Hello. It’s Woody again, so grab your most scholarly hat and get ready to learn a few more things in this the fourth part in my series on “misusing” myth!
I’m excited about this part of the series because I get to talk about the master of the art of appropriating stories entirely to suit one’s own purposes: Publius Ovidius Naso – Ovid to you and me. Ovid is excellent. His father sent him to the rhetoric schools to prepare him for a political career, but he turned his talent to poetry instead. He is one the great masters of the turn of phrase and the master of playing with point-of-view and his readers’ expectations. I have only two regrets about Ovid: the first is that his version of Medea doesn’t survive; and the second is that it took me about four years from the time I first read him to when I understood his genius. I’m making up for that now in proseltysing in Ovid’s favour, and am in no way ashamed if I come off all fanboyish.
If you are not a Classicist, chances are any myth you know that doesn’t come down to us through Athenian Tragedy is from Ovid’s work The Metamorphoses. Daedalus and Icarus? Ovid. Daphne and Apollo? Ovid. This is a great big tome of unfathomably complex self-aware literary artistry, it’s both epigrammatic and epic. It’s excellent and is the case in point for why things are better in the original language. Ovid appropriates and subverts everything: literary forms and genres, traditional views on the gods, the political climate of Augustan Rome, and (of most interest to this blog) myth.
I’ll take a case example to demonstrate the sort of thing he does with myth, that of Actaeon. Actaeon is out hunting one day when he spies the chaste goddess of hunting Dianna (or Artemis if you prefer the Greek names) bathing with her entourage of nymphs. The nymphs shield the angry Dianna who turns Actaeon into a stag and has his own dogs tear him apart. A jolly bedtime story if ever there was one.
Ovid subverts this myth in two main ways. Firstly Dianna, when presented either as herself or in metaphor describing some regal woman with her entourage of handmaidens (like Dido in Aeneid.I or Nausicaa in Odyssey.VI), is always clearly far taller than her nymphs. Ovid pokes fun of this traditional image of Dianna by making it quite clear the nymphs surrounding her were too little to conceal anything important or interesting saying ‘however the goddess herself was taller than these others and stands over and above them’ (Metamorphoses III.181/2). After this Ovid has the goddess blush in embarrassment. A goddess blushing! Scandalous and unheard of for Ovid’s contemporaries!
The other way Ovid subverts the myth tradition gave him is concerning Actaeon and Ovid’s sympathies towards him. The traditional myth is that Actaeon actively and voyeuristically sought out Dianna. Ovid’s having none of this. Ovid himself was exiled from Rome for some scandal involving seeing something he shouldn’t have concerning one of the Imperial family’s daughters (probably). This is brought into his treatment of the myth. In the narrative it’s made clear Actaeon’s presence at the pool wasn’t deliberate. More than this, in introducing the story Ovid flat out says “[regarding the matter] if you were to look closely the allegation was one of Chance / you find no crime, for what crime does an error have?” (Metamorphoses III.142). Ovid properly and fundamentally changed the spin on this myth to suit his view on the world.
The Metamorphoses is Ovid’s masterpiece and one of the better things ever written, but it would be remiss of me not to mention at least some of his other works. Apart from the Metamorphoses, Ovid is probably best known for his two collections of love elegy, the Amores and the Ars Amatoria. Now, to enlightened, 21st century types like you and me Roman love elegies can seem less romantic and more a restraining order waiting to happen. That said, it’s good poetry and well worth a read. Myth doesn’t raise its head all that much in these works except as descriptive metaphor. In Book II of Ars, for example, we get a version of the Daedalus and Icarus myth with Icarus being used to describe the young man about to start on a quest for love. If you have the time compare this version of the myth to the one that appears in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses; you’ll get a sense of just how for Ovid progressed as an artist between those two works.
I shall have to pause here while I go find a soap-box on which to stand, for I have an announcement to make for the good of you all. You need to read Ovid’s Heroides. Go order your copy now. Go on, you’ll thank me later. The Heroides – often translated as “Heroines” or occaisionally “Legendary Women” – is a collection of twenty-one poems written as letters from the point-of-view of assorted mythical women. We have, amongst others, Dido writing to Aeneas, Medea to Jason and (interestingly, the only historical woman in the collection) Sappho writing to Phaon.
The Metamorphoses shows the genius of scale, of refuting Callimachus’ saying “Big book, big bore” and is rightly lauded; the Heroides shows the genius of the personal. Ovid takes these women who are often ancillary, patronised, ignored, condemned, or a mixture thereof and lends them the full force of the language of a rhetorician-cum-poet to let them make their case. He understands these stories and presents them in a light that is fascinatingly engaging to us and must have been at least a little shocking to his original readers.
I think I’m a little over-excited now, so I’m going to have a lie-down.
One hopes you’re well,
Yours,
ADWoodward
