This is a short extract from a long poem, telling a grisly tale of an impious king getting his just deserts from an angry god. The tale is simple: King Pentheus of Thebes is outraged that his people are worshipping this strange god Bacchus and is determined to put a stop to their revelry – for Bacchus is the god of wine and various forms of ecstasy and his worship was uninhibited and must have been alarming to onlookers and rulers. The king sends his men to sort out these Bacchic worshippers but the men come back defeated. Along with them comes a stranger, Acoetes, with his own tale to tell. He had been on a voyage when they put into the shore for the night: his men find a young boy wandering around and decide to kidnap him for a ransom, despite Acoetes’ demands that they do no such thing. The ship sets sail and suddenly the ‘boy’ turns out to be the god Bacchus himself who stops the ship with ivy growing up the oars and masts and then turns the sailors into dolphins. Acoetes warns King Pentheus to beware annoying this god – look what happened to my men when they tried a trick on him – but Pentheus takes no notice. He in fact gives orders for Acoetes to be tortured and killed for his impudence. The prisoner is miraculously set free, his chains slipping off his arms and the prison gates opening of their own accord. Pentheus is by now at the end of his tether and goes off to the mountainside to sort these Bacchants out himself once and for all. When he gets there he is spotted by his mother and her sisters who, in their divinely-induced hallucinatory trance, think he is a boar wandering on the grass and tear him limb from limb and rip his head clean off. After that the Thebans worship Bacchus and nobody would dare question this ever again.
Ovid is a master of Latin verse. He manages to be subtle without being over-complex and his use of descriptive language and vivid dialogue brings the tale to life. Pentheus’ speech urging the Thebans to stand up to this ‘perfumed boy’ is a classic of its kind: superbly constructed and yet obviously wrong-headed at the same time, a triumph of form over content. The passage in which the cheeky sailors are turned into dolphins is astonishing: the details of the transformation are packed in – their new skin and beaks, the loss of their arms etc. – and yet the tale does not drag and the whole crew is transformed within 15 lines. There is dramatic irony; we know full well that Pentheus is heading for disaster and yet we watch and listen to him blustering and refusing to see sense until it is too late.
This is a story which most people knew from going to the theatre: it had been put into tragedies in Greek and Latin and Ovid seems to allude to this several times: the use of Pentheus’ big speech to outline the argument against Bacchus is typical of Greek tragedy, as is the use of the Messenger (in this case Acoetes) who warns the king of what has happened offstage. The dénouement is clearly dramatic and visual: indeed the setting on Mount Cithaeron is described as being a spectabilis undique campus – a plain open to view on all sides – which is a strong hint that we are in the position of a theatrical audience watching the awful fate unfold. What is worse, the actual events are more the stuff of the Roman amphitheatre than the Greek theatre as this spectacle enacts the brutal revenge on an impious king, the very Roman ‘beast hunt’ being enacted but (as in the case of Actaeon) with a human victim rather than the animal his killers supposed.
This is of course highly problematic: we cannot now claim to know what Ovid intended when he composed this tale. It is clear, however, that a reading of this text explores a view of how we should behave, and how the gods in fact behave which will prompt discussion and argument. If gods behave like this – turning non-believers into dolphins or having them dismembered by their mothers – should we worship them? Equally, do we dare not worship beings powerful and callous enough to do this? The ‘theology’ of the tale is perhaps less important than the emotional investment of fear which the tale instils in the reader: this is a revenge drama told from the point of view of two cowed onlookers – the narrator and then the second narrator within the narrative, Acoetes.
Reading this story will not change your life – as reading Plato or Lucretius (for example) could. It will however give pleasure: the thrill of the horror story with the gory details in full colour on the page, the shiver of irony as the awful fate we can see coming hits the king (and the sailors) even more than we expected, the satisfaction of seeing bad behaviour rewarded with punishment but also the nagging doubt about the justification of this kind of ‘moral’. The questions of ‘sincerity’ and ‘intention’ are still to be found in discussions of many writers, ancient and modern: Catullus’ longest poem (64) ends with a ‘moral’ which may (or may not) be ironic, Juvenal appears to be pushing a hard line on social and moral issues but is doing so in the exaggerated manner of the satirist whose style undercuts the urge to take his words at face value, and so on. The fundamental ‘purpose’ of a writer is (of course) to write: and perhaps the one thing we can say with some measure of certainty about Ovid is that there is a delight in his own poetic and narrative skill which makes the poetry a constant source of pleasure and value in itself. The purpose of the commentary to this text is to begin the process of investigating the methods and the achievements of this most artistic of poets.
Publius Ovidius Naso was born on 20 March 43 BC in a small town called Sulmo (modern Sulmona) about 80 miles east of Rome. We know more about his upbringing than we do about that of other poets as he left a substantial body of autobiographical works, and he tells us that his family was well-off but not politically active. He was sent to school in Rome – one of the signs of wealth in an age where there was no free schooling – along with his brother, and he studied public speaking (with a view to a legal and/or political career) although he was more drawn to the writing of poetry than to the composition of speeches. He was born into turbulent times: by the time of his birth Julius Caesar had been dead almost a year and when he was 12 Caesar’s great-nephew and heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony in the crucial battle off Actium, leaving the Roman world in the hands of a young man who was soon to change his name to Augustus and become the first of the emperors of Rome. The Roman republic which had stood ever since the last of the kings – the infamous Tarquinius Superbus – was expelled in 510 BC was now subverted into a ‘Principate’ in which supreme power rested in the hands of the princeps or emperor and freedom of speech and free elections came to be increasingly circumscribed and sanctioned. Ovid’s choice of career as a writer rather than as a lawyer or politician (or both, as was Cicero) is therefore not totally surprising seeing that he was born in an age when the scope for a lively-minded man to find the outlet for his talents in politics was inevitably limited by the regime in power. Ovid hardly ever refers explicitly to politics in his works, although it is clear from some of his less guarded lines that he might not have survived long as a politician in the imperial court.
