HAC Arethusa TENUS (Met. 5.642)

Arethusa is a symbol who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is transferred from Elis to Sicily and transformed into a Romanized figure. This chapter demonstrates how Ovid uses Arethusa’s geographical transition to thematize her transposition into a different cultural context—that of Italy, as well as a new generic frame—that of epic. The chapter explores how the delineation of space in the Arethusa story and the altering of her identity contribute to the narrative of Met. 5, as well as to the broader poetic mapping of the ever-changing world in the Metamorphoses. Ovid activates in the spatial context of Arethusa’s story the possibilities offered by Arethusa’s past in colonial myths and in pastoral poetry in order to renew the poetics of epic. The story of Arethusa’s and Alpheus’ travel was traditionally deployed in ancient geographical treatises and in the mapping of the world stemming from colonialism. Ovid picks up Arethusa’s association with migration and her metapoetic symbolism to renew the epic genre, by systematically mapping out Arethusa’s travel.

Introduction

At the end of the extended account of Phaethon’s disastrous celestial journey (Met. 1.750–2.400), the hapless charioteer’s family and friends give way to wildly expressive grief. Phaethon’s father, the Sun, refuses to shine (2.329–32); his mother, Clymene, wanders over the world looking for his scattered bones until she finds his tomb (made by some helpful nymphs, 2.325–8) at which to mourn ...

Latent Transformations

In Ovid’s stories one finds metamorphoses where the outward appearance is transformed while the inner being remains the same. This chapter argues that the reverse can occasionally be detected in the poetic language: when an expression is repeated, the appearance (word) is the same while the inner being (meaning) is not. In three cases, from the stories of Echo, Pygmalion, and the plague in Aegina, it is shown that the hidden transformations are subtly signalled by the poet. In the first and third cases, the poet’s hints to the readers have been overlooked; as a result, lines containing one or both of the expressions have been considered interpolations by some critics. Arguments are presented in support of their authenticity, and it is suggested that textual problems which may have arisen from early readers’ failure to catch a hint by the poet can be eliminated in two cases by means of conjectures rather than by bracketing entire lines. In the third case the meaning of a repeated expression undergoes a transformation by reappearing in a different generic surrounding.

Ovid’s Dream, or, Byblis and the Circle of Metamorphoses

Chapter 5 explores the role played by the Byblis episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a form of authorial self-portrait. Byblis, placed at what this paper shows to be the poem’s chronological centre, is both the work’s first long-form writer and its first, and only, dreamer of fully human dreams. Where Morpheus in the Metamorphoses’ House of Sleep may serve as model for the poet as shape-shifter and creator, Byblis represents the intimate connection between creativity and self-deception in Ovid’s poetic programme. Through Byblis, this paper argues, Ovid comes to recapitulate Latin literature’s ‘primal scene of instruction’, the Hesiodic and Callimachean dream of Homer that opens Ennius’ Annales. The metempsychotic dimension of Ovid’s representation of his own poetic project, this paper concludes, has important affinities with the circular form of the self-perpetuating fountain into which Byblis is transformed, and with the anthropocentric dreams that make possible Byblis’ metamorphosis, and the circle of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a whole.

Gender and Transformation

Ovid often displays a remarkable attention to the psychology of female actors, but the question is to what extent this attention can be regarded as truly sympathetic and empathetic, and to what extent it is objectifying. Rather than treating this question in one or a few passages, this chapter approaches the problem systematically. The chapter explores the rules which seem to apply to gender through transformation, including those instances that are actually metamorphosis of gender. Thus, not only a well-known example like Teiresias but a number of others are summoned to detail how Ovid does in a variety of ways sensitively represent female subjectivity—but only in negative contexts. Metamorphosis of gender goes almost exclusively in one direction. The chapter suggests the possibility of holding in tension both sympathy and objectification, arguing that there is a disproportionate emphasis on women’s (as opposed to men’s) experience of metamorphosis and that this is combined with the power relations which make certain kinds of metamorphosis a negatively feminizing process.

