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

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:

Of wolf-bane and other poisonous substances

Ovid seems never to miss an opportunity to interweave some odd factoid, or bit of legend, into his narrative, introducing these elements seemingly at random. We recall in Book 4, after Perseus had put the head of Medusa on the ground, we are offered a fine description of how it turned living plants into coral, living rock.

In Metamorphoses 7, Ovid takes pains to describe organic modes of development at moments that don't seem to call for them. Here's Jason sowing the dragon's teeth, repeating Cadmus's famous act in Book 3, prior to the founding of Thebes. While Cadmus's warriors rose immediately from his toothy seeds, Ovid gives Jason's a more gradual, organic development:

 Then he took the dragon’s teeth from the bronze helmet, and scattered them over the turned earth. The soil softened the seeds that had been steeped in virulent poison, and they sprouted, and the teeth, freshly sown, produced new bodies. As an embryo takes on human form in the mother’s womb, and is fully developed there in every aspect, not emerging to the living air until it is complete, so when those shapes of men had been made in the bowels of the pregnant earth, they surged from the teeming soil, and, what is even more wonderful, clashed weapons, created with them. 7.123 ff

Later, as Medea arrives in Corinth, we learn in passing that the people of that city derived from rain-soaked mushrooms:

At last, the dragon’s wings brought her to Corinth, the ancient Ephyre, and its Pirenian spring. Here, tradition says, that in earliest times, human bodies sprang from fungi, swollen by rain. 7.391 ff

And when Medea is preparing to poison Theseus to secure the Athenian succession for her own son, we learn the origin of wolf-bane, from the slobber of the hound of hell:

Medea, seeking his destruction, prepared a mixture of poisonous aconite, she had brought with her from the coast of Scythia. This poison is said to have dripped from the teeth of Cerberus, the Echidnean dog. There is a dark cavern with a gaping mouth, and a path into the depths, up which Hercules, hero of Tiryns, dragged the dog, tied with steel chains, resisting and twisting its eyes away from the daylight and the shining rays. Cerberus, provoked to a rabid frenzy, filled all the air with his simultaneous three-headed howling, and spattered the green fields with white flecks of foam. These are supposed to have congealed and found food to multiply, gaining harmful strength from the rich soil. Because they are long-lived, springing from the hard rock, the country people call these shoots, of wolf-bane, ‘soil-less’ aconites. 7.405 ff

 These brief, gratuitous-seeming bits of lore and detail support the very Ovidian notion that underlying all appearances is change, and you neither know what something might turn into, nor can necessarily be sure what it came from. It certainly might come as news to some Corinthians that their ancestors were wet mushrooms. (Mycenae is also said to derive from  "μύκης" (mycēs) = mushroom.)

We might press further, and suggest that these three miniature tales of generation all share asexuality. Mushrooms grow from spores, which are more like bacteria than like seeds, and depend on the richness of surrounding soil to grow. They also do not need light. We might speculate that the same holds true for dragon's teeth and Cerberus' saliva (the description of which sounds awfully bacteriological) -- neither stores food nor needs the sun. Yet things emerge from them.

Are there further nuances? Are we, for example, to think to compare Jason's feat with that of Cadmus? Cadmus's tale is largely a denial of the womb -- after he fails to find his sister Europa, his city springs from males who instantly rise up, without the benefit of slow development (and his tale ends with Pentheus being killed by his mother). Jason's quest for the fleece succeeds in large part due to the mediation of Medea. It's worth noting that Cadmus founded a doomed city, while Jason, after returning with the fleece, went on to found nothing, and to lose his children to the very woman who "made" him what he was. Jason even receives his best-known epitaph from Euripides' witch:

 you, a coward, you will die a coward's death as you deserve,
struck on your head by a remnant of the wreck of the Argo
seeing a bitter end to your marriage to me.

Is there a further contrast between the slow generation of the warriors sown by Jason, and the inorganic use of natural materials drawn from all over the world, in Medea's magic, to do the most unnatural thing of all, to make the aged Aeson again young?

