Why Read the Classics? (5 page)

[1978]

This is Ovid at the beginning of the
Metamorphoses
, introducing us to the world of the celestial gods. He begins by bringing us so close to that world as to make it identical to the Rome of his day in terms of its urban topography, its class divisions, its local customs (the
clientes
calling in every day), and even in terms of religion: the gods themselves have their own Penates in the houses they inhabit, which means that the lords of the heavens and the earth in turn pay homage to their own little domestic gods.

Providing such a close-up does not necessarily mean diminishing or ironising: this is a universe in which space is densely packed with forms which constantly swap size and nature, while the flow of time is continually filled by a proliferation of tales and cycles of tales. Earthly forms and stories repeat heavenly ones, but both intertwine around each other in a double spiral. This contiguity between gods and humans—who are related to the gods and are the objects of their compulsive desires—is one of the
dominant themes of the
Metamorphoses
, but this is simply a specific instance of the contiguity that exists between all the figures and forms of the existing world, whether anthropomorphic or otherwise. The fauna and flora, the mineral world and the firmament encompass within their common substance that collection of corporeal, psychological and moral qualities which we usually consider human.

The poetry of the
Metamorphoses
is rooted particularly in these blurred confines between different worlds, and as early as Book 2 offers an extraordinary example of this in the myth of Phaethon who dares to take over the reins of the Sun’s chariot. In this episode the heavens appear both as unconfined space, abstract geometry, and at the same time as the scene of a human adventure recounted with such detailed precision that we never lose the thread even for a moment, as it carries our emotional involvement to fever pitch.

It is not just Ovid’s precision in the most concrete particulars, such as the movement of the chariot which swerves and bounces because of its unusually light load, or the emotions of the young, unskilled charioteer, but also his exactness in the visualisation of unearthly forms such as the map of the heavens. It should be said straight away that this exactness is only an illusion: the contradictory details communicate their powerful spell both if taken one by one and as a general narrative effect, but they can never combine to form a totally consistent vision. The sky is a sphere criss-crossed by ascending and descending roads which are recognisable by their rutted wheeltracks, but at the same time this sphere is whirling vertiginously in the opposite direction to the Sun’s chariot; it is suspended at a dizzying height above the lands and seas which can be seen down in the distance; at one point it appears as an overarching vault at whose highest point the stars are fixed; at another it is like a bridge supporting the chariot over the void causing Phaethon to be equally terrified of both continuing his journey and turning back (‘Quid faciat? Multum caeli post terga relictum / ante oculos plus est. Animo metitur utrumque.’ (What should he do? A huge tract of sky was already behind him, but in front of him lay even more. Mentally he measured up both.)); it is empty and deserted (it is not the city-like sky of Book 1, hence Apollo asks: ‘Maybe you thought that here there were sacred woods and cities of gods and temples dripping with rich gifts?’), populated only by fierce beasts which are but
simulacra
, the shapes of the constellations, but no less menacing for that; in it an oblique track is just about visible, half-way up the ascent, which avoids both the southern and
northern pole, but if you lose the track and stray amongst the steep precipices you end up going underneath the Moon, singeing the clouds and setting fire to the Earth.

After this ride through the heavens suspended over the void, which is the most evocative part of the tale, comes the awesome description of the Earth burning, the sea boiling with the bodies of seals floating belly-upwards on its surface — one of the classic pages of Ovid the poet of catastrophe — which acts as a sequel to the flood in Book 1. All the waters gather around
Alma Tellus
, Mother Earth. The dried-up springs try to return to hide in the dark womb of the mother (‘fontes / qui se condiderant in opacae viscera matris …’). And the Earth, with her hair singed and her eyes shot through with cinders, pleads with Jupiter in a frail voice which sticks in her parched throat, warning him that if the poles catch fire, then the palaces of the gods will soon come crashing down. (But are these the Earth’s poles or those of the heavens? There is also talk of the axis of the Earth which Atlas can no longer support because it is red hot. But the poles in Ovid’s time were an astronomical notion, and in any case the next line is quite specific: ‘regia caeli’ (the palace of the heavens). So the palace of the gods was really up in the heavens? Why then did Apollo deny this, and why did Phaethon not encounter it on his journey? In any case these contradictions are not exclusive to Ovid; in Virgil too, as well as in the other canonical poets of antiquity, it is difficult for us to gain a proper idea of how the ancients really ‘saw’ the world.)