Narcissus Revisited

Chapter 10 brings the transforming force of reading Ovid’s epic up to the present, by offering a view of the differences in the scholarly situation encountered by two researchers investigating the Narcissus theme at the distance of half-a-century—one in the 1960s, the other in the 2010s. The first part of the chapter gives a view of the scholarly conditions under which Vinge prepared her celebrated work on the Narcissus theme in the mid-1960s. In the second part, Johansson presents an overview of scholarly investigations of the Narcissus theme over the fifty years since the publication of Vinge’s study. The theoretical advances in literary studies as well as the growth of research on the Narcissus tradition has made it difficult to grasp the entire history of the theme. In the resulting divergence of perspectives, there arises an implicit disagreement not only about the meaning of Narcissus, but also about how Narcissus is conceptualized in the first place.

The Metamorphoses of Sin

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the encyclopedia of pagan mythology for later centuries, was also pressed into the service of Christian theology. This chapter shows how three Christian poets—Prudentius, Dante, and John Milton—reworked metamorphosis into a snake, each in his own specific way. The central text is Metamorphoses 4.569–603, where Cadmus and his wife Harmonia are transformed into snakes in fulfilment of a supernatural prophecy, the ultimate consequence of Cadmus’ slaying of the serpent of Mars on the site of Thebes. While the metamorphosed Cadmus falls physically to the ground, in the Christian authors serpentine metamorphosis signifies a theological and spiritual fall. In the late fourth century, Prudentius projects the transformation on to Satan, while Dante in the early fourteenth century exploits Ovidian metamorphosis into snakes for the punishment of sinners in Inferno. Milton, a reader of both Prudentius and Dante, applies the metamorphosis to Satan, but in a very different way from Prudentius. Each of these Christian poets explores the motif of serpentine metamorphosis in their own language, and within their own culture. The demonic repetition of falls into serpentine metamorphosis also figures the repetitive migration of the Ovidian motif through the Christian centuries.

Naso Deus

Chapter 6 comments on the rarely observed telestich at Met. 1.452–5, spelling out the noun Naso. The chapter posits that it ought to be connected to the acrostic deus, noted by Isidor Hilberg at 1.29–32. Together, the two so-named intexts form the authorial signature Naso deus, which resembles Ovid’s references to himself elsewhere in his poetry and invites a number of playful interpretations ranging from the metapoetic to the political. By including intexts in his poetry, Ovid inserts himself into a tradition of literary sophistication that reaches back ultimately to the Hellenistic era. Yet Ovid’s signature also highlights the poet’s role as the demiurge who created the cosmos of the Metamorphoses. The deus acrostic occurs in a passage describing the formation of the universe, and the Naso telestich marks the famous Primus amor Phoebi episode, which narrates the world’s transformation into a truly Ovidian realm of illicit sexual affairs between humans and gods. For this literary creation, the signature suggests, Ovid can claim the title of Naso deus.

Between a Rock and a Hard Race

Chapter 3 discusses Deucalion and Pyrrha’s regeneration of the human race after the destruction of the flood. The chapter links the hermeneutic ‘transformation’ of stones to bones both to a thematic interest within the narrative in the relationship of the new future to its Iron Age past, and to the readers’ experience of the text before them. The key to perceiving the connections between the content and the real-world presence of Ovid’s text is the phenomenon of sexual difference. Within the narrative, the opposition between male and female encodes the difference between an ordered, stable future and a rebellious past. But this tension also involves the relationship between the new forms imposed on the world and the subsistence of a material stratum that implies sameness. New transformations, like Deucalion’s of bones to stones, struggle to reconfigure reality, while the readings of a Pyrrha threaten to erase this difference. The chapter suggests that Ovid’s foregrounding of gender as a formal aspect of his text helps to create a parallelism between the experience of the reader and the hermeneutic challenges that play out within the story.

The Bavarian Commentary and the Beginning of the Medieval Reception of the Metamorphoses

This chapter explores the earliest material witnesses to the medieval reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and shows what they can tell us about what attracted the medieval reader to Ovid’s great work. The earliest witnesses consist of two families of freestanding commentaries, both of which seem to stem from Bavaria around the year 1100. This chapter demonstrates how the commentaries make use of several different interpretative strategies. These include, of course, explanations focussed on the mythological background, but also comments on the grammar and vocabulary of the Metamorphoses, as well as explanations focussing on neoplatonic cosmography and Euhemeristic interpretations of Ovid’s work. As this is the first documented stage of adapting, and in that sense transforming, Ovid’s Metamorphoses for later readers, the categories of commentary discerned also lay the foundation for relating and understanding later stages of the tradition.