These might seem idle thoughts, but the second half of book 7, which approaches the center of the poem, concerns the marvelous generation of an entire people, thanks to the holy Aeacus (or Aeakos), son of Zeus and Aegina, and grandfather of Achilles. As we have observed, Ovid links his tales in strange ways.

The missing necklace

Polynices giving Eriphyle the necklace of Harmonia.

Attic red-figure oinochoe, ca. 450–440 BC. Found in Italy.

Something we didn't mention in talking about the curse of the House of Cadmus is the Necklace of Harmonia. It seems that everyone who ever wore that ornament ended rather badly. Here's the back story:

Hephaestus, blacksmith of the Olympian gods, discovered his wife, Aphrodite, goddess of love, having a sexual affair with Ares, the god of war. He became enraged and vowed to avenge himself for Aphrodite's infidelity by cursing any lineage of children resulting from the affair. Aphrodite bore a daughter, Harmonia, from Ares' seed. Harmonia grew up and was later betrothed to Cadmus of Thebes. Upon hearing of the royal engagement, Hephaestus presented Harmonia with an exquisite necklace and robe as a wedding gift. In some versions of the myth, only the necklace is given. In either case, the necklace was wrought by Hephaestus' own hand and was cursed to bring disaster to any who wore it.

So we have another God who's not happy with the House of Cadmus - Hephaestus. But how odd is it that Ovid never mentions the necklace, given that one of the daughters of Minyas actually tells the tale of the enlacement of Mars and Venus by the enraged husband.

Plus, it's got magical properties that would surely enhance a tale:

The magical necklace, referred to simply as the Necklace of Harmonia, allowed any woman wearing it to remain eternally young and beautiful. It thus became a much-coveted object amongst women of the House of Thebes in Greek myths. Although no solid description of the Necklace exists, it is usually described in ancient Greek passages as being of beautifully wrought gold, in the shape of two serpents whose open mouths formed a clasp, and inlaid with various jewels.

It's even stranger if you follow the necklace's history:

The Necklace then went to Harmonia's daughter Semele. She wore it the very day that Hera visited her and insinuated that her husband was not really Zeus. This led to Semele's destruction when she foolishly demanded that Zeus prove his identity by displaying himself in all his glory as the lord of heaven.

Several generations later, Queen Jocasta wore the legendary Necklace. It allowed her to retain her youth and beauty. Thus, after the death of her husband King Laius, she was able to marry her own son, Oedipus. When the truth about Oedipus was discovered, Jocasta committed suicide, and Oedipus tore out his own eyes. The descendants and relations of Oedipus all suffered various personal tragedies, as described in Sophocles' "Three Theban Plays": Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.

The necklace was a basic part of the Harmonia legend -- surely Ovid's readers knew the story. What could it mean that he chose not to avail himself of a ready-to-hand device that would have strung together elements of the House of Cadmus story like pearls? Like the "figure in the carpet" of Henry James, the necklace is made more present by its absence.

Drakon sacer

A few threads from yesterday's discussion. Here's a late Classical image (340 BC or so) of Cadmus confronting the serpent. The hero has a water pitcher in one hand, and a stone in the other. Behind Cadmus is Harmonia; to the right is Ismene, the nymph of the Ismenian spring which was guarded by the dragon:

As we have seen, Cadmus and Harmonia end their days as benign serpents -- their final transformation arriving like a teletyped confirmation from -- the gods? Nature? Fate? -- that his revised view of the serpent, i.e. that it was "sacer" - was correct. His metamorphosis gives his reading a sudden legitimacy that otherwise would still be open to question -- almost like an official stamp, or notarization.

As in a dream, his wish is fulfilled:

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.’

What's curious is that Cadmus is not wishing to become a serpent, but rather to know the truth -- "if" this is the case, "then" let this follow from it. In the world of Ovid, knowing the truth can be literally transformative, but unlike in, say, Plato, it's not necessarily a liberating experience.