As a young man he did what we could call the Grand Tour, travelling to Greece, Sicily and Asia Minor, and it is clear from his work that he, like most educated Romans, understood and read Greek literature in the original. His training as a lawyer would have encouraged him to compose suasoriae – artificial exercises in which the student composes a speech to ‘try to persuade’ (suadere) a historical figure about to make some momentous act, such as Sulla about to invade Rome, or Hannibal after the Battle of Cannae. This sort of imaginative work did him no harm at all as a writer and his composition of speeches in particular shows ample signs of having been much influenced by these student exercises; Pentheus’ speech to the Thebans in this book is just the kind of thing a young Ovid might have written in his rhetorical training.
Ovid’s political career did not, then, last long and he soon devoted himself to writing poetry. He may have enjoyed the private means which other poets such as Horace did not have; or he may have continued with some business interests alongside his literary output. Literature was clearly however the focus of his career.
He began by writing love poetry in elegiac couplets: three books of Amores (‘Loves’, or ‘Love-affairs’) which are fully in the tradition of love-elegy. He published three books of these elegies, purporting to be love-poetry told in the first person: he followed this with the Heroides, which are fictional verse letters written from famous women of legend, such as Dido writing to Aeneas and Penelope to Ulysses.
Much of ancient literature was didactic in that it claimed to teach its readers lessons of one sort or another. Sometimes it was explicitly so, as in Nicander’s poem On Venomous Reptiles, Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura or Virgil’s Georgics, and sometimes it was simply a feeling that poetry ‘ought’ to educate young and old. Ovid next produced two works which pretended to be didactic literature, but composed them in the elegiac metre of love poetry rather than the hexameters of the traditional didactic epic. The Medicamina Faciei Femineae (‘medical treatments for woman’s appearance’) looked at how women could maintain their appearance with drugs and potions – very much in the style of the didactic poet Nicander. We only have 100 lines surviving of this poem, but the Ars Amatoria (the first two books of which were published in 1 BC) was a sustained experiment in applying the form of didactic poetry to the elegiac content of the life of love, instructing young men how to court women using abundant material from literature and legend as well as some vivid descriptions of such features of ancient Rome as the Circus Maximus and its races. This was followed by the antidote to love (Remedia Amoris (1 BC–AD 2) which is clearly a sequel to the successful Ars Amatoria.
The Metamorphoses was written before his exile in AD 8 – an exile imposed on Ovid by the Emperor Augustus because of his unspecified poem (usually regarded as the Ars Amatoria) and his very mysterious ‘crime’ which seems to have consisted in the poet witnessing something secret and which was scandalous enough to have him banished to remote Tomis (modern Constanza on the Black Sea coast of Romania) for the rest of his life. Before his exile he had also begun to write the Fasti – poem on the feasts and tales associated with the Roman calendar, with one book for each of the months of the year.
Once stranded in exile in Tomis he composed the Tristia (AD 9–12) – ‘sad things’ – poems expressive of Ovid’s misery in his banishment, as well as the Epistulae ex Ponto and the mysterious curse-poem Ibis (AD 10–11?). For all his poetic pleading, Ovid never returned to Rome and died at the age of 60 in AD 17.
Epic in the ancient world begins with Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey – poems of enormous length composed in dactylic hexameters – framed the conventions of the genre for hundreds of years to come. Homer’s poems concern themselves with warfare, heroism and gods and contain speeches and elaborate similes and this is very much what ‘epic’ meant to the ancient reader. Homer was imitated widely in the centuries after his death by writers such as Apollonius Rhodius (whose Argonautica we have) and many others whose works have not survived. The influential writer and critic Callimachus, who lived and worked in the great library at Alexandria in Egypt, led something of a revolt against the predominance of epic (‘I detest epic’ is one of his pithier fragments) and promoted the idea of literature as miniature gems of stylistic perfection rather than the broad brush of the epic narrative. His own surviving works show this tendency to give us the unexpected rather than to follow the well-trodden path of Homeric imitation, to produce small-scale poems rather than long tales – and Roman poets found themselves under the conflicting sways of both Homer and Callimachus. The last generation of the Roman republic saw the emergence of the so-called ‘Neoteric’ poets who followed the Callimachean aspiration of l’art pour l’art and produced such small-scale masterpieces as Catullus’ short epic on Peleus and Thetis (poem 64). Then came Virgil.
Virgil’s debt to Homer is obvious: the very opening words of his great Roman epic The Aeneid salute his Greek predecessor, with the arma of arma virumque cano representing the Iliad and the virum being a nod towards Odysseus who is the ‘man’ mentioned in the first word of Homer’s Odyssey. Virgil’s epic breaks into two halves, an ‘Odyssean’ (books 1–6) and an ‘Iliadic’ half (7–12) and the Roman poet’s debt to Homer in terms of storyline, language and style are all immediately obvious. Clearly when Ovid decided to write his epic he was not going to try to imitate Virgil but needed to find his own way.
