ANCIENTS IN ACTION

Also available

CatuJlus
Amanda Kolson Hurley

Horace
Philip D. Hills

Lucretius
John Godwin

Ovid: Love Songs

Genevieve Liveley

Spartaens
Theresa Urbainczyk
 ANCIENTS IN ACTION

OVID
Myth and Metamorphosis

Sarah Annes Brown

BRISTOL CLASSICAL PRESS

 First published in 2005 by
Bristol Classical Press, an imprint of
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk

© 2005 by Sarah Annes Brown

All rights reserved. No part of chis public!ltion

may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

A caralogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

ISBN 1 85399 672 6

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright mate-
rial from the following works:
'If you will let me sing' by HD (Hilda Doolittle), from Collected Poems, 1912-
1944, copyright 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Used by permission ofNew
Directions Publishing Corporation.
Excerpts from Taks from Ovid by Ted Hughes, After Ovid by Michael Hofinann
and James Lasdun, and Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath. Used by permission of Faber
&Faber.
'Science' copyright 1925, 1929 and renewed 1953, 1957 by Robinson Jeffers,
from Selected Poetry ofRobinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by David R. Slavitt, copyright 1994 by
David R. Slavitt. Used by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Excerpt from 'Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree' from
To Bedlam and Part \%y Back by Anne Sexton, copyright 1960 by Anne Sexton,
renewed 1988 by Linda G. Sexton. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from 'Tongues' from Red Under the Skin by Narasha Saje, copyright
1994. Reprinted by permission of the University of Phtsburgh Press.
'Metamorphoses' by C.H. Sisson, from Collected Poems, 1984. Used by permis-
sion of Carcanet Press.

Printed and hound in Great Britain by

CPI Bath
 Contents

Preface 7
Introduction 9

1. Daphne 45
2. Actaeon 67
3. Philomela 85
4. Arachne 105
5. Pygmalion 123
6. Ovid in the Third Millennium 143

Note on Translations 147

Further Reading 149
Works Cited and Consulted 151
Index 155
For Alex
 Preface

This short introduction to Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses,

is aimed at anyone who wants to find out more about the poem
and its impact on Western culture: general readers, students in the
humanities, even fully-fledged classicists.
Considering the centuries which have passed since it was
written - Ovid died nearly two thousand years ago - the
Metamorphoses is a surprisingly accessible text. The stories Ovid
tells are astonishingly varied - birth, death, creation, war, flood,
famine, rape and romance all compete for our attention.
This book begins with an introduction which identifies and
describes the Metamorphoses' most notable features - such as its
presentation of the gods and its treatment of metamorphosis
itself- and places the poem within Ovid's own cultural context:
the age of Augustus. Each of the following five chapters is
devoted to a single myth. Here I explore the impact these tales
have had on later writers, artists and film makers and analyse the
relationship between the developing creative reception of the
Metamorphoses and the many cultural shifts which have taken
place since Ovid's own day.
Although there were many candidates for inclusion- Icarus,
Ceyx and Alcyone, Narcissus and Callisto are just a few exam-
ples of other Ovidian stories which repay close attention - the
five myths I eventually chose are all strikingly memorable and
have been adapted and interpreted in coundess different ways.
Apollo's unrequited love for Daphne is the first of Ovid's

7
 Ovid

many troubling rape narratives and may make uneasy reading

for today's readers of the Metamorphoses. The story of Actaeon,
whose punislunent seems so disproportionate to his crime, has
a haunting, mysterious quality not unlike that of Coleridge's
'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' - both centre on men who break
a strange taboo. The tale of Philomela and Procne is one of the
most shocking in the poem, and I offer a fresh interpretation of
this violent narrative, a controversial reading which is derived
from my earlier research into literary depictions of the sister
relationship. The fourth and fifth chapters are devoted to
Arachne and Pygmalion, two of Ovid's many striking artist
figures. But whereas Arachne the weaver is punished for daring
to compete with the goddess Athena, the sculptor Pygmalion is
granted his heart's desire through the miraculous intervention of
Venus.

8
 Introduction

I was introduced to Ovid by an unsuitable boyfriend in the

summer of 1989. As far as Ovid goes I've never looked back-
though the boyfriend has long since been replaced. This book
is a short introduction to his best-known poem, the
Metamorphoses. I hope to show that Ovid is still a hugely
important and influential force in Western culture, not a
recherche figure of interest only to classicists and academics.
Much of this book is focused on the reception of the
Metamorphoses, in other words, on the way it has influenced
later works - whether poems, paintings, novels or films. Many
of the best known productions of Western culture - including
works by Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe and Proust -
are indebted to this poem.
Although the Metamorphoses begins with the creation of the
world and ends with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, the inter-
vening books do not comprise an orderly account of
Greco-Roman myth and history. Some very rough trends can be
identified- towards the end of the poem the focus moves west-
ward, from Greece to Rome, as Ovid first retells the story of
Rome's founder, Aeneas, and then relates a handful of legends -
that of Pomona and Vertumnus for example -which are Roman
rather than Greek. But it is difficult to map any orderly scheme -
whether narrative, thematic or contextual - on to the poem. Or
rather, it is too easy- any number of competing explanations have
been provided by the poem's many commentators. Some are more

9
 Ovid

convincing than others, but collectively they suggest that no

single explanation can do justice to the poem's complexity. Each
generation, each individual reader, will tend to concentrate on
certain stories, themes and threads and disregard others. Seeing
the Metamorphoses all in one go is rather like trying to see a free-
standing statue all at once- we can only really concentrate on one
angle, a few details, at a time. The same is of course true of other
complex literary works - Hamlet is a good example.
Anyone who turns to the Metamorphoses is likely to have
quite a wide frame of cultural reference to draw on already,
much of it derived, whether directly or indirectly; from Ovid
himself Reading the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, for
example, will be a slightly different experience if we already
know Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, Cocteau's Orphee
or Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The impossibility of
reading Ovid pristinely, as it were, is nicely suggested by Ted
Hughes in his translation of 'Pyramus and This be'. This story of
star-crossed lovers is already familiar to nearly all first time
English-speaking readers of Ovid through its comic re-
enactment in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Tales from Ovid,
Thisbe seems to escape from her Ovidian setting in order to
remind us that she is now part of a larger, post-classical, literary
landscape. She and Pyramus arrange to meet:

Their rendezvous the mulberry tree

Over the tomb of Ninus, a famous landmark [my italics]

The last phrase is not in Ovid; we may infer that the 'landmark'
is literary as well as geographical, 'famous' because it is immor-
talised as 'Ninny's tomb' by Shakespeare's Francis Flute, the
bellows-mender. In other words Hughes' Thisbe seems to be
aware that her readers already know her story.

10
 Introduction

i:: But Ovid's influence went beyond putting dozens of stories

ihto the literary domain - the way he told these stories also
had a huge impact on later literature. When we begin to pick
-tjp on Ovid's peculiar narrative style, his insistent reminders
that we are only reading a fiction, we are likely to make
connections with other equally self-conscious productions. We
might think of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and the
various games it plays with its readers, or of the post-modern
stories of]orge Luis Borges. But we might just as easily be put
in mind of the Simpsons episode ('Treehouse of Horror IX') in
which Bart and Lisa are sucked into their TV set and become
part of a further inset cartoon programme, 'The Itchy and
Scratchy Show'
Ovid's original audience would obviously have made
completely different connections - with the earlier presenta-
tion of Orpheus in Virgil's Georgics, perhaps, or with works by
the similarly mannered 'neoterics' {new poets) such as
Catullus. Although we can begin to reconstruct the literary
and cultural context which gave birth to the Metamorphoses,
we can never completely reproduce the experience of the
poem's first readers. Many of Ovid's most important literary
influences no longer exist- we know of some through brief
quotation or report in the works of others, but he probably
drew on other sources which have vanished without trace.
Even though the Metamorphoses has come down to us intact, it
is not precisely the same poem Ovid wrote because the audi-
ence he wrote for, the cultural moment he wrote in, have
vanished. But it doesn't matter that our Ovid is a twenty-first
century Ovid rather than the original model. The works of any
really influential writer - for example Shakespeare - are
endlessly reinvented, whether it is the text itself which is
altered - the science fiction film version of The Tempest,

11
 Ovid

Forbidden Planet, is a memorable example - or simply the

perspective from which it is viewed. Whether we try to recon-
struct a Roman reading of Ovid or are relaxed about reading
his works from a modern perspective we shouldn't forget all
the intervening 'Ovids' which the last two millennia have
thrown up.
The medieval commentary tradition was particularly impor-
tant. Clerics would adapt classical texts such as the attractive
but reprehensible Metamorphoses, making the stories palatable
by relating them to Christian doctrine. Best known of these
commentaries is the fourteenth-century Ovide moralist of
Pierre Bersuire. The very strangeness and (to modern eyes)
inaptness of some of the moralisers' interpretations - the asso-
ciation forged between Myrrha (who slept with her father) and
the Virgin Mary for example - make them paradoxically
Ovidian. This simultaneous rejection and embrace of Ovid is
neatly suggested by the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot,
Bernard of Clairvaux, when he condemns the fashion for
portraying metamorphic compound creatures in church carv-
ings. 'What is the point of such ridiculous monstrosity, the
strange kind of shapeless shapeliness, of shapely shapelessness',
he rails (Barnard, 60). But the chiming repetition here surely
recalls one of Ovid's most famous lines - apparently one of his
three personal favourites - his description of the minotaur as a
'semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem', 'the man half-
bull and the bull half-man' {Art ofLove 2.24).

Influences
Even though we cannot turn back the clock and read the
poem exactly as Ovid's first readers would have done, we can
piece together quite a lot of information about the forces -

12
 Introduction
..::·.

literary, historical and biographical - which shaped the

Metamorphoses. Ovid himself - or Publius Ovidius Naso to
g~ve him his full name - was born in Sulmo in 43 BC to
parents of equestrian rank, the Roman 'gentry' class. He
ilioved to Rome and became a prominent poet, although in
A.D 7, as he was completing the Metamorphoses, his successful
career was cut short when the Emperor Augustus banished
him to Tomis in modern Romania. It is unclear exactly what
Ovid did to alienate Augustus. In his exile poetry the poet
suggests two reasons: first, his racy Art of Love in which he
advised young men (and young women) how to succeed with
the opposite sex, secondly a mysterious 'error' - perhaps the
inadvertent discovery of an imperial scandal.
Ovid's nemesis, Augustus, was the adopted son of Julius
Caesar and one of the most celebrated Roman emperors.
Although his achievements were immense his methods were
often ruthless, and his ambition to restore the virtues of the
more austere Republican era - the good old Roman values of
discipline, obedience, morality and a strong commitment to
the family as an institution - compromised political enquiry
and free expression. An obvious modern comparison is
Margaret Thatcher's call for a return to 'Victorian Values'. In
Paul West's contribution to Philip Terry's anthology Ovid
Metamorphosed (200 1), a short story called 'Nightfall on the
Romanian Coast', a different parallel is drawn by the ghost of
the long dead Ovid:

My own view, though, is that I was sent packing for being

unfaithful to poetry, for not writing the wholesome stuff the
Emperor wanted; as the Boss, he owned all that was thought,
said or done. To put it in Soviet terms, I had refused to come
up with tractor poems, paeans to hydroelectric stations, to the

13
 Ovid

founders of the party, to the rustic rabble and the proles of

Rome.

The generation which immediately preceded Ovid provided

him with some powerful - perhaps oppressive - role models.
Lucretius, Virgil and Horace were the most famous writers of
this slightly older generation, though more important models
for the Metamorphoses itself can be found in the works of still
earlier writers; the catalogue poems of Hellenistic Greek writers
were a particularly strong influence. The Hellenistic age lasted
from the end of the fourth century BC to the end of the first
century BC. Its literature has traditionally been seen as
secondary to the productions of the earlier 'classical' period.
One of these Hellenistic writers was Callimachus, a Greek poet
and scholar of the third century BC. His Aitia - 'causes' - in
many ways looks forward to Ovid's poem, as it explains the
mythical origins of numerous Greek customs in a witty and
sophisticated way. (A more familiar and more recent example of
an aetiological collection is Rudyard Kipling's just So Stories.)
Another poem which undoubtedly influenced Ovid was
Nicander of Colophon's Heteroeumena, a mythological epic,
though this has not survived.

Genre
The Metamorphoses is a story collection. Over the course of
fifteen books (some 12,000 lines in total) Ovid tells hundreds
of stories. Some - those of Pygmalion or Ceyx and Alcyone -
are told at great length, whereas others are rather allusions than
stories, brief references to tales the reader is assumed to know
already. Although, generically, the Metamorphoses can be linked
with earlier Hellenistic catalogue poems, it is an exceptionally

14
 Introduction

hard work to classify. It is written in the metre of epic (the

hexameter, in which every line consists of six metrical feet), yet
t
1 embraces a range of genres including tragedy, comedy, pane-
gyric, history, philosophy and love poetry. Indeed one of its
distinctive features is its ability to slide from one mode into
another. When Ovid (rather briefly) retells the already canon-
t<:al Aeneid towards the end of the Metamorphoses the narrator
slips in and out of the expected epic and heroic mode to
mdulge in episodes of pastoral and love elegy. The poem thus
enacts as well as describes metamorphosis. In so far as the
Metamorphoses is an epic - and a lot of ink has been expended
debating that question - it is a kind of uber-epic. Most epics
chart a single military campaign or heroic quest, but the
Metamorphoses' subject matter is life, the universe and every-
thing: its starting point predates the creation of the world and
it concludes in Ovid's own Augustan age.

Metamorphosis
In some of the stories Ovid tells (Narcissus' metamorphosis
into a flower is a case in point) the transformation seems tacked
on as an afterthought; however the phenomenon of metamor-
phosis is far more than simply a convenient umbrella concept
for yet another mythological catalogue poem. Ovid is intensely
interested in exactly what happens when his characters -
whether hapless victims or triumphant gods - undergo a trans-
formation; how does it feel to be changed into an entirely
different form? In different stories metamorphosis provides an
escape route, a punishment, a reward, or simply closure.
Although generally there is a downwards momentum - from a
human into an animal or flower - sometimes the trajectory is
upward, as when Pyrrha and Deucalion create a new race of

15
 Ovid

men from the stones they throw behind them after the flood,
or Hercules becomes a god. Often a person's new state is a crys-
tallisation of his or her strongest character trait - savage,
cannibalistic King Lycaon changes into a wolf; hard-hearted
Anaxarete is turned to stone. But sometimes the connection is
more obscure, and needs to be explained to the reader. Warlike
Tereus is transformed into a hoopoe because the crest and long
beak of that bird suggest the helmet and sword of a soldier
ready for battle.
So metamorphic is Ovid's imagination that he seems to hint
at transformation even when none has taken place. In the
shifting Ovidian world we feel that anyone - or anything -
might be on the verge of changing shape. At the death of
Orpheus, for example, the rivers and trees are simultaneously
inhuman and human in their response (11.46-8):

The trees shed their leaves as though they were tearing out
their hair, and they say that the rivers were swollen with their
own tears.

Conversely, when Alcyone is told that her husband has to go

on a dangerous voyage the description of her shock and grief
hints at various metamorphoses which never quite advance from
metaphor {11.416-19):

Alcyone immediately felt a chill in the very marrow of her

bones, her face was as pale as boxwood, and her cheeks were
wet with streaming tears. Three times she tried to speak, three
times her face was watered with tears.

Her inability to speak is itself a key symptom of metamorphosis

in Ovid, though here it is caused by grief alone. Elsewhere such

16
 Introduction

~~t!tCat the loss of human form or capacity is the prdude to

Ml4blown metamorphosis. When the Bacchantes who killed
!(;i)~pheus are changed into trees Ovid concludes: 'you might
th;ihkher knotty arms were real branches, and if you thought so
:y~t,.would not be mistaken' (11.82-3).
;;::;,,':Metamorphosis is more than a repeated event in the poem-
:j'~fii!:i1, part of its linguistic texture. Words shift their meaning,
:~tbugh either a change in their form or a change in their
&J~text. Although Echo can only repeat the words of others she
~~l:)tly transforms them. Narcissus angrily rejects her, crying
!Miy I die before I give you power over me', to which she
:t~plies 'I give you power over me' (3.391-2). Sometimes, like
&he of his characters mid-metamorphosis, Ovid's words possess
two meanings simultaneously. As Myrrha is transformed into a
tree we are told that her medulla remained the same. This is
ttue only at the linguistic level. Although Myrrha's body has
b~en completely metamorphosed, a double meaning - medulla
fuay mean either pith or marrow - suggests otherwise. Here, as
elsewhere, the narrator seems to play with the reading habits we
have picked up as we progress through the poem. Generally
when Ovid tells us that something remains the same after
metamorphosis - the shining beauty of Daphne for example -
he refers to some real, physical vestige of the old self, not an
accident of language.
Similar wordplay seems to be at work in the tale of Byblis,
victim of an incestuous passion for her brother. She talces up her
pen to reveal the terrible secret to him in a letter. The word used
for pen is ferrum- this can signify any sharp metal object but its
most common meaning is 'sword'. (Her writing surface is a wax
tablet rather than paper.) If we first interpret ferrum as sword,
we may not simply be misreading. Her name resembles the
Greek biblos, a written document, and in carving her confes-

17
 Ovid

stonalletter she seals her own doom as surely as though she had
stabbed herself

Boundaries
Ovid's fascination with metamorphosis and wordplay is
matched by his absorption in other borderline states, and his
fondness for blurring boundaries of all kinds. Some of his char-
acters are doomed when they cross very literal boundaries to
step on tabooed territory. Others step over metaphorical bound-
aries - as when Myrrha's admirable love for her father develops
into outlawed lust. Ovid himself, as well as his characters, has a
fondness for transgression. Apparently secure historical bound-
aries, for example, are put under pressure by the poem's narrator.
At first his account of the earth's development seems ordered
and sequential. We learn how the Edenic golden age gave way
to the less favourable silver and bronze ages, before declining
further into the iron age. But this apparently logical deteriora-
tion is problematised by the way Ovid describes the last age,
that of iron (1.138-42):

Men went right into the bowels of the earth, and the treasure
which had been hidden in the Stygian shades was dug up - the
wealth that incites men to crime. Soon came baneful iron, and
then gold, more baneful still ... [my italics].

There does not at first seem to be anything odd in this little

morality fable explaining that money is the root of all evil. But
when we are first told that iron is mined we connect this inno-
vation with the fact that this is the 'iron age', and thus may feel
wrong-footed when we learn that gold too is mined. Is some
connection with the long distant 'golden age' being hinted at?

18
 Introduction

~;~~urious that the basest and latest age should be so bound

AP/With the substance associated with man's perfect original
~tat¢• This apparent disjuncture may reflect the fact that Ovid
'~k.s;Ysupposedly living in a second Golden Age - that of
j\..'l.lgustus. By blurring the boundary between the iron and
!g6lden ages Ovid seems to undercut the pretensions of his
bWri time to be called golden, perhaps hinting that it is
':grilden' only in an economic rather than a moral or cultural
sense. Such a view is more clearly and cynically articulated in
the Art ofLove when he describes women's fondness for costly
~ifts (2.277-8):

:;::}:'fhis is truly a golden age; many an honour is sold for gold,

( and gold procures love.

~J>atial and geographical boundaries, as well as temporal ones, are

$l.J.bject to confusion in the poem. Two memorable passages, from
Book 1 and Book 15 respectively, describe (in very different
contexts) the processes of flux and reversal. In the first, the flood
~ent by Jupiter to punish mankind results in a weirdly topsy-turvy
landscape, surreal and strangely beauti.ful (1.297-303):

And sometimes it happened that an anchor was embedded in

a green meadow, or curved keels brushed over the vineyards.
And where slender goats had once grazed, now the ugly sea
cows rested their bulk. The Nereids wonder at the underwater
houses, towns and groves, dolphins take over the woods and
swim among the high branches, shaking the oak trees when
they crash into them.

In the second passage, which is part of a long monologue spoken

by the Greek polymath Pythagoras, we learn of a far slower process

19
 Ovid

of reversal, one which is more unsettling because it is based on

historical fact rather than mythological fancy (15.259-65):

'I don't believe anything stays the same for long. Thus the
Golden Age gave way to the Iron Age, and places have changed
their state just as often. I myself have seen dry land change to
sea, and I've seen land emerge from the water. Seashells lie far
from the shore, and a rusty anchor has been discovered at the
top of a mountain.'

In fact yet another of the many boundaries Ovid plays with is

that between reality and fiction. We may dismiss the flood of
Book 1 as a fable, only to reflect that geological proof exists for
equally dramatic shifts, albeit over a longer timescale.

Pythagoras
The speech of Pythagoras takes up nearly half of Book 15;
although the last portion of his speech is a lecture on muta-
bility, the first part is devoted to an attack on meat eating. He
describes the fate of slaughtered animals very feelingly
(15.133-5):

A victim sees the grain he helped to cultivate sprinlded on his

brow. Then he is struck down, and the knife -which he might
already have noticed reflected in the bright water - is stained
with his blood.

Although some of the poem's readers have added Ovid to the list
of famous historical vegetarians on the strength of this passage,
others have detected a satirical note in the polemic, and have felt
that the entire speech is undermined by the philosopher's mili-

20
 Introduction

t:ll1t vegetarianism. Generally the tone and overall significance

of~ythagoras' speech is difficult to gauge. For example, who is
b~I#g satirised here: the speaker or the poets he dismisses?
(1~153-5):

0 mortals, stupefied by your dread of icy death, why do you

ife<l.r the Styx, the shades, and empty names? They are poets'
f:incies, bugbears from an invented world.

Whether we read it straight or conclude that Ovid was sending

~agoras up, it is probably fair to say that the interest of
m.odern readers is sparked far less readily by this long speech
than by the lively tales themselves.

Race
C)rl.e further boundary, one to which Ovid was not conspicu-
qusly alert but yet which colours the poem's reception, is that of
race. In a poem whose human characters liaise with trees,
clouds, statues, their immediate kin and farmyard animals, it is
hardly surprising that no one bats an eyelid when Greek Perseus
marries Ethiopian Andromeda, and Dido's unsuitability as a
wife for Aeneas has nothing to do with the fact that she's an
Mrican (from Libya). But despite the poem's apparent colour-
blindness, some of Ovid's imitators have used his adaptable tales
to engage with issues of race. In a poem included by Hofmann
and Lasdun in After Ovid, Fred D'Aguiar's retelling of Pyramus
and Thisbe, the young lovers are separated by a colour bar:

I am black and you're white:

What's the day without night
To measure it by and give

21
 Ovid

It definition; life.
We'll go where love's colour-
Blind and therefore coloured.

The move is a fairly obvious one - a similar impulse led to the

Capulets and Montagues being recast as the white Jets and
Puerto Rican Sharks in West Side Story - but dovetails nicely
with the tale's slightly unusual final metamorphosis. Pyramus
and Thisbe retain their human forms, but the mulberry
changes colour (from white to red) when Pyramus' blood falls
on it.
We might expect race to bring a new charge to twentieth-
century retellings of Ovid, but not, perhaps, to eighteenth-century
translations into heroic couplets, such as this extract from the story
of Niobe, whose children were all killed by the gods:

One only daughter lives, and she the least;

The queen close clasp'd the daughter to her breast:
'Ye heav'nly pow'rs, ah spare me one,' she cry'd,
'Ah! spare me one,' the vocal hills reply'd:
In vain she begs, the Fates her suit deny,
In her embrace she sees her daughter die.

But we may respond rather differently to this account of an

anguished mother, cruelly deprived of all her children, once we
know that the poet, Phillis Wheatley, was taken from the
Gambia to Boston as a slave. As well as having experienced the
loss of her own family as a child, Wheatley would have been
aware that the children of slaves were routinely sold to other
masters and never seen again, and wondered, like Niobe, 'why
is such privilege to them allowed?'
In another story from Philip Terry's Ovid Metamorphosed,

22
 Introduction
"""

J'i:io~~tt1d Belben's 'Disjecta Membra', Ovid seduces his mistress'

$lay~ B·1th an Mrican. He is rather disdainful of her native
c:ultqt~vand calls her a barbarian:

fmtist go back for more of her stilted talk, it's quite quaint, she
i& afraid she'll lose her language, I wondered why, or what it
tftY~tlt to her, she cannot read or write so why mourn a distant
t:j:jrigue

Brit there is an ironic interplay between her fear of losing her

lar{griage and the fear, articulated by the real Ovid in his exile
pq~tty, of forgetting Latin and only being able to speak the
barbarian northern tongue ofTomis. (In fact for Ovid it is far
n{§.fe likely that the term barbarian would have been associated
:W"lth.northern types, such as Anglo-Saxons, than with people
.ftb.fu Mrica which, although exotic, lay within the Roman
cultural pale.)

