Why Read the Classics? (6 page)

The
Metamorphoses
is the poem of rapidity: each episode has to follow another in a relentless rhythm, to strike our imagination, each image must overlay another one, and thus acquire density before disappearing. It is the same principle as cinematography: each line like each photogram must be full of visual stimuli in continuous movement.
Horror vacui
dominates both the poem’s time and space. In page after page the verbs are all in the present; everything happening before our eyes; new events quickly follow on; all distance is abolished. And when Ovid feels the need to change rhythm, the first thing he does is not to change the tense but the person of the verb: he moves from third to second person, in other words he introduces the person of whom he is about to talk, by addressing him directly in the second person singular: ‘Te quoque mutatum torvo, Neptune, iuvenco’ (You too, Neptune, now changed into a fierce-looking ox). Not only is the present there in the verb tense, but the character’s actual presence is evoked in this way. Even when the verbs are in the past, the vocative effects a sudden sense of immediacy. This procedure is often adopted when several subjects carry out parallel actions, to avoid the monotony of lists. If he has spoken of Tityus in the third person, Tantalus and Sisyphus are addressed directly with the vocative ‘tu’. Even plants can be addressed in the second person (‘Vos quoque, flexipedes hederae, venistis…’ (You too came, tendril-trailing ivy), and no wonder, especially when these are plants which move like people and come running to the sound of Orpheus, now widowed, playing the lyre, clustering round him in a teeming array of Mediterranean flora (Book 10). There are also times and the episode just mentioned is one of them — when the pace of narrative has to slow down, switch to a calmer rhythm, give the feeling of time being suspended, almost veiled in the distance. What does Ovid do at such times? To make it clear that the narrative is in no hurry, he stops to dwell on the smallest details. For instance: Baucis and Philemon welcome into their humble cottage the unknown visitors, the two gods. ‘… Mensae sed erat pes tertius impar: / testa parem fecit; quae postquam subdita clivum / sustulit, aequatam mentae tersere virentes…’ (But one of the three legs of the table was too short. She put a piece of pottery under it to make it level. As soon as this had fixed the sloping surface, they cleaned the table surface with green mintleaves. On top they then put olives of both colours, sacred to the virgin Minerva, and autumnal cherries preserved in wine lees, and endives and radishes and a round of cheese, and eggs that had been cooked
and turned gently in ashes that were not too hot; everything was served in terracotta dishes…) (Book 8).

It is by continuing to add to the detail of the picture that Ovid obtains an effect of rarefaction and pause. His instinct is always to add, never to take away; to go for greater and greater detail, never to shade off into vagueness—a procedure which produces differing effects depending on the tone, which is here restrained and in harmony with the humble ambience, but elsewhere is excited, impatient to saturate the marvellous elements of the tale with realistic observation of natural phenomena. For instance, that moment when Perseus is about to fight with the sea monster with its back encrusted with shells, and he rests Medusa’s head, bristling with serpents, face-down on a rock, but only after spreading a layer of seaweed and underwater reeds so that the head should not suffer contact with the rough surface of the sand. Seeing the reeds turn to stone on contact with the Medusa, the Nymphs play at making other reeds suffer the same fate: this is how coral is born, which though soft underneath the water becomes petrified on contact with the air. So Ovid concludes the fabulous adventure on a note of etiological legend, dictated by his taste for nature’s more bizarre forms.

