Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Our December Old School Group Read is Metamorphoses by Ovid
This is a Spoiler thread.

This is down for December in the "No Spoilers" thread. I haven't noticed a change of schedule, so I'm assuming "January" is a typo. My apologies if I've misunderstood something.

Just an error, Ian. Doing too many things at one time...most of them rooted in January. Sorry.

Thanks

Sara wrote: "Just an error, Ian. Doing too many things at one time...most of them rooted in January. Sorry."

We all make mistakes all of the time. This is the way we learn.

Here is a technical note, that ought to be in translations, but usually isn't.

In about line 45 or so, depending on your translation, Ovid has the Arctic, North Temperate, Equatorial, South Temperate, and Antarctic Zones mapped left and right, instead of up and down, as we would expect using a globe, or a modern map.

The flat maps of Antiquity (and the Middle Ages) generally had the East at the "top" and the West on the "bottom" of the chart, so North and South had to occupy the extremities. Hence Ovid's description.

Digression on notions of geography:

In medieval Christian maps, Jerusalem was placed at the center, although everyone with an education knew that the world was round, and that this was symbolic of its spiritual importance. What ordinary people thought about it, if they ever saw a schematic map, in unrecorded. By the late Middle Ages, seamen had created coastal charts, which were detailed and practical, but had no reference to the shape of the earth.

The various "zones" were originally philosophical conceptions, neatly showing the extreme north and south as uninhabitable by reason of intense cold, the equatorial region as uninhabitable because it was too hot, and the two temperate zones as forever unknown to each other.

This neat geographical schematic was refuted by a Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa, but learned Greeks considered that one of the preposterous notions passed on by that magpie of unreliable story collecting, Herodotus. However, rumors that such a voyage was possible, if extremely difficult, were revived when ships from the Red Sea began sailing farther south, on their way to India. L. Sprague de Camp, best known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, got an historical novel out of this, The Golden Wind

The idea doesn't seem to have caught on in much in the Islamic world, which early on learned perfectly well that it was possible to cross the equatorial zone without burning up. But it was received knowledge in the Christian West, until the Portuguese began expeditions down the West Coast of Africa, eventually taking around the Cape of Good Hope (see Vasco de Gama), which probably put paid to the idea once and for all, although not immediately.

Just finished the first book. As you might know, critics have difficulty classifying Metamorphoses as an epic because of its lack of some elements, notably a central hero or a journey. But as far as i can see, Ovid treated conceptions, deeds and changes as the central hero(es). Just like Homer followed Odysseus through his journey, Ovid explored changes that were brought about by actions, be it benevolent or malicious. Metamorphosis is interwoven inside all the stories as if he wanted to put emphasis on a hero (unusual one in this place) that an epic poem requires.

Another fairly technical note, which can be skipped.

I've been learning a lot from various commentaries and studies about things I missed from reading Ovid only in undocumented translations, like Innes and Humphries.

(My excuse is that, back then, the old Loeb Classical Library bi-lingual edition by F.J. Miller wasn't conveniently available in PDF, so I never bothered to look at the Latin.)

Ovid has jokes/puns which probably don't work in any language besides classical Latin. And which might merely confuse a dabbler like me, with a little Latin (which is now more than rusty).

In some cases, though, this reflection may invite over-reading of the Latin.

For a possible example of the latter: in describing the Olympian residences of the most powerful gods, he refers to them as "penates," which in context means "settled households."

However, the primary sense of Penates is "household gods," minor ancestral protective deities, maintained by all proper (or at least upper-class) Romans. This might suggest, briefly, a paradoxical notion that the great Gods have lesser, private, gods to worship.

But it isn't clear to me that this would be the immediate response for native speakers of classical Latin, as opposed to those who have to pick their way through primary and derived meanings of the vocabulary (e.g., through the old Lewis and Short Latin-English Dictionary, now readily available on-line, and not just on a library's non-circulating reference shelves.)

However, the word soon appears in the primary meaning, in Jupiter's subsequent description of his punishment of Lykaon. He describes how he brought down the evil king's house on the heads of the Penates, who there must be the household's protective gods, with no ambiguity. (Although it attributes Roman customs to prehistoric Arcadians -- Ovid also "modernizes" his retellings of old stories.)

At the same time, he is explaining to the Olympians his proposal to destroy mankind in order to protect the lesser, non-Olympian, gods, among whom the Penates must figure....

Ian wrote: "Another fairly technical note, which can be skipped.

I've been learning a lot from various commentaries and studies about things I missed from reading Ovid only in undocumented translations, like ..."

Could you please recommend few supplementary readings to enhance our reading and understandings of the book?