Gods
.Although many classical texts - most famously Homer's Iliad
.:ihd Odyssey - portray the gods of Olympus as faulty quasi-
human characters, who love, hate, behave badly and make
iliistakes, Ovid takes this process a step further, frequently crit-
iCising or poking fun at his deities. This is Juno's reaction to
hearing that her rival Callisto (whom she had turned into a bear
as a punishment for her liaison with Jupiter) has been trans-
formed into a star (2.520-6):

Oh, what great things have I achieved! How vast is my power!

I took away her human form- and now she has become a
goddess! So this is how I punish my enemies - this is what

23
 Ovid

my great power amounts to! All it needs now is for him to

free her from her animal form and give her back her old face
as he did with Io. Now that I have been cast aside I don't
know why he doesn't install her in the bedroom and become
Lycaon's son-in-law.

Her sarcasm, spite and self-pity make her very human, if not in
a particularly attractive way. The final dig, at the very unwel-
come in-laws Callisto would bring into Olympus' first family;
strikes a domestic and somehow modern note - indeed her
surprisingly realistic and human snobbery allows us to make an
unexpected connection with another spiteful, rejected female,
Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. When her pretensions
to Mr Darcy are threatened by Elizabeth Bennett, Miss Bingley
lashes out by reminding Darcy how galling it would be to have
the insufferable Mrs Bennett as a mother-in-law- 'You will have
a charming mother-in-law, indeed, and of course she will be
always at Pemberley with you.'
Ovid draws several comic parallels between the gods' exis-
tence and that of men, with the effect of making the former
seem almost comically mundane. We generally imagine the gods
operating on an elevated plane, but Ovid introduces little scraps
of information which hint at a very human, almost humdrum,
existence. We are given a glimpse of the gods' home life when
Jupiter calls a council meeting to tell his subjects about the
crime Lycaon has committed (1.170-6):

The gods travel along the Milky Way to the halls and royal
palace of the great Thunderer. On either side the doors of the
high-ranking gods' dwellings are flung open, and their
entrance halls swarm with visitors. (Lower-class gods live in a
different quarter.) In this neighbourhood only the most cele-

24
 Introduction

~,: ~ brared heaven dwellen have estoblished theit homehold god..

)'\:(:And this is the place, if I might be so bold, which I would
,[::scarcely hesitate to call the Palatia of Heaven.

~here is an amusing and unexpected precision in Ovid's

}~tnphasis on the physical specificities of divine life. We may be
~Ware of a hierarchy among gods, but we don't press this vague
)dtowledge to its logical conclusion - that some parts of heaven
','dre classier than others. (One might say Dante does this when
he takes us through Heaven via ascending circles, but his
'~tcount doesn't smack of house prices in the same way Ovid's
'does.) Further little details - such as a passing reference to
Jupiter selecting his second-best lightning bolts in a vain effort
Jo save the life of Semele after she has insisted on seeing him in
full divine regalia - compound this effect. Another wooer,
Mercury, primps himself amusingly before making contact with
the beautiful Herse - he 'arranges his mantle so that it may hang
becomingly, and makes sure that its golden border is clearly
visible' (2. 733-4).
The slightly jarring effect of this mixture of the banal and the
elevated might be compared to that created by Terry Pratchett
when he gives Death a horse named Binky or invents a fifth
horseman of the apocalypse who left before the others became
famous. Or indeed to the effect created by comparing a revered
classical text with a comic fantasy novel. The Powell and
Pressburger film A Matter of Lifo and Death (I 946) is particu-
larly Ovidian in its presentation of the afterlife. The angels
conduct business rather in the manner of civil servants - the
hero's guide is called 'angel 71' - and their hierarchy and
bureaucracy are clearly defined. God seems to be keeping up
with mankind's advances: new angels travel to heaven on a
moving staircase and carefully carry their wings in dry cleaning

25
 Ovid

bags. Heaven even has a Coke machine. If the Powell and

Pressburger angels have learned from humanity's technological
advances, so have Ovid's gods. Just before the assassination of
Julius Caesar, Venus begs Jupiter to save him- he advises her to
consult the gods' rerum tabu/aria, the 'public record office' to see
for herself that Caesar's fate is sealed- an ultra-Roman detail
which was probably inserted for comic effect, rather as though
a modern poet were to depict God using Microsoft Excel to
work out who gets into Heaven.
In fact the Metamorphoses is full of anachronisms that modern
readers will tend to overlook because, for most of us, classical
antiquity is a time-free zone. But Ovid's readers would have seen
details such as the description of Diana and her attendants as
amusingly modern and decidedly Roman - she is a typical
matrona surrounded by her slave girls (3.167-72):

Another attendant drapes the goddess' discarded robe over her

arm. Two untie her shoelaces, while Theban Crocale, who is
more accomplished than the others, gathers the goddess'
rippling locks into a knot, while her own hair remains
unbound. Nephele, Hyale, Rhanis, Psecas and Phiale fill brim-
mmgurns.

The effect achieved by mapping the customs and accou-

trements of a sophisticated urban society onto an archaic
mythical world is paralleled in the Disney film Hercules. The
Greek world Hercules inhabits clearly mirrors the United States
- Thebes is known as 'the Big Olive' and the superhero
endorses his own brand of trainers and soft drinks. (If you find
Disney films annoying the parallel works even better - Ovid's
flip approach to his work seriously irritated many of his
contemporaries.)

26
 Introduction

r~c;J(~vid's gods were like powerful Romans, then Jupiter and

,~~gQ.S~us might be thought to have a special bond, and this is
'~erta.tnly suggested when (in the passage quoted above) Ovid
~¢~~pares Jupiter's dwelling to the Roman imperial palace, or
~Rdaya., and, later in the same episode, assures Augustus that
;~up 1~er is just as pleased as he is when his subjects are loyal. But
.~the H11k does not work quite as comfortably or flatteringly as we
mtghfexpect. Augustus, with his obsession with family values,
.llltght not have wanted to be associated with the morally lax and
!rit¢tmittently rapacious Jupiter. Even episodes which seem to
shdW the god in a more authoritative and judicial role have a
disC:oncerting edge. The story of Lycaon is a telling example, for
1tit.s. narrated by Jupiter himsel£ Augustus was an expert propa-
g#ridist, and Jupiter similarly manipulates his rhetoric to ensure
that all the lesser gods are 'on message'. A hint that Jupiter is in
¢~I"l.trol of the narrative is given when Ovid reminds us that the
~thry he is about to tell was 'still unpublished because the events
\\rete so recent' (1.164) - Jupiter will be responsible for how
~ycaon is remembered.
Jupiter's rhetoric is impressive, and he carefully softens his
~udience up with portentous generalities before explaining the
precise reason for his wrath (1.190-1):

Every solution must first be tried, but if the problem doesn't

respond to treatment it must be cut away with a knife.

It turns out that when Jupiter visited the king in human form,
Lycaon attempted to serve him with hwnan flesh in order to test
the god's divinity. By the time Jupiter gets round to telling
heaven about this scandal, however, Lycaon has already sponta-
neously metamorphosed into a wolf. As everyone else Jupiter
encountered worshipped him respectfully, it would seem that no

27
 Ovid

action is really needed. But even though he has assured heaven

that 'every solution must first be tried', Jupiter goes on to decree
that the whole of humankind be destroyed in a flood, making
way for a new and improved race of men to be created. & we
shall see when we look at the stories of Actaeon and Arachne in
more detail in later chapters, the justice of the gods' treatment
of mortals is frequently very suspect.

WVmen
The presentation of women in the poem has been the subject of
much recent discussion. Ovid's attitude towards them has been
characterised as voyeuristic, even sadistic, but many have made
a case for a proto-feminist Ovid who sympathises with his hero-
ines and their difficulties. A jaundiced reader might wonder
why, if Ovid likes women so much, he again and again depicts
them as victims of rape, mutilation or punitive metamorphosis.
A number of male writers have generated similar unease in their
female readers - Thomas Hardy, for example, simultaneously
appears to champion and punish his heroines, most famously
the tragic Tess, who is hanged for murder after many misfor-
tunes. We may view Hardy's apparent solicitous sympathy for
Tess in a different light if we have also read his account of a
hanging he witnessed aged just sixteen. Later, in his eighties, he
recorded the impact this gruesome spectacle had upon him:
'what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the
misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape
as she wheeled half round and back.'
But even though Ovid might fall similarly foul of the polit-
ical correctness police, he is undeniably interested in women.
One of his major poems, the Heroides, comprises a series of
fictional letters written by mythical and historical women,

28
~1~ding Dido and He:n~~::, love~; in &ving
;tfet6.lries - some of whom are comparatively marginal figures
the~
';:~::~otce, he often makes us aware of the particular difficulties
;:f~~~Ag women, consciously offering a different perspective
ft~m(that implicit in the male-dominated, usually epic works
'Wht~li form his sources. (In another parallel drawn from the
\Zl~t6rian novel we might compare Sue Roe's Estella: Her
]Jjp~ttations - an adaptation of Dickens' Great Expectations
,;W(itten from the point of view of its mysterious heroine.)
~~id's Art ofLove similarly manifests an interest in the female
p~i~pective; although the first two books of this poem instruct
yg~rig men how to get girls into bed, in the last book the
~~bles are turned and Ovid advises girls how best to entice
fiJ~h. However, it shouldn't be assumed that Ovid's motives for
:ih~$,reversal were egalitarian, or indeed that women were the
trlt~nded readers of Book 3.
ii::(ibvid's only tragedy, just two lines of which survive, focused
:~'rl the troubled Medea, and his depiction of her in Book 7 of
}ij~ Metamorphoses gives some indication of the effect this lost
1If~y might have produced. As a tortured, passionate woman,
::monstrous yet never quite alienating our sympathy, Medea is
part of the tradition of striking 'anti-heroines' lying behind Lady
fytacbeth. Indeed Ovid's depiction of Medea's agonised thoughts
~,she hesitates, torn between love and duty, his evocation of the
~jrnamic tension between opposing impulses, rather resembles a
§hakespearean soliloquy (7.11-20):

It is futile to resist - some god or other is standing in my way.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were that thing called love - it is
certainly something like it, for why do my father's orders seem
so harsh to me? They certainly are too harsh. Why do I fear
that Jason will die when I've only just clapped eyes upon him?

29
 Ovid

Why am I so afraid? Banish the flames of love from your

virgin breast if you can, miserable Medea. I'd stop this
madness if I could. But a strange force is pulling me even
though I am unwilling. Desire draws me one way, reason
another. I know full well which way is better but I follow the
worse all the same.

Medea brings at least some of her troubles on her own head, but
the Metamorphoses is full of women who suffer through no fault
of their own. Io is first raped by Jupiter and then metamor-
phosed into a cow to conceal her from Juno's wrath. But Juno
sees through the ruse, demands the heifer as a gift, and gives her
to many-eyed Argus to guard (1.635-41):

When she imploringly tried to stretch out her arms towards

Argus, she had no arms to stretch. She tried to complain, but
could only moo. She started at the noise, and was terrified by
her own voice. She arrived at the banks of her father Inachus'
stream, where she had often played. But when she saw her
gaping jaws and sprouting horns reflected in the stream, she
was afraid, and fled, terrified of hersel£

Io is eventually rescued by Mercury, who manages to send

Argus to sleep by telling him the story of Syrinx - it remains
unfinished because Argus falls asleep so quickly. There is a
poignancy in the choice of Syrinx as the subject of this tale.
She is yet another victim of male lust, chased by Pan until,
rather like Daphne, she escapes through metamorphosis into
reeds. From the reader's point of view there may be a joke here
-we, by this time, are also perhaps a bit bored with rape narra-
tives. But from Io's point of view Argus' boredom is a grim
reminder that male violence against women is an everyday

30
 Introduction

,..L._.......~, not worth staying awake for. Chaucer creates a

in the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales
offers us a succession of comic tales of sexual
·. •· · •·' '•• ·The inimitable Miller's Tale is followed by the rather
Reeve's Tale. The Cook then begins what
to be a still further diminished variation on the same
· only for the tale to stop abruptly after just forty lines .
•:~l!l,....,........,·...~, like Ovid, flirts dangerously with the reader's
•.ilaJf;a(::tty for boredom.
only obviously appealing doe-eyed victims whom we
. . to pity. Iphis - the name, like Hilary and Evelyn,
. < •• ·•• be used for a boy or a girl -was brought up as a boy to
from being put to death by her father. Before her birth
.u~:;..,t~o:~,u. informed his wife that (9.676-9):

·········•·:.'Wo'm~:ns
lives are harder, and fortune denies them strength.
••:..O'•.•Jn~=rerore
(and may it not fall out thus) if it should happen
you give birth to a girl - I am unwilling to say such a
@O.sht:lck'mg thing - let her be destroyed.

. . . weac1mg is planned between young Iphis and her friend

_..,. ..,..... Although Iphis is in love with Ianthe she is filled with
:(,l~;;;)f..ld.u at the thought that the marriage can never be consum-
.4~,....,... We are encouraged to feel sorry for Iphis, although
also (I think) injects comedy into her complaint. She
. .. miserably that 'cows don't love cows, nor mares, mares' .
.• ·:. fact cows often attempt to mate with other cows when on
. and generally Iphis' sense of her own perversity seems
..·. exaggerated - she compares herself unfavourably with
rasiphae, mother of the minotaur, who persuaded a bull to
.!'nate with her by disguising herself as a heifer. !phis goes on to
observe that 'if all the inventive skill in the world should be

31
 Ovid

centred here, if Daedalus himself should fly back on his waxen

wings, what could he contrive with his skill? (741-3). I think
we may be supposed to snigger at this point - why does Ovid
get her to invoke, not a god or enchanter, but an inventor of
artefacts? - but the innocent Iphis is saved from her quandary
by the intervention of the goddess Isis, who turns her into a
boy at the altar.
A still more unlikely focus for our sympathy is Medusa. At
the conclusion of the long and excitingly swashbudding adven-
tures of Perseus, when he and his cronies are relaxing over a
meal, he is asked how he gained his secret weapon, the head of
the gorgon Medusa which turns all who see it to stone. He
briefly explains that he killed her when she was asleep, before
going on to tell more tales of derring-do. Only when he is asked
why Medusa had serpents for hair do we learn the gorgon's
history (4.794-801):

She used to be a celebrated beauty, and many suitors vied for

her favour. Her hair was her best feature - I was told this by
someone who claimed to have seen her. It is said that Neptune,
ruler of the ocean, raped her in Minerva's temple. The
daughter of Jupiter turned away in loathing and shielded her
chaste countenance behind her aegis. And so the deed might
not go unpunished, she changed the gorgon's locks into foul
serpents.

This little narrative is all the more shocking because it is so

coldly and casually told - Perseus seems to have no sense of the
unfairness of her punishment, of the cruelty displayed by both
Neptune and Minerva, and nor does he reflect on whether he
was justified in killing her. Yet Ovid, I like to think, was acutely
aware of all these factors.

32
lg, it would be very/n~:~g to suggest that the
Jjfj;tamorphoses is full of wronged women and wicked men. The
b~autiful youth, Hermaphroditus, falls victim to a man-eating
hymph, Salmacis, who assaults him while he bathes. Ovid's
imagery nicely captures the counter-intuitive quality of female
~acual aggression. The snalce at first seems to be the victim in her
i¢ricounter with the eagle, ivy is (ostensibly) far more fragile than
/ifu oak tree, and the polyp attacks by enclosing rather than pene-
f~kting (4.361-7):

· · •· •.•.· And then, though he struggles to escape, she entwines herself

round him, like a serpent whom an eagle has seized and borne
away on high; thus dangling, the snake clasps his head and
feet, and binds his beating wings with her tail. Salmacis also
resembles the ivy, which often weaves itself around great tree
trunks, and the squid, which immobilises its captive prey
under water with its tentacles.

It is difficult to avoid a touch of absurdity, if not downright

comedy, when depicting the victims of predatory females. But
when the predator is a goddess the danger is more acute, and is
treated with corresponding seriousness. Although she cannot,
like her male counterparts, force handsome Picus to become her
lover, Circe is able to punish him severely for his disdain. 'You
will find out what a woman crossed in love can do - and Circe
is a woman crossed in love' (14.384-5) she cries, and turns him
into a woodpecker. When his companions venture to protest at
this harsh treatment she unhesitatingly changes all of them into
beasts too.
Men who err the other way, and force their attentions on
goddesses, are liable to receive similar punishments. We may not

33
 Ovid

particularly sympathise with the violent Pyreneus, who falls to

his death attempting to chase the winged muses off a tower, but
Actaeon, who only happens to come across the naked Diana,
and is turned into a stag and killed by his own hounds, is surely
to be pitied.
Ovid is very good at debunking typically 'masculine' preten-
sions of various kinds. When he beholds the chained princess
Andromeda about to be attacked by a sea monster, Perseus
addresses the weeping girl and her grieving parents in the
following pompous speech (4.695-702):

You will soon have plenty of time for weeping, but there is
little time left for helping. If I sought this girl as the son of
Jupiter and of Danae, whom Jupiter filled with fecund gold
when she was imprisoned, or as Perseus, victor of the snaky
locked gorgon, who dared to fly though the air on fluttering
wings, I would certainly be your first choice as a son-in-law.
And now, if the gods will permit, I shall try to add the merit
of being really useful to all my other gifts.

When reading the story quickly it is easy to miss the jokes here
because we just assume that successful heroes are heroic. But in
fact Perseus betrays his weaknesses in various ways, We have
already been told by Ovid that Perseus is a timid flyer - he is
nervous about flying at night - and we will soon learn that his
great victory over Medusa consisted of killing her when she was
asleep. And why, if 'there is little time Left for helping', is he
boasting of his manly prowess rather than getting on with the
rescue? Sara Mack describes the comic bathos of Perseus' final
triumph. 'When the going gets rough [he] simply takes out his
trusty Gorgon's head and petrifies the Last two hundred of the
enemy' (126). Superior technology is used to create a similar

34
 Introduction

sbtr of comic anticlimax in Raiders ofthe Lost Ark when Indiana

Jbl'les, faced by a dazzling display of scimitarsmanship from his
qpponent as he warms up for a fight, simply pulls out his gun
in.d shoots him.
Brawny Hercules is also the butt of Ovid's humour. When
h.b . and his bride Deianira are faced with a swollen, turbulent
rlver, Hercules takes at face value the centaur Nessus' offer to
F~hy Deianira over safely while Hercules makes his own way
~(;ross. As well as being foolishly trusting, Hercules indulges
il1 pointless heroics: 'He neither hesitated nor made any effort
tp find the least turbulent spot - indeed he scorned to take
:idvantage of the smoother water' (9 .116-17). Hercules wins
pack Deianira fairly easily, but in the next book we are intro-
duced to a husband who braves far more for the sake of his
wife. Orpheus' bride Eurydice dies soon after their marriage
when she is bitten on the ankle by a snake. Famously,
Orpheus goes down to the Underworld to beg for her return .
.But in Ovid's version little is done to make the poet's feat
seem in any way exceptional - no barriers are put in his way,
and the whole trip seems no more daunting than going
through the Channel Tunnel. Even when he delivers his
speech to Pluto and Proserpina we aren't really given the
impression of a grieving widower. He injects a little facetious
urbanity into his plea when he cites (in a rather knowing, coy
way) Proserpina's abduction as proof that love is common to
all (10.26-9):

But I have been conquered by Love, a god who is celebrated on

earth, though I'm not sure whether that is the case down below
-yet I suspect that he is just as well known here, for unless the
old story of that abduction is false, Love joined you two
together as well.

35
 Ovid

Because Orpheus seems such an oddly cool customer, the

description of how even the 'bloodless shades' were moved to
tears by his plea seems rather unconvincing. Once Orpheus has
lost Eurydice for a second and final time (when he looks back at
her before they have left the Underworld) a further jarring,
bathetic note is introduced. We are told that he rejected the love
of women, even though many loved him. Such behaviour seems
touchingly loyal - but when Ovid goes on to inform us that
Orpheus transferred his affections to young boys the effect, if
not comic precisely, is far from tragic.

Structure
Ovid seems to play with his poem's resistance to structure and
order in various ways. One obvious example is his placement
of book divisions. Many of the poem's fifteen books end in the
middle of stories rather than at one of the many 'natural'
breaks between tales. A teasing example is that between Books
2 and 3. Book 2 ends with the abduction of Europa by Jupiter
in the form of a bull. But Book 3 brushes the story's ending
aside in a single sentence, with no reference to any sexual
liaison between Europa and her abductor - 'Now the god,
having put aside his disguise and owned his true identity,
reached the fields of Crete' (3.1-2). It may be that Ovid signals
his own awareness of the way he is breaking the story at an
exciting point when, at the very end of Book 2, he describes
Europa clutching one of the bull's horns as she is carried away
from the shore. To a modern reader this detail perhaps seems
sexually suggestive, but it might have had a further resonance
within a Roman context. The principal meaning of cornu was
an animal's horn, but the same word was also used to describe
the end of a stick around which books were rolled. 'So might

36
 Introduction

!teader be holding on to the hom of the book and

wbndering, like Europa, what next?' (Wheeler 93). This odd
Jirik between the poem's events and its physical existence as a
)bbbkroll is reprised in the way Book 8 segues into Book 9.
~bbk 8 ends with the river-god Achelotis explaining that he
G~s lost one of his horns and groaning with misery. Book 9
;;~~gins, as though there has been no pause, with Theseus
'~$king him to explain the reason for his mutilated forehead.
1]h.e Latin word frons means forehead, but was also used to
~Igriifjr the outer end of a book roll. Thus the phrase 'truncae
(#tangled, truncated) frontis' might refer to the deformed
£6rehead of Achelotis or, more obliquely, to the way the narra-
fiV'e has been chopped in half by the arbitrary book division.
The links between stories are still more noteworthy. At the
y~ry beginning of the poem the narrator promises his readers a
$erpetual song' and, even though he has so very many stories to
t~ll, Ovid weaves them together in an endless variety of ways,
:iilid makes particularly inventive use of multiple narrators - the
tale of Atalanta is told by Venus to Adonis, while their story is
Itself told by a still further inset narrator, Orpheus. More often
than not, unless we're consciously looking out for them, we
don't even notice the way tales are linked together, but are swept
along by the poem's buoyant momentum. But sometimes we
feel Ovid is encouraging us to notice the occasional moment of
comically shaky continuity. On more than one occasion he uses
a person's absence. or non-involvement in events as an excuse to
embark on their story. For example, after the funeral of Aesacus,
because Ovid wants to begin his Trojan War narrative, we are
told that 'Paris was not present on this sad occasion, Paris, who
would soon bring prolonged war to his homeland with his
stolen wife' (12.4-6). Another clever join between two uncon-
nected tales is forged later in the same book (12.536-40):

37
 Ovid

AJ;Nestor related the conflict between the Lapiths and the

Centaurs, Tlepolemus couldn't keep quiet when Hercules was
passed over without a mention, and said: 'I am amazed that
you have forgotten to praise the deeds of Hercules '

As well as playing around with the idea of story-telling,

manipulating or cheating the reader's expectations of narra-
tive drive, Ovid disrupts our sense of the integrity of his
imagined world. Its chronology, in particular, doesn't quite
compute. For example Callisto's father, as I've already briefly
mentioned, was Lycaon. Her story is told after that ofLycaon,
and clearly the enmity between him and Jupiter is established,
for, as we have already seen, Juno refers to it when she taunts
Jupiter. Yet Lycaon's unnatural behaviour caused Jupiter co
flood the earth, leaving only Pyrrha, Deucalion and the new
race created from stones to survive. How can Lycaon's
daughter have slipped through the net? It has been suggested
that the placement of this story is significant - Jupiter
glimpses Callisto while (in another amusingly literal-minded
evocation of divinity) checking that Phaethon's exploits with
the chariot of the sun haven't caused too much damage: 'But
now the Almighty Father makes a survey of heaven's high
walls and checks to see whether anything has been weakened
or loosened as a result of the raging fire' (2.401-3). Is it
possible, as Andrew Zissos and Ingo Gildenhard suggest, that
Phaethon's mismanagement of the sun (as the sun is so bound
up with our sense of time) has created some kind of temporal
distortion, a disruption in the space-time continuum
allowing Callisto to spring into existence? If we reject this
science-fictional response to the apparent glitch it is still
possible that Ovid wasn't simply being forgetful. He likes to
keep his readers on their toes and often disconcerts us by

38
 Introduction
::;:::;:::\-:\(

"~~hting at his own unreliability. As well as casting doubt on

;p~~ts' tales in Pythagoras' speech, he encourages the reader's
;~~~pticism at various other points, as when he introduces
-$'o/lla: 'She had the face of a virgin, and if poets' tales are not
illflies, was once a virgin indeed' (13. 733-4). Yet scepticism is
'~dangerous quality in the poem - Pentheus is torn apart in
l?*nishment for doubting the divinity of Bacchus and, less
dtamatically, Theseus' friend Pirithoiis elicits a reaction of
~hock and disapproval from his companions when he speaks
~rleeringly of metamorphic myths (8.614-15):
::,.,·:::.

ij'::: 'These are just stories, Achelous,' he said, 'and you impute too
:,, much power to the gods when you claim that they can change
/i people's shape'.
:;_:.::.-.

