The Epic of the Sufferers
Ovid’s Grand, Grotesque, Repellent and Profound Metamorphoses
In our lives there will be times when the sadness of life rather gets the better of us. During one such period, I opened my mailbox and found a package from a good friend. It was a video called The Secret. My heart was warmed by the gesture (someone sent me a package!), but my brain sighed with vague dread: the level of thinking in a video proclaiming itself to be the secret was not going to be very high, and I’m (alas) one of those people for whom it’s the thought that counts. Anyway, the idea of the video was that the actual nature of the universe is to be a kind of “transmitter,” and if you think good thoughts into it, like “I want a Mercedes-Benz,” the universe will of its own nature deliver you a Mercedes-Benz. Think the thought, the video proclaimed, and envision the vision, and the universe will deliver. “Ask, believe, receive.” Now I won’t discount this entirely: for us rich Americans, as long as we limit our desires to consumer goods or general financial wellbeing — the kinds of things where desire really counts for a lot — the things we want are probably within our reach. On the other hand (if we are honest), for the more complicated desires, the universe is a terrible transmitter. All the combatants in wars pray very earnestly for victory, but usually only one side gets heard, and usually at terrible cost. I’ve heard little children asking for things like their parents to get back together again, or for their dead father to come back, and to me it’s a sacrilege to tell them the only thing between them and complete fulfilment is willpower. But I’ve heard The Secret line of thinking from a lot of people, ones who I’m sure have never seen or heard of the video. It’s part of modern culture. They believe that we all “create our own reality,” and so if you are sad, or victimized, or a bomb is dropped on you in a war, you must have done a lousy job creating your reality.
At the time The Secret arrived in my mailbox, I had just recently read the entirety of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin, which is like a vaccine against simplistic optimism. This month I read it all again, and returned to many of these thoughts. An antidote to modern self-help thinking, the poem takes the form of a flowing, intricate sequence of stories of bodily transformation, almost all of which take place irrespective of the will of the occupants of the bodies. Most writers tend to focus on the choices that we as humans beings make, which makes sense: that’s the small part of the world we can control. Ovid seems to focus on everything else: that we are born without our volition, inhabit a body we did not select, age in ways we cannot control, and die according to a destiny we did not choose. And in the meantime we endure a million things on account of others around us, and suffer through the power they have over us. We tend to think of epic poetry as being about heroes — strong people, geniuses, survivors, the sort who “create their own reality”: Aeneas founding a new nation, Odysseus surviving by his wits in incredible dangers — but Ovid gives us an entirely different kind of epic, an extended meditation on the powerlessness and limitation that resides in the fact of our bodies.
The book opens with a brief statement of theme discounting any personal agency: “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora” — “the spirit brings [me] to tell of forms changed into new bodies.” Some kind of agent, some kind of possessor of that spirit, would normally be implied — I put in a “me,” a reasonable grammatical supposition — but Ovid makes no claim for authorship here. He then proceeds to begin his poem with the creation of the world, form emerging out of chaos, as directed by “deus et melior natura,” another odd phrase, “god and better nature.” This source of agency stands outside of the creation, as it seems, and shapes it: it divides (diremit), cuts off (abscidit), separates (secrevit), rotates (evolvit), removes (exemit), binds (ligavit), slices (secuit), gathers (coegit), and forms (glomeravit). The entire world as we know it is presented as the result of the actions and orders of this Source, identified only as “quisquis fuit ille deorum” — “whoever of the gods it was.” The material world is putty in this Being’s hands. This extended account of Creation is suggestively followed by an account of the existence of giants on the Earth and a flood prompted by the wickedness of mankind, a remarkable parallel with the book of Genesis. This alone is enough to explain the interest European Christian culture has so long had for Ovid, despite the presence of quite a bit of salacious material. The Biblical analogy is compelling: both take us from the Creation of the world to the early Roman Empire, with hundreds of named characters over a span of thousands of years. The Bible, of course, is the work of many hands, which makes the ambition of Ovid’s book all the more astounding.
The broad structural similarity with the Bible highlights the differences as well. Ovid’s writing is consistently leavened with humor. That said, he makes it to line 176 before he cracks even a small joke, mocking the Olympian gods as living on “great heaven’s Palatine” away from the plebeian gods, and it is not until the story of Apollo and Daphne that Ovid moves into his general narrative voice, which typically implies a degree of ridicule and ludicrousness. Apollo is running after Daphne trying to rape her, but he says he is worried about her and asks her to run more carefully, and if she does he will pursue her more slowly (“Aspera qua properas loca sunt; moderatius, oro, curre fugamque inhibe, moderatius insequar ipse”). This is followed by another rape story, of Jupiter and Io, where Jupiter ludicrously changes his lover into a cow in order to put his wife Juno (“aut ego fallor aut ego laedor,” she says comically, “Either I’m wrong or I’m being wronged!”) off the scent. When the cow is given to Juno and Argus becomes its guard, Ovid can’t help mocking pastoral poetry — a genre he never bothered with — by having Mercury put Argus to sleep by telling a love story set in Arcadia. This is typical Ovid — there is usually some kind of sly contemptuous humor at play.