See, to begin with, the No-Spoiler thread for this discussion, for a whole lot of background books, and translations with commentary: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I included a lot of parallel versions and source texts for Ovid, and something on contemporary history, which a lot of critics think is also very important background.

I'll add more titles of major recent studies tomorrow morning. I've been evaluating them as I find and make time to read them, and have a short list worked up. For the moment, see particularly #59 for a free source for a number of books, some of which are turning out to be quite good.

I'll try to add some judgments on their difficulty or general interest -- for me, anyway: I should warn that I took graduate courses in both literature and mythology, so I'm guessing how transparent some of them might be for others without that background.

The seamless transitions between stories and books give an impression of a cinematic one-shot technique, everything occur simultaneously or a flashback to a past incident. Furthermore, stories and characters make a return in later stories as a brief mention or follow a descendant of a character that we encountered previously, as in Callisto's story. "(...), she still fears the sight of bears along the mountain slopes and shudders when the wolves approach, although Lycaon, her own father, is a wolf."

Even traits that led to an event of metamorphosis of a character returns to cause a problem and eventual change in another character. For example, in the story of Neptune and Coronis who chased her because of her beauty and burning desire for her. "My beauty was my ruin." such story resonates the encounter in Book I, when Apollo was enchanted by Daphne whose beauty and love led to a chase and finally a metamorphosis. It seems to me as if there are Wagnerian leitmotiffs flowing through the epic.

Such recurring themes and reminiscents of characters in the successive events alter the sense of time. It makes me wonder, if Ovid intended his stories to be one continuous flow, why then he divided the epic into several books?

Ian wrote: "See, to begin with, the No-Spoiler thread for this discussion, for a whole lot of background books, and translations with commentary: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...-..."

Thank you alot for your help!

if Ovid intended his stories to be one continuous flow, why then he divided the epic into several books?

Dividing long works into books was a standard convention, based on the very practical concern that a papyrus scroll could only be made so long before it began to break whenever it was handled. Ovid was well aware of this -- he re-issued some of his early poems, apparently with revisions, with different numbers of books.

The practice goes back a very long way, in Egypt at anyway. (The Mesopotamian civilizations used clay tablets: papyrus was imported into Western Asia. Early on it was distributed in the Mediterranean from the Phoenician city of Byblos, which gave its name to the Greek "biblia," book (hence the Bible, "The BOOK").

There were exceptions to the size limit: some copies of the anthology known to us as "The Egyptian Book of the Dead" could be quite large -- but then, they were magically "self-reading." So the dead didn't even have to unroll them in the next life.... Some were sloppily compiled, but the living customer probably never checked on them.

There were exceptions also to the use of papyrus: there are Egyptian documents on leather, probably intended to be durable master copies for official documents meant to be handled for copying on many occasions, and so worth the trouble and expense.

A lot of Classical (Greek) Literature was divided into books by scholars -- or copyists -- at the Library of Alexandria In Egypt, were papyrus was easily obtained. And it is not certain that all the book divisions reflected authorial control, instead of editorial judgment. Certainly the great -- and largely lost -- compilations of lyric poets were subject to a high degree of editorial control, whereas the division of Homer into 24 books might already have been conventional, albeit with variations in the divisions. And Herodotus and Thucydides seem to have planned their book divisions, and so forth.

By Ovid's time, the codex -- the format of the modern bound book, with writing on two sides of a page -- was coming into use, and, for the literary, it was the technological marvel of the age.

It was now possible to have a "complete works" of many poets. not to mention longer prose writings, without a whole lot of storage space for all those scrolls. No more trouble with missing scrolls from a set. And it could even be carried around without trouble.

Early Christians seem to have gone for the slender codex for their own writings, starting with the early collections of the Pauline Epistles, so this would have been the form in which the major components of the New Testament mostly originally circulated, before they were assembled in large compendiums of authoritative Scripture.

The Jews, who had already begun to organize their Scriptures centuries earlier, seem to have been more reluctant to give up the familiar form of the scroll, although the codex eventually came into use without a lot of controversy.

But the early rabbis, concerned that the individual scrolls of the Torah -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy -- might be separated from each other, with some treated as more authoritative than others (as some Christians seem to have tried), insisted that they be compiled, at least for congregational reading, in a five-work single scroll. The Dead Sea scrolls show that at one time shorter, more practical, collections, like Genesis-Exodus, also circulated, alongside single "books."