The episode culminates with the shattering of the Sun’s chariot when it is struck by Jove’s thunderbolt in an explosion of scattered fragments: ‘Illic frena iacent, illic temone revulsus / axis, in hac radii fractarum parte rotarum …’ (There lie the reins, there the axle ripped away from its pole, and further away lie the spokes of the shattered wheels). (This is not the only traffic accident in the
Metamorphoses:
another driver who goes off the road at full speed is Hippolytus in the last book of the poem, where the wealth of detail in recounting the accident is more anatomical than mechanical, providing gory particulars of his innards splitting open and his limbs scattering far and wide.)

The interpenetration between gods, humans and nature implies not a hierarchical order but an intricate system of interrelations in which every level may influence the other two, though to varying extents. In Ovid, myth is the field of tension where these forces clash and balance each other out. Everything depends on the tone in which the myth is narrated:
sometimes the gods themselves recount the myth in which they have played a key part, as moral examples to warn mortals; at other times humans use these same myths as an argument or challenge against the gods, as do the Pierides or Arachne. Or again there are myths which the gods love to hear recounted and others they would prefer were never mentioned. The daughters of Pierius know a version of the attack of the Titans on Olympus, a version from the Giants’ side, full of the fear of the gods who are put to flight (Book 5). They recount it after challenging the Muses in the art of narration, and the Muses respond with another series of myths which re-establish the authority of the Olympians; they then punish the Pierides by turning them into magpies. The challenge to the gods implies an irreverent or blasphemous intention in the tale: Arachne the weaver challenges Minerva in the art of the loom and depicts in a tapestry the sins of the lustful gods (Book 6).

The technical precision with which Ovid describes the working of the looms in this contest might suggest a possible identification of the poet’s work with the weaving of a tapestry of multicoloured threads. But with which tapestry does his text identify? Pallas-Minerva’s, where four divine punishments exacted on mortals who have challenged the gods are portrayed in minute scenes in the four corners of the tapestry, framed by olive leaves, while the central scene depicts the great Olympian figures with their traditional attributes? Or with Arachne’s, in which the insidious seductions of Jupiter, Neptune and Apollo, which Ovid had already recounted in some detail, reappear like sarcastic emblems amidst garlands of flowers and wreaths of ivy (each with the addition of some precious details: Europa, for instance, while being transported across the sea on the back of the bull, carefully lifts her feet so as not to get them wet: ‘ … tactumque vereri / adsilientis aquae timidasque reducere plantas’ (afraid of her feet being splashed by the surging waves and drawing up her fearful heels))?

The answer is with neither of them. In the great array of myths which constitute the whole poem, the myth of Pallas and Arachne seems to contain in turn two scaled-down selections in the tapestries, pointing in ideologically opposed directions: one to instil a sacred fear, the other inciting towards irreverence and moral relativity. But it would be a mistake for anyone to infer from this that the whole poem has to be read either in the first way — because Arachne’s challenge is cruelly punished — or in the second — on the grounds that the poetry sides with the guilty victim. The
Metamorphoses
aim to portray the entirety of narratable tales that have been
handed down by literature with all the force of imagery and meaning that tradition can convey, without privileging — as is only correct, according to the ambiguity typical of myth — any particular reading. Only by accepting into his poem all the tales and the intentions behind them which flow in every direction, pushing and shoving to squeeze them into the ordered ranks of the epic’s hexameters, only in this way will the poet be sure of not serving a partial design but the living multiplicity that does not exclude any known or unknown god.