The result is the Metamorphoses, a continuous poem (carmen perpetuum as he calls it in Metamorphoses 1.4) in 15 books, containing roughly 250 tales of ‘transformations’ or ‘shape-shifting’. Not for Ovid the concentrated narrative of the Iliad, dealing with a short period of time in the final year of the Trojan War, or the Aeneid with its constant movement in the direction of the foundation of Rome and its glorious future. Ovid’s poem jumps from time to time and place to place, links between the stories being at times tenuous and keeping his readers on their toes by sometimes putting stories within other stories – as in this text where the tale of the sailors is embedded in the tale of Pentheus. Homer’s Iliad is dominated by a theme – anger – and a small group of characters, whereas the Metamorphoses has a huge dramatis personae and defies easy analysis in thematic terms.
The obvious ‘subject’ of the poem is stated in its title – ‘changes of shape’ which is what the Greek word metamorphosis means. In the course of the poem we see people changed into animals (the sailors in this book become dolphins), trees (Baucis and Philemon), flowers (Narcissus), the opposite sex (Tiresias), stars (Julius Caesar) and even a god (Augustus’ deification is prophesied in the final pages of book 15), and so on. This suits Ovid the writer perfectly as his blend of epic poetry and ‘magic realism’ is ideal for these tales of ‘shape-shifting’ which make up the poem. It also suits Ovid the literary stylist who can change one literary genre into another, so that disparate materials in a variety of forms – tragedy, comedy, elegy, lyric, rhetoric and so on – all find themselves metamorphosed into this highly sophisticated hexameter poetry. On the outside it all looks the same – but read the poem and you find yourself taken on something of a tour of ancient literature as well as a long voyage through the seas of myth and history. This also allows Ovid to indulge the ironic side of his writing. Kenneth Quinn once famously described Ovid as a poseur – which means a writer whose work pretends to be something which its ironic style denies, such as the ardent lover in the Amores or the ‘teacher of love’ in the Ars Amatoria. The Metamorphoses never allows the reader to become too emotionally involved in the feelings of the characters portrayed either because they are too bad to deserve our sympathy – just as Pentheus is here characterised as getting no more than a contemptor superum (‘despiser of the gods’) deserves – or else because they end up mysteriously better off – as in the case of the old couple Baucis and Philemon in book 8, who have their lifespan extended by several hundred years by being turned into adjoining trees, or (for that matter) in the case of the sailors here who are turned into apparently happy dolphins. There is also much comedy in the telling of the tales – for instance the cat-and-mouse game Bacchus plays on the sailors when he feigns fear and helplessness as he ‘realises’ that they are taking him away from Naxos, or the black humour of Pentheus trying to extend his arms in prayer to his mother only to find she has torn them off his body. The brilliance of the style sometimes impresses us so much that it gets in the way of our emotional involvement, even when the style is being used to persuade, as in the case of the rousing speech where Pentheus tries to instil patriotic fervour in his ‘snake-born’ Thebans by reminding them of their old foe the dragon, or in the wonderful ‘messenger speech’ piece of narrative when Acoetes tells the story of the sailors, or in the neat ‘moral’ ending to the book. This piece of Latin is skilful and versatile, and it shows Ovid the stylist at the height of his powers. The form is self-contained in a triptych A-B-A in which the tale of Pentheus begins the section and ends it, with a related middle section concerning Acoetes: this structure is exactly that of Catullus 64, which begins and ends with the marriage of Peleus and Thetis but has a lengthy middle section telling the tale of Ariadne being rescued by Bacchus after being abandoned on Naxos by Theseus, before ending with a moralistic coda. Ovid uses his art to display his art – in places such as his brilliant use of echoes in the ‘Narcissus and Echo’ section of book 3 or the highly entertaining ‘catalogue’ of Actaeon’s dogs (206–25) which have significant names (such as ‘Whitey’, ‘Blackey’, ‘Barker’ and ‘Shaggy’) and this ironic manner makes Ovid a pleasure to read but has in the past made him seem a difficult poet to take seriously. Critics felt that he was just a clever wordsmith when compared to the gravity of a Virgil or a Homer. More recently, however, with the post-modernist emphasis on the textuality of literature and the self-conscious relationship all writers have with their work and the life it reflects, Ovid has come more into fashion, and his tales of shape-shifting no longer seem so silly in the age of ‘magic realist’ writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges and television series such as Heroes.
Not that the events here described are themselves ‘magic’. We only have Acoetes’ word for the transformation of men into dolphins, and the murdering of a man by people in a state of madness is far from unknown in the ‘real’ world. The section ends with the Theban women, ‘warned by examples such as these’, inspired to make offerings to Bacchus now that his opponent Pentheus is safely dead. The writer rounds off the incident with a neat form of closure – ‘that was what happened and so ever afterwards…’ – but which focuses on the women of Thebes in order to lead straight into the start of book 4 and which leaves the tale on a sombre, fearful note. Ovid has in this extract covered his bases: his ending manages to distance the writer from the tale he has just told just as his use of direct speech from Acoetes resists any compulsion to pin the authority of Ovid himself to his tale, as does his subtle fama est in line 700.