:t~ order to convince the sceptic that he is mistaken, Lelex tells

the story of Baucis and Philemon. Homely details - when
Jupiter and Mercury come to dine Baucis has to stabilise the
table with a potsherd because its legs are different lengths -
certainly create an air of verisimilitude, and Lelex supplies
arresting testimony to the reality of the old couple's final meta-
morphosis into trees (8.719-22):

And to this day the Bithynian peasant points out the neigh-
bouring trees, growing from a double trunk. I was told this by
serious old men who had no reason to lie.

But when a rather similar rhetoric of proof and certainty is

used by one of Ovid's many internal narrators, Vertumnus, we
may, retrospectively, wonder just how convincing Lelex's argu-
ments are. Vertumnus tells the nymph Pomona the tale of
heartless Anaxarete who turned to stone after her suitor

39
 Ovid

(another !phis) committed suicide. Because he wants to

persuade Pomona to sleep with him, and shun the example of
hard-hearted Anaxarete, Vertumnus adds this portentous
assurance of the tale's veracity: ~d so that you won't think
this just a story, there is still a statue in the princess' image in
Salamis to this day', before adding rather inconsequentially
'Salamis also contains a temple in honour of the Gazing Venus'
(14.758-61). Unlike Lelex's old men, !phis does have a reason
to deceive, and we might well reflect that although the reality
of any particular tree or statue may be proved, further evidence
is needed to demonstrate that these things are the result of
metamorphosis.
This possible potential bond between the stories told by
Vertumnus and Lelex is just one little example of the hundreds
of parallels and connections the reader may spot in the
Metamorphoses. So many nuances are lost when one reads the
stories anthologised out of order or in isolation. A grisly
example comes in Ovid's account ofPentheus, who doubted the
divinity of Bacchus and received a horrible punishment. A
repeated motif in the Metamorphoses, which the attentive reader
would have picked up on by this stage (the end of Book 3), is
the poignant post-metamorphic moment when the victim
attempts to stretch his arms out beseechingly to a friend or rela-
tive but cannot because he no longer has arms. Typical is Io:
'When she imploringly tried to stretch out her arms towards
Argus, she had no arms to stretch' (1.635-6). Pentheus' situation
taps into this motif but his lack of arms has a more grotesque
cause than metamorphosis. His mother and aunts are maddened
by Bacchic frenzy (3.721-6):

She tears off the pleader's right arm. The frenzied Ino tears
off the other. The miserable man has no arms to stretch out

40
~~ h~ moilia, but show::::,::ibttd munps, ilie limbs
,;;'torn away, and cries '0 mother, look at me'. Agave ... rips his
,;;:(head off.

Ia if the reader still remembers this grisly tale by the time

ijp~k 6 is reached another link may be made. Sisters Procne and
~hilomela (discussed in Chapter 3) tear apart Procne's young
~qn ltys following a similar Bacchanal. The two stories are in
i#~y ways quite dissimilar, but in both we find sisters, Bacchic
frbnzy, a son murdered by his mother and the subsequent
}'paragmos - or ritual tearing apart of a hero.
:, But there is no real limit to the amount and variety of links
.Which can be formed between the poem's many tales. The tale
qf Philomela may take us back to Pentheus, but is equally likely
'to make us reflect on Philomela's affinities with her fellow-
weaver, Arachne, or with Scylla and her father Nisus, who also
shockingly transgress their ties of kinship, and are similarly
turned into birds to avoid bloodshed. It is common to talk of
the Metamorphoses as a woven poem because the tales are so
tightly enmeshed together; however, as the nodes between them
are almost inexhaustible and are not constrained by their loca-
tion in the poem, it is really more like a miniature world wide
web than a tapestry.
Of course this analogy only works up to a point - it would
be doing a disservice to Ovid's art to suggest that there is no
significance in the ordering of his tales. Sometimes a clue to
our intended response may be hidden if we read a tale out of
context. The goddess Latona seems a victim to be pitied when
a 'rustic rabble' prevents her drinking from their pool. We
are particularly inclined to sympathise with Latona when
she begs the peasants to take pity on her twin babies (6.358-
60):

41
 Ovid

'And let these children, who stretch out their little arms from
my breast, move your pity.' And by chance the children did
stretch out their arms. Who would not have been moved by
the goddess' gentle words?

The rhetorical question gains an ironic edge, however, if we

remember that we have just been reading about these same chil-
dren's adult exploits. When Niobe boasted that she had more
children than Latona, the goddess told the twins, Diana and
Apollo, to punish her. Resisting all pleas for mercy, they shot
dead Niobe's seven daughters and seven sons. As we hear of
Latona's own plea for mercy less than 100 lines later, the pathos
of the babies' plight may ring hollow. We might even wonder
whether the babies really stretch out their arms 'by chance', or
whether, rather like John Wyndham's 'Midwich Cuckoos', they
are responding to their mother's cue with sinister precocity.
Certainly the very next story should persuade the reader of the
family's cruelty, for we are told in agonising detail of the fate of
Marsyas, flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a music contest
and losing. (The deal was that the winner was allowed to do
whatever he wanted to the loser.) (6.387-91):

The skin is stripped off his limbs as he screams, and his whole
body is one massive wound. Blood streams down his sides, his
sinews lie revealed; his trembling veins quiver with no skin to
cover them. You could count his beating organs, and the
entrails were clearly visible in his breast.

The background to this horrible act is summarised in a single

sentence - 'another remembered the satyr who had been beaten
by the son of Latona in a piping contest, and punished' (6.383-5)
allowing us to meditate with horrified sympathy on his

42
 Introduction

shocking end, memorably depicted in a late painting by Titian.

Iri a typical example of the Ovidian wit so many readers have
found reprehensible, Marsyas cries out to Apollo 'why do you
tear me from myself?' Apollo's icy unconcern for the feelings of
others is apparent from his debut in Book 1 of the
f,t{etamorphoses, in the first of many tales of unrequited lust, the
~ccount of his passion for the nymph Daphne.

43
 1

Daphne

She'll tell
her story
rather than be held inside its web. There are holes -
have you noticed -
where the seams don't quite dose? Daphne peers through
those gaps.
She scans the sky and plans to stare - you can almost hear her
glance-
down the air, the blank, the optical until
a face stares back
Alice Fulton, 'Turn: a version'

The earth is quick to generate new life after the flood, summoned
by Jupiter to punish mankind, subsides, Among the creatures
brought forth is the monstrous Python, who terrifies the new race
of men but is finally destroyed by Apollo's arrows. The god's pride
in his victory prompts him to taunt Cupid, sneering that a mere
boy has no business with a bow and arrow. Angered by Apollo's
scorn, Cupid shoots him with a golden arrow which enflames him
with love for Daphne, the virgin daughter ofPeneus the river-god.
Cupid then shoots Daphne with a leaden arrow to ensure she
responds to the god's suit with horror. As Apollo pursues the
fleeing nymph she begs her father to help her escape, and is trans-
formed into a laurel. Apollo claims the tree as his own, to be a
symbol of military and artistic triumph.

45
 Ovid

This is one of the Metamorphoses' best known stories.

Daphne's transformation has been depicted by numerous
painters as well as by Bernini in his celebrated sculpture, and has
also inspired composers, most famously Handel and Richard
Strauss. One of the most striking recent literary adaptations of
the myth, Alice Fulton's 'Daphne and Apollo', a quirky series of
poems very loosely based on the Metamorphoses, was included in
Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's After Ovid. Her retelling
is firmly embedded within its own cultural context, very
different from that in which Ovid's own poem is enmeshed. In
the third poem, 'Take: A Roman Wedding', Fulton reanimates
the historical realities of Roman women's lives from a twentieth-
century perspective, evoking the fear and helplessness of a girl
forced into the kind of marriage Daphne is so anxious to avoid:

Once upon a bride there was a time.

Between twelve and twenty. But a minor

all her life. Once - no often, every war -

She was taken by force, as spoils, as lifting
her over

the threshold remembers.

Just as Fulton can read the unarticulated female point of view

out of (or into) the literature of Roman men, so can she exca-
vate a Daphne from the Metamorphoses whom Ovid probably
wouldn't recognise:

She could snuff a burning candle with a bullet,

break
five eggs before they hit the ground and pierce the ace of hearts.
All with her back to the target, while aiming in her compact.

46
 1. Daphne

In 'Turn: a version', quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Fulton

$~ems to reflect on the problems inherent in this kind of moderni-
sation. To what extent is a story able to freewheel, to generate new
meanings and break free of its author's intentions and its historical
context? Fulton seems to be suggesting that Daphne is like a fly
trapped in a story web from which she must struggle to escape. Yet
at the same time she appears to acknowledge that the story is not
so constricting after all, that in fact it has a very open weave and
can accommodate different readings. Fulton's feminist take on
Daphne is perhaps already present, or potential at least, in Ovid's
version. Certainly the afterlife of Ovid's brief narrative is astonish-
ingly complex, and can, as Fulton implies, be seen as a batde
fought over Daphne, as her story is reprised, reinvented, even
completely reversed by countless writers who view her with pity,
hostility, approval, irritation and laughter. This chapter charts
Daphne as a contested site of interpretation from Ovid's own
poem to some of the most recent responses to the myth.
The sharp divisions in the tale's reception may partly be
explained by the tone of the original. The experiences of Apollo
and Daphne, the amorous pursuer and the terrified victim, are
clearly polarised in Ovid's narrative. We are encouraged to
understand both points of view - that of Daphne is not privi-
leged. Although himself in a sense a 'victim' - of Cupid's golden
arrow which has kindled his desire for Daphne - Apollo seems
less a thrall to love or even lust than an elegant connoisseur of
the pleasures of the chase (1.504-11):

Nymph, Peneus' daughter, - stay, I beg you. It is not a foe who

chases you. Please stay! Thus the lamb flies from the wolf and
the deer from the lion, thus doves fly from the eagle on flut-
tering wings, thus do all creatures flee from their enemies. But
Love is the reason for my pursuit - woe is me! I am worried

47
 Ovid

that you will slip, and that thorns will tear your tender limbs -
I don't wish to cause you pain. The terrain over which you run
is rough. I beg you to run more slowly, and I will moderate my
own pace to match yours.

Although Apollo seeks to disassociate his own amorous pursuit

from that of a predator hunting its prey, the effect is to align the
nymph with such terrified victims, particularly in a poem which
so frequently compares victims of rape to hunted animals. And
Apollo's promise that if she will only slow down he will conscien-
tiously moderate his own pace to match is cruelly unconvincing
in its wit. It is perhaps disturbing to modern readers that this cool
Apollonian wit seems so similar to the poet's own, and when Ovid
explains dispassionately that Daphne's wish for perpetual virginity
is incompatible with her appearance we may feel that the narra-
tive is taking Apollo's side (1.488-9):

Her father gave in to Daphne's request to remain a virgin. But

your loveliness forbids the fulfilment of your desires, Daphne,
and your beauty repulses your prayers.

By semi-personifying her beauty as an agent at war with her

wishes, Ovid seems almost to hint at her own complicity with
Apollo's pursuit. As there is no concrete evidence for this in the
action, as distinct from Ovid's own narrative gloss on events, it
might be fair to say that Ovid seems an unfairly Apollonian
narrator, who suspects that Daphne is just a little less reluctant
than she makes out.
Literary rapes (and attempted rapes) are frequently thus prob-
lematic. Victims - such as Mozart's Donna Anna, Samuel
Richardson's Oarissa and Amy, the female lead in Sam Peckinpah's
Straw Dogf - are tainted, or perceived to be tainted, by a sugges-

48
IL of responsibility or J:::easure. An extended and
ID~turbingly equivocal account of rape is given in Shakespeare's
?lfape of Lucrece. Like Ovid, Shakespeare's narrator describes a
}i~roine at war with herself; beauty's red and virtue's white compete
f6:r the face ofLucrece (68-70).
Yet their ambition makes them still to fight,
The sovereignty of either being so great
That oft they interchange each other's seat.
:;: ~;l:\:=;:
'{'arquin, the rapist, himself goes on to use a similar image of
Lucrece at war with herself; her beauty, like that of Daphne,
#ikes arms on behalf of the male aggressor. The affinity between
the rapist's rhetoric and that of his narrator (similar to that in
the Metamorphoses) hints that the telling is biased in some way
(477-80):

'The colour in thy face,

That even for anger makes the lily pale
And the red rose blush at her disgrace,
Shall plead for me and tell my loving tale'.

Returning to Daphne's plight, we seem to be further drawn in

to an Apollonian perspective by the way we see, and in a sense
participate in, his lingering gaze as it travels tantalisingly over
her body, striptease style. As Daphne runs, the god's visual
enjoyment is further enhanced when the wind blows away her
hair and clothes, revealing still more of her body (1.527-30):

The wind exposed her body to view, while opposing breezes

ruffled her garments and made her locks stream out behind
her. In flight she seemed still lovelier than before.

49
 Ovid

The reader who knows Ovid's earlier Art of Love might well
suspect that Daphne was partly complicit in the pursuit, for that
poem's narrator counselled women to affect indifference in
order to heighten their desirability and assured his male readers
that women often secredy wish to be taken by force (1.665-6):

She may struggle at first and cry 'you monster', yet she will
hope to be overwhelmed in the struggle.

There are other hints in the text which encourage us to see

Apollo and Ovid sharing similar goals. As a tree Daphne will
serve Apollo's ends - she will flatter his art, adorning his hair,
lyre and quiver. Daphne is similarly subservient to Ovid's
artistic ambitions, and the narrator playfully alludes to this
function through wordplay. We have already seen that Ovid
likes to permeate the boundaries between the real world, in
which the reader handles the text as a physical volume, and the
fictive world of the poem. After her metamorphosis Daphne is
enclosed in bark- fiber- and her hair changes to foliage -frons.
In Latin tiber may mean book as well as bark, and, as we saw in
the previous chapter, one meaning of .frons is the outside of a
book roll. Daphne is imprisoned not just within the laurel but
within the pages of the Metamorphoses as well. Although neither
Ovid nor Apollo enjoys Daphne sexually, they could be said to
collaborate in an artistic exploitation of her transformed body.
But if she is a text she is an ambiguous text, one whose mean-
ings are not confined to those which the narrator seems to
intend. Just as Shakespeare's Tarquinian narrator should not be
assumed to speak with Shakespeare's voice, so Ovid's narrator
allows us plenty of room for interpretative manoeuvre - as
indeed he also does in the Art ofLove. The reader is not obliged
to see events from a masculine, Apollonian, perspective. We are

50
 1. Daphne

invited, for example, to interrogate Daphne's apparent final

approval of her new role as Apollo's tree (1.566-7):

When Apollo had finished, the laurel inclined her branches

and seemed to nod her leafY top.

The word 'seemed' is significant. The tree may be non-sentient,

1ts top moved only by the wind. Or the movement may express
arejection of Apollo's plan; the verb used by Ovid to express the
tree's movement - agito - to move or shake - could, like the
English agitate, have connotations of disturbance or vexation.
Presumably by chance, the Disney film Hercules includes a
comic detail which might be interpreted as confirmation of a
'reluctant Daphne. The lecherous Philoctetes chases a bevy of
tiymphs only to watch in dismay as they all metamorphose into
trees. Refusing to accept the evidence of his eyes, he assures
Hercules that the nymphs can't keep their hands off him, only
to have his statement confirmed when a nymph/tree slaps his
face with her hand/branch. In Ovid the wooer's misreading of
events is only one possibility, in the Disney film there is no such
ambiguity, yet both play with the potential of language to tell
different stories.
The narrative subtlety and complexity of Ovid's narrative,
and the way both points of view are represented, encouraged
later writers to approach the tale in sharply contrasting ways.
Whereas earlier poets and commentators often reinvented
Daphne as a variously faulty character, the twentieth century
saw a number of writers, particularly women, rewriting the
myth from an avowedly feminist perspective. Some of the most
startling takes on Apollo and Daphne can be found in Christian
commentaries on the poem. Such interpretations were
frequently counter-intuitive and what might be described as a

51
 Ovid

kind of institutionalised misogyny often recast women as

villains, quite against the grain of the original text. Eurydice, for
example, is figured by one such commentary as 'lust' whereas in
Ovid's account she is a hapless and chaste victim, first of death,
then of Orpheus' lack of self-restraint. Daphne is treated still
more unfairly by some commentators; Pierre Bersuire, for
example, writing in the fourteenth century, casts her as the
reluctant synagogue, obstinately resisting the opportunity to
convert to Christianity, while the would-be rapist Apollo is
figured as Christ. Yet the commentary tradition is rich and
varied, though very alien from modern sensibilities, and is by no
means consistently anti-female in its bias. The fourteenth-
century Ovide moralist associated Daphne with the Virgin Mary,
and John of Garland, writing in the thirteenth century, inter-
preted the myth as man's pursuit of wisdom. {Though
interestingly this positive gloss on the nymph's role implies the
desirability of Daphne's capture.)
The misogyny apparently inherent in medieval culture also
affects even ostensibly neutral responses to Ovid's tale.
Illustrations of the Ovide moralist depict Daphne in the final
stage of metamorphosis; her body has been turned into a tree
but her human head remains visible, peeping out from the
branches. Although the artist does not actively suggest that she
is anything but a victim, the iconography of Western culture
works against her, for images of Adam and Eve's temptation
from the same period frequently depict a serpent with a
woman's face entwined round the tree in the garden of Eden.
Thus the misogynist impulse which gave Satan a sex change in
medieval iconography might be said to have indirectly tainted
representations of Daphne.
If we move forward five centuries or so we can find Satan
and Daphne brought once again into curious complicity in a

52
l n t poem by Wdlia:· ;:rth, 'The Snake in
G~rden Considers Daphne'. Satan addresses the transformed
the
~ymph:

up there it seems to be all light

and prelapsarian elation - but bear
in mind your lower half that gropes
for water, the slender roots you spread
in secret to fascinate the rocks,
while sunlight pries apart your leaves
and flights of birds arouse the air
around you.

~ere Satan seems to imply that Daphne is less pure, more

£onsciously alluring, than she pretends to be, and at the end of
~he poem he binds her closer to him, morally, when he casts
them both as comparable figures of temptation, even though
Daphne is an unwitting and unwilling 'temptress' while Satan
sets out deliberately to entrap and destroy:

We cannot grasp
The word hope, which the ones we've tempted
Find always at their fingertips

Although the association of Daphne with Satan is rather an

unusual and extreme example of a misogynistic response to her
story, the nymph is repeatedly viewed in a cynical light. In
particular, it is frequently assumed (or at least pretended) that
Daphne did not deserve her reputation for chasti~. And if her
virginicy is allowed, its merit is compromised in various ways.
Even in a broadly accurate, though burlesque, seventeenth-
century retelling of the tale, Thomas Brown refers to her fleeing

53
 Ovid

Apollo 'like a whore from a constable freed'. Although the

action of his poem mirrors that of Ovid's tale, the terms of this
particular comparison, like some of the hostile medieval inter-
pretations, cast her as the transgressor and Apollo as the
upholder of order. Another poet at work in the same period,
Henry Bold, suggests that Daphne's refusal was a matter of taste
rather than principle when, in a poem addressed to Charles II,
he assures the king that:

Had Phoebus ever shone so fair as this

Daphne had scaped her metamorphosis

Whereas Bold doesn't question the mythical chastity of Daphne,

merely hypothesises her inability to withstand Charles, other
writers contorted the legend, recasting the virtuous nymph as an
adulteress. Here is a Victorian variation on the joke, penned by
Horace Smith (the 'memento' is not the original laurel wreath
but the horns traditionally ascribed to cuckolds):

Daphne, like many another fair,

To whom connubial ties are horrid,
Fled from his arms, but left a rare
Memento sprouting on his forehead.

By sleight of hand Smith maps a straying wife's aversion to one

particular, established 'connubial tie' - she flees from her
husband because she craves variety - onto virginal Daphne's
quite different aversion to marriage as an institution.
Indeed male writers' capacity to find ways of casting
Daphne's behaviour in the worst possible light seems almost
unbounded. Jonathan Swift offers a sneering explanation for her
disinclination:

54
 I. Daphne

For such is all the sex's flight

They fly from learning, wit and light.
They fly, and none can overtake
But some gay coxcomb or a rake.

;~~ift, like the author of the Ovide moralise, does not deny
fjaphne's genuine reluctance but puts an unfavourable gloss on
'H nonetheless. Like Smith, he has refigured Daphne's terrified
flight from rape as mere flightiness. A number of other poets
;fecast her reluctance as unjustified, implying that a woman
khould not thwart a man's desires however unwilling she might
'be. In an early seventeenth-century poem by Richard Barnfield,
for example, Apollo tells Cassandra that Daphne's metamor-
phosis was a punishment:

Who for she would not to my will agree,

The gods transformed into a laurell tree.

However (as he is trying to persuade Cassandra to be less cold

than Daphne) it may be Apollo who is deliberately misinter-
preting the story rather than the poet getting it wrong. Earlier
the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser put a similar spin on the
legend in one of his Amoretti; here too it is implied that the
narrator is mistelling the story for his own amorous ends as he
addresses his beloved:

Proud Daphne scorning Phoebus' lovely fire

On the Thessalian shore from him did flee:
For which the gods in their revengeful ire
Did her transform into a laurel tree.

Although in these two examples Daphne is described as in some

way to blame, the context ensures that the effect is more playful

55
 Ovid

than misogynistic. The speaker is (more or less securely) differ-

entiated from the poet, and we are implicitly allowed, even
invited, to resist his line of argument.
Alice Fulton crystallises and exaggerates Apollo's misogyny in
order to increase our sympathy for Daphne. His response to her
metamorphosis, for example, appears bizarrely perverse:

Of course, he liked her better as a tree. 'Girls are trees'

was his belief. Mediated
forms pleased him. 'If you can't find a partner, use
a wooden chair'

But this curious preference is anticipated in several much earlier

responses to the myth. A strange, vegetal sexuality, silent and
acquiescent, is oddly hinted at in several medieval illustrations
of Daphne. These invert Ovid's implied metamorphic sequence
- the transformation of her head is described at the very end of
his account - depicting her with a leafy top and a woman's body.
The narrator of Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden' unambiguously
suggests a preference for trees over women:

When we have run our passions heat,

Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow.
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph but for a reed.

The narrator's love of trees might seem innocuous, the garden

itself a bucolic and anti-erotic idyll. But this isn't the whole
story. He describes foliage in almost sexual terms, as a direct

56
 1. Daphne

feplacement for women - an alternative object of desire, not a

'llieans of escaping desire:

No white nor red was ever seen

So am'rous as this lovely green.

The luscious dusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach

We might wonder whether the 'race' which the gods end in a

tree connotes not a running contest but a species, doomed by
~rrange miscegeny to extinction. A similar grotesque possibility
~s suggested in 'Noon Vision', written by the early twentieth-
Eentury poet Thomas Sturge Moore; this is his description of
the god's acceptance of Daphne's change:

And must a god then feel dismay,

Seeking a mouth, to find a flower?
Or ... ! an effect of divine power,
Was this thy will?
This blossom, this fair open thing
That holds no secret from the world?
Not like a mouth

All these poets are of course male. Women poets often

swerved the other way, making the legend more, not less,
woman-friendly. Daphne, as the laurel, is primarily associated
with poetry, and is thus frequently invoked when praise is given
to poets. Daphne's transformation into a laurel seems to cast the
woman in an acquiescent, purely supportive role by contrast
with the creative male poet of genius. But her function subtly

57
 Ovid

changes when the poet being praised is female. In a flattering

poem addressed to the Restoration poet Aphra Behn for
example:

The female laurels were obscured till now,

And they deserved the shades in which they grew.
But Daphne at your call returns her flight,
Looks boldly up, and dares the god of light.

Daphne is no longer a passive commodity, gift of a god to

future male poets, but the active ally of a female poet who
wishes to outdo her male predecessors - a little later in the
poem Aphra Behn is assured that 'If love's the theme, you
outdo Ovid's art'. The victory of Behn over Ovid mirrors
Daphne's triumph over Apollo. It is possible that more is being
said here than that Behn was an unusually gifted female poet.
By suggesting a reversal of the Daphne legend, the nymph is
empowered but also subtly sexualised. She is after all fleeing a
rape rather than any other kind of attack, so her decision to
face rather than avoid the challenge implies a willingness to co-
operate with the god's desires rather than valour - the word
'boldly' (when used of a woman's glance) commonly suggested
sexual immodesty. Behn has perhaps mastered Ovid in the
practice as well as in the theory of love's arts.
Daphne is invoked as proof of female poetic superiority even
more strongly, and less equivocally, in a poem addressed to
another seventeenth-century poet, Katherine Philips, by 'Philo-
Philippa':

Thee I invoke Orinda, for my Muse;

He could but force a branch, Daphne her tree
Most freely offers to her sex and thee,

58
 1. Daphne

And says to verse so unconstrained as yours,

Her laurel freely comes, your fame secures;
And men no longer shall with ravished bays
Crown their forced poems by as forced a praise.