Cadmus points up the engima that has haunted his house from the start - the imponderable relation of man, or woman, to "sacer"* - from Actaeon to Semele and even perhaps Narcissus and Echo, the encounter with what is "sacer" has proven to be destructive. It need not always end badly, as Acoetes' tale suggests, but for Pentheus, failure to apprehend Bacchus leads to a terrible transformation.

In this archaic image (550 BC), Cadmus is again fighting the serpent/dragon; behind the creature stands the god, Mars.

*Giorgio Agamben has written a challenging book about "homo sacer."

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?

Some genealogical help

The chart below might be useful in sorting out the relations among various tales Ovid tells in the first five books of Metamorphoses. Clicking the image will offer a more readable view.

Note the name "Agenor" Greek: Ἀγήνωρ, gen.: Ἀγήνορος) is said to mean "heroic, manly."("Belus" is linked to Baal.)


We see the line of Harmonia and Cadmus, son of Agenor, which seemed at first so promising, coming to a dead halt -- the critical moment was the rape of Europa -- not only was she lost to Agenor, but so were all his sons, thanks to his ultimatum ("find her or go into exile"). Interesting to note that Epaphus, son of Io, whom we last saw taunting Phaethon into doubting his paternity, became (with Memphis) the father of Libya, who with Poseidon came to be the mother of Agenor and Belus. Agenor and Beluw thus are genealogically linked to both Zeus and Poseidon.

Belus, the brother of Agenor, married Achiroe. Their line, via Danaus and Aegyptus, culminates in Perseus, hero of Book 5.

Perseus frees Andromeda (detail) by Piero di Cosimo

Afterthought: In this chart are the eponymous forebears of Ocean, Nile, Egypt, Ionia, Libya, Phoenicia, and Memphis, and the founders of Crete, Argos, Phocis, Thebes and Mycenae.

Serpent-born Man of Sorrows

Pentheus and the Maenads - Roman Fresco

It should be said early on that Book 3 of Metamorphoses is largely about coming to terms with the Dionysian. This strange, late-born god, a descendant of the line of Cadmus, turns out to be pivotal to the fate of the House of the son of Agenor, and to his mighty city, Thebes.

So as we read the tales that follow the scene of Cadmus and the Serpent, we should be thinking about how they relate to the central antagonism of the book. This antagonism comes out in thematic form with the appearance of Pentheus (around line 510), son of Echion, strongest of the Spartoi, and of Agave, daughter of Cadmus.

Immediately before we see Pentheus in action, Tiresias has warned him that his fate hangs upon how he responds to the advent of Bacchus/Liber:

unless you think him worthy to be done honour in your sanctuaries, you will be scattered, torn, in a thousand pieces, and stain your mother, and her sisters and the woods themselves with your blood. (Kline)

The name Pentheus as Dionysus and Tiresias both point out, means "Man of Sorrows" and derives from πένθος, pénthos, sorrow or grief, especially the grief caused by the death of a loved one; even his name destines him for tragedy. Pentheus's son, Menoeceus, fathered Jocasta, making Oedipus the great-great grandson of Echion, and great-great-great grandson of Cadmus.

Pentheus takes his orientation, his vision of the sacred, from his own origins -- origins which, if one has been paying attention, have been in question ever since Cadmus rather mindlessly followed the first pretty cow that came along. Here he confronts the masses of revelers, contrasting their unwarlike, babbling, feminine energy of the masses with the savage, solitary warlike "father" of Thebes, the dragon:

Remember, I beg you, from what roots you were created, and show the spirit of the serpent, who, though one alone, killed many. He died for his spring and pool, but you should conquer for your own glory! He put brave men to death, but you should make craven men run, and maintain the honour of your country! If it is Thebe’s fate to stand for only a short time, I wish her walls might be destroyed by men and siege engines. . .. But now Thebes will be taken by an unarmed boy, who takes no pleasure in fighting, or weapons, or the use of horses, but in myrrh-drenched hair, soft wreathes of leaves, and embroidered robes woven with gold.