A law of maximum internal economy dominates this poem which apparently seems devoted to unrestrained expansion. It is an economy particular to metamorphosis, which demands that the new forms recuperate as much as possible of the material of the old forms. After the flood, in the transformation of the stones into human beings (Book 1), ‘if there was in the stones a part that was damp with moisture, or earthy, this became part of the body; whatever was solid and inflexible changed into bones; what had been veins in the rock stayed the same, including the name.’ Here the economy extends even to the name (vein): ‘quae modo vena fuit, sub eodem nomine mansit.’ Daphne’s most striking attribute (Book 1) is her hair dishevelled in the wind (so much so that Apollo’s first thought on seeing her is ‘What would that hair be like when properly combed’ —‘Spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos / et “Quid si comantur?” ait…’ (He gazes at her unadorned lock hanging down around her neck, and says to himself: ‘What would that hair be like when properly combed?’)), and she is already predisposed by the sinuous lines of her flight to a vegetable metamorphosis: ‘in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt; / pes modo tarn velox pigris radicibus haeret’ (her hair turns into foliage, her arms into branches; her foot once so swift now sticks to the ground with
immovable roots). Cyane (Book 5) merely carries to its logical conclusion her dissolving into tears (‘lacrimisque absumitur omnis’ (and she is completely consumed by her own tears)) until she evaporates into the pool whose nymph she once had been. And the Lycian peasants (Book 6), who hurl abuse and pollute the lake by stirring up its mud when wandering Latona wants to slake the thirst of her newborn twins, were already not too far from the frogs into which a just punishment changes them: all that has to happen is for the neck to disappear, the shoulders to join with the head, the back turn green and the belly assume an off-white colour.

This technique of metamorphosis has been studied by Sceglov in an extremely lucid and persuasive essay. ‘All these transformations’, says Sceglov, ‘concern the distinctive physical and spatial characteristics which Ovid usually highlights even in elements not subject to metamorphosis (“hard rock”, “long body”, “curved back”) … Thanks to his knowledge of the properties of things, the poet provides the shortest route for the metamorphosis, because he knows in advance what man has in common with dolphins, as well as what he lacks compared to them, and what they lack compared to him. The essential point is that since he portrays the whole world as a system made up of elementary components, the process of transformation — this most unlikely and fantastic phenomenon — is reduced to a sequence of quite simple processes. The event is no longer represented as a fairytale but rather as a collection of everyday, realistic facts (growing, diminishing, hardening, softening, curving, straightening, joining, separating etc.).’

Ovid’s writing, as described by Sceglov, appears to contain within itself the model, or at least the programme, for Robbe-Grillet at his most cold and rigorous. Of course such a description does not exhaust everything we can find in Ovid. But the important point is that this way of portraying (animate and inanimate) objects
objectively
, ‘as different combinations of a relatively small number of basic, very simple elements’ sums up exactly the only incontrovertible philosophy in the poem, namely ‘that of the unity and inter-connectedness of everything that exists in the world, both things and living creatures’.

Setting out his cosmogony in the first book and his profession of faith in Pythagoras in the last, Ovid clearly wanted to provide this natural philosophy with a theoretical basis, perhaps to rival the by now remote Lucretius. There has been considerable discussion as to the weight one should attach to these professions of faith, but probably the only thing that
matters is the poetic consistency of the manner in which Ovid portrays and narrates his world: namely this swarming and intertwining of events that are often similar but are always different, in which the continuity and mobility of everything is celebrated.

Before he has even finished the chapter on the origins of the world and its early catastrophes, Ovid is already embarking on the series of love affairs that the gods have with nymphs or mortal girls. There are several constants in the love stories (which mostly occupy the liveliest part of the poem, the first eleven books): as Bernardini has shown they involve love at first sight, overwhelming desire, no psychological complications, and demand an immediate resolution. And since the desired creature usually refuses and flees, the motif of the chase through the woods constantly recurs; metamorphosis can occur at different times, either before (the seducer’s disguise), during (the pursued maiden’s escape), or afterwards (punishment inflicted by another jealous deity on the seduced girl).

Compared with the constant pressure of male desire, the instances of female initiative in love are rather rare; but to compensate, these are usually more complex desires, not sudden whims but real passions, which involve greater psychological richness (Venus in love with Adonis), often contain a more morbid erotic element (the nymph Salmacis who when she sexually embraces Hermaphroditus blends into a bisexual creature), and in some cases are totally illicit, incestuous passions (such as the tragic characters Myrrha and Byblis: the way in which the latter realises her desire for her brother, through a revelatory but upsetting dream, is one of the finest psychological passages in Ovid), or tales of homosexual love (Iphys), or of wicked jealousy (Medea). The stories of Jason and Medea open up right at the centre of the poem (Book 7) a space for a genuine romance tale, involving a mixture of adventure, brooding passion, and the ‘black’ grotesque scene of the magic philtres, which will resurface almost identically in
Macbeth
.

