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

Numa's quest for the rule of wisdom

The story was told that the founders of Crotona and Sybaris both consulted the Oracle at Delphi at the same time and were given the choice of wealth or health; Archias the founder of Sybaris chose wealth, while Myskellos chose health. (1, 2)

With the deaths of Romulus/Quirinus and Hersilia/Hora, the foundations of the Roman "thing" are set. Romulus can depart, and become a new god with an Etruscan name, because the young state was strong enough not to depend upon the particular strengths and talents of a single leader.

Ovid has Mars speak that judgment:

Mars, removing his helmet, addressed the father of gods and men in these words: ‘The time has come, lord, to grant the reward (that you promised to me and your deserving grandson), since the Roman state is strong, on firm foundations, and does not depend on a single champion: free his spirit, and raising him from earth set him in the heavens.

'tempus adest, genitor, quoniam fundamine magno
res Romana valet nec praeside pendet ab uno,
praemia, (sunt promissa mihi dignoque nepoti)           810
solvere et ablatum terris inponere caelo.'

Ovid's re-vision of the war god, who removes his helmet (perhaps recalling Homer's tender description of Hector removing his helmet when it scared his young son) -- Mars' thoughtful and attentive memory, his care for his son, is bold but doesn't draw attention to itself. It's interesting that it is the king who is to be "freed" -- when the res Romana is strong enough, the people can let the king go -- a reversal of the usual vision of top-down power structures.

Book 15 begins with a question -- the first word, Quaeritur, underscores the state of uncertainty, rich with the potential for disaster, that comes with the power vacuum after the death of a king (it was in the air.) The question of succession is felt with urgency: Romulus is dead, who shall succeed, and how shall he lead?

Quaeritur interea qui tantae pondera molis
sustineat tantoque queat succedere regi:

This being a poem by Ovid, the quest for a ruler worthy to succeed Romulus is not simply a matter of history or of political science. Instead we get a richly suggestive antipasto involving Hercules, on his return from his 10th labor, visiting Croton, then returning in the dreams of Myscellus several hundred years later, prodding the young man to leave his home city and travel to Italy, where his city will shelter Pythagoras who in turn will host Numa. Dreams, signs, harbingers, become a strong motif in book 15.

If it seems somewhat unconventional to fashion the story of Numa by mixing the legend of the greatest action hero with the history of ancient Crotona we can say it has the strangeness of Ovidian storytelling.

Pythagoras

Instead of telling the succession of kings in the literal historical register of "first came x, followed by y," Ovid chooses to portray the event of Numa's reign as the moment when the provincial Sabine-Roman people acceded to the scientific and philosophical breadth and power of Pythagoras, the sage whose work in math and music bespoke a truly cosmopolitan consciousness. They were able to do this because the animo maiora capaci of Numa wanted to go beyond the particulars of Sabine customs, to discover universal laws upon which to base future Roman rule.

Mixing the question of political succession with the cattle drive of Hercules and the mind of Pythagoras is Ovid's way of telling not one story, but several at once. It gives the narrative a certain drunken swagger, yoking (as in Horace's callida iunctura) mythic energy to analytic insight. For Ovid, the quest for a good successor necessarily involves a questioning of "the known" -- one's own unique rules. What does it mean to go from one's narrow home, with its age-old ways and insular rejection of the larger world, to a broader realm in which an attentive mind can compare, contrast, and derive general norms from myriad particulars? To succeed in transitioning from a strong tribal leader to the enduring stability of the res Romana, one needs science, knowledge, a mind that has meditated upon the changing world and arrived at a sense of what abides, what matters and holds true not for the few, or the many, but for all.

Heracles fights Geryon, whose shield bears the image of Medusa

If Plato's philosopher wished to eject poets from the idea Republic, Ovid's ideal ruler seeks out a philosopher. The possibility of this occurs through moments of hospitality -- of Croton, who hosted Heracles, and of Myscellus's city Crotona, famed for taking in the self-imposed exile Pythagoras -- and foreshadowings -- Ovid has Crotona's founding driven both by Heracles; the legend of Myscellus invoked oracular pronouncements.

Hospitality here, as in the Odyssey, involves a civil openness to the other, broadening the mind by bringing it into contact with more of the world. The burden of the beginning of the last book of the Metamorphoses -- its quest -- is to prepare both the ruler and the people to be free. They first must accede to expansive human wisdom, which is what Numa, after broadening his views at Crotona, brought back to Rome. The quest for a stable structure of imperial rule, the poet suggests, finds solid ground not in war, but in the moment after Mars removes his helmet, when a people can choose: do they stubbornly reject all customs and races and religions who are not themselves and enslave themselves to some swaggering strong man, or do they find the philosophic latitude to "entertain" what's new and strange -- a path that can lead to enlightened freedom from kingship?