One of the features of the poem which has attracted a lot of critical attention is the way in which Ovid links his tales together into groups and some have seen book 3 as less coherent than it might have been in this respect. The link between the two tales here is obvious, as the tale of Acoetes and the sailors is linked to the ‘frame-story’ of Pentheus as (a) it is being narrated to Pentheus and so the speech is part of Pentheus’ tale, and (b) it concerns the same god Bacchus and issues a warning about the way he should be regarded. The book as a whole, however, has less obvious links: it starts with the tale of Cadmus, founder of Thebes and the sower of dragon’s teeth: the link to the next story is that one of Cadmus’ grandsons was a hunter called Actaeon whose grisly death (in lines 141–252) is one of the most famous passages in the book. Actaeon accidentally saw the goddess Diana bathing naked and for this compromise to the modesty of the virgin goddess he is torn to pieces by his own hounds after he has been turned into a stag. This tale has obvious links with Pentheus – the insult to the god answered by the tearing of the miscreant to pieces, the crime being superficially one of seeing what should not be seen – but is quite different in other respects, as Actaeon was innocent of any blame whereas Pentheus was very much the architect of his own downfall. Both men were made to look like wild animals to be killed, but Pentheus’ transformation is all in the deranged mind of his killers while Actaeon really did turn into the stag for the dogs to tear. Lines 253–315 tell the tale of Juno and Semele, where the jealous Juno tricks the gullible Semele (who is carrying Jupiter’s child) into asking Jupiter to make love to her as he does with Juno, knowing that a mortal woman would never survive the experience. She is burnt to death in the ensuing conflagration, and Jupiter has to rescue his unborn son Bacchus from her womb and implant the child into his own thigh. The link with the previous tale is that Diana and Juno are both angry gods: the ‘metamorphosis’ is the change which Jupiter makes to his person to please the misguided Semele. The story of Semele is tragic in many ways – a woman in love who misguidedly incurs disaster, rather like Deianeira in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis who also suffers for her mixture of love and naiveté – her ‘mistake’ being something like the error of the unwary Actaeon. The link with the tale of Pentheus is interesting. Clearly we see here the background of the god and can only pity this baby orphaned by the malice of a wicked stepmother, while at the same time it signals the ruthlessness of all gods – and Bacchus is a god – towards mortals.
Human tragedies do not touch the divine comedy, however, or not for long. In the next episode (316–510) there is a ludicrous debate between Jupiter and Juno about whether men or women enjoy sex more. They cannot agree and so they ask the expert Tiresias, who had been both male and female and so was competent to judge. He told them that women gain far more – 90 per cent in fact – of the pleasure, whereas men get a paltry 10 per cent of the fun. Jupiter was pleased with this answer which of course confirmed the male view that women were all incorrigibly and permanently randy and gave Tiresias prophetic gifts. Juno was angry and poked his eyes out. Tiresias was consulted about the future soon afterwards and one such consultation was about a young man called Narcissus – which leads to the tale of Narcissus and Echo. The debate between the gods about sex is shocking not least for the way it is sandwiched between the tragedy of Semele and the melodrama of Echo – another woman crucified by her helpless love who had already had the power of initiating speech taken from her by a jealous Juno and who now pined away with love until only her echoing voice remained, while the object of her affections Narcissus becomes a flower because he only loves himself and he is stuck to the adoring sight of his own reflection in a pool. The link here to the final (Pentheus) episode is the fame of Tiresias, who had so skilfully foreseen the fate of Narcissus, but who was despised by the arrogant King Pentheus who sneered at his blindness. This leads to the final section in which the king is killed for his impiety by his mother and the other Bacchants.
How do these tales make up a coherent narrative?
One common theme is that of changes of shape (metamorphosis):
Another obvious link is avenging gods:
Less obviously, the theme is one of sexual love:
Note however that, for all their common themes, the stories do not pursue a monotonous moral tone. Some characters are to blame for pride/stupidity (Pentheus, sailors, Narcissus); others are helpless victims of their own overpowering emotions (Semele, Echo); and others blameless (Actaeon – ‘for how could a mistake be a crime?’ quid enim scelus error habebat? 142). Divine retribution falls on the deserving and on the undeserving, and the contrast between the tragedy on earth and the levity of the gods’ attitude towards it is brought out sharply in the contrast between the death of Semele and the farcical divine conversation which follows it.
Above all, think of the literary effects of this book. Ovid avoids tedium in his writing by constantly shifting the tone and the emphasis from narrative to rhetoric, tragedy to farce, gods to men, land to sea. In the Narcissus/Echo episode, for instance, he shows a real interest in psychology, somewhat like the analysis of Medea in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, and manages to make Echo’s story more plausible as her obsessive love ends up being self-destructive. On the surface this is a simple tale of Juno punishing a cheeky nymph by making her love the unattainable, killing two birds with one curse by having the unattainable destroyed by his own self-infatuation, but Ovid invests far more subtlety in the tale and Echo’s wasting away is a convincing portrayal of a woman in emotional turmoil.