~td Charles Goodall, in a poem about a lesser known contem-

p~rary of Behn's, Mrs Wright, simply says: 'Daphne to laurel
turned, a female brow/ Has the best title to a female bough'.
i . A particularly interesting twist on this co-option of Daphne
~y; or on behalf of, women poets is offered by the eighteenth-
tentury bluestocking, Elizabeth Carter, in a poem written to a
young lady who aspires to be a poet. Whereas the connection
forged by Philo-Philippa between the pursuit of'laurels' and the
pursuit of Daphne as a sexual object was merely epigrammatic
and opportunistic, Carter emphasises the link, invoking literary
success as a kind ofjouissance:

Let not ungentle Daphne's scorn

Thy rising hopes restrain
Apollo, pow'r of wit and verse,
Her favour sued in vain.

The young poetess is assured that:

Repeated efforts shall prevail

And gain the beauteous prize.

Apollo is indeed the god of wit and poetry, but his pursuit of the
nymph was sexual, not literary. The slippage between Daphne
as erotic object and crown of poetic ambition is of course more
striking because the wooer, the poem's addressee, is a woman. (If
she were a man one might suspect a play on the word 'rising'.)

59
 Ovid

The need to recast the traditional pattern of male poet and

female muse, and the acknowledgement that any disruption
of this pattern may constitute a sexual as well as a literary
transgression, is implicit in a poem by the American
Modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle ('HD'), 'If you will let me
sing'. Here she seems to address a male poet or the male
literary establishment, restoring a gender balance to inspira-
tion by aligning Daphne with Hyacinthus, another (male)
love of Apollo's. The function of Muse or inspiration seems to
have shifted back to Apollo, with Daphne and Hyacinthus
acting as intermediaries who will ensure that both men and
women can gain access to the god.

If you will let me sing,

That God will be
gracious to each of us,
who found his own wild Daphne
in a tree,
who set
on desolate plinth,
image
of Hyacinth.

Although HD's seems a plea for simple equality, implicit in

many of the earlier poems in praise of poetesses is the notion of
a battle between the sexes, and a certain pleasure in the god's
discomfiture. But just as not all male poets skewed the myth in
Daphne's disfavour (many of the flattering verses quoted above
are by men), not all women poets have simply championed
Daphne as a totem of female virtue or female genius. Her virtue,
in particular, has not been found universally appealing. We have
already seen how Daphne was used ostensibly to flatter Aphra

60
 1. Daphne

!~ihn,but possibly also to hint at her sexual experience. Behn's

~betry is certainly not coy. One of her best known erotic poems
~~ 'The Disappointment'. Its heroine, Chloris, flees her lover
~ysander as Daphne fled Apollo:

Like lightning through the grove she hies,

Or Daphne from the Delphic god,
No print upon the grassy road
She leaves, to instruct pursuing eyes.
The wind that wantoned in her hair,
And with her ruffied garments played,
Discovered in the flying maid,
All that the gods e'er made, if fair.

;~hloris' shock is produced not by her lover's violence but by his

(rnpotence. Thus the new context encourages the reader to see
fhe attractions of her dishevelled form in flight as a deliberate
~~tempt to arouse Lysander. This consciously topsy-turvy allu-
~ion to the fleeing Daphne is all the more edgy because we have
:i.lready learnt that Chloris had earlier feigned reluctance when
tysander made his first advance. In fact her words seem
unequivocally those of a potential rape victim:

She cry'd - cease cease - your vain desire,

Or I'll call out - What would you do?
My dearer honour ev'n to you
I cannot, must not give - Retire,
Or take this life

But the narrator assures us that she is only acting:

She with a charming languishment,

Permits his force, yet gently strove;

61
 Ovid

Her hands his bosom softly meet,

But not to put him back design'd,
Rather to draw him on indin'd.

Chloris assumes the Daphne role so effortlessly as almost to cast

doubt on the 'real' Daphne, and indeed on other rape victims.
It is notoriously difficult for an outsider to distinguish between
rape and consensual sex. Seen from a distance, the action the
poem describes would probably suggest a male attack on an
unwilling female. If the poet were male we might say that he was
trivialising sexual violence, misreading genuine opposition as
affected coyness. Because she is female we respond to the poem
differently, perhaps uncovering a suggestion that women are
forced to feign a reluctance they do not feel because of society's
sexual double standards.
Although some of the more recent female responses to the
poem similarly see Daphne as a victim of sexual repression,
others seem to approve her self-sufficiency. Alice Fulton plays
with the 'date rape' problem, but her treatment of the myth is
actually more reassuring than Behn's because such a gulf
yawns between Apollo {speaking below) and the poet's own
VOICe:

Your presence pursues its own undoing.

just asking for it: just use two hands and twist.
As it is as it is: your ftmaleness naturally
says take. Says this rape has your name on it.
Your beauty provokes
Its own dominion, whose no can never mean no.

The italics effect a final distancing between this voice and

Fulton's own - when her Daphne says no, she means it. Fulton

62
 1. Daphne
::::::::::-:

ihhaginatively probes Daphne's motives; her nymph's fantastical

;p~rspective on words and objects, and particularly her confla-
t!on of literal and metaphorical spaces, recalls the voice of
~nother solitary female, the nineteenth-century American poet,
Emily Dickinson. Fulton's Daphne sees marriage itself as a kind
~f metamorphosis, one which offers her less freedom than trans-
fbrmation into a laurel:
···:=:

::::':But her gift for visualizing the inner

i.i chambers
::; of words was most impressive. She'd tell of wedlock's wall
>: that was a shroud
::\ of pink, its wall that was a picket fence, the one of chainlink
i and one
that was all strings. While Apollo hardened with love for her,
Daphne
stripped the euphemism from the pith. Love was nothing
but a suite
of polished steel: mirrors breeding mirrors in successions
of forever, his
name amplified through sons of sons and coats of arms,
her limbs
spidering, her mind changed to moss and symbol, a trousseau of
fumed wood,
the scent of perforations as his relief rose above her
smoky field.

However, some of the many modern women poets who have

been drawn to Daphne think her determination to flee the god
misjudged. In Anne Sexton's 'Where I live in this honorable
house of the laurel' the nymph's treelike state is shown to be
unnatural, even grotesque, and at odds with her belated stirrings
of desire:

63
 Ovid

I live in my wooden legs and 0

my green green hands.
too late
to wish I had not run from you, Apollo,
blood moves still in my bark bound veins.
I, who ran nymph foot to root in flight,
have only this late desire to arm the trees
I lie within.

The reference to 'wooden legs' rather than a trunk conjures up

a clumsy Pinocchio-like image, less graceful yet more humatl.
than a fully laurdled Daphne. Throughout the poem, languag~
itself is subjected to Ovidian metamorphosis; the 0 at the end
of line one is linked syntactically with the wooden legs a$
though it too were somehow part of her physical environment;
Even though the next line shows 0 to be an exclamation, th~
misreading is not without significance as the letter traditionally
connotes female genitalia - a kind of absent presence for thi~
yearning Daphne - and here may also suggest her new shap~;:
the ring of a tree. Her memory of being transformed into ~
laurel is reflected in the confused syntax of 'I, who ran nymph.
foot to root in flight'. A single letter metamorphoses her 'foot(
into a 'root', encouraging us to see both words as the same part
of speech. Yet it is possible to see 'root' not as a noun but as a
verb; Daphne is paradoxically rooted while 'in flight' because
transformation is the only way she can escape Apollo. .. .
The textuality - remember the Latin wordplay linking bark
and foliage with books - of Daphne is also hinted at by Sexto~
when the speaker tells us: . ·.·

Frost taps my skin and I stay glossed

in honor for you are gone in time.

64
 1. Daphne

'Glossed' might signify her shining beauty, but equally suggests

tqterpretation, and perhaps misinterpretation, for yet again we
a.£"~ wrongfooted by the following line, at first assuming that she
1¥glossed in honour of the god, then realising that there is a
[>&use after honour, and that the god seems to have vanished
ft6m the picture completely- 'you are gone in time'. It would
therefore seem that her honour is entirely self-contained, her
chastity rather than her gift to poets. The prominence of honour
here - the tree is described as 'honorable' in the title, and the
word is used three times in the poem - is significant. Its reso-
riance continues to shift throughout the poem; her 'laureate'
honour appears an empty and frustrating gift:

I build the air with the crown of honor; it keys

my out of time and luckless appetite.

~ut in the next line 'honor' seems to have metamorphosed

iri;to the honour done by Apollo to Daphne by his great desire
for her:

You gave me honor too soon, Apollo ...

Whereas Fulton sees marriage as a delusive trap, it seems that

Sexton sees Daphne's fetishistic concern with her chastity as
equally destructive, a position apparently shared by Sylvia Plath
who also, though with some equivocation, deprecates the need
to seek refuge from sexuality in metamorphosis. In 'Virgin in a
Tree' she equates approval for Daphne's decision with Hamlet's
wish for Ophelia to enter a nunnery:

Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap

Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers

65
 Ovid

Approving chased girls who get them to a tree

And put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects

All amorous arrows.

Plath's vision of Daphne resembles that of Sexton, for both s~~

the nymph's metamorphosis as grotesque and unnatural: ,',;;;

!
.:·=··::

~~ ~;:;d,:t~~·~e
Now, dour-faced, her fingers
tortuow bough.' overripe

Stiff as twigs, her body woodenly

Askew
<=i:::;

It is scarcely surprising that Daphne is an ambiguous figur~

for most modern Western women, who are likely to sympathis~
with her wish for independence and her refusal to subordinat~
her own feelings to those of her father and suitor, but find h~r
preoccupation with virginity alienating. Daphne's retreat frofi!
sexual experience may (arguably) damage her, but leaves het
tormentor unpunished. By contrast, as we shall see in the nex:~
chapter, Apollo's sister Diana responds with unforgiving
violence as soon as her chastity comes under threat. ,

66
 2

Actaeon

know the rules for a Particicution,' Aunt Lydia says. 'You

wait until I blow the whistle. Mcer that, what you do is up
you, until I blow the whistle again. Understood?'
A noise comes from among us, a formless assent
'This man,' says Aunt Lydia, 'has been convicted of a rape.'
voice trembles with rage, and a kind of triumph
There's a surge forward, like a crowd at a rock concert in the
';':'')Jtorrner time, when the doors opened, that urgency coming like a
through us. The air is bright with adrenalin, we are
,:'pf:rm1ittfxi anything and this is freedom, in my body also, I'm
,,,,,,,""'' '"'"'.."''"' red spreads everywhere ... now there are sounds, gasps, a
noise like growling, yells and the red bodies tumble forward
,,,:' and I can no longer see, he's obscured by arms, fists, feet. A high
'/>scream comes from somewhere, like a horse in terror.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, 1986

~~llowing the car crash which killed Diana, Princess of Wales,

~pth the poet Andrew Motion and the Princess' brother, Earl
$pencer, observed the same irony in her fate. Although named
~~er the virgin goddess of the chase, she was hounded to death,
the hunted, not the hunter:
And you? Your life was not your own to keep
or lose. Beside the river, swerving under ground,
your future tracked you, snapping at your heels:
Diana, breathless, hunted by your own quick hounds.
Andrew Motion

67
 Ovid

My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is

threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.
It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana,
perhaps the greatest was this - a girl given the name of the
ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted
person of the modern age.
Earl Spencer's funeral oration

But both men's words generate as well as describe irony. For

the Ovidian reader any reference to the poignancy of a hunter
killed by his or her own hounds suggests a story in which
Diana is the aggressor rather than the victim - the metamor-.
phosis of Actaeon. The young prince, having finished hunting
for the morning, stumbled upon Diana bathing in a grove. She
sprinkled water over him, transforming him into a deer. He
tried to run away but was tracked and killed by his hunting
dogs. Any echo of this particular legend in Earl Spencer's
speech is probably fortuitous, but it seems actually embedded
within Motion's poem because of the phrase 'your own quick
hounds'. This has the effect of undercutting the poem's
poignant tribute by reminding us how ruthless the mythical
Diana could be. It also, within the context of the Princess' life,
hints that she was partly responsible for the accident. By
describing the photographers and journalists as her 'own quick
hounds' Motion suggests that she had previously found them
useful, and exploited their hunting instinct for the purposes of
self-promotion.
These ironies may have been unintentional but they are
perfectly consistent with the complex reception of this legend.
Much of the story's haunting energy derives from its ambiguou~
handling of blame and responsibility. Ovid's own version of the
myth is conspicuously favourable to Actaeon, and he describes

68
 2. Actaeon

th.e hunter's final metamorphosis and death with great pathos,

~Wphasising the gulf between his animal shape and human
mind. David Slavitt offers a particularly effective translation of
this scene:

His ears are sharpening into pointed

excrescences, while his hands are pointing, becoming hoofs,
and his arms are turning to forelegs. His skin is a hide, and his
. heart
is cold with terror.

'(he catalogue of change cheats us into expecting that Actaeon's

heart has also become something different - the placement of
'heart' at the end of the line delays and intensifies our shock
when we realise that his consciousness remains that of a
suffering human. This is the key to the tale's horror- the hunter
.ftllly shares the reader's awareness of his fate's terrible irony.
Ovid's sympathy for Actaeon is apparent from the very begin-
fling of the story, for as soon as he is introduced we are assured
that his fate was completely undeserved (3 .141-2):

But if you examine the facts carefully, you will find that the
fault was fortune's, not Actaeon's. For how can simple bad luck
be anyone's fault?

13m it could be countered that the narrating voice is protesting

too much - and that we are in fact being encouraged to
)'\'onder whether Actaeon was more blameworthy than Ovid's
retelling suggests. Certainly some earlier versions cast him in a
.tl1ore dubious light- suggesting that he hid in order to spy on
Diana or that he arrogantly challenged her to a hunting
match, for example. At the end of Ovid's narrative a 'vox pop'

69
 Ovid

invites us to think further about the goddess' behaviour

(3.253-5):

People were divided in their response. To some the goddess

seemed unjustly cruel, others praise her, saying the deed
befitted her stern virginity.

It is especially difficult to adjudicate between the two because

they have so much in common. Both are hunters, both seek rest;
weary from the chase. That their apparent opposition conceals~
great affinity is perhaps suggested by the description of Diana's
grotto. Here two opposites, Nature and Art, come together and
cannot be distinguished from one another (3.157-60):

In its deepest recesses was a shady grotto, worked by no artist's

skill. But Nature had imitated Art using her own wit, for she
had constructed a native arch of the living rock and soft tufa.

If Diana is ruthless and bloodthirsty, so is Actaeon, whos~(

wholesale slaughter of countless animals is particularly empha~
sised by Ovid. (Though it is difficult to know whether the poe~
would have seen Actaeon's passion for hunting as problematic;
just as it is difficult to know whether he meant the vegetaria#
Pythagoras to seem admirable or ridiculous.) It has beel1:
suggested that Diana's cruelty in Ovid is less capricious than firs~
appears. She can be seen as a reader of her own text whos~
instincts have been trained on story after story of helples~
females - Daphne, lo, Syrinx, Callisto - being pursued, eve4
raped, by male predators. Thus she acts in self-defence, mistak+
enly assuming Actaeon's intrusion is intentional and violent. .· · •·
But a reader who is trying to weigh up the balance of blam~
in the legend may feel that this explanation lets Diana off the
70
 2. Actaeon

hook too easily - the theory might in any case be turned on its
head by focusing less on gender and more on power. The
pattern established in the first few books of the Metamorphoses
1s one of predatory deity and reluctant mortal. Might not the
'telationship between Diana and Actaeon retain this pattern of
,predation?
' There is a great emphasis in the tale on Actaeon's loss of all
capacity for speech. John Heath notes that ~ctaeon's muteness
ts uniquely severe, prolonged, and even inappropriate' (72). A
due to the reason for Diana's silencing of Actaeon might be
found in the story of Philomela, which I discuss in more detail
m the next chapter. Like Actaeon she is deliberately silenced
:whereas other characters such as lo suffer muteness as a chance
byproduct of metamorphosis. As only Diana and her nymphs
witnessed what really happened - apart from Actaeon whose
mability to communicate we are so insistently reminded of-
might not the real story be hidden from us? With her reputa-
tion for perfect chastity to protect, Diana may be trying to
conceal the same secret as Tereus, a sexual encounter between
herself and her mute victim. After all, if Diana was so anxious
to stop anyone knowing that Actaeon had seen her naked, why
ts this story, in the form we have it, allowed to leak out at all?
Perhaps because this version of events, in which she is
portrayed as virtuous, though cruel, is one she wants bruited as
widely abroad as possible.
Ovid here and elsewhere encourages us to think about the
'narrating instance', in other words the circumstances
surrounding the production of his stories, their internal audiences
and the motivation for their telling, and he frequently invites us
to reflect on the effect of these circumstances on the way stories
are told. (Think back to how- and why- Jupiter related the tale
of Lycaon.) An accusation of rape is a tried and tested excuse for

71
 Ovid

a lynching - the heroine of The Handmaid's Tale later discovers

that the unfortunate 'rapist' she helped to murder (in the passage
quoted at the beginning of this chapter) was really a political pris~
oner. Reading the tale of Actaeon as an elaborate cover-up may bJ
fanciful, but this myth's afterlife is characterised by a suspicion
that there is more to the tale than meets the eye, and a determi~
nation to reveal its hidden meanings.
The difficulties posed by the story for the reader who wants to
come down on one side or the other make Diana a potent tool
with which to register equivocation. Four centuries before
Motion's edgy poem of praise for the Princess ofWales, the repre:.O
sentation of another powerful royal was rendered ambiguous by
the Actaeon myth. Addressing her as 'Cynthia' (another name for
Diana), Edmund Spenser invites Elizabeth I to find her reflection'
in his epic masterpiece The Faerie Queene (3 Proem 5):

Ne let his fairest Cynthia refuse,

In mirrours more then one her selfe to see,
But either Gloriana let her chuse,
Or in Belphoebe fashioned to bee:
In th' one her rule, in th' other her rare chasti tee.

As well as explicitly identifYing two characters as incarnations of

Elizabeth (Gloriana and Belphoebe) Spenser's address to the
Queen as Cynthia/Diana tacitly alerts us to the possible signifi-"
cance of allusions to Diana in the poem. The story of Actaeon
- with its emphasis on the goddess' majesty, virginity and sharp
temper- would have been a particularly resonant episode for a
readership of Elizabethan courtiers. However, whether or not
Spenser was alert to the possible effect he was creating, the first
echo of the myth (in Book 1) is by no means complimentary to
Elizabeth-as-Diana.

72
 2. Actaeon

•', Immediately after the Red Cross Knight has encountered the
~~icked enchantress Duessa he plucks a bough from a tree,
~ausing it to bleed, and learns that the tree is in fact a meta-
thorphosed man, Fraudubio. The speaking tree describes how
he was himself bewitched by Duessa's seeming beauty before
•discovering the deception (1.2.40-1):

Till on a day (that day is every prime)

When witches wont do penance for their crime)
I chaunst to see her in her proper hew,
Bathing her selfe in origane and thyme:
A filthy foule old woman I did vew,
That ever to haue toucht her, I did deadly rew.
Her neather partes misshapen, monstruous,
Were hidd in water, that I could not see,
But they did seeme more foule and hideous,
Then womans shape man would beleeue to bee

It is not only the reference to a man's unintentional glimpse of

a bathing female which signals an Actaeon link. Apparently a
gulf separates the ugly witch Duessa from the beautiful goddess
Diana. But this gulf would be dosed for readers who were aware
of the lively, scurrilous explanation for Diana's fury offered by
the Greek satirist Lucian:

She made them worry him for fear

He should tell tales, and blaze a story
(She knew must needs be detractory)
Of what a filthy fulsome quean,
He bathing had stark naked seen.
For the virginity (forsooth)
She brags of, is a gross untruth

73
 Ovid

Both Lucian's Diana and Spenser's Duessa seek to protect

their reputations for beauty and chastity by metamorphosing
their unwitting spies. We may imagine that the reflex which
drove Lucian to transform Diana from a beautiful virgin into a
misshapen crone must have found a parallel within real life - a
queen who vaunted her own, slightly suspect, virginity, who
insisted on being treated as a beauty despite her advancing years,
and whose popularity was on the wane, must have been a
tempting target for satirists.
"When we encounter the 'real' Diana in Book 3 of The Faerie
Queene, the apparently straightforward account of the bathing
goddess being disturbed by the advent ofVenus may be tainted
by our memories of Duessa (3.6.19):

Soone as she ~nus saw behind her backe,

She was asham'd to be so loose surprized,
And woxe halfe wroth against her damzels slacke,
That had not her thereof before avized,
But suffred her so carelesly disguized
Be ouertaken

'Loose' ostensibly refers to her state of undress, but is commonly

used to signify wanton, as when Spenser describes Red Cross's',
dream of Una transformed into a 'loose Ieman' (48). And
although 'disguized' may be glossed 'undressed', the alternativei
meanings of'concealed' and 'deformed' were also available in tht(
Renaissance, harking back to Lucian's interpretation of the tale;,/,
Ovid had already set a precedent for equating Diana with ari_;'
irascible and Wiforgiving ruler, a response to the tale which would
become far more potent for writers whose monarch was both.}
female and, supposedly, virginal. In his later exile poetry; Ovid.
cast Augustus as Diana and identified himself with Actaeon;)

74
 2. Actaeon

claiming that both he and Actaeon were innocent victims of

chance, and thus suggesting that the mysterious error for which
he was relegated involved some chance discovery of scandal.
Ovid's seventeenth-century translator, George Sandys, confirmed
kuch a reading of the tale when he explained that the myth can be
taken to show 'how dangerous a curiosity it is to search into the
secrets of Princes, or by chance to discover their nakednesse: who
thereby incurring their hatred ever after live the life of a Hart, full
offeare and suspicion'.
Ovid's creation of a link between his own unwitting error
and the hunter's mistake has not necessarily made interpreta-
tion of Actaeon's story any more straightforward for the
commentators of later centuries. For Ovid himself is a kind of
mythical figure - as ambiguous as any character in the
Metamorphoses - and as subject to the vagaries of interpreta-
tion. One uncanny story describes how two clerics prayed for
Ovid's soul by his tomb, only for the poet's disembodied voice
to speak out, rejecting Christ and salvation. Another tradition,
by contrast, holds that he was converted to Christianity and
became St Naso, Bishop of Tomis. So it is not surprising that
we find medieval interpreters explaining the story of his alter
ego Actaeon in diametrically opposed ways. Some said that
Actaeon was really an idle and extravagant youth who lost his
entire fortune through keeping expensive hounds, while others
associated Actaeon with Christ. With rather Ovidian ingenuity,
commentators linked the hunter's metamorphosis into a stag -
'cerf' in French - with Christ's incarnation as a man, the
'suffering servant' of Isaiah, or ser£
A further comic, secular approach to Actaeon's story focused
on his acquisition of horns. It would seem that for readers and
audiences in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, jokes about cuckolds - traditionally associated with

75
 Ovid

horns - were irresistibly and inexplicably hilarious. It is not

entirely clear why horns were associated with cuckolds,
although it has been suggested that the joke derives from the
practice of distinguishing capons from cockerels by grafting
their spurs onto their combs. Here they apparently grew as
'horns'. As a castrated cockerel, the capon had an affinity with
the supposedly 'unmanned' cuckold. With predictable
misogyny it was even sometimes claimed that Diana, although
reputed chaste, in fact cuckolded Actaeon:

The first of the three,

Diana should be,
But she cuckolded poor Act::eon,
And his head she adorns,
With such visible horns,
That he's fit for his hounds for to prey on.

Thus Alexander Brome (a Restoration poet) metamorphoses

Diana, like Daphne, from a virgin into a whore.
In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night the lovesick Duke Orsino
seems to shift the blame away from the goddess when he casts the
beautiful Olivia as Diana and himself as Actaeon (1.1.18-21):

0, when mine eyes did see Olivia first

Methought she purged the air of pestilence;
That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.

For Orsino the hounds have been internalised as his own self-
destructive desires, and the pun on 'heart' and 'hart' suggests
that any metamorphosis he has undergone (by contrast with

76
 2. Actaeon

Ovid's version of events) transforms his mind rather than his

body. Although his words imply no conscious cruelty on Olivia's
part - she did not intend to affect him in this way- it could be
argued that, simply by invoking the myth, he subtly implies that
she is to blame for not returning his love. The impact of her
indifference is as great as that of Diana's fury.
A similar reading of the myth is implied when the mysterious
and beautiful Ayesha in Rider Haggard's She (1887) warns the
hero, Holly, that it would be dangerous for him to behold her
dazzling beauty:

'Was there not one Acta:on who perished miserably because

he looked on too much beauty? If I show thee my face,
perchance thou wouldst perish miserably also; perchance thou
wouldst eat out thy heart in impotent desire; for know I am
not for thee - I am for no man, save one, who hath been, but
is not yet.'

