Groves, forests, animals, and birds in the Tereus-Procne-Philomela story (Ov. Met. 6.412-674) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Antiquities Beyond Humanism, 2019
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a story of new bodies. The world emerged from a rough, undifferentiated mass, thanks to a god and a “better nature.” Jupiter destroyed it, in anger. Later, a divine collective decision brought it back into being. Finally, Phaeton, the unwary child of another god, the Sun, almost reduced the universe to ashes. The gods live in a beautiful town, a celestial Rome. They are over-occupied and worried for all human affairs: they help, advise, punish, and reward. They love, suffer, get angry, and take revenge. Bending people’s will, directing their agency and manufacturing events are, for them, an incessant activity. The gods care for the cosmos. Their truly favourite occupation, however, is the transformation of human beings into non-human, or, at least non-anthropomorphic creatures. They can never stop reshaping women and men into other animals, plants, stars, or springs. These are hybrids: not quite the same as they were before, but not completely different either. Together with an unexpected corporeal figura, an old identity remains. New bodies are new configurations of embodiment. A poetic metaphysics runs through the Metamorphoses. At the end of the poem, a philosophical commentator, Pythagoras of Samos, delivers a lecture on its principles. His long and famous speech, uttered in Book 15, has provoked many conflicting interpretations. I shall suggest my own. In doing so I hope to be able to demonstrate two things. Firstly, Pythagoras offers a synoptic theory of change that subsumes what occurs in the Metamorphoses. Change makes the world, and it does so quite well. Cuncta fluunt, all things are in flux, Pythagoras says, and yet the stream of becoming allows for moments of relatively lasting stability. Without being eternal, concrete inanimate objects and complex living beings come into existence — and then subsist for a while. Pythagoras himself personifies this experience. He has enjoyed many different lives. He can remember the successive identities he took over time. Likewise, the nova corpora we encounter in the poem come to be, become what they now are — and are there to stay. What is more, these animal, vegetal or mineral new beings know who they were, and still are anyhow, notwithstanding what they have also become. Their memory is their awareness of a transition from being shaped and equipped in a visibly human fashion, to being differently incorporated into the world. This point is hardly new, but its importance deserves to be emphasized once again, because it is precisely this particular kind of becoming — creative, rather than destructive; vital rather than deadly; cumulative rather than annihilating; partial rather than total — that explains the metamorphoses in the poem as well as Pythagoras’s vision of changeability. The cosmos of the poem is posthuman for we could be recycled in an instant into other kinds of beings, but it is paradoxically anthropocentric because this plasticity affects us -- and we are still there. Secondly, Pythagoras sets up a taxonomy that separates humans, non-human animals, and plants. On the one hand, this taxonomy is porous on account of the liquid ontology that keeps together the world. “All things are in flux” means that immortal souls transmigrate from human to non-human beings. Fluidity blurs the lines of demarcation. But, on the other hand, it also creates perceptive uncertainty about the potential humanity of beings that do not look anthropomorphic. This is particularly disconcerting when it concerns food. By mistake, we might eat semi-human flesh. Precisely because humanity is diluted across the ecosphere, therefore, Pythagoras’ taxonomy has to respect alimentary distinctions. Differences matter from the standpoint of what we, as human beings, may or may not eat. Once again, we are the protagonists. We must abstain from eating meat. We are permitted to consume only vegetables and fruits. This classification of food groups (edible versus inedible) fits perfectly Pythagoras’s own conception of metempsychosis, a crucial component of his general theory of universal mutability. It is also consistent with the poetic and narrative thinking of the Metamorphoses. Such a thinking deserves to be takes seriously, for the poem is not merely a masterful exemplar of a literary genre, epic poetry. The poem creates a “possible world,” defined by a range of “modalities” – what must, should, might or can happen. All these necessities and possibilities may well be incompatible with the expectations of a Roman of the first century BCE, in their daily life. Metamorphosis itself is a miracle. And yet a consistent line of thought runs through this marvellous universe. Metamorphosis brings about all kinds of animals — wild, domestic, unappetizing or good to eat. We have to abstain from all of them, Pythagoras warns, lest we ingest potentially human flesh. We must all be vegetarians. In the same poetic biosphere, however, there exist also massive trees, colourful flowers, or aromatic herbs that either grow in the wilderness or can be cultivated. Metamorphosis gives rise to some of them. A question then arises. Since it is the transformation of humans into all sorts of non-anthropomorphic beings that creates the risk of anthropophagy, can vegetarianism protect us from eating a human transformed into a plant? The answer is yes. Metamorphosis generates no vegetables destined for culinary use. Only inedible plants are metamorphic, thus misleading. All farm or garden products that are comestible are “safe” to eat. These plants have always existed as such, unscathed by any human pedigree. No cannibalism is in sight, therefore, for a vegetarian. Far for being a foil or a fad, vegetarianism operates in the text itself. By crafting a consistent set of distinctive traits, Ovid makes sure that the poem agrees with Pythagoras’s vegetarian ethics, and yet takes the liberty to recount the life of half-human plants. These vegetal hybrids may well bleed or speak, but nobody would dream of tasting them. They are not foodstuff. The cosmos of the poem respects a vegetarian contrainte, which is logical, structural and literary.