In the Pentheus tale there is a similar simplicity about the moral of the text: right at the start we are told that Pentheus was a contemptor superum and that he mocked the old man Tiresias, just as the greedy sailors abuse and mock poor Acoetes who is trying to protect the innocent ‘boy’. Pride goes before a fall, and just as in the case of Narcissus, Pentheus will suffer for his arrogance. Notice however the subtlety of the story: the irony (or poetic justice) of Pentheus being both produced and destroyed through his mother, the dramatic irony of his dismissing of Bacchus as a mere youth (553) and the rhetoric he comes up with to instil martial valour into the ‘offspring of Mars’ (531), the irony that Pentheus’ ‘madness’ (rabies) makes him go to the mountain where the real madness of his mother and her sisters is waiting for him. Just as Narcissus suffered the Tantalus-style torment of seeing his beloved reflection recede from him whenever he reached out to it, so also Pentheus speaks to and pleads with his mother and his aunt (he even uses the title matertera (‘auntie’); 79) but they cannot recognise him and ignore his words. Pentheus’ last words (725) could not be more appropriate – ‘look, mother’ – as looking is what cost him his life as Tiresias predicted (517–18) and the poignancy of the son pleading with a murderous mother is highly charged, a sentiment which in other contexts (such as the tale of Medea for instance) could have been tragic but which here is made into almost sick humour as he waves his armless shoulders at her, the deluded son now seeing straight and the deluded mother unaware of who he is, shouting her victorious claim ‘our work is now our victory’ (728). The virtuosity of the narrative makes the horrific events both vivid and stylised, witty and ghastly at the same time: the (amphi-)theatrical scene-setting in the clearing giving a good view for Pentheus (and for us the audience) setting up the suspense, followed by the immediate act of seeing emphasised by the tricolon of prima … prima … prima (711–12), the direct speech of Agaue with hyperbaton showing her disordered state of mind and repeated ille suggesting her pointing out the ‘beast’ (713–15), the neat ring-composition whereby Pentheus mentions his cousin Actaeon (720–1) to remind his aunt of who he is and which also reminds the reader of the earlier tale of a man who incurred the wrath of a god. Ovid’s delight in verbal fireworks is most obvious in the transformation of the sailors into dolphins as he savours (678) the transformation of ‘hands’ into ‘fins’ (manus into pinnas), the speed of the metamorphosis being brought out in the near juxtaposition of the two words in the line; another sailor was keen to grasp the plaited ropes and there is a whole line expressing this wish (679) before the sudden truth hits in three words: bracchia non habuit (680). The two tales (of Pentheus and of Acoetes) mirror each other, as each of them ends with the survivors worshipping Bacchus (690–1, 732–3). There are also the familiar rhetorical tricks running through the piece such as the anaphoras (e.g. 539, 632–3), chiasmus at 611–12 and 655, the rhetorical ‘deliberative’ question (538), the homely touch of Acoetes’ poor childhood with his worthy but impecunious father (582–91), the detailed knowledge of stars shown by Acoetes with five proper names mentioned in two lines (594–5) showing that he really does know what he is talking about, the amusingly inappropriate names given to some of the sailors (‘Melanthus’ (‘black-flower’) is flavus; 617) and above all the in-jokes in places such as 608–9, where the god of wine seems to be drunk, or the ironic threat in 579–80 where the words of Pentheus to Acoetes (‘by your death you will give lessons to others’) will in fact apply to him rather than to his victim, or the way in which the sailors accuse Acoetes of being mad (641) when it is they who are not seeing the truth. Ovid uses the metre expressively, such as the sluggish spondees in line 662 when they are trying and failing to move the ship, and his sound-effects are easily spotted by anyone who reads this poetry aloud – look for instance at the ringing sounds of the bacchants in the alliteration and assonance of lines 702–3:
Cithaeron
cantibus et clara bacchantum voce sonabat
All ancient poetry was written to be recited aloud, of course, and there is much to be gained from hearing this text spoken to appreciate the effects of the metre and the verbal sound-effects which the poet so skilfully embeds in his text; the commentary points out many of these but there are many others which readers can discover for themselves and which must have been instrumental in making the performance of the work impressive to its audience.
The epic poet always uses similes, but the ones in this text are short and straight to the point (e.g. Pentheus was inspired like a horse hearing the trumpet going to battle (704–5)), unlike the extended similes we find in Homer, and often the similes amount to a tiny thumbnail sketch such as the dolphins ‘looking like a chorus’ (685). The poet composes speeches to put into the mouth of his main heroes (Tiresias, Pentheus and Acoetes) and all of these are appropriate to the character. Tiresias speaks in a suitably oracular style (auguror; 519) and uses inflated grammatical forms such as fueris dignatus (521: for eris dignatus) along with his confident prophetic future indicatives (spargere, foedabis, eveniet) to give Pentheus the lessons he needs but will reject. Pentheus speaks with a suitable mixture of patriotism (calling the Thebans’ attention to their ancestry and their past valour in line 531) and mockery of the enemy they now face (this unarmed boy) using the argument form a fortiori:
You defeated the dragon before
This enemy is far less fierce than the dragon was
Therefore you will easily defeat this enemy if you try to.
Only towards the end of this speech do we see the king’s sense of his own weak position when he contrasts himself with Acrisius and refers to himself in the pompous third-person:
Penthea terrebit cum totis advena Thebis?
(‘Will the stranger terrify Pentheus along with all of Thebes?’)