The move from one story to the next without any interval is underlined by the fact that — as Wilkinson points out — ‘the end of a story rarely coincides with the end of a book. He will even begin a new one within the last few lines. This is partly the time-honoured device of the serial writer to whet the reader’s appetite for the next instalment; but it is also an indication of the continuity of the work, which should not have been divided into books at all, were it not that its length necessitated a number of rolls. This
then gives us the impression of a real and consistent world in which events which are usually considered in isolation interact with each other.’

The stories are often similar, never the same. It is not by chance that the most heart-rending tale is that of the unlucky love of Echo (Book 3), doomed to repeat sounds, for the young Narcissus, who in turn is condemned to contemplate his own repeated image in the reflecting waters. Ovid runs across this forest of love stories which are all the same and all different, pursued by the voice of Echo resounding from the rocks ‘Coëamus!’ ‘Coëamus!’ ‘Coëamus!’

[1979]

For sheer pleasure of reading, I would advise anyone taking up Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
to focus mainly on three books: the two containing the fundamentals of his philosophy, that is to say Book 2 (on cosmography) and Book 7 (on man), and — for an example of his unique blend of erudition and fantasy — Book 8 (on land animals). Of course you can discover astonishing pages everywhere: in the books on geography (3-6), on aquatic animals, entomology and comparative anatomy (9-11), on botany, agronomy and pharmacology (12-32), or those on metals, precious stones and the fine arts (33-37).

It has always been the case, I believe, that people do not read Pliny, they go to Pliny to consult him, both to find out what the ancients knew or thought they knew about a certain topic, and to winkle out bizarre facts and curiosities. On this latter point one cannot ignore Book 1, an index of the whole work, whose charm derives from unpredictable juxtapositions: ‘Fish which have a small stone in their head; Fish which hide in winter; Fish which are influenced by the stars; Fish which have fetched extraordinary prices’; or ‘Roses: 12 varieties, 32 drugs; Lilies: 3 varieties, 21 drugs; Plants which grow from an exudation; Narcissus: 3 varieties; 16 drugs; The plant whose seed can be dyed to produce coloured flowers; Saffron: 20 drugs; Where the best flowers grow; What flowers were known at the time of the Trojan war; Floral patterns in clothes.’ Or again, ‘The nature of metals; Of gold; Of the amount of gold possessed by the ancients; Of the equestrian order and the right to wear gold rings; How many times the equestrian order has changed name’. But Pliny is also an author who deserves an extended read, for the measured movement of his prose, which
is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena.

We could distinguish Pliny the poet and philosopher, with his awareness for the universe, his sympathy for knowledge and mystery, from Pliny the neurotic collector of data, the compulsive compiler of facts, whose sole concern appears to be not to waste any note from his gigantic collection of index cards. (In his use of written sources he was both omnivorous and eclectic, but not uncritical: there were facts he recorded as true, others to which he gave the benefit of the doubt, others he rejected as obvious nonsense. The only problem is that his method of evaluation appears to be extremely inconsistent and unpredictable.) However, once one admits the existence of these two sides to him, one has to recognise that Pliny is just one writer, just as the world he wants to describe is just one world though it contains a great variety of forms. To achieve his objective, he is not afraid of trying to embrace the infinite number of existing forms in the world, which in turn is multiplied by the countless number of reports which exist about all these forms, since forms and reports both have the same right to be part of natural history and to be examined by someone who seeks in them that sign of a higher reason which he is convinced they must contain.

For Pliny the world is the eternal sky which was not created by anyone, and whose spherical, rotating vault covers all earthly things (2.2). But the world is difficult to distinguish from God, who for Pliny and the Stoic culture which he embraced is a single deity that cannot be identified with any single portion or aspect, nor with the crowd of Olympian gods (apart perhaps from the Sun, which is the soul, mind or spirit of the heavens (2.13)). But at the same time the sky is composed of stars as eternal as God (the stars weave the sky and at the same time they are interwoven into the heavenly fabric: ‘aeterna caelestibus est natura intexentibus mundum intextuque concretis’, 2.30), and is also the air (both above and below the moon) which seems empty and diffuses down here the vital spirit, generating clouds, hail, thunder, lightning and storms (2.102).