Although her allusion implies that Diana was innocent of any

harmful intent, Ayesha is as cruel and pitiless as Ovid's goddess,
and her final metamorphosis from an ageless beauty to a shriv-
elled crone links her with the Lucianic anti-Diana tradition.
The interpretation of Actaeon's death as a kind of self-
consummation by one's own desires works in non-sexual
contexts too. Robinson Jeffers, writing in the early twentieth
century, uses Actaeon's fate as a metaphor for man's projected
self-destruction through science:

Man, introverted man, having crossed

In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter
century
Has begot giants; but being taken up

77
 Ovid

Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot

manage his hybrids.
Being used to deal with edgeless dreams,
Now he's bred knives on nature turns them also inward: they
have thirsty points though.
His mind forebodes his own destruction;
Actaeon who saw the goddess naked among leaves and his
hounds tore him.
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infi-
nitely little too much?

Actaeon seems to morph into Victor Frankenstein here, the

hunter's fragments reassembled as the overreaching scientist.
Perhaps simply because the responses to the Actaeon myth
which have come down to us are, by definition, produced by
literary men and women, one strand of the story's reception asso-
ciates the voracious hounds with literary parasites. The Cavalier
poet, Sir John Denham, describes the Jacobean playwright John
Fletcher as an Actaeon murdered by imitators who stole his ideas
while Thomas Mathias, writing at the end of the eighteenth
century, exclaims:

Must I for Shakspeare no compassion feel,

Almost eat up by commentating zeal?

He parodies Ovid's long catalogue of hounds, reinventing them

as Shakespeare's hordes of commentators, before concluding:

Hot was the chace; I left it out of breath;

I wish'd not to be in at Shakspeare's death.

Aptly, in the context of a myth which makes it difficult for us

to know which side we should be on, the poet is himself impli-

78
 2. Actaeon

cared in the slaughter of Actaeon-as-Shakespeare. The narrator

is out of breath - he may not have been in at the kill, but he
has certainly been running in the hunt. And, in writing this
poem, Mathias in a sense becomes part of the critical tradition
he satirises.
Much of the myth's power lies in its invocation of a myste-
rious taboo. A single unwitting step seals Actaeon's fate, and the
disproportionate nature of his punishment makes the reader
struggle to find some hidden meaning behind Diana's action.
The mysterious, nebulous taboo attached to Diana's grove
encourages us to extrapolate some more specific prohibition.
One website I stumbled across while hunting for Actaeon texts
was guarded with a warning of the kind Actaeon himself could
have done with: 'if you don't know exactly why you're here you
probably shouldn't be'. I trespassed far enough into the site to
learn a new word, 'zoophilia'. Actaeon's metamorphic status
between beast and human was being used to encode one of
society's strongest taboos. Although the focus of this site was
apparently rather remote from the original legend, there is a
precedent for reinventing the Actaeon myth as the tale of a
sexual liaison between beast and human (or goddess).
Whereas the website in question warned me not to progress
further if I was under 18, primary school children everywhere
receive their first exposure to Shakespeare through A
Midsummer Night's Dream. Here Titania (as Diana is called by
Ovid in the Actaeon story) has a sexual liaison with Bottom
after he has been given an ass's head by Puck and has crossed the
threshold from the mortal to the fairy world. As Thomas
Boehrer arrestingly contends: 'Although no one has paid much
sustained attention to the fact, A Midsummer Night's Dream is
patently about bestiality.' He explains that Oberon purposely
drugs Titania in order to ensure her sexual bondage to a beast as

79
 Ovid

a way of reinforcing marital authority. And certainly in one of

the play's principal sources, The Golden Ass, a novel by the
Roman writer Apuleius about a man, Lucius, who is trans-
formed into a donkey, much lewd attention is paid to the
protagonist's erotic appeal to humans of both sexes.
Significantly, the story of Actaeon is a potent intertext in The
Golden Ass- Lucius is turned into a donkey after spying on the
witch Pamphile.
Another curious eroticisation (and reversal) of the myth can
be found in an early work of Boccaccio, La Caccia di Diana, in
which a long and appreciative description of Diana hunting
with her beautiful attendants concludes when Venus intervenes
and turns all the hunted deer into handsome young men who
pair off with the nymphs. A twist is provided by the poem's final
revelation - that the voyeuristic narrator is himself a stag who
will be rewarded with one of the nymphs he had admired, even
though (as we only now realise) he was their natural prey.
This link between eroticism and hunting should not really
surprise us. As seen in the previous chapter, a man pursuing a
woman is often compared to a predator chasing its prey. The
tendency to link hunting and sex together in our minds is
apparent from many of the expressions we use. Someone who
pursues his or her loved one obsessively is a 'stalker'; sexually
promiscuous men are called 'wolves' or 'lady-killers' - neither
term necessarily implying disapproval. The tale of Little Red
Riding Hood seems to be about the dangers of being eaten up
by a wolf, but its real message is probably a warning against
sexual predators.
This erotic potential of the hunt is exploited by Shakespeare
in a poem based on another Ovidian story, Venus and Adonis.
The sexual reversal of the erotic chase -Venus pursues the beau-
tiful but reluctant youth Adonis - is mirrored in the reversal

80
 2. Actaeon

which brings about Adonis' death - the hunted boar becomes

the hunter and gores Adonis with his tusks. His death suggests
a further inversion: rather than an active male wooer he is the
passive object of the boar's desire, which is expressed in unam-
biguously homoerotic language ( 1115-16):

And, nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine

Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin.

The same sense of violent death in a hunt replacing or figuring

an expected sexual encounter seems present in C. H. Sisson's free
translation of the Actaeon story:

To show her bitter virgin spite

There was some blood but not her own.

The potential equivalence between sex and death, signalled

within a Roman context by the similarity of mors and amor and
within a Renaissance context by the slang use of 'death' to mean
sexual climax, is here allowed to emerge through the reminder
that sex between Actaeon and the virginal Diana would also
have resulted in bloodshed.
Bestiality is not the only sexual taboo associated with the
Actaeon story. Although the dynamic of the legend, in so far as
it is sexual at all, seems heterosexual, it is amenable to queering
of different kinds. In particular, the strong sense of transgression
or boundary-crossing inherent in the myth may figure same-sex
desire even though it is concealed behind a male/female
encounter. (It is quite common for different kinds of taboos to
stand for one another - for example in many texts a symbolic
link is forged between cannibalism and incest.)
Aphra Behn reanimates the legend in 'Verses to a Fair Lady

81
 Ovid

that desired she would absent herself, to cure her love' by casting
herself as Actaeon and the lady as Diana. Both the forbidden
territory and the goddess' fury gain new significance within a
context of unrequited lesbian love. The playwright Christopher
Marlowe had earlier given Diana, rather than Actaeon, a sex
change. When, in Edward II, the Icing's lover Gaveston describes
the wanton entertainments he will devise to amuse Edward, it is
the story of Actaeon and Diana, with its sexually charged atmos-
phere of danger and transgression, rather than some more
obviously erotic narrative, which he translates into a homoerotic
context (1.1.60-9):

Sometime a louelie boye in Dians shape,

With haire that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearle about his naked armes,
And in his sportfull hands an Oliue tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring, and there hard by,
One like Acta::on peeping through the groue,
Shall by the angrie goddesse be transformde,
And running in the likenes of an Hart,
By yelping hounds puld downe, and seeme to die.

The literal and metaphorical resonances of tabooed ground

are brought into still closer conjunction by Camille Paglia.
According to the explanation of the legend which she offers in
her online advice column, Actaeon is destroyed because he
witnesses tabooed behaviour - sexual contact between Diana
and her handmaidens: 'The forbidden allure of watching nude
women cavort with one another can be detected as early as the
Greek myth of Actaeon, the hunter who spied on the goddess
Artemis bathing with her nymphs. She didn't take it very well:

82
 2. Actaeon

She turned him into a stag torn to pieces by his own hounds,
which symbolise his lecherous desires.' Paglia's reading of the
legend is a playful response to a male correspondent who is
confused by his voyeuristic attraction to lesbianism. But the
reception of another Ovidian tale, that of Philomela, confirms
the readiness of readers to associate violent vengeance taken
against men with lesbian sexuality, as well as the impulse to
forge links between apparently quite distinct forms of tabooed
behaviour.

83
 3

Philomela

Tereus raped Philomela and cut out her tongue,

but she wove a cape that told the story,
the voice of the shuttle, Sophocles called it.
But that's only half: her sister saw the cape and understood.
Some stories float; others are held under
until someone sees a small series of bubbles and knows
there's a body to be dredged.
Natasha Saje, 'Tongues', Red Under the Skin, 1984

We seem to accept only what is seen and what is said as

evidence. These limitations have shaped both how we know
and how we imagine the lesbian. I want to argue for the possi-
bilities of the 'not said' and the 'not seen' as conceptual tools
for the writing oflesbian history. Recognizing the power of not
naming - of the unsaid - is a crucial means for understanding
a past that is so dependent upon fragmentary evidence, gossip,
and suspicion.
Martha Vicinus {1994), 57-8

Few of Ovid's tales are more savage and painful than that of
Actaeon. One of these few is the story of Philomela. This opens
with the marriage of Philomela's sister Procne to King Tereus of
Thrace - the match cements a military alliance between him
and the girls' father, King Pandion of Athens. The wedding is
ill-omened; it is attended by the Furies rather than Hymen, god
of marriage. But at first all goes well, and Procne gives birth to

85
 Ovid

a son, ltys. However after five years she begs Tereus to allow her
to see Philomela again and he returns to Athens to request i
visit. When he sees how beautiful Philomela is he becomes
inflamed with love. As soon as they have landed in Thrace;
Tereus drags her to a secluded hut, rapes her and cuts out her
tongue so that she cannot proclaim his wickedness. But even
though she is kept a prisoner Philomela contrives to let her sister
know what has happened. She weaves her story onto a tapestry
and smuggles it into the palace. The festival of Bacchus is being
celebrated and Procne takes advantage of the atmosphere of riot
and confusion to rescue Philomela. Then the sisters take a
terrible revenge. They kill Procne's little son ltys, cook him and
serve the dish to Tereus. When the frenzied Philomela emerges
from hiding and hurls the child's head at his father, Tereus draws
his sword and attempts to kill the sisters. But all three are trans-
formed into birds, preventing further violence.
Some critics would argue that the meaning of a text is gener-
ated at the point of reception - in other words that it is the
reader rather than the writer who decides what a story or poem
is really about. This need not mean that anything goes, or that
all readings are equally valuable. (Though the Vicinus passage
quoted at the beginning of this chapter issues an irresistible
challenge to be inventive!) If reading about Proserpina's fatal
taste of pomegranate, which doomed her to spend six months of
the year in the Underworld, puts us in mind of Eve and the
apple, we are reading that myth in a way its originators could
not have imagined or intended. But because the Christian tradi-
tion is so powerful in Western culture our tendency to associate
the stories together is not an eccentric, isolated impulse, but a
move which unites us with a whole community of readers -
including Milton, who compared Eve with Proserpina in
Paradise Lost. But if the story of Proserpina reminds us of some

86
 3. Philomela

~vent from our childhood, such a reading is unlikely to have

$ignificance for anyone but ourselves.
i My own most recent thoughts about Philomela's story
¢ertainly originated outside Ovid's text - they stem from
research carried out for my previous book, a study of the sister
relationship in nineteenth-century literature. One chapter
focused on homoerotic bonds between sisters, bonds which
sometimes proved more powerful than heterosexual ties. To give
just one example from a well known novel, Jo March in Little
WVmen tells her mother that Meg 'gets prettier every day, and
I'm in love with her sometimes' and exclaims 'I just wish I could
marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family'. I'm sure I
would not have detected any hint of homoeroticism in the rela-
tionship between Philomela and Procne if I had not already
been researching lesbian incest in this very different context.
Certainly there is nothing in Ovid to match the sensuality of
Christina Rossetti's sister heroines in 'Goblin Market':

'Did you miss me?

Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.'

But at least if my interpretation of the tale was ultimately a

misreading, I was not quite alone in my suspicions. In Ovid the
wild women-only Bacchanal which reunites the sisters is not

87
 Ovid

given any special emphasis. But in Timberlake Wertenbaker's

play Love ofthe Nightingale (first performed in 1988) the secret
rites in which Procne participates clearly involve lesbian sexu-
ality. The scene in which the soldiers spy on the women's rites
(seen but yet not seen as they remain hidden from the audi""
ence) suggests both their sexual nature and their capacity to
enrage men:

Second Soldier: That window, there. We could see through the

shutters.
First Soldier. It's supposed to be a mystery, a woman's mystery
Second Soldier: You could sit on my shoulders. Make sure your
girl's behaving.
First Soldier. It's all women in there.
Second Soldier: It's all men in a war.
First Soldier: You mean, she - they - no.
Second Soldier: Have a look.
First Soldier. If she - I'll strangle her.

The window might be seen as a window onto the myth itself,

hinting at a buried narrative of female sexuality which excludes
men. Alternatively, Wertenbaker's importation of a lesbian
undercurrent into the story could be read as an extrapolation,
legitimate in a new fiction, but one which reflects late
twentieth-century perceptions of female separatist behaviour
and which has nothing to do with the original Metamorphoses.
If we are unsure how to interpret Ovid's Bacchanal we might
seek dues in The Bacchae, written by the Greek tragedian
Euripides four centuries earlier. This play included a more
detailed exploration of women-only rites. King Pentheus is infu-
riated by the introduction of a Dionysiac cult into Thebes,
particularly when his own aunt and mother become involved in

88
 3. Philomela

the excesses. Like Wertenbaker's soldiers, he is fascinated as well

as appalled by their activities. When he too considers spying on
the women, Dionysus tells him 'But for all your sorrow, you'd
like very much to see them?' (line 815). Pentheus himself later
acknowledges a prurient interest (lines 957-8):

I can see them already, there among the bushes,

Mating like birds, caught in the toils of love.

However, although the emphasis is on the women, it is possible

that Pentheus envisions them mating with men rather than each
other. An apparently more secure association between women-
only worship and lesbianism can be found in Plutarch's account
of a scandal which shook Rome shortly before the birth of Ovid.
Clodius spied on the secret female rites of the Bona Dea,
disguised as a woman, but was found out when a female devotee
propositioned him. At least that is what some interpreters and
commentators would have us believe. The Greek may be trans-
lated 'Aurelia came upon him and asked him to play with her, as
one woman would another'. Play may signify sexual activity, but
might also suggest that she wants him to play the lute. (He is
disguised as a lute-girl.)
Although Euripides' play seems very different from Ovid's
story, the endings are surprisingly similar, for both conclude
when a boy- a youth in Euripides, a child in Ovid- is torn apart
by his mother and aunt. Both narratives are preoccupied with the
transgression of boundaries and the shattering of taboos.
Dionysus characterises Pentheus as one who is 'curious to see
forbidden sights' (912-13), and the same dangerous confusions
inhere in the later Ovidian story. Tereus rapes his sister-in-law
Philomela 'fassusque nefas', 'openly confessing his impious deed'
(524). The English translation does not capture the jarring

89
 Ovid

contradiction of this description. Tereus, Ovid informs us, speaks

that which may not be spoken. Of course the apparent paradox
is hardly insurmountable. To rape a defenceless girl, the sister of
his wife, may be, to use an English idiom, too horrible for words,
but there is nothing concrete to prevent Tereus from articulating
his dreadful purpose. But 'fassusque nefas' perhaps signals a
peculiarly charged tension between communication and the
uncommunicable in this text. In The Love of the Nightingale,
Timberlake Wertenbaker speculates suggestively about the narra-
tive's secret, hidden energies (pp. 19-20):

What is a myth? The oblique image of an unwanted truth,

reverberating through time And what about Procne, the
cause perhaps, in any case the motor of a myth that leaves her
mostly absent?

One way of moving Procne back centrestage is to focus less

on the direct, incestuous connection between Tereus and
Philomela and more on the covert, indirectly incestuous bond
between the sisters. Tereus' passion, as Philomela herself
eloquently argues in Ovid, is wrong for many reasons, but
particularly because it is incestuous (6.537-8):

You have turned everything upside down. I have been made

into a concubine, you a husband to us both. Now Procne must
be my foe.

Although incest is a universal taboo, that which constitutes

incest varies greatly from culture to culture. But Philomela's
horror would have been perfectly understandable to Ovid's
later Christian readers. The Bible's teaching on incest was
inconsistent. Jacob married two sisters, Leah and Rachel, in

90
 3. Philomela

turn. However Christian practice took the prohibitions listed

in Leviticus 18 ('You shall not uncover the nakedness of your
brother's wife, it is your brother's nakedness') as the basis for
establishing prohibited degrees between relatives of affinity -
in-laws.
Pace Leah and Rachel, the same prohibition was more or less
strictly enforced against a woman sleeping with her sister's
husband. If we invert Leviticus - 'you shall not uncover the
nakedness of your sister's husband, it is your sister's nakedness'
- and map its warning onto Ovid, we may view the story of
Philomela in a rather different light.
Historically it is the man's predicament which has been
emphasised, but it is possible to reframe this taboo in terms of
the indirect sexual connection effected between sisters. In Two
Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest, Frans:oise
Heritier highlights the importance of this 'secondary' incest
'between same-sex blood relatives who are not homosexual but
who share the same sexual partner' (p. 12), a liaison which
implies 'an inconceivable carnal intimacy between blood rela-
tives, expressible only by innuendo' (p. 44). She asserts that
many societies would find it more acceptable for a man to sleep
with his daughter than with his son's wife, for the latter act leads
to an indirect homosexual liaison between father and son.
Heritier concentrates on examples from non-European cultures,
but asserts that these taboos have also been a powerful force in
Western society. She briefly alludes to the story of Philomela as
an example of this type of incest. 'Through Tereus, Philomela
has committed incest with her sister' (p. 52).
If we re-examine the story in the light of Heritier's observa-
tions, Procne, 'the motor of a myth that leaves her mostly
absent', regains prominence, while Tereus is less an agent of
incest than a conduit for incest. For it is possible to see Tereus'

91
 Ovid

rape, not as the definitive act which creates a bond between the
sisters, but simply as the cementing of an existing closeness. It is
after all Procne, not Tereus, who planned Philomela's visit. She
asks for the visit as a favour 'cum blandita' - coaxingly or flat-
teringly. In Chaucer's retelling of the story in The Legend of
Good W0men rather more urgency attends the request (2260-2):

Till on a day she gan so sore Ionge

To sen hire sister, that she say nat Ionge
That for desyr she niste what to seye ...

The word 'desyr' is normally used by Chaucer in a context of

heterosexual passion. Here it comes unexpectedly, and is signif-
icantly attended by a temporary loss of speech. Procne seems to
have no words with which to express her feelings. But in fact the
very next line denies any such dumbness: 'But to hire husbonde
gan she for to preye.' This little fissure in the text between fas
and nefas - what can and cannot be spoken - gestures at a gap
between what the myth's surface communicates and what
Timberlake Wertenbaker describes as its 'unwanted truth'. If
Chaucer's text hints at a 'love which dare not speak its name' on
Procne's part, it would seem that his Tereus is alert to his wife's
feelings. When Philomela weaves her tapestry it is in order to
reveal 'How she was served for her systers love' (2365). Here we
have a hint of an alternative motivation for Tereus' rage: she is
the victim not of lust and a purely pragmatic, self-serving
violence; she is punished for partaking in an economy of desire
from which he is excluded. We may compare the urge felt by •· •
Wertenbaker's soldier to strangle his girlfriend if he finds out
she's been involved in the lesbian Bacchanal.
Tereus' ardour for Philomela is controlled - ventriloquised -
by Procne (6.467-71):

92
 3. Philomela

Now he fears a delay, and eagerly repeated Procne's request,

using her words to press his own case. Love gave him
eloquence, and whenever he urged her more pressingly than he
should have done, he asserted that Procne wished it so. He
wept as well, as though Procne had asked him to.

The significance of this ventriloquism, the way he almost

becomes Procne when his desire is most fiercely kindled, is
heightened in an adaptation of the myth by the Elizabethan
writer, George Gascoigne. Whereas Ovid's Tereus seems more or
less in control of the effect he creates, deliberately invoking
Procne's wishes as an excuse for ardour, Gascoigne suggests a
more mysterious and elliptical relationship between the desires
of husband and wife:

Love made him eloquent

And if he cravde too much,
He then excusde him selfe, and saide
That Prognes words were such.

His teares confirmed all

Teares: like to sisters teares,
As who shuld say by these fewe drops
Thy sisters griefe appeares.

Gascoigne's Pandion invokes an incestuous hothouse of

complex shared desires. The repetition of 'desire' and 'crave'
intensifies their impact and significance, and blurs the distinc-
tion between heterosexual lust and sisterly love:

He usde this parting speech:

Daughter (quoth he) you have desire
Your sisters court to seech.

93
 Ovid

Your sister seemes likewise

Your companie to crave,
That crave you both, & Tereus here
The selfe same thing would have.

Ne coulde I more withstande

So many deepe desires

The strength and significance of Procne's own desire for

Philomela is further suggested when Gascoigne amplifies Ovid's
account of Procne's original longing to see her sister. Ovid
doesn't describe the desire itself, only the outcome. But
Gascoigne explains how:

Such coles of kindely love did seme

Within hir brest to be.

So, when we later learn ofTereus' passion, his burning desire for
Philomela seems but a reflex of Procne's own feelings. He
mirrors her not just with his words and gestures but in his mind:

And as the blazing bronde,

Might kindle rotten reeds:
Even so hir Jooke a secret flame,
Within his bosome breedes.

Procne's ardour is echoed still more tellingly and startlingly at

the very end of Gascoigne's poem when we learn ofTereus' fate
as a henpecked hoopoe:

As soone as coles ofkinde

Have warmed him to do
The selly shift of dewties dole
Which him belongeth to:

94
 3. Philomela

His hen straight way him hates,

And flieth farre him fro,
And dose conveis hir eggs from him,
As from hir mortal foe [my italics].

Here 'coles of kinde' unequivocally reference heterosexual

congress, and strengthen retrospectively the significant inten-
sity of those 'coles of kindely love' kindled by Philomela in
Procne. The repetition is all the more significant because
Gascoigne seems to encourage his readers to ponder on the
related but potentially incompatible meanings of 'kind'
(amiable, pertaining to kin, pertaining to sexual generation,
lawful, natural) at the very beginning of the poem when he
explains of Pandion that 'kinde became so kind,/ That he two
daughters had.
Again and again we can find examples of the story's English
translators heightening the implicit link between Procne and
Tereus. To borrow an image used by Natasha Saje in 'Tongues',
quoted at the beginning of this chapter, these translations allow a
few more of the story's 'bubbles' to float to the surface. For
example the epigrammatic wit of Samuel Croxall's eighteenth-
century translation -1\nd in his wife's, he speaks his own desires'
- encourages the reader to dwell on the word 'desires'. This is
withheld until the end of the line, and is separated from the
phrase 'his wife's'; yet by making the reader work to excavate
'Procne's desires' from syntactic ellipsis, the importance of these
silenced longings is increased. This is, admittedly, a tiny if not a
tenuous hint that the desires ofProcne and Tereus are disturbingly
similar. But another little detail, an addition to Ovid, may
strengthen such an effect by encouraging us to focus on Procne's
thoughts. When she begs Tereus to let her see Philomela, Croxall's
Procne 'spoke the secret wishes of her breast'.

95
 Ovid

In Sandys' translation the effect of Tereus being almost

possessed by Procne is heightened by an unusually literal trans-
lation ofTereus' triumphant exclamation after Pandion relents.
'Vicimus' becomes 'She's ours'. As the rhetorical plural is so
much more commonplace in Latin than in English, its
surprising retention at this climactic moment may signal the
contamination of Tereus' supposedly spontaneous desires by
those of Procne. Wertenbaker offers an interesting variation on
this merging effect by staging a play within a play at the
Athenian court - the story of Phaedra, smitten with desire for
her stepson Hippolytus. Trying to explain his feelings to
Philomela, Tereus says 'I am Phaedra'. Through Tereus' associa-
tion with an incestuous female Procne is further implicated in
his lust. This effect is communicated still more strongly in Ted
Hughes' translation. Here, for a moment, Tereus is completely
erased from the picture, for Pandion 'Surrendered at last/ To the
doubled passion of his daughters'. A little earlier Hughes seems
to open a curious little window up onto the myth's hidden
'unwanted truth'. The following lines are a free but fairly faithful
translation of the original Latin:

He swore Procne
Sickened to see her sister.
He even wept as he spoke,

As if he had brought her tears with him

As well as her pleading words.
God in heaven, how blind men are!