The fear mentioned in terrebit is actually inside Pentheus who sees power being taken from him as he has lost control over his people: and his fear turns (as fear often does) into cruelty towards Bacchus and later on towards Acoetes. Acoetes is brought in arrested with his arms tied behind his back, reminiscent in this of Sinon in Virgil’s Aeneid 2 who is also brought in to tell a tale which will have disastrous effects on its hearers. He seems oddly unconcerned (metu vacuus; 582) and takes his time telling a long tale (Pentheus later describes his speech as ‘rambling’; 692) to show the king what this stranger can do. Here again we have direct speech quoted inside the direct speech of Acoetes’ tale, we have some very strong action – such as Acoetes getting punched in the throat by Lycabas (626–7) – and we have some wonderful narrative art shown in the transformation first of the ship, then of the men, with the side-show of the tigers, lynxes and panthers thrown in for extra effect. Ovid writes a speech for each character which seems to come straight from the speaker’s heart; but he also manages to convey dialogue in reported speech (572–3):
Bacchus ubi esset
quaerenti domino Bacchum vidisse negarunt
This amounts to:
‘“where is Bacchus?”
The master asked. ‘We have not seen Bacchus’ they said.’
The closing section of the book is remarkable for the way Ovid does not take the opportunity to investigate the ‘psychopathology’ of Pentheus as Euripides had done in the Bacchae. Pentheus here is simply the ‘despiser of the gods’ who rejects the old prophet and the god with the same dismissive scepticism. This makes the narrative unusually ‘conventional’ with minatory prophecies presaging the end and a set-piece description of the slaughter, the moral being drawn by Acoetes and the closing lines of the book which see the incident as an exemplum conveying a moral message. Is this Ovid reverting to the banal? Or is it ironic?
One of the cardinal features of Alexandrian literature was the stress on novelty of treatment in its handling of a literary topos (set theme). Instead of trotting out the old story in the familiar manner, the poet tried to find a new way to look at it, rather as later Greek sculptures which were made to be seen from several different angles as well as the four-square front view. So the ‘modern’ Euripidean view of Pentheus was perhaps less attractive for Ovid precisely because it had been done so successfully already. Paradoxically, the more ‘primitive’ account of Pentheus would be more original; and yet the writer is still interested in psychopathology. This time it is that of the women hallucinating and murdering their own rather than the crazed king of Euripides.
The god whom the Romans called Bacchus or Liber was the equivalent of the Greek god Dionysus and was one of the most interesting of the ancient deities, as well as one of the more complex. Born, as Ovid tells us, from the thigh of his father Jupiter after the death of his mother Semele, and brought up initially by nymphs on Mount Nysa, he is a mixture of god and man; and his image depicts him also as a mixture of young and old, man and animal, male and female, able to appear at will and work miracles when his quixotic mind wanted to do so, and constantly on the move. He induced in his followers a state of trance-like ecstasy which enabled them to perform amazing feats themselves such as the dismemberment of a king in the passage in this book, holding of snakes in their hands, etc. He was linked to wine and intoxication, but is also the god of the theatre – perhaps because both wine and drama take people (actors and audience) out of their inhibited selves and enable them to become somebody new. He is described in Euripides’ Bacchae 861 as ‘most terrible and yet most sweet to mortals’ and his depiction in Ovid bears this out well – he is irresistibly attractive to the crowd of Thebans who rush out to worship him and his image in Acoetes’ tale is that of a harmless young boy, and yet he wrecks the lives of those who cross him. The wine which he represents and embodies is itself a mixed blessing of course, but images of him on vases from the classical period show him as the ultimate party animal, surrounded by his followers the satyrs (the animalistic beings who are permanently seeking wine and sex), nymphs (beautiful female nature-spirits) and the Maenads.
These Maenads were mortal women who would go up to the mountains in the depths of winter to worship the god. They would remove their shoes, let down their hair and start to dance, accompanied by the drum and the pipe and in the glimmer of torchlight, until they fell into a state of ecstatic trance. The legends have it that in this state of trance they were insensitive to pain – and obviously to cold – and that they tore animals apart with their bare hands and ate the meat raw. There is little hard evidence for this – and some revisionist attempts have been made to show the Maenads as engaging in a more prosaic social and religious event on the mountain away from their menfolk.
Drink is of course an inescapable part of the myth of Dionysus: Odysseus tells the incredulous Polyphemus in Euripides’ play Cyclops (519–28) that the wine-skin has a god living in it. Yet the rituals and the ecstasies do not seem to have been driven by alcohol, and the worshippers did not think of themselves as either mad or intoxicated but simply in the hands of the god. It is interesting that Ovid uses the name Liber often in preference to Bacchus – even in lines such as 528 where Bacchus would have fitted the metre perfectly – and there is almost a sense in these early lines in the passage that the god is a ‘liberator’ of the Thebans from the repressive regime of Pentheus, with the god giving them a holiday (festis; 528) in which all social classes and ages mix freely in a happy throng – although the dark side is hinted at in fremunt ululatibus which looks forward to Pentheus’ marching out to face the Bacchants in 704–6 where similar language is used.