There are also the rapes. I didn’t count them, but there are certainly dozens. One can quibble with Yahweh’s morality in the Bible — as the New Atheists have done at great length — but the one account of Yahweh impregnating a woman (Mary) does feature explicit consent. Abuse of power seems to be natural to the popular Greco-Roman conception of divinity, a fact that has been controversial since at least Plato’s Republic (where Glaucon says that a man armed with the Ring of Gyges would kill and steal and rape and in general “act like a god”). Ovid was almost exactly the kind of poet Plato was talking about when he complained that poets make the gods out to be terrible, immoral beings. To this day there is a real question as to how much time we wish to spend with the moral grotesquerie of Greco-Roman myth.
But a read of the complete poem does at least put the rapes into some kind of context. Almost all the characters — female and male — are deprived of willpower and are made to suffer. Lycaon is the first who endures metamorphosis, changed into a wolf as punishment for attempting to feed Jupiter human flesh and then kill him. Julius Caesar is the last: Ovid describes his murder (“en, acui sceleratos cernitis enses,” says Venus as she laments that she cannot save him: “Look, you see the wicked swords [of the conspirators] are being sharpened”) and his subsequent transformation into a comet. In between we see every variety of powerlessness: Marsyas gets his skin flayed off by Apollo for losing a singing contest with him, and Arachne gets turned into a spider for winning a weaving contest with Minerva (yes, she actually wins). Circe tries to seduce Picus, and when she fails she turns him into a woodpecker. Actaeon discovers Diana by accident, and is turned into a dog and ripped apart; Hecuba transforms into a dog when she finds her last son murdered; Glaucus becomes a god by tasting some grass; Scylla becomes a monster by swimming in a pool of water; Ajax commits suicide after being refused the armor of Achilles and his blood is turned into flowers. Even happy stories, such as the transformation of Baucis and Philemon into trees, operate independently of any internal volition: deus et melior natura seem to be the source of these changes. The gods themselves can do little: when Venus begs for Caesar’s life, Jupiter pleads powerlessness: he can do nothing against the Fates.
Even the desire which prompts so much of the action of the poem appears to be separate from and even contrary to volition. Apollo is not the source of his desire for Daphne, nor is Daphne the source of her aversion: both are the playthings of Cupid’s arrows. This reaches a horrible pitch of intensity in three separate tales of incest, all fully developed, lengthy episodes, and all grotesque and disturbing: Tereus (book 6) falls in love with his sister-in-law Philomela, whom he imprisons for a year, repeatedly rapes, and cuts her tongue out when she promises to tell. They are both turned into birds. Byblis (book 9) falls in love with her brother, and is tormented by the thought, begging “obscenae procul hinc discedite flammae” — that the obscene fires of love get away from her. But in the end she makes the attempt to seduce her brother, is rebuffed, and is turned into a stream. Myrrha falls in love with her own father, and tries to talk herself out of it, but with the help of her nurse consummates the deed when he is drunk (like Lot from the Bible) and is turned into a tree. Ovid blames all three for their incest to some extent, but the stories are so intricately told, one cannot claim that Ovid only begrudgingly took up the subject. In each case he lavishes hundreds of lines of these stories, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere of madness inescapable, building up to conclusions so terrible the effect is rather like the effect of reading too much Dante — alternating revulsion and grief for the contemptibly pitiful condition of human race.
But Ovid does not hold these stories at arm’s length — indeed he selected them, out of a range of options, and it appears he has some kind of sympathy with his characters. This appears to have a principled cause: Ovid seems to be arguing against responsibility, and for sympathy. All of these desires — licit and illicit — come into our lives through our bodies, and it is not clear that we are to be held responsible for our bodies, or that we are our bodies, a theme Ovid plays with continually. Adonis coming into manhood is described as iam se formosior ipso est — more beautiful than himself (10.523). Marriage for Atalanta is described — quite powerfully, knowing how difficult marriage can be for us all — as teque ipsa viva carebis (“you will no longer have yourself, though you will be alive,” 10.566). When Marsyas gets his skin flayed by Apollo, he cries Quid me mihi trahis? “Why do you tear me from myself?” Dante, picking up on this same passage, actually prays (at the beginning of the Paradiso) that God treat him similarly, “as you once removed Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs” “sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue.” Dante is writing with a great deal of metaphysical certainty that we are not our bodies, and hence any ripping away of the body, however painful it may be, will leave only a purified essence. Ovid makes a similar claim in the poem, but only through the mouth of Pythagoras. Both, however, operate from a religious perspective, one which is strikingly different from the typical modern position: that we are not in control, and that we must suffer through whatever the divine power destines for us. The gods give us our lives; and so it is lawful for them to take them. In religious terms, we have no rights before the gods; in secular terms, the universe owes us nothing. When Apollo and Diana kill all fourteen children of Niobe, who asserts that she is greater than the gods, she does not say they do it wrongly — she is just angry that they would use their rights in this way: irascentemque quod ausi hoc essent superi, quod tantum iuris haberent. “And she was angry that they dared this, that they had such rights.”