The hand-written parchment Torah scroll is still in congregational use today: weekly portions are read from it -- although the reader is expected to have studied printed texts with vocalizations and cantorial markings, as the old text is without vowels and grammatical markers. (Printed paper scrolls are also published, in theory for practice in reading from a "real" copy, although some amount to little more than religious souvenirs.)

These had to be unusually large, and so required the use of parchment, again to avoid breakage, which made it very expensive.

In fact, it probably also required, as practical matter, the invention of parchment, instead of ordinary leather, made by separating membranes of animal hide to produce a finer writing surface, and multiply the amount of space available from each skin.

(English "Parchment" is ultimately derived from "Pergamon," the city in Asia Minor where the process is supposed to have been invented, in order that it might rival the Library of Alexandria without having to buy Egyptian papyrus.)

Aqeel wrote: "Thank you alot for your help!..."

I've decided to post my response on the No-Spoilers thread, instead of here, where it would interrupt the flow of discussion. And in installments, which makes it easier for me, and also avoids choking Goodreads with a lot of html, which in my experience sometimes glitches and destroys the whole posting.

Depending on your translation, you may or may not be aware that in the story of Phaethon and the sun-chariot, the sun god seems to be Phoebus Apollo. But elsewhere in the Metamorphoses the Sun personified is Sol, the Greek Helios, instead.

The idea of Apollo as a god of the sun was considerably older, but never consistently maintained. Apollo was one of the most widely worshiped Olympian gods, but the Sun proper had an important cult on the island of Rhodes, and was sometimes thought of as non-Greek.

It seems to me that the main problem with Apollo as the Sun in mythology would seem to be how even a divinity could find the time for everything else he is supposed to be doing, given that he is fully occupied by guiding the sun-chariot, and traveling back to his eastern starting point during the night. This obviously called for a specialist.

However, Phoebus (Greek Phoibos), one of his most frequent epithets, means "the Bright One,' whicih looks like it could be by-name for the sun, or at least some celestial body. (The feminine form, Phoebe, could also refer to the Moon , that is, Selene, the Roman Luna, who was another personification not felt to be entirely Greek).

To add to the confusion, there was another Greek name which might be identified with the Sun, a Hyperion, a Titan. It appears in Homer and Hesiod as either the sun's by-name or as the name of his father. In the latter case, Helios was a younger Titan who made his peace with Zeus and the Olympians after his father's generation, lead by Kronos (Saturn) was overthrown by Zeus (Jupiter) and his siblings. You may be familiar with his name from Keats' unfinished poem, "The Fall of Hyperion."

Ovid glosses over, with a mention of Saturn, a lot of the violent story of the early generations of the gods, which may have been politically prudent. His Jupiter often seems to be connected to Augustus, who might not have wanted his own violent seizure of power to be given too much attention.

I'm not sure what the discussion program is yet, but I will post from time to time some of my favourite passages from this wonderful work. I'll stick to the first two books for now. I'm using the Humphries translation.

The first is from the passage of the flood, Book 1, lines 304-311.

The dolphins
Invade the woods and brush against the oak-trees;
The wolf swims with the lamb; lion and tiger
Are borne along together; the wild boar
Finds all his strength is useless, and the deer
Cannot outspeed that torrent; wandering birds
Look long, in vain, for landing-place, and tumble,
Exhausted, into the sea.

I love the way this passage obliterates all the differences between the animals, whether pursuer or prey, and makes their abilities useless and irrelevant, much as these slightly earlier lines show how the water obliterates the land's physical distinctions.

Its towers are under water, and land and ocean
Are all alike, and everything is ocean,
An ocean with no shore-line.

It is an interesting contrast to the particularity of the subsequent transformations.

Ben wrote: "I'm not sure what the discussion program is yet, but I will post from time to time some of my favourite passages from this wonderful work. I'll stick to the first two books for now. I'm using the H..."

Good choices.

But from antiquity down to the present, there have been critics who complained that Ovid was given to saying poetic and witty things about disasters and tragedies.

This is not completely unreasonable.

Here, for example, the wonderful imagery tends to blunt the fact that he is describing the destruction of all land-dwelling animals, along with the humans that are Jupiter's proclaimed target.

Personally, I don't see a real problem. But then, I belong to a generation that really liked Catch-22, which is filled with bot absurd and horrific events. -- sometimes both at once.

(By the way, there is a long tradition -- right back to the Middle Ages, if not earlier -- of comical/satirical stories about Noah's Flood. And for all levels of readers. One of Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle stories, Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, is about the Deluge as seen by a giant turtle.... Of course, it is by far the darkest and most overtly satirical of his books, written with WW II in mind: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_....)

A follow-up to posts #81 and #83 in the No Spoiler thread, introducing a book on Augustan Rome, and to #15, above.

The passing identification of Apollo with the sun-god early in the Metamorphoses may reflect imperial propaganda as well as mythological traditions and speculations.

Apollo was Augustus' special guardian deity -- there was even a temple to him next to Augustus' house on the Palatine.

It seems that Apollo appears twice on the torso of a marble statue, believed to represent the Emperor, which is included in both editions of Wallace-Hadrill's Augustan Rome(although better in the first edition). He is wearing a breastplate with an elaborate set of imperial symbols. One image is Apollo with a lyre, as the god of culture: but above it is an image of Apollo as the Sun. (The identification seems conclusive: he is paired with images of his sister Diana, both as a huntress and as the Moon.)

Of course, the sun-god, under whatever name, doesn't come off all that well in the story of Phaethon, so Augustus might not have appreciated the gesture, if he ever read the poem.

I will add that Ovid's Greek sources had Helius, and not Apollo, in mind, as is confirmed by the collective name of his sisters, (at Book 2, line 340) as the Heliades, offspring of Helius. Which meaning would have been immediately evident to many Roman readers, who had at least a little Greek culture in their education, and in some cases quite a bit more.

The whole passage about Phaethon and the Sun's chariot is marvellous, and the speech by the Sun god urging his son to reconsider his wish to drive the chariot is familiar to every parent urging his child to choose better, and with a familiar result. (Just like regretted permission to drive the family car.)

Beware, my son! I do not want to give you
The gift of death; there is time to change your prayer.
Of course you want the most convincing proof
I am your father. That I give you, surely,
By fearing as I do. I am proved a father
By a father’s fear. Look at me! You see my face;
Would you could see my heart and all the cares
Held there for you, my son. Or look about you,
Ask something, anything, from all those riches
Of Heaven, earth, and ocean: you shall have it!
Only this one thing do not ask, I beg you;
A punishment, not a favor. Silly boy,
Why put those pleading arms around me?
Doubt not, It will be given, whatever you choose.
I swore it. But choose more wisely!”

And the description of Phaethon's lack of driving skill and inability to control the horses is wonderful.

But the weight was light,
Not such as they were used to, and the yoke
Without its usual pressure; so, as schooners,
Unballasted, careen and roll and yaw
Out of the proper course, so the bright chariot
Tosses and bounds, as if there were no driver.
It did not take the horses long to know it,
To run away, beyond control; the driver,
In panic, does not know in which direction
To turn the reins, does not know where the road is,
And even if he knew, he could do nothing
With those wild plunging animals.

Out of his senses, with cold fear upon him,
Phaethon dropped the reins. And when the horses
Feel them across their backs, and none to check them,
Bolting, they charge the air of unknown regions,
Wherever impulse hurls them, lawless, crashing
Against high stars; they keep the chariot bounding
Through pathless ways, now high, now low, toward Heaven
Or plunging sheer toward earth.

In consulting a reference book for something else, I stumbled across an interesting twist on the Lykaon (Lycaon) story. Ovid's version is somewhat unusual, and he had a choice of what to make the story about.

But I didn't remember the full set of variants.

I was aware that in some earlier, Greek, versions of the "sacrifice," the klng was good, but his sons were wicked, and they were responsible for the killing, in some cases of their youngest brother, Arkas, who had opposed them.

This resolved the contradiction that elsewhere Lykaon is presented as the original model of a pious and blameless king, who instituted the first regular worship of Zeus (i.e, Jupiter), with the epithet Lykeios, and also originated the Lykeion festival games in the god's honor, the oldest by the usual Greek reckoning.

However, in what may be the oldest version, in a fragment attributed to Hesiod (the next-oldest epic poet after Homer, in traditional reckonings), the story had different motivations.

It appears there that Zeus had seduced Lykaon's daughter, and the outraged father had cut up the resulting child, also named Arkas, and served him to the god. This is not too far out of line with the behavior of other grandfathers of demi-gods, although they usually resort to exposure (which was legal in Greece if the child had not yet been named, although we don't know how common it was).

In all the cases where Arkas is named, however, Zeus restores him to life, and he becomes the eponym (name source) of Arcadia and the Arcadian people, rather than his father/grandfather.

This has a parallel in at least one other Greek story of human child sacrifice that I can think of off-hand, so it may be an old motif, not someone looking for a "happy ending."

It is striking how perspectives and sympathies regarding a character shift relative to the context in Book IV.

On one hand, while we sympathise with Nibe's unjust punishment, we imbue Latona with cruelty and injustice when she prayed for the savage slaughter of Niobe's sons and daughters.

"And Niobe now sat childless, among cadavers-daughters, sons, and husband; grief had made her stony, stiff.
she weeps; and swept up in a strong whirlwind,
she's carried to her native land and set
upon the peak of Sipylus-and there
she weeps, and to this day her rock sheds tears."

On the other hand, the following story depicts Latona as a victim and can't help but feel sympathy with her most basic and rightful request, to drink water from the pool.

I am continuing my selective quoting of my favourite lines from Metamorphoses.

These following lines near the end of Book 2 describe the characteristics of Envy as a personification of that sin, which Minerva unleashes on Aglauros as revenge for the latter's revealing of the baby "born without a mother"

there was Envy
Eating the flesh of snakes, the proper food
To nourish venom with. Minerva turned,
As Envy rose, torpid and slow, the snakes
Half-eaten on the ground, and she came forward,
Torpid and slow, and as she saw the goddess,
All bright and beautiful in all her armor,
She groaned aloud and sighed for that bright presence.
Pale, skinny, squint-eyed, mean, her teeth are red
With rust, her breast is green with gall, her tongue
Suffused with poison, and she never laughs
Except when watching pain; she never sleeps,
Too troubled by anxiety; if men
Succeed, she fails; consumes, and is consumed,
Herself her punishment.

I love the description of the misery spread by envy.

And Envy watched her, sidelong, out of sight,
Mumbling and muttering, sorry to be helpful In any victory, picked up her staff
All wound with thorns, put on the cloudy mantle
In which she travels, and wherever she goes
The grasses wither, the tall trees are blighted,
And towns and houses and their people tainted.

Here, Envy plants the emotion in Aglauros. The words "fills her heart with thorns" are a wonderful description of the pain envy inflicts on the one who feels it, and "more than doubles the wonder of it all" describes how the envious one experiences the happiness of the envied.

lays her festering hand
On the girl’s breast, and fills her heart with thorns,
Breathes pestilence through her nostrils, spreads the poison
Black through her bones.
To give her cause, she pictures
Her sister’s happy union, and the god
With her in all his beauty; she more than doubles
The wonder of it all. Aglauros, maddened,
Eats her heart out in secret, anxious always,
By day, by night, and wastes away, most wretched In dissolution, slow as ice is melted When the sun shines wan and fitfully across it.
Herse is happy, she believes; Aglauros
Burns with a sullen hopeless kind of burning
The way weeds smolder, set on fire, no blazing,
No flame, but only sullen slow resistance.
She would rather die than see her sister happy:

Every love story in the Metamorphoses explore a different aspect of that feeling. What i find interesting is that the ancient Greeks and Romans (as far as i noticed) viewed love with such tragedy that almost always lovers or any character inflamed by love commit a crime. Rape, murder, revenge and jealousy. For them to love is to suffer and eventually lead to madness. An example of this suffering can be seen in the story of Cephalus and Procris. Even though they were, so far, the happiest lovers in the epic, still they suffered from their love. "O phocus, sorrow has its origin in joys". Despite their years-long relationship, still there was mistrust that lurked beneath their love and i believe it stemmed from obsession and a desire to totally possess the lover which led, as any love story, to a tragedy. What's different here is that none of the two was unfaithful! there was no problem at all (probably only Cephalus' way of addressing aurora which was kind of suspicious, it was so intimate that at times you might think there was something), But despite of all, their story led to the death of Procris, for nothing!

In my post #13, I went on much longer than I intended on the meaning of "book" in classical antiquity, the original reference to the material of which it was made, and how the technology for using it was already changing in Ovid's time.

But I still omitted some of the points I intended to make.

To begin with the name of "Byblos," the Phoenician city from which papyrus was once distributed, is reflected in more than just the English term "Bible." It of course survives in bibliography and bibliophile, and, bibliomaniac, and, with reference mainly to the Bible, bibliolater.

In many European languages it is part of a common word for Library (from Latin), for example French "bibliotheque." (originally from Greek). It very rarely shows up in English too, as bibliothecas, borrowed from the French in the twelfth century, but replaced by library in actual modern usage.

(Ironically, the name of the city was properly "Gebal," and the Greeks garbled it, in the same manner as they scorned when done by "barbarians" to Greek.)

Finally, as what should have been my conclusion:

As pointed out by Genevieve Lively, in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Reader's Guide, Ovid actually introduces a character name Byblis, whose interior monologues are remarkably "bookish," in that they seem to reflect an (anachronistic) knowledge of Hellenistic and Roman love poetry, up through and including Ovid's earlier works. (See #68 in the No Spoiler thread for where to find the book on-line, free.)