Paper presented at the International Conference on Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies (London, 20/ 10/ 2018) The Romance of the seven sages is a stories-within-a-story of Eastern origin that had a vast success in the Middle Ages and was variously translated and creatively rearranged across Europe. The most ancient of its Western versions, the French verse Le roman des sept sages de Rome (second half of the 12th century), strikes us for the concentration of environment-related tales: since the frame story deals with an accusation of infidelity, the tales tend to discuss cases of disputed love, and several of them describe tragic stories of human affection towards plants and animals. How do the contrasting attitudes expressed by the characters of these tales and the morality bestowed upon them by the narrating voices in the frame story contribute to draw the lines of a complex pre-modern ecology? In the proposed paper, I will discuss the special non-human bonds related in one of these tales, Tentamina: in this tale, a noblewoman tries to enrage her husband by destroying all his love objects - a pear tree, a hound, and his vassals’ esteem. In the light of the other “ecological” tales of the Roman, I will untangle the vegetal, the animal and the human agents of Tentamina, the agenda of its fictional narrators, and the textual form in which they all participate. The purpose of this analysis will be to highlight the ecocritical aspects of this polyphonic text, focusing on the interplay between environment, love and storytelling they stage.
Collectanea Philologica, 2023
The aim of this article is to analyse two examples of the motif of arboreal metamorphosis in the Neo-Latin bucolic, present in the poems by Jacopo Sannazaro (Salices) and Pierre-Daniel Huet (Vitis). In Salices, nymphs fleeing from the deities are transformed into willows, repeting the fate of Ovid’s Daphne, Syrinx and the Heliades. In Vitis the poet creates a story about a nymph, named Vitis, on the basis of the love story of the satyr Ampelos and Dionysus. For betraying Bacchus, she is turned into a vine and her lover Ulmus into an elm. Their fate is similar to Ovid’s Myrrha and Philemon and Baucis. In the history of Vitis, particularly in the description of the lovers’ metamorphosis, one can see borrowings from Sannazaro. Both bucolic poems are linked by the ambiguity of the ontological status of the newly created plants. They differ in their moral interpretation of metamorphosis. The turning of the nymphs into trees can be understood as some kind of punishment for the rape that had been committed on them. On the other hand, Vitis, who committed treachery, is in fact rewarded and by the will of Jupiter she remains united with her lover forever
'Vegetable-but-nonetheless-human life:' Allegories of Arborical Transformation in Ovid, Virgil, and
2022
Metamorphosis of the human body is a central image in countless texts, myths, and cultures. One of the most well-known examples of this in the Western tradition is Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. The backbone of his epic poem is the idea of transformation, as we can see in the first line of the text: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas/ corpora, 'I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities' (Swanson 1959, 201). Although Ovid was not the genesis of these stories of transformation, there is one anecdote in particular whose imagery can be directly traced through at least two other canonical world literature texts: Virgil's Aeneid and Dante Alighieri's Inferno in La Commedia. Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Book Four of Metamorphoses details the fates of two star-crossed lovers who both end up dead as humans, but on the spot where they die crop up two mulberry trees whose berries become as dark as the lovers' spilled blood. Notably similar imagery occurs in the Aeneid with the story of Polydorus, 1 and Canto XIII of the Inferno manifestly imitates the Aeneid in Dante's interaction with Pier della Vigna. However, the image of a tree that was once a human is deepened by the fact that all the texts also contain a prayer from or to the trees, descriptions of flowing and dark blood, and intense fear and horror. Dante, Virgil, and Ovid allegorically use human-tree metamorphosis to explore human life. Despite various differences across the texts overall, in these passages, as is reinforced by their shared lexicons, the authors use this tree imagery to capture how human nature is entwined between the physical-connecting to the animal and vegetable aspects of earthly life-and incorporeal-connecting to the soul, death, and godly judgement. The Pyramus and Thisbe story is one of many stories in Ovid's writing in which young people, often lovers, are immortalised as plants. In Ovid's telling, Pyramus and Thisbe fall in love, yet are kept apart by their parents, which only increases the 'fierce flames' (Ovid 1717, 96) of their love. They sneak out of their homes to meet in 'their well-known place' (Ovid 1717, 128) in fields outside of their 'unfaithful town' (ibid, 133). This place is the tomb of Ninus 2 where 'they might rest secure beneath the shade, / Which boughs, with snowy fruit encumber'd, made' (Ovid 1717, 138-9). Here, Ovid creates a gentle pastoral scene, away from the cruel parents and 'unfaithful' town where the lovers are kept apart. Out here in the fields, by the 'wide-spread mulberry' (1717, 140) and 'gurgling brook' (ibid, 141), they are able to be at peace. When Thisbe arrives at the Tomb of Ninus, 'spirited by love' (Ovid 1717, 151) a lioness arrives, 'grimly besmear'd with blood of oxen slain' (ibid, 153); her bloody arrival is the beginning of the pastoral scene being viscerally distorted into a scene of 'new horrors' (ibid, 154) and gruesome tragedy. Thisbe is terrified by the lion; 'wing'd with her fear, swift, as the wind, she flies' (Ovid 1717, 157) and hides in a cave to recover her senses. However, she drops her veil, which the lion finds and chews it with her bloody jaws. Pyramus then arrives, and seeing the bloody, torn veil, surmises Thisbe was killed by the lion and blames himself: ''Tis I am guilty, I have thee betray'd…Whatever slew thee, I the cause remain' (Ovid 1717, 172-4). He decides he must kill himself, as 'the brave still have it in their pow'r to die' (Ovid 1717, 179), an idea Dante challenges in the La Commedia, as we will see later in this essay. Kissing the veil, his tears deepen the blood stain; he then stabs himself with his sword. When Thisbe returns soon after as she fears Pyramus might think she had spurned him, she finds him dying. She cries over his bleeding wounds, and becomes almost animalistic with despair when she realises what happened: she shrieks, tears her hair, and beats her chest. Ovid repeatedly references blood in the passage to emphasize the terror and gore of the scene that 2 When Shakespeare writes in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as a play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the players mispronounce Ninus' tomb as Ninny's tomb. 1 The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) was written before Metamorphoses (8 CE). There is no evidence to claim if either of them was the true originator of the body-to-tree anecdote in Roman poetry. I began my argument with Ovid because of his text's obvious relevance in the study of metamorphosis and transformation, and this passage's potent imagery, not because I claim that Virgil worked off of this exact story.
