoses before his expulsion from Rome, but reportedly burned his manuscript. The book survived because friends had copies -- imperfect, perhaps, but better than nothing. From afar he directed them to protect the poem, even as he continued working on Fasti, his effort to fill in the key days of the Roman Calendar as revised by Caesar and ordered by Augustus.

The Fasti has received more scholarly attention of late, and a new prose translation arrived in April, appropriately the month of Venus. Anne and Peter Wiseman's version of the poem, done for Oxford World Classics, is in prose and annotated with a good introduction, situating the poem and its material in context.

Scholars are divided over whether the poem is wholly invested in the Roman traditions and myth as set forth under the new imperial order, or whether Ovid, being Ovid, is least in part conducting an indirect but radical critique of that order. (Some of the more recent work on the poem is discussed here, here and here, and much more can be found with a simple search.)

The question of the poem's vision of Rome and its new order is one major issue. Another would be the relationship of the many stories and mythic tales in the Fasti to the Metamorphoses. We saw many examples of Ovid's consciousness of earlier poets in the latter poem, usually in relation to Virgil, Homer, and the Greek tragedians.  Fasti seems to bear the additional dimension of writing with his own prior masterpiece in view.

For example near the very beginning of Fasti there's a retelling of the origin of the world tale as told in Metamorphoses I. Except now the purely Roman god Janus is equated with Chaos as well as with the order that arises from it. Not only is Janus affirmed to be the first and most powerful god, but he then puts in an appearance, visiting Ovid as he's writing about Janus, and willingly answers several questions the poet puts to him. Ovid is having fun, but he's also setting his book of days in relation to the Metamorphoses, and expects us to be cognizant of their intertextual play.

I'm enjoying reading the Wiseman version of the poem, and am also looking at Tony Kline's free online version, and the older translation by Frazer used in the Loeb edition and available in Theoi.

It is worth pondering what necessitated that this poet of Amor be placed at the very edge of the Roman empire by order of Augustus. Ovid himself knew how troublesome love can be to those who rule:

Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur 

maiestas et amor:

Royalty and love
do not sit well together, nor stay long in the same house

Ovid never stopped writing. Fasti ends with June -- something disrupted that project -- but Ovid kept going -- the Tristia, the Ibis, and more. It's doubtful whether, in the millennia since his residence in Tomis, real poetry has managed more than a marginal relation to the centers of power in the West.

Ovid as reading teacher 2: Sequence

tu face nescio quos esto contentus amores

inritare tua, nec laudes adsere nostras!' 1.461-2

One of the very Italian things about Ovid is his sprezzatura -- his art of concealing art. Every time we blithely skate from one tale to the next as though we were changing channels on TV, we run the risk of missing some degree of pertinence arising from the relation of one tale to the next.

At least we might ask, as we run, say, from the tale of the flood in Metamorphoses 1 to that of Apollo slaying the Python to the vivid pursuit of Daphne, whether there is some connection to be made, some relation worth considering, between these tales. Are they just individual items on a chain, or could they form segments of a larger semantic structure?

Heracles & Hydra: Louvre