There is a case of a new, foreign god, not easily recognisable as such, a scandalous god at odds with all models of beauty and virtue, who is fully recorded in the
Metamorphoses:
Bacchus-Dionysus. It is his orgiastic cult which the devotees of Minerva (the daughters of Minyas) refuse to attend as they continue to weave and card wool on the days of the Bacchic festival, alleviating their long labours with story-telling. Here then is another use of stories, which is justified in secular terms as pure enjoyment (‘quod tempora longa videri / non sinat’ (to prevent time from seeming to drag)) and as an aid to productivity (‘utile opus manuum vario sermone levemus’ (we will lighten the useful labour of our hands with a variety of stories)), but which is still appropriately associated with Minerva, the ‘melior dea’ (superior goddess) for those hard-working girls who are revolted by the orgies and excesses of the cult of Dionysus which had swept into Greece after conquering the Orient.

It is clear that the art of narrating, so beloved by weavers, has a link with the cult of Pallas Athene. We saw it with Arachne, who was turned into a spider for having spurned the goddess; but we also see it in the opposite case, of an excessive cult of Pallas, which leads to a neglect of the other gods. So even the daughters of Minyas (Book 4), guilty inasmuch as they are overweening in their sense of virtue, and too exclusive in their devotion to ‘intempestiva Minerva’ (untimely Minerva), will also undergo a horrendous punishment, being turned into bats by the god who only recognises inebriation, not work, and who listens not to tales but to the obscure chant which overwhelms the mind. So as not to be turned into a bat as well, Ovid is careful to leave every door of his poem open to the gods of the past, present and future, indigenous and foreign gods, and gods of the Orient which in a world beyond Greece rubs shoulders with the world of fables, as well as to Augustus’ restoration of Roman religion which is intimately bound up with the political and intellectual life of his own times. But the poet will not manage to convince the god of executive
power closest to him, Augustus, who will turn a poet who wanted to make everything omnipresent and near to hand, into an exile for ever, an inhabitant of a remote world.

From the Orient (‘in some ancestor of
The Arabian Nights’
says Wilkinson) comes the romantic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (which one of the daughters of Minyas chooses from a list of others from the same mysterious source), with the hole providing access for whispered words but not kisses, with the night bathed in moonlight beneath the white mulberry tree, a tale which will transmit its echoes to a midsummer night in Elizabethan England.

From the Orient via an Alexandrian romance Ovid derives the technique for expanding the space inside the work, through tales contained within other tales, which here heightens the impression of a packed, teeming, tangled space. Such is the forest in which a boar hunt brings together the destinies of several illustrious heroes (Book 8), not far from the whirlpool of Achelous, which blocks the path home of those returning from the hunt. They are then offered hospitality in the river-god’s dwelling, which thus is both their obstacle and refuge, a pause in the action, an opportunity for stories and reflection. Since one of the hunters there is Theseus, curious as always to find out the origin of everything he sees, as well as Pirithous the insolent unbeliever (‘deorum / spretor erat mentisque ferox’ (he was a spurner of the gods, and fiercely proud in spirit)), the river-god feels encouraged to tell tales of marvellous metamorphoses, and is then imitated by his guests. In this way new layers of stories continually join together in the
Metamorphoses
, like shells which eventually might produce a pearl: the pearl in this case being the humble idyll of Baucis and Philemon which contains a whole world of minute detail and a completely different rhythm.

It has to be said that Ovid only rarely avails himself of these structural complexities: the passion which dominates his compositional skills is not systematic organisation but accumulation, and this has to be combined with variations in point of view, and changes in rhythm. This is why when Mercury starts to recount the metamorphosis of the nymph Syrinx into a clump of reeds, to put Argus to sleep whose hundred eyelids never all close together, his narration is partly given in direct speech, and partly shortened into a single sentence, because the rest of the story is left; in suspension; the god falls silent as soon as he sees that all the eyes of Argus have succumbed to sleep.