This dissertation uncovers literary self-consciousness in the forest settings of early modern Italian narratives, which exploit the symbolic and ecological properties of forest environments to fashion meditations on various aspects of narrative composition. The first chapter presents the etymological associations between woods, words and metaphysical generation solidified by Aristotelian commentators and applies these to the selva oscura of Dante’s Commedia. A reading of the opening forest as reflective of the poem’s still unrealized potential illuminates a sequence of metaliterary settings and throws into relief a character in the forest of suicides who seems aware both of his transformation into a poetic device and of his limited role within Italian literary history. A Dantesque pastiche tinges a haunted pine forest in one of Boccaccio’s novellas that expounds a spirit of inspired opportunism synonymous with the Decameron itself. The other narrative exploitations of the forest treated in the second chapter betray Boccaccio’s understanding of the randomness and believability necessary to hold the literary work in tension between nature and artifice, city and country, safety and danger, as emblematized by that other perennial symbol for the macronarrative, the garden. The final two chapters examine the same features of the forest in later works that imagine literary composition as a far less balanced operation. The plot of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso depends on its forest settings so much that it allows the trees to narrate its most momentous episode. By fully immersing the romance in the rhythms and vulnerabilities of the forest ecologies the author reveals the complexity and, indeed, vitality of literary worlds. Eager to clear the Ariostean woods from the morally legitimate realm of narrative poetry, Tasso devises a highly organized drama in which the forest is exploited for every material, spiritual and narrative functionality that can serve the pious and conservative hermeneutics demanded by counter-Reformation academics. Despite a lexical rigor that views trees as machines, the Gerusalemme liberata still gives room to explore the pathetic, personal potential of trees, especially those that share the poet’s name. While unique to the works containing the various forests, the four studies together trace the use of a particular construction to effect metaliterary commentary and in so doing confirm the general tendencies of early modern Italian literature, especially those concerning the complication of literary communication, through the relatively unexplored subfield of setting.
The Poet in an Artificial Landscape: Ovid at Falerii (Amores 3.13)
For Ovid, erotic elegy is a quintessentially urban genre 2 . In the Amores, excursions outside the city are infrequent 3 . Distance from the city generally equals distance from the beloved, and so from the life of the lover 4 . is is peculiarly true of Amores, 3.13, a poem that seems to signal the end of Ovid's career as a literary lover and to predict his future as a poet of rituals and antiquities 5 . For a student of poetry, it is tempting to read the landscape of such a poem as purely symbolic; and I will begin by sketching such a reading. But, as we will see, testing this reading against what can be known about the actual landscape in which the poem is set forces a revision of the results. And this revision is twofold. In the rst instance, taking into account certain speci c features of the landscape makes possible the correction of the particular, somewhat limited interpretive hypothesis that a purely literary reading would most probably recommend, and this is valuable in itself. But paying more general attention to what can be known about this landscape over its long history raises some larger questions, most of which could hardly arise from a conventional literary reading. Nor, I should add, are such questions likely to arise from a consideration of landscape alone: it is the way in which literary and landscape studies seem to contradict one another, both super cially and on a deeper level, that makes this poem so fascinating. ese contradictions cannot, in my view, be entirely resolved; and for this reason they give us an opportunity to re ect on certain theoretical issues that I will raise here only brie y, reserving them for fuller exploration elsewhere 6 .
The Poet in an Artificial Landscape: Ovid at Falerii
2014
For Ovid, erotic elegy is a quintessentially urban genre. In the Amores, excursions outside the city are infrequent. Distance from the city generally equals distance from the beloved, and so from the life of the lover. This is peculiarly true of Amores, 3.13, a poem that seems to signal the end of Ovid’s career as a literary lover and to predict his future as a poet of rituals and antiquities. For a student of poetry, it is tempting to read the landscape of such a poem as purely symbolic; and I will begin by sketching such a reading. But, as we will see, testing this reading against what can be known about the actual landscape in which the poem is set forces a revision of the results. And this revision is twofold. In the first instance, taking into account certain specific features of the landscape makes possible the correction of the particular, somewhat limited interpretive hypothesis that a purely literary reading would most probably recommend, and this is valuable in itself. But...
The Poet in an Artificial Landscape: Ovid at \u3cem\u3eFalerii\u3c/em\u3e
2014
For Ovid, erotic elegy is a quintessentially urban genre. In the Amores, excursions outside the city are infrequent. Distance from the city generally equals distance from the beloved, and so from the life of the lover. This is peculiarly true of Amores, 3.13, a poem that seems to signal the end of Ovid’s career as a literary lover and to predict his future as a poet of rituals and antiquities. For a student of poetry, it is tempting to read the landscape of such a poem as purely symbolic; and I will begin by sketching such a reading. But, as we will see, testing this reading against what can be known about the actual landscape in which the poem is set forces a revision of the results. And this revision is twofold. In the first instance, taking into account certain specific features of the landscape makes possible the correction of the particular, somewhat limited interpretive hypothesis that a purely literary reading would most probably recommend, and this is valuable in itself. But...