Political Science examines the conditions for what sort of governance can be had, by what sort of people, with what sort of leader. Ovid's "analysis" is oblique and fantastical -- it is, after all, a poem. In yoking the ultimate action hero to the wide-ranging mathematical and musical rigor of Pythagoras, the poet is bringing the farthest reaches of human power and human thought into proximity. The curiosity of Numa and the hospitality of Crotona are propitious augurs for the balance of knowledge and power necessary if Roman rule is to succeed.

The unheralded visitor: Somnus and Morpheus

There are three major scenes in Metamorphoses 11: the death of Orpheus, the tempest that destroys Ceyx's ship, and the house of Somnus. It is a measure of Ovid's confidence as a storyteller that he feels perfectly comfortable threading narratives so completely different in tone, in affect, in subject and style, even as he's sketching in the background of the Trojan War. (For some preliminary interpretive thoughts on what Ovid is up to, see the preceding post entitled History and Theater in Metamorphoses 11.)

Let's take a quick look at the third of these narratives, in which Iris visits the cave of Sleep:

Iris at the cave of Somnus

When the nymph entered and, with her hands, brushed aside the dreams in her way, the sacred place shone with the light of her robes. The god, hardly able to lift his eyes heavy with sleep, again and again, falling back, striking his nodding chin on his chest, at last shook himself free of his own influence and resting on an elbow asked her (for he knew her) why she had come, and she replied: 

‘Sleep, all things’ rest: Sleep, gentlest of the gods, the spirit’s peace, care flies from: who soothes the body wearied with toil, and readies it for fresh labours: Sleep, order a likeness, that mirrors his true form, and let it go, the image of King Ceyx, to Alcyone, in Trachin of Hercules, and depict a phantasm of the wreck. This, Juno commands.’ . . . (Kline)

Sleep does not wish to be disturbed; to wake is to undo sleep. Yet Iris's presence does that:

excussit tandem sibi se;
nevertheless he shook himself from himself

Excussit (<excutio) means to shake off, cast off, drive off, or to banish. To be Somnus is to be the negation of consciousness, to be most present when most absent. The moment he wakes, he vanishes, or becomes a kind of meta-somnus.

To this reader, the dependency of Somnus upon the condition of being Somnus is not unlike Alcyone's predicament, her all-consuming love for Ceyx. For Alcyone, the absence of Ceyx (dramatized through the gradual distancing of his ship) is a negation of her proper self. Alone, her untethered imagination is overrun by anxious and fearful images. When she learns, via the performance of Morpheus in her dream, of her husband's death, she at once says, 'nulla est Alcyone, nulla est':

‘Alcyone is nothing, is nothing: she has died together with her Ceyx.

Like Somnus awakening, she is bereft of what made her herself. She is nothing, and yet, like him, comments upon her own undoing.

Somnus returns to himself after waking (excitat: call out, summon forth, wake, arouse) Morpheus to act out the part of Ceyx informing Alcyone that he's actually dead. Morpheus goes beyond that simple role, though, as he strives to assure Alcyone that he really, really is Ceyx:

Non haec tibi nuntiat auctor  

ambiguus, non ista vagis rumoribus audis:
ipse ego fata tibi praesens mea naufragus edo.

No dubious author announces this news to you, nor do you hear it as a vague report: I myself, drowned, as you see me before you, tell my fate.

Attentive readers will note that in describing Ceyx's death, Morpheus copies the death of Orpheus:

My lips, calling helplessly on your name, drank the waves.

And in denying that his words are but vagis rumoribus, he's pretending to be a reliable author, not a murmur from the House of Rumor (Fama), which we'll visit in Book 12.

As often, Ovid's digressive fables turn back upon the poem they form part of. Like the waking Somnus, the fable of Morpheus theatrically performing the role of the veritable Ceyx telling the true story of his own death brings us once again to the questions of authorship and authority, true and false images, dream perceptions and waking visions that Ovid believes are germane to the status of any story, mythological or historical.