But then where Ovid had written 'Tereus is credited with proper
feeling, when he is in fact masterminding a wicked plot, and
winning praise for a crime' (6.73-4), Hughes substitutes:

96
 3. Philomela

Everybody who witnessed it marvelled

At what this man would do for his wife's sake,
The lengths he would go to!

At first the change may not seem too significant. Hughes

reminds us of Tereus' perfidy through dramatic irony whereas
Ovid makes the point more directly. But the line 'God in
heaven, how blind men are' now might well apply, not to
Pandion's deluded courtiers, but to the apparently uxorious
Tereus, and thus suggest that he is ill advised to pander to his
wife's longing for Philomela. Of course such an inference seems
irrelevant to the story as we have it, but might make perfect
sense in relation to the myth's possible buried subtext.
A similarly counterintuitive moment can be found in John
Hopkins' 1700 version of the story. He opens at the moment of
Procne's request. The odd epithet 'artful fair' suggests that the
requested favour is not entirely innocent:

Five Winters now, Wing'd with their Storms, were fled,

Since Progne first did Royal Tereus wed.
When thus the Artful fair her suit did move,
Urg'd, as a proof of his continu'd Love.

This hint is carried forward through the opening movement of the

poem. The emphasis on Tereus' complacency implies that he is
foolish, almost as though he were admitting a rival lover into the
household:

Tereus, well pleas'd, without the least Dispute,

Commends her Fondness, and approves her suit.

But the strange implicit affinity between Procne and Tereus,

their shared desire for Philomela, is made most dearly apparent

97
 Ovid

by Wertenbaker. Her Philomela says of Tereus 'Why does he

follow me everywhere? Even Procne left me alone sometimes.'
Procne reminisces about their early companionship, a time
about which Ovid of course tells us nothing (p. 7}:

'How we talked. Our words played, caressed each other, our

words were tossed lightly, a challenge to catch.'

Significantly the subtle eroticism of their relationship is

achieved through language- thus when Wertenbaker's Tereus
robs Philomela of her tongue we may associate his act with ci
wish to brecik the sisters' bond. Procne emphasises her need to
speak to Philomela: 'I want to talk to her. I want her here I
cannot talk to my husband. I have nothing to say to my son.'
The suggestion that Tereus fears verbal intimacy between his
wife and her sister fits in with a shift in Philomela's threat after
the rape - she is less anxious to broadcast his wickedness than to
share a joke about his inadequacy. She calls him 'this scarecrow
dribbling embarrassed lust'. By giving Philomela such a strong
voice Wertenbaker increases the significance of Tereus' urge to
silence her. The act seems driven as much by irritation at her
intelligence and articulacy as by the danger she poses. As in
Chaucer's version of the story, Tereus' need to silence Philomela
goes beyond the need to conceal his crime.
Procne's evocation of her verbal intimacy with Philomela in
Wertenbciker's play may highlight a hidden conversation between
Ovid's parted sisters, one that tcikes place beneath the surface of the
text, on the boundary between speech and silence. Each sister is
silenced during the course of the story. Each sister's tongue is asso-
ciated with a quest for expression which fails. Philomelas 'seeks the
feet of its mistress even in its death throes' (6.560). Procne, when
she receives the cloth, is similarly speechless (6.583-6):

98
 3. Philomela

Grief strikes her dumb, and her questing tongue can find no
words strong enough to express her indignation. There is no
room for tears, but she rushes on to confound right and
wrong, her whole mind fixed on vengeance.

This odd link between the sisters' questing tongues (the same
verb quaero, meaning to seek but also to desire, is used in each
passage) means that they are joined through language (lingua,
like 'tongue', incorporates the meaning 'language') at precisely
the moment when they are robbed of speech. Their verbal and
sensual connection thus defies Tereus' attempt to part and
silence them.
The later stages of the story can similarly be opened up -
with some difficulty in Ovid, more readily in later versions - to
reveal strange new meanings. Procne's rescue of Philomela can
be read as a replay of her original rape by Tereus. His action is
emphasised through 'polyptoton' - the repetition of a word in a
slightly different form (6.464):

Aut rapere et aevo raptam defendere bello

(Or else to ravish her and defend the rape by brutal conflict
[my italics])

So is Procne's (6.598-9):

Germanamque rapit raptaeque insignia Bacchi

Induit
([She] seizes her sister and clothes her in the garb of a frenzied
Bacchante [my italics])

Although the primary meaning of rapio is 'seize' rather than

'rape' the emphatic doublet rapit raptaeque might take us back

99
 Ovid

to the myth's pivotal action, particularly as the precise meaning

of raptaeque is not made dear until the end of the line. Raptae
here probably needs to be glossed 'carried away by frenzy', and
applied to the Bacchante, but before we know the full context
there is a possibility that it is Philomela, the raped woman, who
is signified by raptae. The rhetorical figure of polyptoton is
normally used (as here) of a verbal repetition. But the echo of
one rape in another (really a rescue) is a kind of narratological
polyptoton. Curiously this episode, a woman rescuing her
fragile, wronged sister from incarceration by a man, anticipates
Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, where Marian rescues her
sister Laura from a madhouse in which she has been unjustly
confined by her scheming husband. The connection may be a
chance one, but is significant because Marian's love for Laura
has been interpreted by some readers and critics as lesbian.
Procne's next action uncannily echoes Leviticus (6.604):

Oraque develat miserae pudibunda sororis

(And she unveils the shamefaced countenance of her wretched
sister.)

Whether or not we agree with the Elizabethan translator of the

Metamorphoses, Arthur Golding, that Ovid must have had access
to the Bible:

What man is he but would suppose the author of this booke

The first foundation of his woorke from Moyses wryghtings
tooke?

the wording proved suggestive for the tale's later imitators and
translators. Pudibunda may mean shameful or disgraceful, but
in its more positive aspect means simply bashful or modest.

100
 3. Philomela

Croxall invests the moment with a bridal atmosphere,

suppressing Ovid's discordant miserae:

She strait unveil'd her blushing sister's face,

And fondly clasped her with a close embrace.

Sandys' translation of the same moment has an oddly stuttering

quality, as though he feels some nervousness about this part of
the story:

Progne with-drawes; the sacred weeds vnlos'd;

Her wofull sisters bashfull face disclos'd:
Falls on her neck

Again Philomela and Procne seem like a bride and groom.

Procne's withdrawal suggests a husband sensitive to his wife's
modesty, the 'sacred weeds' are Bacchic, but through
Christianisation suggest a solemn sacrament, while 'bashful' is
more suggestive of sweet reluctant amorous delay than of any
terrible shame. These translators may be reading a marital effect
into, rather than out of, Ovid. But their shared impulse is
suggestive nonetheless, implying that the myth's incestuous
framework, and perhaps at least some details of Ovid's own
retelling, encourage us to see a quasi-sexual connection between
the sisters.
The most horrific point in the story is the murder of ltys.
When the sisters feed him to Tereus they forfeit their status as
the story's victims and Tereus' own villainy is almost eclipsed.
But might this most unnatural act mask another focus for male
anxiety? Strong bonds between women might challenge patriar-
chal commodification of women as units of exchange and
guarantors of patrilineal continuity by further excluding men

101
 Ovid

from the child rearing process. Gascoigne's observations on th~

mating patterns of hoopoes fit particularly aptly with such an.
interpretation of the story:

A;, soone as coles of kinde

Have warmed him to do
The selly shift of dewties dole
Which him belongeth to:

His hen straight way him hates,

And flieth farre him fro,
And dose conveis hir eggs from him,
As from hir mortal foe.

Patricia Klindienst Joplin offers a suggestive account of the

scapegoating of society's female victims which the myth's bloody
conclusion may obscure:

The end of the tale represents an attempt to forestall or foreclose

a moment of radical transition when dominance and hierarchy
might have begun to change or to give way. Culture hides from
its own sacrificial violence. The Greek imagination uses the
mythic end to expel its own violence and to avoid any knowledge
of the process. Patriarchal culture feels, as Tereus does, that it is
asked to incorporate something monstrous when the woman
returns from exile to tell her own story. But myth seeks to blame
the women for the inability of the culture to allow the raped,
mutilated, but newly resisting woman to return: the sisters must
become force-feeders; they must turn out to be bloodthirsty.
Supposedly, the sisters quickly forget their long delayed desire to
be together in giving way to the wish for revenge.

Although, as we have seen, many responses to the myth help

to draw away the veil, as it were, from the hidden sub text, others

102
 3. Philomela

seek to silence Philomela still further. For example the eighteenth-

century poet Elijah Fenton seems almost to transform her
hatred for Tereus into love by suggesting its equivalence to his
own feelings about a dead friend:

Or softly tune thy tender Notes to mine,

Forgetting Tereus, make my Sorrows thine.
Now the dear Youth has left the lonely Plain,
And is the Grief, who was the Grace, of ev'ry British Swain.

Another eighteenth-century poet, Samuel Boyce, prettifies the

myth still more outrageously:

Then pours sweet Philomel, through dulcet throat,

The musically, melancholy, note;
Tereus she mourns, all lonely on a thorn,
While turtles coo a soft farewell till morn

This sanitisation of the story in a sense continues Tereus' work.

The rape has been excised from Philomela's story. Moving
forward to the twentieth century once again, it is interesting to
compare a similar silencing of the inconvenient female voice in
another tale of two sisters, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar
Named Desire. Here Blanche Dubois disrupts her sister Stella's
marriage to Stanley when she comes to stay in their small,
shabby apartment. Stella's affectionate care for her charismatic
and demanding sister causes her to be less attentive to her
husband's needs. We sense that Stanley is jealous of Blanche's
hold over Stella, and his eventual rape of Blanche seems moti-
vated more by an urge to overpower and humiliate her than by
desire. When Blanche tells her sister what has happened Stella
refuses to believe her, and Blanche is committed to a mental

103
 Ovid

institution, silenced less horribly than Philomela, but no less

effectively.
Is Tennessee Williams' play in any sense related to Ovid's
story and its complex literary reception? Or are the similarities
a matter of chance alone? Maybe their points of contact are
determined by shared archetypes, deep structures of thought
which forge the same kind of bond between Ovid and Williams
as between Ovid's Proserpina and the Judeo-Christian Eve,
related stories from distinct, though not unrelated, cultural
traditions.

104
 4

Arachne

Thus Tapistry of old, the Walls adorn'd,

Ere noblest Dames the artful Shuttle scorn'd:
Arachne, then, with Pallas did contest,
And scarce th' Immortal Work was judg'd the Best.
Nor valorous Actions, then, in Books were sought;
But all the Fame, that from the Field was brought,
Employ'd the Loom, where the kind Consort wrought:
Whilst sharing in the Toil, she shar'd the Fame,
And with the Heroes mixt her intetwoven Name.
No longer, Females to such Praise aspire,
And seldom now We rightly do admire.
Anne Finch, 1713

The many artists featured in the Metamorphoses are often -

rather like the banished Ovid himself - presented as victims,
and their productions can frequently be read as a kind of
commentary on Ovid's own art. His description of the intri-
cate maze created by Daedalus, for example, might be a
description of the Metamorphoses itself: 'He confused the
passages and led the eye astray in a tangled maze of contradic-
tory paths' (8.160-1).
The word 'passages' translates the Latin notas. Nota can
mean any kind of sign, but is most usually applied to letters,
or to writing more generally. The ambiguity is retained in the
translation, for 'passages' may suggest either 'corridors' or

lOS
 Ovid

'paragraphs'. (This is one of those examples of metaphor being

so embedded in language that we cease to notice it.) Ovid
concludes the description of the labyrinth with another teasing
reference to his own unreliability - 'his construction was so
deceptive' (168). This quality of deliberate confusion, of not
allowing the reader to know which path to take, is exemplified
in one of Ovid's most famous stories about artists, the tale of
Arachne.
Arachne is a mortal woman of humble birth but unparalleled
skill. Her weaving makes her famous throughout Lydia, and
even the nymphs flock to watch her at work. Her downfall
comes through pride, for when she asserts that her genius owes
nothing to Minerva, patron of weaving, the goddess comes to
test her disguised as a crone. When Arachne speaks slightingly
of the goddess, Minerva unmasks herself; Arachne responds by
boldly challenging her to a weaving contest.
Minerva's tapestry depicts a hierarchical vision of the
Olympian gods in triumph and also shows the fates of some of
those, like Arachne herself, presumptuous enough to doubt or
challenge their authority. The subject matter of Arachne's
tapestry is in some ways similar; yet she chooses, not rebellious
assertive figures, but girls such as Europa and Leda, victims of
the gods' lust. The goddess is furious, partly because Arachne's
tapestry is perfect, partly because of its subversive subject
matter, and she first destroys it and then strikes Arachne with a
wooden shuttle until she hangs herself. Feeling some pity for her
victim, Minerva saves her from death by metamorphosing her
into a spider.
The story - and particularly the contest - has long divided
the poem's readers and commentators. It is possible to identify
many responses which straightforwardly condemn Arachne's
pride and self-sufficiency, and her rejection of authority,

106
 4. Arachne

particularly divine authority. Typical of this strand is 'Arachne'

by the seventeenth-century poet, Alexander Ross:

Thou that in knowledge dost excell,

Must humble be,
And think what on Arachne fell,
May fall on thee:
It was her pride did her undo,
And pride may overthrow thee too.

But sympathetic, even partisan, supporters of Arachne are

equally easy to locate. The position of Erasmus Darwin, writing
in the eighteenth century, is unequivocally expressed:

And fair Arachne with her rival loom

Found undeserved a melancholy doom -

A review of a recent illustrated poetic retelling of the myth for

children, Kate Hovey's Arachne Speaks, describes Hovey's
response as 'distinctly modern in its sympathy for Arachne's
pride in her self-taught achievements and for her lack of respect
for the gods and goddesses'. This characterisation of the
'Arachnean' perspective as modern makes a lot of sense. A
modern reader is probably less likely to feel instinctive distrust
for the rebellious artist than, say; a Renaissance reader.
But is it more dangerous to over- or underestimate the gap
between ourselves and the productions of the past?
Identifying an apparent shift from a Palladian to an
Arachnean perspective over the course of the last few
centuries does not necessarily help us to establish an Ovidian
perspective. The responses of Christian readers are likely to
evince a greater respect for divine authority than may be

107
 Ovid

appropriate within a classical context. A story in which a man

rebels against God - such as Marlowe's Dr Faustus - cannot
simply be mapped onto a narrative of rebellion against a clas-
sical deity. If, as many suspect, Marlowe felt a sneaking
sympathy for his overreaching anti-hero, it is highly likely
that Ovid might similarly have favoured Arachne. The gods
of Ovid - and other classical writers - are frequently faulty
and unjust. And as they constantly quarrel amongst them-
selves it is no sign of special impiety to have just one god or
goddess as an enemy. Aeneas, for example, was violently
opposed by Juno but aided by many other gods including his
mother Venus. More significant than such generalisations
about classical literature is the evidence of the Metamorphoses
itself. There are many compelling reasons for deducing that
Ovid was on Arachne's side.
Like Arachne, Ovid is an artist whose productions get him
into trouble. Ovid's notorious Art ofLove was one of the reasons
why the poet was sent into exile by Augustus. Although the
poem's most obvious impropriety lay in its incitement to adul-
tery (thus flouting Augustus' commitment to 'family values'),
more particularly subversive were the subtle associations made
between the imperial family and the lewd strategies counselled
by Ovid's knowing narrator - he recommended the porticoes of
Livia and Octavia as likely pick-up joints. Like Arachne, Ovid
cocked a snook at authority and suffered the consequences.
Perhaps because he identified with her, he seems to describe her
own tapestry with particular elan, inserting telling little details
just as he does in his own representations of myths within the
larger poem (6.103-7):

Arachne depicts Europa deceived by the semblance of a bull-

you would think it was a real bull and real waves. The girl

108
 4. Arachne

seems to gaze back at the land she has left, crying out to her
playmates. Fearing the touch of the surging waves, she draws
back her timid feet.

If Arachne's web captivates, Minerva's tapestry may alienate

the reader. She depicts herself in a prominent position, beating
Neptune in an earlier contest. Considering this reminder of her
highly competitive nature, not to mention the bleak and
violent fates of every mortal she includes on her design, it
seems ironic that the finishing touch Minerva gives her work is
a border of 'peaceful olive'. She is, after all, the goddess of war
as well as weaving.
It is possible that such a characteristically 'modern',
Arachnean, reading of the weaving contest reflects wishful
thinking on the reader's part. We like underdogs, rebels and
artists and we want Ovid to like them too, just as we want to
feel that Chaucer's violently anti-semitic Prioress's Tale
reflects her views, not his. Arachne herself provides a warning
to those who would infer that, because Ovid resembles the
weaver in some ways, he must therefore sympathise with her.
Although she appears to be a champion of female victims, she
has little in common with these lovely, defenceless girls.
Arachne is not a romantic figure, but a married woman of
humble birth about whose appearance we learn nothing. If
she resembles anyone, she resembles the gods whom she
apparently deplores. Her creative abilities take us back to the
very beginning of Ovid's poem, for the way she rolls her balls
of wool echoes the description of the creator of the world
moulding the earth into a ball. And the deceptive brilliance of
her tapestry is equalled only by the transformative - and
equally deceptive - skill of the shapeshifting gods. When he
describes her depiction of Europa's rape by Jupiter disguised

109
 Ovid

as a bull Ovid admiringly comments: 'you would think it was

a real bull and real waves'. It is significant that he shifts posk
tion almost imperceptibly, first praising the ingenuity of
Jupiter, then the wit of the weaver. Whatever Ovid's position
vis-a-vis Arachne may be, it would seem that Arachne is of
Jupiter's party without knowing it.
If we fail to notice the divide between Ovid's two very
different expressions of praise, this is a due to yet another link
between his art and Arachne's. The hues of rhe tapestry shade
into one another so subtly that, even though 'the extremes are
clearly distinct' (67), 'the transitions between them deceive the
eye' (66). This is true of Ovid's art too, not just in the little local
instance noted above, but in the poem more generally. Each
story shimmers confusingly into the next.
Many of the Metamorphoses' readers have, whether
consciously or unconsciously, picked up on the possible bond
between Ovid and Arachne and reinvented it in their own
responses to the poem. A striking example is Velazquez's
painting of the myth, Las Hilenderas or The Spinners. This
seems to depict different stages of the story: the contest
between Arachne and Minerva (still disguised as a crone)
dominates the foreground while the tale's denouement is
shown on a more distant plane behind them. The more
remote Arachne - the figure in the background - has an
uncertain status. She seems neither more nor less 'real' than
Europa, as depicted by Velazquez on the painted tapestry, just
as within the Metamorphoses itself both Arachne and Europa
are equally fictive. In creating this effect Velazquez also
encourages us to draw a parallel between his own art and the
mythical weaver's: we cannot tell where his painting ends and
her tapestry begins.
Shakespeare similarly inscribes himself as Arachne at the end

110
 4. Arachne

of Troilus and Cressida. Troilus has just witnessed Cressida faith-

lessly transfer her affections from him to Diomede. He cannot
believe that this is the same woman he loved:

this is, and is not, Cressid.

Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth,
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.

Cressida has a double nature though a single self; the speech

is elliptical but may be illuminated if we remember Ovid's
account of Arachne working from one extreme of the colour
spectrum to the other, but so subtly that we barely notice the
change from one shade to the next. Her art resembles
Shakespeare's in so far as Cressida too confounds us, and
Troilus, by her shifting nature. The name Ariachne is a
strange conflation of Arachne with Ariadne - also associated
with skilful handling of wool, through her contrivance of the
clew which allows Theseus to escape from the labyrinth.
Although almost certainly a slip- either Shakespeare's or the
compositor's- this new woven name, like Cressida's character,
like Arachne's web, is another 'thing inseparate', single and
yet divisible.
Another telling example of a writer aligning himself with
Arachne comes in the translation of the Metamorphoses used by
Shakespeare, Golding's version of 1547. He explains that
Minerva 'purposed to put the Lydian Maidel Arachne to hir
neckeverse.' This curious expression is defined by the Oxford
English Dictionary as follows:

111
 Ovid

A Latin verse printed in black~letter (usually the beginning of

the ft.fty~first psalm) formerly set before one claiming benefit
of clergy by reading which he might save his neck.

By proving his ability to translate Latin, a felon demonstrated

that he had received clerical training and thus had a right to
'benefit of clergy' - that is, he was exempt from trial by a secular
court. The poet and playwright Ben Jonson, among others,
benefited from this bizarre legal loophole. Golding's use of the
phrase seems a curiously nalve anachronism, yet on further
inspection generates a complexly Ovidian charge. In using a
specifically English word pertaining to Christian customs
entirely alien to the classical world of the Metamorphoses,
Golding replicates Ovid's own fondness for Romanising
touches. We tend to forget that the gap which separated Ovid
from his earliest Greek sources is far greater than that which
separates us from Shakespeare and Golding. So when Ovid says
that Cyparissus' pet stag wears a bulla - a specifically Roman
symbol of freeborn status - he creates an effect every bit as
incongruous as Golding's reference to the 'neckeverse'.
Returning to Arachne herself, it might be noted that there is
a further incongruity involved in putting her to her neckeverse,
for few English women could pass such a test and - because
women could not of course be ordained - none would ever be
given the opportunity to qualify for 'benefit of clergy' But,
although doubly incongruous, the expression is of course apt
because Arachne does hang by the neck. And thus we are
encouraged to dwell on the unfairness of Minerva's approach.
'Putting someone to one's neckeverse' is a challenge to show
skill. Arachne passed this test conspicuously well. Yet she is
constructively executed, as it were, all the same.
Having shown that Golding's odd use of the term 'neckeverse'

112
 4. Arachne

works on Arachne's behalf, I would like to suggest that it also

forges a very specific link between her and Golding. The skills
tested by the 'neckeverse' challenge were literary/linguistic
rather than artistic. One might thus say that Golding is
acknowledging and bringing out Arachne's link with her creator
Ovid. But, still more specifically, the felon needed to prove his
ability to translate from Latin, precisely the skill Golding
demonstrates in his Metamorphoses. Perhaps through this move
Golding situates Ovid on Minervis side, as the figure of
authority and tradition with whom the modern writer competes
at his peril.
Both the Latin and English languages make associations
between weavers and poets especially easy and apt. We connect
the two arts together, probably without realising it, whenever we
talk about spinning yarns, weaving the threads of a plot, or
effecting a denouement. The Romans similarly elided the two
activities, as did the Greeks- the word rhapsode, meaning poet,
was etymologically linked to weaving. Poets drawing on the
Arachne myth instinctively exploited this shared terminology,
associating their craft with her web. The Elizabethan poet
Thomas Storer self-deprecatingly explains that his poem is no
great work of art:

But rather such a web as I could frame

In slender lines, yet slender as they be,
My Muse Arachne-like presents to thee.

In the early nineteenth century Lady Emmeline Stuart-

Wortley disassociated herself from those who 'weave a dazzling
web of words,/ Subtle as those Arachne wove'. So interwoven
are the arts of weaving and literature that we are unlikely to
remember (or indeed know) that the primary meaning of

113
 Ovid

'subtle' is 'finely woven' and that it derives from a Latin verb

subtexo, to weave under.
Stuart-Wortley's implied slight distrust of Arachnean subtlety
connects with another important strand in the story's reception,
one well described by Jonathan Sawday (2000, p. 36):

The spider's web or network symbolised craft, cunning, and

deceit. What animal, other than the human creature, was
known to construct such premeditated snares for the unwary?
The metaphor of the spider's snare was, however, much more
than a flimsy tissue of silken cobwebs; instead the net or
web became associated with a snare of words spun from
nothing more than the malevolent interior of the gossip or
calumniator.

This Arachnean deceit is memorably conveyed in Dante's

description of Geryon, symbol of fraud (Inferno 17):

Two paws it had, hairy unto the armpits;

The back, and breast, and both the sides it had
Depicted o'er with nooses and with shields,

With colours more, groundwork or broidery,

Never in cloth did Tartars make or Turks,
Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid

There is a hint of beauty behind the grotesque, a clue that

Dante himself is not immune to fraud. And if we look at the
end of the previous canto, when the arrival of Geryon is
described, we can see that Dante is also, in a sense, implicated
in the fraud which Geryon represents. Dante acknowledges
that it is hard to convince his readers that this beast is real
(Inferno 16):

114
 4. Arachne

Aye, to that truth which has the face of falsehood,

A man should close his lips as far as may be,
Because without his fault it causes shame;

But here I cannot; and, Reader, by the notes

Of this my Comedy to thee I swear,
So may they not be void of lasting favour,

Athwart that dense and darksome atmosphere

I saw a figure swimming upward come,
Marvellous unto every steadfast heart.