Dionysus has been seen in European thought – especially in the works of such thinkers as Nietzsche – as the embodiment of that fertile chaos, the irrational ‘dark’ side of humanity as opposed to Apollo the sun-god and the bringer of healing and light. His worship shows human beings losing their self-control and acting in ways which to outsiders seemed mad and subversive to the good order of the state. Dionysus’ birthplace was Thebes and it is only natural that this city became the home of Maenadism. It is also unsurprising that a king who was keen to maintain tight control over the people in his city would be unimpressed when they ran off to worship this ambivalent and unsettling god. Drama feeds on conflict, and the clash between the political ruler and the divine being was always going to make good drama. There was also good Roman relevance in the story: the Roman Senate had taken steps to ban the Bacchic rites from Rome in 186 BC, and Livy tells us that so long as the cult was confined to women the Senate had few objections; it was only when a new priestess started to initiate men (cf. the note to lines 529–30) that the Senate feared the practices would make Roman men effeminate and therefore unfit to be citizens (Livy 39.15.9–14) – sentiments which Ovid puts into the mouth of Pentheus (see note on line 547).
The name Pentheus derives from the Greek word penthos meaning ‘sorrow’ or ‘pain’ and it was always obvious that the fight between him and the god would end painfully for the king; Ovid adds to this theme by making Pentheus the sadistic ruler who also inflicts pain such as the unnecessary torture of Acoetes in lines 694–8. The traditional tale sees Pentheus as a young king faced with a mysterious stranger who is in fact Dionysus/Bacchus in human form but whom Pentheus sees as merely a bad influence on the good women of Thebes. The king imprisons the stranger – only for him to burst out of his prison when an earthquake knocks its walls down. The god now bewitches the king somehow and gets him to dress up as a woman and go to Mount Cithaeron to spy on the women; when they get to the mountain the women then think the man is a wild beast and kill him. His mother Agaue brings home Pentheus’ head in triumph, telling everyone that it is the head of a lion she has killed; her father Cadmus has the sad duty of bringing her to her senses and letting her see what she has done. The story was told most famously in Euripides’ play The Bacchae but was also handled by Aeschylus and other Greek tragedians and was adapted into Latin in tragedies by Accius and Pacuvius of which only fragments survive. The difference between the Euripidean version of the tale and that in Ovid is however marked. Euripides has Pentheus influenced directly by the god in his desire to go and spy on the women, whereas Ovid simply has Pentheus march out as an irate king fed up with all this prevarication. The psychological subtlety of the tragedy – the voyeurism, the cross-dressing and so on – are all missing from Ovid’s simpler tale of pride being punished, of a king eager to rule being himself murdered by his subjects and of a god proving his divinity by the harshest of lessons. Closer perhaps to Ovid is the tale as told in the Hellenistic poet Theocritus’ 26th Idyll, composed about 270 BC also in hexameters: Theocritus has Ino, Autonoe and Agaue leading three groups of Maenads to the mountain and seeing Pentheus watching their secret rituals.
By now she was in a frenzy as were the others and they chased him:
Pentheus spoke thus: ‘what do you want, women?’
Autonoe said this: ‘you will soon know before you even hear it.’
His mother grabbed her son’s head and roared
Like the roar of a lioness with cubs.
Ino tore off the great shoulder along with the shoulder-blade
Stepping with her feet on his stomach, and Autonoe did the same sort of thing:
The remaining bits of him the other women butchered up
And they all came to Thebes spattered with blood
Bringing from the mountain not Pentheus but penthea (pain)…(12–26)
This is close to Ovid but is (again) not the sole model for the Roman poet and the differences are also plain: Ovid does not actually show the mother ripping off the head for one thing (although he strongly suggests it in lines 725–8) and is more interested in how Pentheus spoke and how Agaue looked than he is in the butchery itself.
The character of Pentheus in Ovid is less subtle perhaps than we had expected. He is full of anger and spirit – what the Greeks termed thymos – and he can compose a calculated speech targeting different groups of his audience with reminders of their glorious past and taunting them with their imminent defeat by a bunch of weaklings (molles; 547) led by a perfumed boy. When he is opposed his ‘rage/madness’ (rabies) only grows all the more and this is to some extent a stock feature of tyrants and leaders in ancient literature – from Achilles dragging the corpse of his dead foe Hector round the tomb of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad to Xerxes flogging the Hellespont (Herodotus 7.34) to Oedipus’ famously short fuse when faced with the unco-operative Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.
In Euripides’ Bacchae the king’s motive for going to the mountain was to spy on these women rather than simply to kill them as here; Euripides has him being led to wear women’s clothing to escape notice and yet there is also a strong sense that this is the god undermining the macho side of the blustering king by ‘feminising’ him, but Ovid resists this whole side of the encounter and merely has Pentheus marching out for himself once his servants have tried to arrest Bacchus and failed bloodily. The death of the king is a study in revenge from the god to the ruler who is no longer talking big (717) but who is now pleading with his mother and aunt like a child.
Acoetes is not in Euripides’ Bacchae where the stranger before the king is the god himself in disguise. It is tempting to at least wonder whether Acoetes is the god himself (who is a master of disguise), as Pentheus had ordered his men to bring the ducem in chains (562–3) and this would give more point to his remark (658–9):
Nec enim praesentior illo/ est deus.
(‘No god is more present than that one’.)
It would be typical of Bacchus to fool Pentheus in this way – but it is also typical of Ovid to foil the reader’s expectations and not to do the obvious but to leave his audience guessing. The tale which Acoetes tells does (after all) remind us of the many ‘Lying Tales’ which Odysseus tells in the course of the Odyssey and which always start with a (false) name and address just like lines 582–3. It also adds a very lively metamorphosis (of men turned into dolphins) to Pentheus’ tale, which is otherwise lacking one.