Going on the hypothesis that Ovid is concerned with the question "what does history look like?" at least allows us to see why a poem that seems so rich in narrative styles might raise the epistemological complications that come with suspending the border between perception and apperception, dreams and waking visions, unreliable rumors and ambiguous speech. As he notes, no clear boundary can be found between the realm of Somnus and the waking world of brilliant light -- no doors, no watchdogs, no geese, no grating hinges. The threshold can only be crossed when one cannot detect the crossing. One arrives at the couch of Somnus unheralded.

                                There is no noyse at all
Of waking dogge, nor gagling goose more waker than the hound
To hinder sleepe. Of beast ne wyld ne tame there is no sound.
No bowghes are stird with blastes of wynd, no noyse of tatling toong
Of man or woman ever yit within that bower roong.
Dumb quiet dwelleth there. Yit from the Roches foote dooth go
The ryver of forgetfulnesse, which ronneth trickling so
Uppon the little pebble stones which in the channell lye,
That unto sleepe a great deale more it dooth provoke thereby.
Before the entry of the Cave, there growes of Poppye store,
With seeded heades, and other weedes innumerable more,
Out of the milkye jewce of which the night dooth gather sleepes,
And over all the shadowed earth with dankish deawe them dreepes.
Bycause the craking hindges of the doore no noyse should make,
There is no doore in all the house, nor porter at the gate. (Golding trans.)

John Waterhouse: Sleep and his Half-Brother Death

Orpheus in Hades: Myth of death, death of myth

As Metamorphoses 10 begins, Ovid makes clear that Orpheus is putting aside all the wiles of rhetoric when he makes his plea to Hades:

‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which, all, who are created mortal, descend; if you allow me, and it is lawful, to set aside the fictions of idle tongues, and speak the truth."

Speaking plainly, he makes these assertions:

• Death will claim all, including Eurydice.
• Love overcame me -- I can't accept her death.
• Did Love not overcame Hades when he carried off Proserpina? 
• I won't return to life without her.

Even as he claims to be speaking without embellishment, the singer is accompanying himself on the lyre, and casts a deep spell. The land of death seems to experience a second death, a stasis new to that realm:

Talia dicentem nervosque ad verba moventem
exsangues flebant animae; nec Tantalus undam
captavit refugam, stupuitque Ixionis orbis,
nec carpsere iecur volucres, urnisque vacarunt
Belides, inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo.

The bloodless spirits wept as he spoke, accompanying his words with the music. Tantalus did not reach for the ever-retreating water: Ixion’s wheel was stilled: the vultures did not pluck at Tityus’s liver: the Belides, the daughters of Danaüs, left their water jars: and you, Sisyphus, perched there, on your rock. 

The stillness that comes over, the immobilizing hush, is the contemplative moment, the timeless mode of the lyric. Ovid is situating lyric poetry in a close relationship with amor and mors.  For as long as Orpheus sings of love, the hard line between life and death, time itself, seems to be suspended. Myrrha will later ask to be situated in such a state. "Deny me both life and death," she begs.

. . . mihi vitamque necemque negate  (10.486)

Orpheus says he's just speaking the truth:

All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later, we hasten home. Here we are all bound, this is our final abode, and you hold the longest reign over the human race.

Yet the very story he alludes to, sung by Calliope in Book 5, concerns a negotiation in which Hades submits to an arrangement whereby Proserpina will never finally be his. Is Orpheus simply stating a fact, as he claims, or is this an example of what rhetoricians call captatio benevolentiae -- the "buttering up" that turns the ear of an audience (or judge) into a receptive, well-disposed receptacle? Fact? Or "captivating" flattery?

Why does Orpheus, while he's pretending to dispense with lies, readily concede the finality of death from the moment he opens his mouth, even as he denies that same finality when he says he is suspended upon an "if"?

if the story of that rape in ancient times is not a lie, you also were wedded by Amor.

Book 10, then, in which Ovid and Orpheus and Venus will have much to say about love, death, and art, finds the poet/lover in direct confrontation with death. Orpheus' claim to be speaking mere truth is complicated first by the question, unanswered, of whether Calliope's story is a lie. We really can't say we possess truth if we remain in suspense about whether something is a lie. When a Muse remembers, does she remember whether her story took place, or is she just remembering the story?

And even as he states the "fact" that death is that country from whose bourne no traveler returns, the poet is uttering a song of such charm that it halts the business of death in its tracks. Whatever else Orpheus's lyrics do, they move. They move trees, beasts, hearts. The quest of Orpheus is to find out whether the boundary between life and death can be set in motion, mis en jeu. The challenge turns out to be less determining that it moves than resisting the impulse to verify its motion.