Pamela Royston Madie notes that an important distinction may

be drawn between fraud which lurks beneath an alluring exterior
- Geryon - and truth which is so fantastic it seems like a lie -
Dante's description of Geryon. His poem 'may authenticate the
miraculous creation of God, in spite of its own fictive status' (pp.
155-7). But ultimately, no matter how skilful a weaver of words
the poet may be, the poem is a fiction and thus - by the high stan-
dards of literal truthfulness which the narrator himself insists on
in the above quotation - at least a partial fraud. Dante's uneasy
identification with Geryon replays the resemblance between
Arachne and the deceitful, rapacious gods she so despises.
Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, can also be outed as
a secret Arachnophile. At the end of his description of the
Bower of Bliss, an enticing pleasure garden, Spenser introduces
its mistress, the alluring but sinful enchantress Acrasia, as she
dallies with her latest lover (2.12.77):

And was arayd, or rather disarrayed,

All in a vele of silke and silver thin,
That hid no wit her alabaster skin,
But rather shewed more white, if more might bee:

115
 Ovid

More subtile web Arachne cannot spin,

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched deaw, do not in th'aire more lightly flee.

This description of the web, or net, so tantalisingly flimsy, is

echoed a few stanzas later when Acrasia is captured by priggish
Sir Guyon and his trusty sidekick, the Palmer (2.12.81):

The noble Elfe, and carefull Palmer drew

So nigh them, minding nought, but lustfull game,
That suddein forth they on them rusht, and threw
A subtile net, which onely for the same
The skillfull Palmer formally did frame.

The reader is invited to invoke the story of Venus and Mars,

caught in Vulcan's net, and may overlook the similarities
between the web which captured Acrasia and the earlier web
with which she trapped her male prey. Once noted, we might go
on to consider whether these two webs similarly fail in their
ostensive purpose. The first one, as a garment, ought to conceal
her charms but actually sets them off to greater effect. The
second is meant to trap Acrasia, but the reader may not imme-
diately be sure who has captured whom. The two pairs - the
enchantress and her lover Verdant, Guyon and the Palmer- are
not securely differentiated. Logically we may assume that it is
the lovers who are preoccupied by 'lustful! game', but the syntax
is ambiguous, and the possibility is raised that the virtuous spies
are themselves not immune from lust.
'Only for the same' is a little oblique. Although A C.
Hamilton is surely correct in offering the explanation 'i.e. for
the same purpose' it is significant that it needs to be explained
at all. There is a similar sense of exclusion and specificity in this

116
 4. Arachne

phrase as there is in 'nought but lustful game'; moreover the

rhyme between 'game' and 'same' increases the possibility of a
chime between them in the reader's mind, and thus implies that
the net is associated with some lustful purpose. Another
reading, tenable until the last line quoted above, might identifY
the rushing pair, not with Guyon and the Palmer, but with the
lustful lovers; the virtuous hunters are thus the captives not the
captors. We may be more inclined to such a reading because
Spenser has already associated Acrasia with the use of a subtle
web to (metaphorically) ensnare her victims.
But ultimately anything other than a firm separation between
the web of Acrasia's garment and the Palmer's net becomes a
misreading. Guyon's victory over lust is unequivocally complete
(83):

But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace brave,

Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrarhfulnesse ...

The Palmer's net may be unambiguous in function, but another

woven surface- the text- has proved as ready to deceive and as
enticing as Acrasia's own 'subtile web'. Like Dante, like Arachne
herself, Spenser betrays the affinities between his own art and
that of his supposed villains. His poetic tapestry seems intended
to serve virtue, but the Faerie Queene would be a less memorable
poem if sin were not sometimes allowed to escape through
the net.
Ovid's tale of Arachne is firmly embedded within a network
of female artists and connoisseurs. Minerva narrates the story to
the Muses, who have just told her how they beat their rivals, the
Pierides, in a rather similar storytelling contest. Minerva and

117
 Ovid

Arachne are both female, and so is their audience of nymphs.

This textual community of artistic women is an important part
of the story's reception. Male writers - whether friendly or
hostile - tend to ignore Arachne's sex, but many female
responses to the tale comment on the traditional association
between women and weaving or embroidery. An assertive
account of this link is given by the eighteenth-century poet
Anne Finch in 'A Description of One of the Pieces ofTapistry
at Long-Lear, made after the famous Cartons of Raphael', which
I quote at the opening of this chapter. Finch does not simply
wish to revitalise this undervalued and neglected female accom-
plishment. Although she implies that weaving should be
regarded as equal to writing, she slides from a discussion of a
traditional and allowed female skill to the more masculine
province of poetry:

So much, All Arts are by the Men engross'd,

And Our few Talents unimprov'd or cross'd;
Even I, who on this Subject wou'd compose,
Which the fam'd Urbin for his Pencil chose,
(And here, in tinctur'd Wool we now behold
Correctly follow'd in each Shade, and Fold)
Shou'd prudently from the Attempt withdraw,
But Inclination proves the stronger Law:
And tho' the Censures of the World pursue
These hardy Flights, whilst his Designs I view;
My burden'd Thoughts, which labour for a Vent,
Urge me t' explain in Verse, what by each Face is meant.

So although Finch seems to champion weaving, her own choice

to express herself in a poem rather than a tapestry might betray
a suspicion that textiles are just a little too 'feminine' to be truly

118
 4. Arachne

great art. This tension in her position, comparable with that

experienced by women about other specialisms of their sex,
including motherhood, is rearriculated in a very recent response
to Arachne, A.S. Byatt's meditation on the myth in the
anthology Ovid Metamorphosed. She describes her childhood
dislike of needlework, which she ascribes to her perception of it
as a woman's art, and she recalls the resentment she felt when
her headmistress told the school that she had written books and
made tablecloths and thought the latter were the greater
achievement. But eventually Byatt becomes reconciled to the
'female arts' and respects the memory of her great-aunt Thirza
who was a skilled embroiderer.
Although both contestants are female it is with Arachne that
female writers seem to have identified most feelingly. Indeed
Minerva can become associated with male authority, as in a
poem by Sara Coleridge in which she thanks Coleridge for the
gift of a thimble; here she implicitly compares her husband with
Minerva and herself with Arachne. Although Sara Coleridge
imagines that such a splendid thimble must have been used by
Minerva, allowing her to vanquish Arachne, it is the mortal
weaver whose work is most vividly described, becoming (though
only because its maker is crying) alive:

And to her eyes, suffus'd with watery woe,

Her flower-embroider'd web danc'd dim, I wist,
Like blossom'd shrubs in a quick-moving mist:
Till vanquish'd the despairing Maid sunk low.

The reference to the quick moving mist and the vanquished

maid might just suggest a story that Arachne didn't include on
her tapestry but which Ovid relates in Book 1 of the
Metamorphoses, that of Io, who is seduced by Jupiter after he

119
 Ovid

takes the form of a mist. Perhaps Sara Coleridge felt more

oppressed by the brilliance of her husband than her apparently
lighthearted poem would suggest. Io is later transformed into a,
cow and loses the power of speech. Sara Coleridge, rather less
dramatically, is also muted. She confirms the connections
between her husband's art and Minerva's in order to elevate his
work at the expense of her own. Yet both her own feeling evoca~
tion of Arachne, and Ovid's original possible preference for the
mortal weaver, undercut her expressions of modesty:

0 Bard! whom sure no common Muse inspires,

I heard your Verse that glows with vestal fires!
And I from unwatch'd needle's erring point
Had surely suffer'd on each finger-joint
Those wounds, which erst did poor Arachne meet;
While he, the much-lov'd Object of my choice
(My bosom thrilling with enthusiast heat),
Pour'd on mine ear with deep impressive voice
What wounds your thought-bewildering Muse might cause
Tis well your finger-shielding gifts prevent.

Sara Coleridge's reinvention of Minerva as an oppressive

figure of male authority reflects earlier traditions surrounding
the goddess. The medieval moralising tradition associated her
with Christ -Arachne was said to represent hypocrisy. And at
the end of Aeschylus' Oresteia the emergence of Athena
(Minerva) from the head of Zeus rather than a womb is
adduced as proof that the mother is only a kind of animated
incubator, not a true parent in the same way the father is. This
evidence is used to pardon Orestes for killing his mother
Clytemnestra.
A motherless female fulfils a similarly equivocal role in the

120
 4. Arachne

story of an artist who understood (unlike Arachne) that

goddesses prefer to be worshipped rather than challenged, the
sculptor Pygmalion.

121
 5
Pygmalion

Paulina: Music; awake her; strike!

Music
(To Hermione) 'Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more.
Approach.
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I'll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away.
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.
(To Leontes) You perceive she stirs.
Hermione slowly descends
Start not. Her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful.
Shakespeare, The Winters Tale

I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my

forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became
convulsed: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as
it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the
wretch - the miserable monster whom I had created. He held
up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be
called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered
some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He
might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched
out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down
stairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house
which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the
night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening

123
 Ovid

attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to

announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I
had so miserably given life.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

In the 2003 war on Iraq one of the most memorable images,

reproduced again and again by television and newspapers, was the
statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled by Iraqi civilians and US
troops in apparent celebration of the downfall of his regime. This
act of violence simultaneously reflected a new political and mili-
tary reality and enacted a symbolic revenge on the body of
Saddam himsel£
The symbolic power of statues which represent leaders and
celebrities, their capacity to become semi-animated in our
imaginations as projections of the original, is comparatively
easy to understand. But it would seem that this power is not
confined to lifelike representations of well known figures; the
idea of the statue more generally has a similar hold over our
imagination. Even a statue which does not represent any
known person seems somehow imbued with the potential for
life. Sigmund Freud (drawing on the work of his contemporary
Ernst Jentsch) identifies the waxwork doll or automaton, life-
less but unmistakably lifelike, as the clearest manifestation of
the 'uncanny' This way of looking at dolls did not originate
with Jentsch. Fanny Kemble's lurid account of her distaste for
dolls, included in the actress' 1878 Record of a Girlhood,
captures their sinister quality perfectly:

They always affected me with a grim sense of being a mockery

of the humanity they were supposed to represent; there was
something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll existence
and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous

124
 5. Pygmalion

dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that

girls are all supposed to love with a species of prophetic
maternal instinct.

The doll's potential to disturb has been exploited by many

writers and artists, most notoriously in the Child's Play films.
Another memorable example from popular culture is the anima-
tion of the autons in the 1970 Doctor Who adventure, Spearhead
from Space. The autons appear to be no more than shop window
dummies, but when triggered remotely by the evil Nestene
consciousness they spring to murderous life. Their hairless heads
and sightless eyes lend them a compellingly sinister blank
neutrality.
On first reading, Ovid's story of Pygmalion could scarcely
contrast more strongly with that of the truly 'uncanny' autons.
A sculptor creates a perfect woman out of ivory. Entranced by
its beauty he dresses it with clothes and jewels as though it were
a real woman and eventually prays to Venus for a wife just like
her. The goddess grants his wish by animating the statue herself,
who becomes Pygmalion's bride. Although it seems that Venus
is the power behind the miracle, Ovid's poetry suggests that the
sculptor's marvellous artistry is the true agent of metamorphosis
(10.283-6):

As he touched the ivory it grew softer and lost its former obdu-
racy; it dimpled and yielded beneath his fingers just as
Hymettian wax, when it melts in the sun, can be worked by
the thumb into many forms, becoming pliable through
handling.

Clearly it is possible to see this as a strongly affirmative story. An

apparently impossible dream becomes a reality thanks to the

125
 Ovid

combined power of love and art. There is generally a kind of

inbuilt bias in favour of any kind of artist in the Metamorphoses,
a sense of fellow feeling with creators such as Arachne and
Mulciber, and we may assume that Ovid sympathised with
Pygmalion's pursuit of beauty and love. The bond between
poetry and sculpture is particularly in evidence in the myth's
reception, where it is frequently manipulated to playful effect.
George Marston, in his erotic 'The Metamorphosis of
Pygmalion's Image' (1598), tricksily elides the sculptor's art with
the poet's when, in his blazon of the statue's charms, he tells us
that 'her breasts like polished ivory appear'. Of course her
breasts are ivory- but poets, like sculptors, enjoy manufacturing
women out of jewels and other precious substances, a habit
which Shakespeare parodies in Sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

One of Ovid's most recent translators, David Slavitt, plays the

same kind of trick on the reader as Marston:

One, especially lovely,

He fashioned out of a piece of snowy ivory flesh
Could never have duplicated.

Ivory might as easily be an adjective qualifying flesh as a

noun, and only as our eye travels to the next line do we realise
we have been deceived. This kind of play is only possible
because so many writers have described women as though they
were precious works of art rather than living beings. This objec-

126
 5. Pygmalion

tification of women inheres in Ovid's story, and for modern,

female readers in particular, the apparent bias towards a male
perspective, the fact that the miracle was performed for the grat-
ification of Pygmalion's desire rather than for Galatea's benefit,
may be a source of unease. Nor are such readers necessarily
reading against the grain, for there are clues within the
Metamorphoses itself which seem to undercut the story and
suggest that Ovid's point of view is by no means identical with
Pygmalion's. Is there, for example, any link between the 'snowy'
white statue Pygmalion carves and the similarly 'snowy' heifers
which he carves up to provide a fitting sacrifice for Venus?
Like many tales within the poem, the story of Pygmalion is
told by an inset narrator rather than by Ovid himself. As with
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to get the full sense of each tale in
the Metamorphoses we must pay attention to its teller. The
narrator of Pygmalion is Orpheus, and he speaks to an audience
of wild beasts and birds, charmed by his voice. At this point in
the narrative Orpheus has already, for the second time, lost his
wife Eurydice whom he had rescued from the Underworld but
forfeited by looking back at her before they left the Valley of
Avernus. He responded to his loss by shunning women and
enjoying instead the love of beautiful boys. The character and
history of Orpheus thus may be reflected in his account of the
sculptor. Pygmalion similarly shuns the love of women- though
because the whole sex fills him with disgust rather than because
of any specific disappointment. He too seeks satisfaction in a
substitute, a statue rather than a boy. And, like Orpheus, he
gives a woman life - though it is ivory rather than a corpse that
he animates. As he does not lose her, the story might reflect a
wish-fulfllment fantasy on the part of Orpheus who is unable to
retain his own revived Eurydice.
An interesting parallel from The Canterbury Tales is 'The

127
 Ovid

Wife of Bath's Tale'. The Wife, a much married woman past het
prime, tells of a youth who is obliged to marry an ugly hag a$:
punishment for rape, but is reprieved when she is transformed.
into a beautiful girl at the tale's climax. We sense that the Wif6
of Bath wishes for a similar miracle to give her back her beauty:,
- and a handsome husband. ,
The tale of Pygmalion may also be illuminated by the very
next story Orpheus narrates, the incestuous love of Myrrha for
her father Cinyras. Significantly, Cinyras is the grandson of
Pygmalion and the statue; the unnatural liaison between a father
and his daughter may be mapped on to the story of Pygmalion's
love for his creation. In this new context the sculptor's passion
is more likely to seem fetishistic and perverse than idealistic or
fairytale-like. Verbal links between the two tales underline the
affinity between them. For example, when Pygmalion prays to
Venus he doesn't dare ask for his ivory maid herself; instead,
after some hesitation, he asks for one similar to her. When
Cinyras asks Myrrha what kind of husband she desires she uses
the same equivocation to hide her true wishes and requests 'one
like you'. In other words, each conceals their real desire by
claiming they only want something 'like' it. And in each case
this shift makes a perverse ideal natural, a lovely woman not a
lovely statue, a man like one's father, not one's father himsel£
And even without looking for disturbing analogues outside
the tale, we can find fuel for discomfort in Pygmalion's rejection
of women. The Propoetides in particular are blamed for his
misogyny. This group of women denied the divinity of Venus,
and the goddess punished them by forcing them into prostitu-
tion. Such a life eventually hardened them until they turned to
stone. As Genevieve Liveley points out, there is a tendency to
misread this compressed little narrative and identify prostitution
as their crime rather than their punishment. Liveley conjectures

128
 5. Pygmalion

that their crime may be celibacy - certainly it must be some

activity (or inactivity) which contrasts with prostitution or the
punishment would have no force. To be reminded that prosti-
tution is the punishment inflicted by the goddess rather than a
crime committed against her may reinflect our sense of Venus
within the narrative; her cruelty towards women whose only
crime may be celibacy contrasts unpleasantly with her provision
of a biddable love object for a man who avowedly 'felt repug-
nance for the countless faults which Nature had embedded in
women's minds' {10.244-5). This is the dynamic of Margaret
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, whose powerful men rob
women of their freedom, forcing them into acquiescent
wife/handmaid roles and compelling those who demonstrate
sexual or intellectual rebellion to work in approved brothels.
The uneasy pitting of transgressive against compliant women
colours much of the tale's reception. The Propoetides themselves
figure in very few responses. However, many texts which allude
to Pygmalion suggest, unlike Ovid, that the sculptor based his
masterpiece on a living model; tension is generated between the
woman and the work of art which mimics her. Often it is
suggested that, because autonomy is an unattractive female trait,
a painting or sculpture of a woman may triumph over the model
hersel£ In Charles Cotton's 'The Picture' {1689) this possibility
is raised but immediately discounted by the poet who is trying
to persuade his mistress to let him have her portrait:

Perchance you fear Idolatry

Would make the Image prove
A Woman fit for love;
Or give it such a soul as shone
Through fond Pigmalion's living stone,
That so I might abandon thee.

129
 Ovid

He swears that seeing her picture would help him stay faithful
to her when they are apart. Less gallant, James Robertson, in a
poem published in 1773, sees definite advantages in a speechless
consort:

To please Pygmalion, Heav'n inspir'd with Life

A Tongueless Stone, of which he made a Wife;
Wou'd Heav'n, all-gracious, hear Asino's moan,
His Wife - her Tongue at least - wou'd soon be Stone.

Charles Sisson's take on this play with reverse metamorphosis

is particularly unpleasant. A poem which begins as a fairly literal
translation of Pygmalion's tale concludes thus:

To his surprise the girl grew warm;

He slobbered and she slobbered back

-This is that famous mutual flame.

The worst of all was yet to come.

Although he often wished her back

In silent marble, good and cold

The bitch retained her human heat,

The conquest of a stone by art.

May Venus keep me from all hope

And let me turn my love to stone.

The disagreeable and unexpected verb 'slobbered' encourages us

to import the full animalistic potential of 'bitch' into the poem.
This in turn makes it difficult to avoid allowing 'heat' -
warmth, life, passion - to be contaminated by the phrase 'on

130
 5. Pygmalion

heat'. A living woman, for Sisson's Pygmalion, ts a rutting

animal. Stone is clearly preferable.
The Pygmalion in Henry James' short story 'The Last of the
Valerii' seems to have similar preferences. The story's narrator is
an American whose young goddaughter, Martha, marries an
Italian count, Camillo Valerio. Their happy marriage is
disrupted when the Count becomes obsessed with a statue of
Juno, discovered during the course of an archaeological excava-
tion of his grounds. The narrator anxiously charts the couple's
growing estrangement, which, we are led to believe, arises from
Valerio's atavistic return to the pagan beliefs of his ancestors
(embodied in the Juno). But can a different interpretation of the
Count's obsession be excavated from the narrative?
One of the tale's several oddnesses is the choice of a majestic
clothed Juno (rather than the more obvious Venus) as the focus
for the Count's obsession. It might seem that the statue's power
is not, or not primarily, supposed to be erotic. In his discussion
of the tale, J. Hillis Miller suggests that Juno represents a
powerful mother figure 'of the sort that demands of her male
children the ultimate sacrifice of their masculinity. This sacrifice
is mimed in the blood sacrifice Camillo performs' (p. 231).
(Martha and her godfather discover blood at the statue's feet.)
He goes on to suggest that her one flaw - a broken hand - is a
further symbol of castration. The precise provenance of the
blood on Juno's altar remains unclear; the godfather seeks to
reassure Martha: '"Be sure it's very innocent," I said; "a lamb, a
kid, or a sucking calf"' (p. 823). We infer that he is assuring her
that the Count has harmed no other human, though a hint at
self-castration might certainly be present. But for Hillis Miller
the Count's implied emasculation is not significant for what it
suggests about his sexuality. Like most commentators he
believes that the Count's struggle is between an alluring but

131
 Ovid

proscribed paganism (represented by Juno) and a wholesome

but depressing modernity (represented by Martha and her
godfather).
But further evidence in the text suggests that the unearthed
statue might represent, not the buried past of the Count's race,
but his suppressed homosexuality. I have already shown that, in
its original Ovidian context, Pygmalion's statue fulfils the same
function as young boys do for Orpheus: both are a replacement
for unsatisfactory women. Because the statue in Ovid is evoked
so powerfully as a heteroerotic love object the reader is unlikely
to dwell on this link. But James carefully de-eroticises the statue
- by transforming her into a clothed Juno - allowing other
interpretive possibilities room for play. We are encouraged to
reflect on the statue's identity, to see James' choice of Juno as
anything but arbitrary, by the narrator's speculations before she
is discovered (p. 807):

I may be summoned to welcome another Antinous back to fame,

- a Venus, a Faun, an Augustus.

The subjects which run through his mind have their own signif-
icance. We are reminded that James might have made the
Count's obsession focus on the ideally sexual female, Venus. A
quite different scenario is suggested by the narrator's very first
conjecture: Antinous, the young lover of the Emperor Hadrian,
whose reputed beauty made him a favourite subject for sculp-
tors. The narrator's initial choice of a homoerotic focus of desire,
the youth Antinous, perhaps gives us a clue how to decode a
curious dual perspective in the way the story is told. A strange
faultline runs through the godfather's narrative, making it diffi-
cult for the reader to piece together the whole story - and,
particularly, to reconstitute the narrator's original impressions.

132
 5. Pygmalion

In hindsight, as he writes, he knows perfectly well that the

Juno is responsible for the Count's alienation from Martha. The
entire tale is narrated from this perspective - from its first
discovery we are aware of the Juno as a portentous and rather
threatening figure. However initially, at the time when the
events actually took place, the godfather was in the dark as to
the cause of the Count's strange behaviour. Yet because we
always have the benefit of the narrator's hindsight, we don't
immediately realise that he hasn't guessed that paganism is at the
root of his goddaughter's marriage problems. In fact it is only
after rereading the story that the potential significance and
possible nature of the narrator's interim suspicions are made
clear. The godfather's uneasy sense that Martha 'was the least bit
strangely mated' and his description of her puzzlement at
Camillo's estrangement from her, for example, reflect impres-
sions that predate his discovery of the Juno's impact on the
Count (p. 813):

She sat at times with her eyes fixed on him with a kind of
imploring curiosity, as if pitying surprise held resentment yet
awhile in check. What passed between them in private, I had,
of course, no warrant to inquire. Nothing, I imagined, - and
that was the misery! From his wife he kept his face inex-
orably averted; and when she approached him with some
persuasive caress, he received it with an ill-concealed shudder.

An important due to what might have gone through the

narrator's mind at this point can be found in his description of
the Count's fascination with another statue, that of Hermes,
which had always stood in his grounds. The godfather finds the
Count sitting in his garden at night gazing at it. For the reader
the statue is most likely to figure paganism and act as a surra-

133
 Ovid

gate for the Juno. But it is possible that the godfather reads the
signals quire differently. The Count's description of the Hermes
suggests a figure both effeminate and sensual 'pouting his great
lips'; he explains that he used to think the statue frightening but
finds that now it 'suggests the most delightful images' (p. 815).

The Hermes, for a wonder, had kept his nose; and when I
reflected that my dear Countess was being neglected for this
senseless pagan block, I secretly promised myself to come the
next day with a hammer and deal him such a lusty blow as
would make him too ridiculous for a sentimental tete-a-tete.

This reflection seems rather jocular and inconsequential and the

reader may skim over its surface implication - that the Hermes
is in some way a sexual rival to the Countess. Because the Juno
is so portentously and mysteriously potent within the story it is
easy to overlook the way the Hermes apparently affects the
narrator. But if we remember that the godfather does not yet
realise the impact the Juno has had on the Count, his reaction
to the Hermes incident provides us with a further due that
homosexuality is suspected (p. 815):

Meanwhile, however, the Count's infatuation was no laughing

matter, and I expressed my sincerest conviction when I said,
after a pause, that I should recommend him to see either a
priest or a physician.