This picture of human weakness before the relatively unlimited rights of whatever power it is that brought us into this universe and governs it, is still in its broad outlines true, whether one personifies this power or calls it mere chance, and it is this fact which gives Ovid’s poem such tragic force and power. In Latin our lives begin and end with passive verbs: nascimur and morimur (we are born, we die). And much of the in-between fits into the verb patimur, we suffer, which is the main material of the Metamorphoses, in its varied forms: sickness (the plague at Aegina is described at length), age, death, love, assassination, loss, grief, mutilation, rape. As much as we might like the universe to be merely a wish-fulfilment machine we can operate with our brains, we find our wills circumscribed by circumstance: in the actuality of other people and their wills (“l’enfer c’est les autres” says Sartre), in the limitations of time and place, and most intimately in the fact of our own bodies, which, let us all admit, are not as we would wish them. Ovid memorably uses Helen of Troy and Milo of Croton (the great Olympic athlete) to describe our helplessness before one of our obvious foes, time and age:
Subruit haec aevi demoliturque prioris
robora: fletque Milon senior, cum spectet inanes
illos, qui fuerant solidorum mole tororum
Herculeis similes, fluidos pendere lacertos;
flet quoque, ut in speculo rugas adspexit aniles,
Tydaris et secum, cur sit bis rapta, requirit.
Tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,
omnis destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi
paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte.Time undermines and destroys the powers of the preceding generation: old Milo of Croton cries when he sees his biceps turned to jelly, hanging down like empty sacks, when they once were like the arms of Hercules, solid masses of muscle; and Helen cries, when she looks in the mirror at her old woman’s wrinkles, and wonders how she could have been twice carried off. Time, devourer of things, and you, jealous old age, destroy everything; you consume them with a slow death, worn down little by little in the teeth of eternity. (15.228–236)
Nothing whatever escapes this slow transmutation and destruction, according to the long and glorious speech of Pythagoras from which this passage is taken, Ovid’s longest earnest poetic performance (if it is not in earnest, it is at least without any obvious jokes) and one of the great glories of all literature. To arrive at the speech of Pythagoras after wandering through the various mythological narratives of suffering is like getting to a mountaintop to find the clouds clearing and a view of the entire countryside exposed. This feels like the central meaning of the entire poem, beyond all the suffering and strife:
Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix
Ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras:
nec perit in toto quicquam mihi credite mundo,
sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur
incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante morique
desinere illud idem. Cum sint huc forsitan illa,
haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant.Nothing maintains its appearance; nature the renewer makes new shapes from old. Nothing perishes in this world, believe me, but is changed and renews itself; what is called being “born” is merely for something to begin to be something other than what it was before, and to “die” is to cease being the same. Though those things are now moved here, and these there, in the final analysis they all endure. (15.252–258)
Pythagoras does not extend this basic principle of constant flux (cuncta fluunt, Ovid’s nifty version of παντα ρει) to souls — morte carent animae Pythagoras says, “souls know not death” — but in the realm of bodies, it certainly does appear that metamorphosis is the law of our existence. This grand overarching vision separates Ovid from Vergil, who seems to posit an eternal Rome (imperium sine fine dedi). For Ovid, to use E.J. Kenney’s phrase used by Feeney, “the Augustan settlement was not, as it had been for Vergil, the start of a new world, novus ordo saeclorum, but another sandbank in the shifting stream of eternity.”
It is still fair to question, in aesthetic terms, whether we really need a catalogue of incest and rape to make this point. The grotesquerie of Ovid’s vision is not to be denied: he seems to relish describing the flaying of Marsyas’s quivering flesh, the wiggling of Philomela’s severed tongue, the blood of Pyramus shooting into the air. Perhaps we can blame Rome, glutted with the blood of men and animals in its arenas; perhaps it is a true picture of the human experience in all its awfulness, and we only lie to ourselves that it is otherwise. It does have the effect of readying the weary reader for the vision of Pythagoras, which includes a sustained call for vegetarianism so earnest I really do wonder now whether Ovid was a vegetarian. Ovid captures not only the horror, but also some of the hope and desire for a world where body shall respect body, and know, as he says, “how great a sin it is for a creature with soul to live by the death of another creature with soul” (quantum scelus est alterius animans animantis vivere leto).”
All in all it is an extraordinary philosophical vision, and one of the world’s most impressive poems. That we may read it all, and go on this long journey with the poet through the ages, is one of the remarkable experiences available to Latinists. It may be a worthy project for your New Year’s Resolutions.
[This is one of a series of essays about reading Ovid at his bimillennial. For more information about the series, and links to other essays, click on the link below.]
John Byron Kuhner is the former president of SALVI, the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies, and editor of In Medias Res.
