Ovid as reading teacher

Ovid is not just a great teller of myths, he's also a fine reader of them. To read them as he read them is to be introduced to the classical sensibility of a Roman under Augustus. He is not just presenting an anthology of myth, he's sharing his understanding of them.

A few things Ovid has taught me about reading:

1. No reference is too small, too slight, to ignore. I learned this by blithely ignoring allusions only to later realize how they served as cues, pointers. For example, here's the doors of the Palace of the Sun -- a Helios-eye-view of the world. In some ways they're like the shield of Achilles:

. . . the twin doors radiated light from polished silver. The work of art was finer than the material: on the doors Mulciber had engraved the waters that surround the earth’s centre, the earthly globe, and the overarching sky. The dark blue sea contains the gods, melodious Triton, shifting Proteus, Aegaeon crushing two huge whales together, his arms across their backs, and Doris with her daughters, some seen swimming, some sitting on rocks drying their sea-green hair, some riding the backs of fish. They are neither all alike, nor all different, just as sisters should be. The land shows men and towns, woods and creatures, rivers and nymphs and other rural gods. Above them was an image of the glowing sky, with six signs of the zodiac on the right hand door and the same number on the left. (Kline trans.)

 Most of the figures are familiar, but I hadn't bothered to look up Aegaeon the whale crusher (a curious detail that might catch the eye). It turns out this fellow is either Briareos, or the father of Briareos. We're brought back to the text of the Theogony, where this 100-armed, 50-headed son of Uranus was a key helper in Zeus's overthrow of Cronos. He also appears in Homer:

"The creature of the hundred hands to tall Olympos, that creature the gods name Briareos, but all men Aigaios' (Aegaeus') son, but he is far greater in strength than his father." Iliad 1. 397 ff (trans. Lattimore).

The text offers the name among others as a mere detail of the giant door. We can choose to treat it as a bit of local color, or decoration, or we can ponder how apt that this figure, titanic in every way, is singled out at the moment we are to cross a threshold to view another of the Titans, a father viewed from the perspective of his son. Phaethon is about to challenge his dad and himself -- to see if he's up to snuff as the (alleged) offspring of Helios.

Behind the surface of the scene is a series of subtexts dealing with fathers and sons, the contention and defining power of the relationship, the questions and ambiguities of paternity, authority, origin, filiation. The theme is important, and returns over and over in Metamorphoses. We're about the read the longest story of the poem. The enriching detail brings into view vast stories that have everything to do with this scene and with a key preoccupation of the poem: the nature of Greece as the putative father, author, and guiding light of Rome.

It's easy to point to many other examples of this attention to detail in Ovid -- it tells me he wanted us to repay his with our own careful attention.

To be continued . . . part 2

Hymen, Orpheus, and deviation

Metamorphoses 10 begins with the figure of Hymen, who leaves the surprisingly successful wedding of Iphis and Ianthe to attend the unfortunate marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Hymen and Eros

His hair is flaxen, his torch is sputtering, and his journey to Thrace is described by the verb digreditur -- to depart, but also to deviate, digress. He has come because he was called by Orpheus, whose call can move trees and beasts. All goes wrong.

There's very little in the available sources about Hymen, who is usually cited not as part of a story, but in close connection with the hymenios, the song sung at the procession of the bride to the house of the groom (as in Catullus's famous Hymn to Hymen). I.e., the god and the hymn calling upon the god are in some sense intermingled.

The god and his song were to accompany the bride to the house of the groom -- a rite of passage, a moving across a threshold from daughter/virgin to wife/mother. Eurydice doesn't make it.

While it might be over-reading to attach too much importance to this failure of Hymen, there are some interesting elements in his mythological background.

In some versions, he is the son of Apollo and a Muse, either Calliope, Urania, or Terpsichore. This would make him at least Orpheus's half-brother, since Orpheus is sometimes believed to be the son of Calliope and Apollo.

At least one story links Hymen not to marriage -- the achievement of an intentional union -- but to a homoerotic state of distraction:

Hesiod tells the story in the Great Eoiae . . . Magnes was the son of Argus, the son of Phrixus and Perimele, Admetus' daughter, and lived in the region of Thessaly, in the land which men called after him Magnesia. He had a son of remarkable beauty, Hymenaeus. And when Apollo saw the boy, he was seized with love for him, and would not leave the house of Magnes. Then Hermes made designs on Apollo's herd of cattle which were grazing in the same place as the cattle of Admetus. First he cast upon the dogs which were guarding them a stupor and strangles, so that the dogs forgot the cows and lost the power of barking. Then he drove away twelve heifers and a hundred cows never yoked, and the bull who mounted the cows, fastening to the tail of each one brushwood to wipe out the footmarks of the cows. He drove them through the country of the Pelasgi, and Achaea in the land of Phthia, and through Locris, and Boeotia and Megaris, and thence into Peloponnesus by way of Corinth and Larissa, until he brought them to Tegea. From there he went on by the Lycaean mountains, and past Maenalus and what are called the watch-posts of Battus. (Antoninus Liberalis.)

We met Battus in Metamorphoses 2 - he's turned to stone for trying to outwit Hermes. Battus is a pointer, an index, who promises to point to the truth, and in so doing, proves himself a liar, and so, via divine wit, becomes a literal touchstone. Orpheus will soon speak of how he is not interested in fictions, but only in speaking truth. Nothing is quite what it seems in Ovid.

Hymen, the deliverer of brides to grooms, here seems to be yet another of Apollo's loves, which sets in motion the digression of what is proper to the god, his cattle stolen by the new-born Hermes. That subject is elaborated beautifully in the Hymn to Apollo.

Are there any successful marriages in Metamorphoses 10?

For further digressive pleasure, consider Monteverdi's Orfeo with Jordi Savall: