Roger’s Comments (group member since Aug 29, 2018)

Roger’s comments from the Ovid's Metamorphoses and Further Metamorphoses group.

I was curious about the stories the Minyades decide not to tell, so looked them up. The quotations are from the Martin translation:

Your story, Babylonian Dercetis?
A woman who, as Syria supposes,
was changed into a scaly thing that swims
now in a little pool? Or how her daughter,
transformed into a dove of purest white,
spent her last years perched on lofty towers?
Or how, by potent herbs and incantations,
a nymph changed little boys to fish, until
she underwent the very same conversion?

All three of these stories seem to be connected, but the only one I can find anything about is Dercetis herself, portrayed as a sexually aggressive nymph (a bit like Salmacis later). I found this from The Thebaid, the epic by Statius published about 92 CE: The Nymphe Dercetis in burning passion and shameless lust of wedlock corrupted ere his time the boy Lapithaon, still innocent of the marriage bed and unripe for a lover's flames; and soon was born the fair Alatreus.But I cannot find any mention of a daughter or the transformation of other boys to fish. However, as dercetis is a genus of fish, there must be some connection.

I will not mention here the too-familiar
loves of the Idaean shepherd Daphnis,
turned into stone for a nymph's rage at a rival:
how thwarted lovers burn! Nor will I speak
of how a law of nature was repealed
when Sithon changed at will from man to woman;
nor of you, Celmis, now adamant, but once
the most faithful guardian of baby Jove;
Nor how the Curetes emerged from a downpour;
nor will I speak of Crocus and his Smilax,
turned into tiny flowers—these I pass by.

Alcithoë mentions no less than five stories here in passing, before beginning her main tale, that of Salmacis:

• Daphnis. A Sicilian shepherd of great beauty, in some versions the son of Hermes. He is beloved by Pan, who teaches him how to play the panpipes. Wikipedia, has many variants of the legend. In one, he is seduced by a princess (who makes him drunk), and the nymph who had loved him turns him to stone in revenge.

• Sithon. The only Sithon I can discover was a Thracian King who killed his daughter's wooers serially until he was bested by Dionysos. I can find no other reference to this or any other bearer of the name changing sex, as Tiresias did.

• Celmis. The name means "smelter." The online Encyclopedia Mythica explains: "He was once the truest friend of the infant Zeus and guarded his cradle. When he insulted Rhea she punished him by having Zeus turn him into adamantine steel."

• Curetes. Or Corybantes, beings who worshipped the goddess Cybele in drumming and dance. This is also connected with the Celmis story in that they were apparently stationed around the cradle of the infant Zeus to deter intruders. Wikipedia suggests that Ovid's myth about them being born from a shower of rain implies Uranus impregnating Mother Earth, their mother.

• Crocus and Smilax. WIkipedia again: "Crocus was a mortal youth who, because he was unhappy in his love affair with the nymph Smilax, was turned by the gods into a plant bearing his name). Smilax is believed to have been given a similar fate and transformed into bindweed." So a semi-reversal of the Narcissus story.

I am curious, too, about why Ovid introduced so many stories in passing. Perhaps to shore up some of his main themes, without duplicating the treatment of the major stories?

Vit wrote: "An intrigue of The Story of Pyramus and Thisbe, especially in the end, reminds of that in Romeo and Juliet."

How strange it is to be invited to take the Pyramus and Thisbe story seriously, when we mostly know it only through Shakespeare's hilarious parody in Act V of A Midsummer Night's Dream! Poussin at least took it seriously; the figures provide the foreground of one of his most impressive landscapes (below), and there are several paintings by minor artists. Shakespeare himself used the key elements of the story (lovers from warring families, and a double suicide prompted by misunderstanding) in a genuine tragedy, Romeo and Juliet,


Poussin: Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651, (Frankfurt)

Reading the scene in Book IV, I was struck by how closely Shakespeare follows Ovid's telling of it, in terms of the sequence of scenes, the images and so forth. Reading it in the Charles Martin translation, I thought I also heard echoes of Shakespeare's text, but I see now that these are trivial only; even the Golding (which Shakespeare would have known) is not nearly as close as I would have expected it to be. Shakespeare may have cribbed his plots, but he wrote his own words!

However, I do recommend Benjamin Britten's brilliant setting of the Pyramus and Thisbe play in the final scene of his opera A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960). To Shakespeare's parody, he adds several musical parodies of his own: a Wall who sings in serialist Sprechstimme, a Pyramus who alternates between Verdi and Handel, and a drag Thisbe whose out-of-tune attempts at a Lucia di Lammermoor mad scene have to be corrected by her attendant flute! Alas, there is no really good production on YouTube, but this updated staging from Israel is not bad:

https://youtu.be/QDy3FlUczNg?t=7251

Kalliope wrote: "One of the aspects I have been tracing in my document/index/table is how the narrative is put together."

Very interesting. I would not know how to enter narrative strategies into a table, but it intrigues me that you are doing so. Does this then give you any insight into the question I posed at post 4? R.

Kalliope wrote: "And to this we will come back to in Book VI - with links to Book II (The Europa and Jupiter theme)."

Ha! I suppose I knew this once, but I had completely forgotten until you mentioned it that the tapestry in the background is a woven version of Titian's Rape of Europa, which you posted at 2/120. Thank you for the reminder.



I am also interested in the outline of that bass viol in the background, and the general "stagey" appearance of the standing figure, as though the painting were also celebrating something close to opera.

Finally, although the Arachne story does indeed come in Book VI, the heading for Book IV devised by Charles Martin, the translator of my edition, is "Spinning Yarns and Weaving Tales"! R.

Kalliope wrote: "No, it is not 'awfully late', Roger, because it comes from Egypt. In the late Classical period the East and West developed differently."

Thanks. You now know the limits of my art-historical knowledge! I love your picture, with the ivory nestling on the red, but I wanted to see the detail, so found a larger picture (alas, not so pretty).

Kalliope wrote: "Organising my photo album I encounter this picture that I took in my last trip to Italy."

That would be the end of the fifth century CE? I'm no expert in this period, but it seems awfully late. On the other hand, C5 BCE would surely be too early to be called Hellenistic? I ask so I can add it to the online database later in the day. R.

Jim wrote: "I'm greatly enjoying the postings that have brought musical adaptations of the Met to the fore (Thank you, Roger for all those links!) ..."

You're welcome, Jim—clearly a fellow opera-lover! And your mention of Wagner is quite on point for the Henze, who of course would have grown up with his aesthetic.

You mention that the propulsiveness of music gives it a special advantage, and I see that. On the other hand, it takes the time it takes, The visual arts have the advantage of immediate impact. R.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what I assume is an epic tradition, the infolding of one or more stories within another? We start the story of the Daughters of Minyas only to break it off for four entirely different stories (Pyramus and Thisbe, Mars and Venus, the Sun and Leucothoë, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus) told by one or other of the sisters to enliven their work. Only then does their own story reach its horrible climax. We have seen this technique at least once before, in Book I where the story of Io is interrupted for that of Pan and Syrinx. But this length of interruption seems unusual. Chaucer does a form of it in The Canterbury Takes and Bocaccio in the Decameron, but both of those are rather different. R.

Charles Martin translates the passage beginning on line 17 (tibi enim inconsumpta iuventa est, tu puer aeternus) as verse, beginning thus:

O Youth undimmend, Eternal Boy,
      Fairest in the heavens;
Without your horns, your countenance
      Is lovely as a maiden's;

Now all the Orient admits
      The godhead that is yours,
Even as far as India,
      Where the dark Ganges pours.

And so on for six stanzas in all. It is as though this section is some preexisting Bacchic hymn. But the Latin gives no obvious indication, and none of the other translations I have seen (Golding, Garth/Dryden, or Humphries) do it. So why? R.

Those details you took are great, Kalliope; I like them more than the picture as a whole. What is the origin and concentration of the Thyssen, as opposed to the Prado? Like the Wallace Collection to the London National Gallery, or the Isabel Stewart Gardiner in Boston? R.

Kalliope wrote: "You could order it from the Amazon.es or from abebooks.com... cheaper there. Can you read Spanish?"

Yes, I have even read quite a few novels in Spanish, but I am a bit rusty now. I will check abebooks.com; thank you for the suggestion. But I need you to tell me first: is this merely a collection of pretty photos of pretty pictures, or does the text have some value in itself? R.

Kalliope wrote: "I have been watching/listening to the Oratorio Semele as produced for the Zurich Opera House in 2007. William Christie was the Director and Cecilia Bartoli sang the leading role.

As I had posted e..."

I'll clearly have to watch the whole of this one. R.

Elena wrote: "Roger, I think you are that enterprising scholar...."

Nah! The art history field is one I left 50 years ago. I have returned to it now, somewhat, but very much as an enthusiastic amateur, certainly not a scholar. But thanks for the compliment! R.

Elena wrote: "From the call for papers of the 2019 Renaissance Society meeting in Toronto: "Paul Barolsky..."

All of which reminds me to look into Barolsky's book, which I bought six weeks ago, but have barely thumbed through. It is good to know that it is more than the gorgeous pictures! R.

Kalliope wrote: "Yesterday I found a new book in the Prado bookshop.

Los mitos en el Museo del Prado

Good timing for me...

I will try go go through it quickly to see if we have missed any works ..."

Too expensive, alas! R.

Thanks, Barbara. I prefer to think of this site, though, as an invitation to drop in anywhere, in the sure knowledge that you can both learn and contribute. It should not be necessary to read all the seven-hundred-plus comments so far, just those that catch your fancy. R.

Continuing the Phaëthon story and filling in one last gap: Cycnus and the Heliades, the mourners of the fallen boy. Here is an etching by Johann WIlhelm Baur that tells the story quite clearly:


Baur: The Sisters of Phaëthon Turn into Trees, etching, c.1639.

And here, more colorful but harder to make out, is a tapestry by Jean Baudouyn after a design by Giulio Romano. The details below show the Heliades turning into poplars on the left, and Cycnus at the extreme right.


Giulio Romano: The Heliades, mid-C16. Tapestry by Jean Baudouyn (Ecouen).

Filling another gap, here is the brief poem Deucalion and Pyrrha by the English poet Christopher Reid, in the anthology After Ovid (1994). It is short enough to give in its entirety, if only to enjoy the delicious way the rhymes nudge, but do not stop, the run-on lines:

                        Only
two survived the flood.
We are not of their blood,
springing instead from the bones
of the great mother: stones,
what have you—rocks, boulders—
hurled over their shoulders
by that pious pair
and becoming people, where
and as they hit the ground.
Since when, we have always found
something hard, ungracious
      obdurate in our natures,
a strain of the very earth
that gave us our abrupt birth;
but a pang, too, at the back
of the mind: a loss . . . a lack . . .

Phaëthon is a very well-represented subject, as we have seen. But there are a few more I want to add. The first is a vase painting from the 5th century BCE. Since there is no specific reference to the contrary, I assume it shows the Sun god Helios, rather than his son:


Greek vase painter: The Chariot of the Sun, 5th century BCE (British Museum).

Here is a pair of engravings by Guillaume de Villenave, published in 1806; I think they are both copies of paintings by François le Barbier. I admire them for the sense of scale in the first, when Phaëthon is still riding high, but things are just beginning to go wrong (perhaps the influence of that Scorpio in the sky), and the totality of the destruction in the second:


Villenave: Phaëthon and the Horses of the Sun, 1806.


Villenave: The Fall of Phaëthon, 1806.

And finally a sculpture by Dominique Lefevre, from the early 18th century. Once again I am struck by the potential of the three-dimensional form to enhance the pathos of such a subject as compared to a painted image:


Lefevre: The Fall of Phaëthon, 1700–11 (London, V&A)

We have no illustrations for the last section of Book I, in which Clymene tells her son Phaëthon about his dad. Here is our reliable Goltzius. I am interested in the tree which, probably fortuitously, looks as though it might be the result of some metamorphosis itself.


Goltzius: Clymene tells Phaëthon about his father, c.1589.