We can see this speech as central to Book 3 - the moment when a character, confronted with something radically new, turns back to the sacred tale of the origins of his race and city with which the book began in order to affirm his own racial identity (show the spirit of the serpent), his nature, his way of being in the world.

If we see this as the core concern of Book 3, then the tales of Actaeon, Semele, Tiresias and Narcissus can be read as variations on a theme we could call "losing the self: dangerous encounters with the Other" -- even, or especially, when the Other turns out to be oneself:

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."

Footnotes re Cadmus, and Freud on Primal Words

A few follow-ups to today's discussion of Cadmus:

1. The sudden voice that speaks to Cadmus says:

“Quid, Agenore nate, peremptum
serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens.”

The second line is a perfect chiasmus. We might also note that spectare - to look at, gaze upon, was related to "spectator," and to speculum, the word for mirror. This book is full of mirrors, doubles, inverted reflections.

2. The line that finds Agenor, Cadmus's father, both "pius and impius" is:

facto pius et sceleratus eodem: : showing himself, by the same action, both pious and impious.

Which leads to (3), the note by Freud on words that can (must?) possess two opposite meanings:

3. Primal Words. I am surprised at how little of Freud's work is accessible online. His brief essay, based on a linguist's work on "primal words," is called "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words"(1910). Here's a very brief note on Freud's paper and on the linguist Carl Abel, whose work inspired it:

Carl Abel was a German linguist known for his research on Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic lexicology, which was published in his Einleitung in ein Aegyptischsemitisch indoeuropeanisches Wurzelwörterbuch (1886).

It was his theory of the "opposite meanings of primitive words" that interested Freud when, after alluding to the idea in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), he wrote an article on the subject ten years later, entitled "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words" (1910e). The theory appeared in Abel's article "Über den Gegensinn der Urworte," which appeared inSprachwissenschaftliche Abhandungen, published in Leipzig in 1885.

Basing his thesis on the fact that a Latin word such as sacer signified both "sacred" and "taboo," Abel proposed a theory of the way vocabulary evolves in languages. For Abel, a word in its primitive state can have opposite meanings, which are gradually distinguished through the progress of the rational intellect. "When learning to think about force, we have to separate it from weakness; to conceive of darkness, we must isolate it from light."

For Freud, primitive words mark a stage of symbolization that precedes the separation of opposites brought on by the reality principle. This cultural phenomenon is comparable to the dream process, which enables a representational content to assume a value as the expression of a desire and an antithetical desire. Consequently, the logic of the primary process is felt in a cultural formation as fully developed as language.

See also here. The paper is listed in the Freud bibliography here.

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.

Curtains

The book that explains ancient stages is A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by Sir William Smith and Charles Anthon, which, dating from 1857, is a free-to-download Google Book.

Click here for the part where is explained how a curtain apparently covered the painted scene on the back wall that closed the stage from behind. The curtain was let down and rolled up on a roller beneath the stage, thus discovering the scene from the top down.

However, the translators all seem to agree that Ovid is describing a painted curtain being raised to display figures depicted on it, in which case we are to imagine how the heads would appear first, followed by the bodies, then the feet. Anderson says the curtain would rise at the end of an act or of an entire play - in which case, Ovid might be playing with the idea that Cadmus, being pointedly excluded from the warriors' fight, is like a spectator at a play. But unlike that spectator, for whom the curtain rises at the end, this "curtain" of warriors rises at the beginning of his life's drama.

Here's More's version:

as he plowed the land,
took care to scatter in the furrowed soil
the dragon's teeth; a seed to raise up man.
'Tis marvelous but true, when this was done
the clods began to move. A spear-point first
appeared above the furrows, followed next
by helmet-covered heads, nodding their cones;
their shoulders, breasts and arms weighted with spears;
and largely grew the shielded crop of men.—
so is it in the joyful theaters
when the gay curtains, rolling from the floor,
are upward drawn until the scene is shown,—
it seems as if the figures rise to view:
first we behold their faces, then we see
their bodies, and their forms by slow degrees
appear before us on the painted cloth.