The tale of the wicked sailors who try to take Bacchus hostage and who are punished goes back a long way, however. The seventh Homeric Hymn describes how the god ‘like a young man in first manhood’ was walking on the shore, when Etruscan sailors captured him and bound him onboard their ship only to find that the fetters fell off him. The (unnamed) helmsman at once realised that this was no ordinary hostage but one of the gods, and shouted at them to let the youth go. The captain would not listen and tried to set sail at once; but the ship was overwhelmed with gushing wine, a vine grew along the top of the sail and ivy grew about the mast, forming berries and garlands. The young man now became a lion in the ship and a shaggy-maned bear elsewhere in the vessel. The lion seized the impious captain and the crew leapt into the sea and turned into dolphins. The helmsman was not punished as he alone had respected the god. This is so close to Ovid that it is possible that there was a common source for both tales, and there is a well-known vase-painting by Exekias from about 530 BC which shows Dionysus/Bacchus reclining on a ship with vines growing on the mast and dolphins swimming in the sea around it which might also reflect the tale.
Latin poetry is written in a fairly rigid system of metres, all of which in turn rely on the pattern of heavy and light syllables, and the metre of the Metamorphoses is the ‘hexameter’, which is a line of six feet. The first four of these ‘feet’ can be either ‘dactyls’ (–∪∪) or ‘spondees’ (– –), where the symbol ‘–’ indicates a heavy syllable and the symbol ‘∪’ a light one. It is usually assumed that a heavy syllable is equivalent to two light ones. The fifth foot of a hexameter is almost always a dactyl (line 669 is the exception in this passage) and the final foot is always one of two syllables, and so it is either a spondee or else a trochee (–∪).
Syllables which contain a diphthong (i.e., a pair of vowels pronounced together such as au, ae) or else a long vowel are heavy syllables, and syllables where a short vowel is followed by two (or more) consonants are also made heavy – although if the second consonant is ‘l’ or ‘r’ (such as in the word patris) then this need not happen. The two consonants do not have to be in the same word as the vowel for this to take place (e.g. 705: dedit tubicen where the (short) final ‘i’ of dedit is followed by t+t and so lengthened).
Single vowels may be long or short by nature and may vary with inflection (e.g. the final -a of mensa is long by nature in the ablative case, short in the nominative) and one must be aware that the letter ‘i’ may be a vowel in some places (nix) and a consonant in others (iam). The quantity of vowels is marked with a ‘–’ symbol in good dictionaries such as James Morwood’s Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2005).
In cases where a word ending with a vowel (or a vowel + m such as iustam) is followed by a word beginning with a vowel or h, the two syllables usually merge (‘elide’) into a single syllable, as ubi electus (702) is scanned as ub’electus (four syllables).
Thus a ‘typical’ hexameter line will run:
–∪∪/ –∪∪ /– //– / –∪∪ / –∪∪ / – –
út fremit/ ácer equ/ús, // cum/ béllicus/ áere so/nóro
where the ´ sign indicates the stressed syllable at the beginning of a foot and the // sign shows the ‘caesura’ – the word-break in the middle of a foot within the line. This usually happens in the third foot after the initial heavy syllable but can also come in the middle of the two short syllables in a dactyl, where it is usually accompanied by a caesura in the fourth foot, as in line 715:
ille mihi feriendus// aper// ruit omnis in unum
or lines 588, 602 and 733.
Latin words also have a natural stress accent (which works as in the same way as English words such as táble, spectátor, fúrniture), whereby most words were stressed on the penultimate syllable, or on the antepenultimate if the penultimate were a short vowel. Thus the final line of the book would be spoken:
Túraque dánt sánctasque cólunt Isménides áras
but ‘scanned’ metrically as:
Túraque dánt sanctásque colúnt Isménides áras
Quite how the two ways of reading Latin verse blended or competed is unclear: one notes that in hexameters there is a tendency for the stress accent and the metrical ictus to collide in the earlier and middle parts of the line but to coincide at the end – a tendency which is however abruptly broken when the line ends with a monosyllable as at 627 where the line ends with Acoetes’ breathless si non.
The most accessible translations of the whole of the Metamorphoses are those in the Penguin Classics series by David Raeburn (London, 2004) or else in the Oxford World Classics series by A. D. Melville (Oxford, 2008).
There is an edition of the whole of book 3 by A. A. R. Henderson in the same series as this book (Bristol Classical Press, 1981), and also a good (if brief) edition (with a facing English translation) of books 1–4 of the Metamorphoses by D. E. Hill (Oxbow Books, 1985)
For general books on the Metamorphoses see:
Fantham, E. (2004), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, London.
Feldherr, A. (2010), Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction, Princeton.
Galinsky, K. (1975), Ovid’s Metamorphoses: an Introduction to the Basic Aspects, Oxford.
Janan, M. (2009), Reflections in a Serpent’s Eye, Oxford.
Otis, B. (1996), Ovid as an Epic Poet, Cambridge.
For more general discussions of Ovid see:
Hardie, P. (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Guide to Ovid, Cambridge.
—(2007), Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, Cambridge.
Wilkinson, L. P. (1955), Ovid Recalled, Cambridge.
For a brief guide to the scansion of Latin hexameter poetry see:
Kennedy, B. H. (1962), The Revised Latin Primer, London, pp. 204–5.