We, the readers, have been fully primed about the Juno's signif-
icance and (oddly) have been misled by the narrator into
thinking that he too, at this time, saw matters the way he has
encouraged us to see them. Thus we will probably assume that
the godfather's feelings of disgust mixed with pity, and his

134
 5. Pygmalion

advice that the Count consult either a priest or a doctor, are

prompted by fears that he is becoming a pagan. Yet the
narrator's assumption that medicine and the church hold the
answers also makes sense within a concealed (but far more prob-
able) context of latent homosexuality - a context we would be
more likely to identify if we had not had the wool of 'paganism'
pulled so tightly over our eyes. The narrator surely misleads us,
for it is only after this exchange that the godfather as character
(as opposed to the godfather as narrator who has known it all
along) learns that it is Paganism that has won Camillo away
from his bride. Before this his anxieties are expressed in a way
which makes far more sense within a context of sexual impro-
priety: 'How should I treat him, what stand should I talte, what
course did Martha's happiness and dignity demand?' (p. 815).
When the Count finally articulates his pagan impulses, the
godfather's first reaction is one of amused relief (pp. 817-18):

I seemed to touch the source of his trouble, and my relief was

great, for my discovery made me feel like bursting into laughter
.... In my gratitude, I was able to thank any gods he pleased ....
A sturdy young Latin I had called Camillo; sturdier, indeed,
than I had dreamed him! Discretion was now misplaced

Although anxiety about Martha's 'dignity' might easily be

ascribed to suspicion that the Count was having an affair with a
woman, the emphasis on his 'sturdiness' (rather than say his
'worthiness') perhaps implies a pleased relief at discovering that
he is after all thoroughly masculine. Finally Martha solves the
problem by ordering that the Juno be reburied in the earth,
leaving the Count apparently cured though he still secretly
possesses her beautiful marble hand, which had broken off when
she was first excavated.

135
 Ovid

Martha's victory is unusual. In other responses to the

Pygmalion story woman and art object are plotted mor~
violently against one another- with the latter generally winning
the fight. Three of the most striking examples of this motif- a
poem, a short story and a film - are all products of the American
Gothic tradition. Washington Allston's poem 'The Paint King~
(1813) tells the horrific tale of Ellen, who falls in love with a
picture of Pygmalion only for the artist to come to life and grind
her up to make the paints with which he will create the portrait
of his own love, the fair Geraldine:

Then Ellen, all reeking, he laid;

With a rock for his muller he crush'd every bone,
But, though ground to jelly, still, still did she groan;
For life had forsook not the maid.

Now reaching his palette, with masterly care

Each tint on its surface he spread;
The blue of her eyes, and the brown of her hair,
And the pearl and the white of her forehead so fair,
And her lips' and her cheeks' rosy red.

However his project ultimately fails because he lacks any black

pigment - a mouse has run off with the unfortunate Ellen's
pupils.
A strikingly 'uncanny' variation on the portrait as love rival
theme is described in Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Oval Portrait'
(1850). In this short story a young artist becomes so absorbed
in the portrait he is painting of his wife that he fails to realise
that she is dying. The impression is created that the picture
sucks the life from its model, and its status as an actively male-
volent rival is hinted at when we are told that the girl should not

136
 5. Pygmalion

have married the painter because he 'already [had] a bride in his

Put'. The tale's climax describes the portrait's completion:

for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the

work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet
gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and
crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned
suddenly to regard his beloved: - She was dead!

The enmity between woman and replica is most evident in

Bryan Forbes' 1975 film version oflra Levin's novel The Stepford
Wives. The film's heroine Joanna, played by Katharine Ross, is
appalled to find that the women in her new home town have no
interests outside the home and are completely submissive to
their husbands. Her suspicions are aroused when her feisty best
friend is transformed overnight into a domestic goddess. Joanna
begins to investigate the town's mysterious Men's Association
which holds secret meetings from which all women are
excluded. Eventually she realises that the club is creating perfect
automata with which the real women are replaced, and is finally
strangled by her own replicant. In this film the idle fantasies of
writers such as James Robertson have become reality, although
the fact that the female robot, not the men, destroys Joanna
points to a subtler message about women's own possible
complicity in their subjugation.
Although its exploration of the Pygmalion motif is less obvi-
ously misogynistic, Alfred Hitchcock's ltertigo offers a more
subtly sinister account of a man's obsession with shaping a
woman to conform to his desires. The ftlm's hero, Scottie,
witnessed what appeared to be the tragic accidental death of his
mysterious love, Madeleine (played by Kim Novak), when she
fell from a bell tower. Haunted by her loss, Scottie starts

137
 Ovid

thinking that every blonde woman wearing grey he glimpses

may be Madeleine, but is one day struck by a girl who is nothing
like her - a brunette called Judy. He courts her and gradually
persuades her to 'become' Madeleine, changing her hair colour,
clothes and make up. Meanwhile the viewer has learnt that the
resemblance is not an illusion - Judy acted the part of
'Madeleine' as part of a plot allowing the real Madeleine's
husband to murder her.
Although Scottie is an essentially likeable character - he is
played by perennial 'nice guy' James Stewart - we become
increasingly uneasy about his pursuit of Madeleine and sympa-
thise with Judy when she expresses resentment at being changed
into a very different woman. Whereas Madeleine was remote,
even glacial, Judy is sassy and sceptical. While Ovid's Pygmalion
seems to sculpt his statue into life after praying to Venus, Scottie
appears to be using cosmetic arts to turn a real woman into a
fake one. It is as though Pygmalion were trying to turn his wife
back into a statue. However the cinematic context complicates
our urge to distinguish 'real' Judy from 'false' Madeleine. Both
roles are, we may assume, equally artificial.
In this film, as in so many responses to the myth, there is a link
between the internal Pygmalion (here Scottie) and the author
(here Hitchcock). Scottie's urge to turn Judy into a blonde
goddess reflects Hitchcock's fascination with manufactured
blonde heroines, played by Grace Kelly, Eve Marie Saint and Kim
Novak herself. The movement &om 'reality' to 'art' enacted by
Scottie/Hitchcock is reflected in the heroine's disturbing double
death, a reversal of the myth's climax of animation. Madeleine's
first death was a feint. But having painstakingly recreated his
beloved on a canvas of flesh and blood Scottie learns of the
conspiracy and takes her to the scene of the crime as a punish-
ment. She is terrified and jumps from the bell tower in earnest.

138
 5. Pygmalion

Like Orpheus- and it is interesting to see this myth paired yet

again with that of Pygmalion - Scottie has lost his love for the
second time. It is as though the transformation of Judy into
Madeleine, a beautiful automaton, was not enough, and, having
turned her back into a statue, Scottie has to destroy her as well.
Although, as we have seen, there are sinister, unnatural
undercurrents already present in Ovid's version of the tale, one
text in particular is probably responsible for the frequent dark-
ening of the story over the course of its nineteenth- and
twentieth-century reception. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
{1818) is not an obvious descendant of Pygmalion, yet the
novel's interrogation of humanity's parameters and powerful
presentation of animation exerted a significant influence on
many later treatments of the myth. The monster repels us but
also forces us to question our own prejudices; as we watch him
being rebuffed by humanity we are bound to reflect on the
ethical dilemmas involved in the creation of artificial life.
Frankenstein is overwhelmed by his creation when the monster
seeks to destroy everything he holds dear, and almost coerces
his maker into giving him a mate. This theme of a creature
gaining uncanny control over its maker is curiously echoed in
Shelley's 1831 introduction to her novel. The description of its
genesis casts her as Pygmalion, the text as Galatea, demanding
to be sculpted into life:

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor

could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed
and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my
mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of a reverie.
I saw with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, - I saw the pale
student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had
put together.

139
 Ovid

This evocation of a nightmarish dream state as the prelude to

creation is paralleled in Ted Hughes' sinister adaptation of
Ovid's tale:

Yet he still dreamed of woman.

He dreamed
Unbrokenly awake as asleep
The perfect body of a perfect woman -
Though this dream
Was not so much the dream of a perfect woman
As a spectre, sick of unbeing,
That had taken possession of his body
To find herself a life.

Both Shelley and Hughes disturb our intuitive sense that the
creator takes precedence over what he creates, skewing the orig-
inal tale's dynamic of power. Similar ambiguities are generated
by Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner.
Both Ovid's version of the Pygmalion story and Frankenstein
feature climactic scenes in which an inanimate being is miracu-
lously brought to life. There is no such epiphany in Blade
Runner. The existence of the 'replicants', perfect replicas of
humanity, is a given of the film, and its aim, and that of its hero,
is to destroy or 'retire' these troubling simulacra whose capacity
to develop emotions is perceived as a threat to humankind.
Death not life is the goal of its anti-Pygmalion, Deckard. The
executions he carries out are presented at some length, and the
film's insistent emphasis on the replicants' physiology, in partic-
ular their capacity to bleed, makes them seem human at the
point of death.
Some of Blade Runner's most striking moments of tension are
provided when a test is administered to subjects whose
humanity is in doubt. The aim of the test is to measure

140
 5. Pygmalion

emotional reactions via objective criteria such as pupil dilation

and heartbeat, and thus distinguish between robot and human.
The effectiveness of this test is put under strain by the film's
most perfect replicant, the beautiful Rachael, an experimental
model who has been implanted with false memories, making
her believe herself to be 'real'. The tension generated by each
administration of the test reflects a more pervasive anxiety
surrounding the increasing difficulty experienced when policing
the boundaries between animate and inanimate life. In many
ways the replicants seem more human than the humans them-
selves - they are resourceful, passionate and fiercely loyal to one
another. Their leader, Roy, saves the life of his pursuer, Deckard,
when he has the chance to let him fall to his death, and speaks
with moving intensity of his adventurous life, which he knows
is about to come to an end. For replicants are programmed to
terminate after just four years, to prevent them developing and
learning beyond a safely contained level. This poignantly brief
life span encourages the viewer to see them as hyper-human
rather than humanity's antithesis.
Blade Runner interiorises the powerful Pygmalion myth,
forcing its hero to question his own ontological status. As is so
often the case in responses to this story, the film's status as a
fictional construct has a part to play in its development of the
myth. As a character in a screenplay Deckard, like Rachael and
the other replicants, has no real past although subjectively he is
aware of family memories, signalled by the photos he hoards.
The same could of course be said of any fictional character, but
this film explicitly encourages us to reflect on Deckard's prob-
lematically sketchy previous life. A mysterious shot of a unicorn
- a childhood fantasy perhaps - gains significance when
Deckard's sinister colleague, an Origami enthusiast, leaves a tiny
model of a unicorn by his door at the end of the film. We have

141
 Ovid

already seen Deckard break the news to Rachael that he can

'read' her mind because he knows which memories have been
implanted in her brain. But perhaps Deckard is similarly vulner-
able. It would seem possible that he, like Rachael, is only a
replicant - this would explain his special ability to track his
fellows down - and that his 'memory' of a unicorn is known to
those around him because they are his creators. Yet, in keeping
with the film's complex presentation of simulated life, the image
of the unicorn has a further significance. As an unactualised
possibility- a fantasy like the story of Pygmalion itself- the
unicorn symbolises the quintessentially human power of imagi-
nation. The image which signals Deckard's possible replicancy
also in a strange way proves his fundamental humanity.

142
 6

Ovid in the Third Millennium

The very last lines of the Metamorphoses anticipate Ovid's poetic

immortality {15.877-9):

"Wherever Rome's might extends itself over conquered lands,

my name shall be on the lips of the people and, if the prophe-
sies of poets have any truth, my fame will live forever.

We are conditioned to be sceptical of such hubristic pronounce-

ments, and tend to assume that ambitious over-reachers will
eventually be punished. Such is the fate of Shelley's imaginary
tyrant Ozymandias, whose former glory is now all but
forgotten, his colossal statue reduced to a few scattered frag-
ments:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yet Ovid's bold prophecy has (so far) been triumphantly

fulfilled. A major factor in his success, as I hope this book has
already demonstrated, is the flexible variety of the
Metamorphoses, and its amenability to a range of readings.
Although the poem has been consistently influential, each

143
 Ovid

generation of readers has been drawn to it for different reasons,

and singled out different stories for special praise. Each age finds
(or contrives) something peculiarly relevant to its own preoccu-
pations in the Metamorphoses; Ovid resembles the timeless
musician on Keats' Grecian Urn: 'happy melodist, unwearied,/
For ever piping songs for ever new'.
It is initially easy to agree with Michael Hofmann and James
Lasdun when, in their introduction to After Ovid, they charac-
terise Ovid as a peculiarly 'modern' poet:

Then, too, the stories have direct, obvious and powerful affmi-
ties with contemporary reality. They offer a mythical key to
most of the more extreme forms of human behaviour and
suffering, especially ones we think of as peculiarly modern ....

But is there really something about our own historical moment

which makes today's readers uniquely responsive to Ovid? Or is
it not possible that Chaucer, Shakespeare and the rest similarly
found something 'modern' in Ovid, even if they did not articu-
late this perception as explicitly as Hofmann and Lasdun?
Borrowing Stravinsky's praise of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, might
we not say that the Metamorphoses is 'an absolutely contempo-
rary work which will be contemporary forever'?
If each age finds itself mirrored in the Metamorphoses, what
will tomorrow's readers find most compelling about Ovid's
masterpiece? Up to a point it is easy to anticipate how the devel-
opment of certain technologies, for example, might make us
look at some of his stories in a new light. Research into human
cloning and artificial intelligence has perhaps not yet impinged
on our daily life, but these and other discoveries have become
part of the furniture of our minds and therefore part of the way
we respond to Ovidian tales such as Pygmalion. The human

144
 6. Ovid in the Third Millennium

imagination anticipates and to some extent predetermines scien-

tific advances - one must be able to conceptualise a robot before
one attempts to create one - and one of the earliest such concep-
tualisations, it might be argued, is Pygmalion's statue herself.
There are of course differences between Pygmalion's Galatea and
Ridley Scott's replicants. The tale of Pygmalion- together with
other Ovidian marvels such as the near extinction of the human
race following the flood - now makes us reflect on the power of
mankind rather than the power of the gods.
But these are shifts in emphasis not of substance. Will the
Metamorphoses be read and interpreted in ways as yet unimagin-
able? This book has shown how Ovid can be used as a
touchstone to gauge the different preoccupations and biases of
successive generations. But if, as the testimony of the past two
thousand years would seem to suggest, Ovid is indeed for all
time, then the future as well as the past is embedded in the
Metamorphoses. The discoveries and cultural shifts of tomorrow
may turn readers to quite different stories in the poem from
those I have discussed in this book, ones which are now largely
overlooked. Boreas' wooing of Orithyia perhaps, or the tale of
Ocyrhoe the prophetess, who mysteriously metamorphoses into
a mare. Whether later generations do indeed find new meaning
in hitherto neglected episodes or discover instead a fresh signifi-
cance in consistently influential tales such as those of Pygmalion
and Narcissus, it seems likely that Ovid will continue to inspire
readers and writers far into the future.

"When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man ....
Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'

145
 Note on Translations

Readers with some Latin will find the Loeb edition useful. This has
an English prose translation (by Frank Justus Miller) facing the Latin
text. Other readers have many good - though very different - poetic
translations from which to choose.
The earliest important translation is that of Arthur Golding
(1 567). This was used by Shakespeare and, although generally
pretty faithful to Ovid, is a very 'English' translation - it is written
in fourteeners and makes use of many colloquial words and expres-
sions. Golding's Ovid has recently been reissued by Penguin.
George Sandys' 1626 translation into iambic pentameter is an
important work, and includes an interesting commentary on the
stories. But poetically it is easily eclipsed by the version of 1717,
edited by Sir Samuel Garth and translated by a number of different
poets, including Dryden, Gay and Addison. The rhyming couplets
capture Ovid's pointed wit, and even the lesser known contributors
generally do full justice to the poem. Garth's Metamorphoses has
recently been republished by Wordsworth Classics, and I would
strongly recommend it.
But those who prefer a modern translation of the Metamorphoses
are also well served. The best known complete translation is probably
A.D. Melville's 1986 version. This is a faithful, careful rendering into
blank verse, and is widely used by students. Some (including me)
may prefer David Slavitt's more quirky translation, published in
1994. This includes odd little modernisations and interjections
which are true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the original.
Many readers will first become acquainted with the
Metamorphoses through Ted Hughes' much praised Tales from Ovid,
free translations of the principal stories. Also noteworthy is

147
 Ovid

Hofmann and Lasdun's After Ovid, an anthology of responses to the

Metamorphoses by a number of well known poets including Carol
Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. But very few of
these contributions could be classed as translations - they are nearly
all freely inventive adaptations.
Full bibliographical details of all these translations may be found
in the bibliography.

148
 Further Reading

This is an extremely selective list. For further ideas consult the much
more extensive bibliographies included in many of the books
detailed below. Full bibliographical details of my own recommenda~
tions are given in the bibliography.
A great deal has been written on the Metamorphoses, particularly
over the last twenty years. L.P. Wilkinson's Ovid Recalled is a classic
early study which heralded the late twentieth~century revival of
interest in Ovid's works. Sara Mack's Ovid deals with the poet's
complete oeuvre and is a lively, readable introduction aimed at
undergraduates. For those who want a slightly more advanced,
though still accessible, account of the Metamorphoses, I recommend
Joseph B. Solodow's The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The recent
Cambridge Companion to Ovid is another very useful volume; it
contains several essays on the Metamorphoses. Its editor, Philip
Hardie, has recently published Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, which I
recommend to anyone who is interested in reading Ovid in the light
of recent developments in criticism and literary theory.
Readers who wish to find out more about Ovid's reception in
English literature might begin by looking at Ovid Renewed, an excel-
lent collection of essays edited by Charles Martindale. Other useful
volumes include Leonard Barkan's impressive and readable account
of Ovid's impact on Renaissance culture, The Gods Made Flesh, and
my own The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes.
Another particularly welcome addition to this topic, although it is
not specifically about Ovid, is Geoffrey Miles' Classical Mythology in
English Literature, an introductory account of Greek myth which
also includes mini anthologies of poems about Orpheus, Venus and
Adonis, and Pygmalion. Studies have been written of several

149
 Ovid

individual writers' debt to Ovid; of most interest to the general

reader is Jonathan Bate's acclaimed Shakespeare and Ovid.
Readers may wish to find out more about the individual myths
discussed in this book. There are several studies of the Pygmalion
legend to choose from. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving
Statue and J. Hillis Miller's Versions of Pygmalion are both chal-
lenging and suggestive, while Essaka Joshua's recent Pygmalion and
Galatea is a more straightforward history of the myth's reception in
English literature. Mary E. Barnard's The Myth ofApollo and Daphne
from Ovid to Quevedo and John Heath's Actaeon, the Unmannerly
Intruder: The Myth and its Meaning in Classical Literature, although
rather more specialised, contain much interesting material. For those
who want to find out more about Philomela and Arachne a good
starting point would be Patricia Klindienst Joplin's influential article
'The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours'. (This is available on the internet
as an electronic text.) Finally, I recommend a hook which discusses
the phenomenon of metamorphosis more widely, Marina Warner's
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds.

150
 Works Cited and Consulted

Barkan, Leonard, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the

Pursuit ofPaganism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press
1986).
Barnard, Mary E., The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to
~evedo: Love, Agon and the Grotesque (Durham: Duke University
Press 1987).
Bate, Jonathan, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press
1993).
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 'Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's
Dream', in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, edited
by David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair and Harold Weber {Ithaca
NY: Cornell University Press 1994), pp. 125-30.
Brown, Sarah Annes, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to
Ted Hughes (London: Duckworth 1999).
Brown, Sarah Annes, Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Si$ter
Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature
(Aldershot: Ashgate 2003).
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, translated by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow {London: Routledge 1867).
Euripides, Three Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press 1968).
Garth, Sir Samuel, ed., Ovid's Metamorphoses (1717) edited by
Garth Tissol (Ware: Wordsworth 1998).
Golding, Arthur, Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567) edited by Madeleine
Forey (London: Penguin 2002).
Gross, Kenneth, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca NY &
London: Cornell University Press 1992).

151
 Ovid

Hardie, Philip, Barchiesi, Alessandro and Hinds, Stephen, Ovidian

Transformations: Essays on Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Reception
(Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society 1999).
Hardie, Philip, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2002).
Hardie, Philip, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2002).
Heath, John, Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder: The Myth and its
Meaning in Classical Literature (New York: P. Lang 1992).
Heritier, Fran<;oise, Two Sisters and their Mother: The Anthropology of
Incest (New York & London: Zone 1999).
Hofmann, Michael, and Lasdun, James, After Ovid (London, Faber
& Faber 1994).
Hopkins, David, ed., Ovid (London: Everyman 1998).
Hughes, Ted, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber & Faber 1997).
James, Henry, Complete Stories, 5 vols (New York: Literary Classics
of the United States 1999), vol. 1.
Joshua, Essaka, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History ofa Narrative in
English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001).
Klindienst Joplin, Patricia, 'The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours',
Stanford Literature Review 1.1. (1984), pp. 25-53.
Liveley, Genevieve, 'Reading Resistance in Ovid's Metamorphoses', in
Hardie (1999), pp. 197-213.
Lyne, Raphael, Ovid's Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses,
1567-1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001).
Macfie, Pamela Royston, 'Ovid, Arachne, and the Poetics of
Paradise', in The Poetry of Allusion: Ovid and Virgil in Dante's
Commedia, edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp
(Stanford: Stanford University Press 1991).
Mack, Sara, Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press 1988).
Martin, Christopher, ed., Ovid in English (London: Penguin 1998).
Martindale, Charles, Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature
and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988).

152
 WOrks Cited and Consulted

Melville, A.D., Ovid's Metamorphoses {Oxford: Oxford University

Press 1987).
Miles, Geoffrey, Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical
Anthology (London & New York: Routledge 1999).
Miller,]. Hillis, Versions ofPygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press 1990).
Ovid, The Art of Love, translated by J.H. Mozeley (London:
Heinemann 1985).
Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by F.J. Miller (London: Heinemann
1984).
Richlin, Amy, 'Reading Ovid's Rapes', in Pornography and
Representation in Greece and Rome, edited by Amy Richlin
{New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), pp. 158-
79.
Sandys, George, Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished (Oxford 1632).
Sawday, Jonathan, 'Towards the Renaissance Computer', in The
Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of
Print, edited by Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London &
New York: Routledge 2000), pp. 29-44.
Slavitt, David, The Metamorphoses of Ovid (Baltimore & London:
Johns Hopkins University Press 1994).
Solodow, Joseph B., The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1988).
Terry, Philip, ed., Ovid Metamorphosed (London: Vintage 200 1).
Vicious, Martha, 'Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All
Facts and No Theory?', in Radical History Review, 60 (1994), pp.
57-75.
Warner, Marina, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: "Ways of
Telling the Seif(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002).
Wertenbaker, Timberlake, The Love ofthe Nightingale; and The Grace
ofMary Traverse (London: Faber & Faber 1989).
Wheeler, Stephen M., A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and
Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press 1999).

153
 Ovid

Wilkinson, L.P., Ovid Recalled (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press 1955).
Zissos, Andrew and Gildenhard, Ingo, 'Problems of Time in
Metamorphoses 2', in Hardie (1999), pp. 48-67.

154
 Index

Achelolis, 37 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 46

Adam, 52 Bersuire, Pierre, 12, 52
Aesacus, 37 bestiality, 79-81
Aeschylus, 120-1 Bible, 90-1
Alcott, Louisa M., 87 Blade Runner, 140-3
Allston, Washington, 136 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 80
Ana:xarete, 14 Boehrer, Thomas, 79-80
Antinous, 132 Bold, Henry, 54
Apuleius, 80 Boreas, 145
A(iadne, 11 0 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11
Argus, 30 boundaries, 18-20
Atalanta, 3 7 Boyce, Samuel, 103
Atwood, Margaret, 67, 72, 129 Brome, Alexander, 76
Austen, Jane, 24 Byatt, A.S., 79-80
artists, 8, 70, 105-21 passim, 123- Byblis, 17-18
42 passim
Augustus, 7, 13, 19, 27, 74-5, 108, Callimachus, 14
132 Callisto, 7
Adonis, 37, 80-1 Caner, Elizabeth, 59
Actaeon, 7, 28, 34, 67-83 Cassandra, 55
Arachne, 8, 28, 41, 105-21 Catullus, 11
Aeneas,9,21, 108 Ceyx and Alcyone, 7, 14, 16
Apollo and Daphne, 7-8, 17, 30, Charles II, 54
42-3, 45-66, 70, 76 Chaucer, Geofhey, 9, 31, 109,
Andromeda, 21, 34 127-8, 144
Cinyras, 128
Bacchus, 39, 40, 88-9 Circe, 33
Barnfield, Richard, 55 Clytemnestra, 120
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 144 Cocteau, Jean, 10
Behn, Aphra, 58, 60-2, 81-2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8, 119-20
Belben, Rosalind, 23 Coleridge, Sara, 119-20
Bernard of Clairvaux, 12 Cotton, Charles, 129-30

155
 Ovid

Croxall, Samuel, 95, 101 Golden Age, 18

Cupid, 45, 47 Golding, Arthur, 100, 111-13
Cyparissus, 112 Goodall, Charles, 59

Daedalus, 32, 105 Hadrian, 132

D'Aguiar, Fred, 21-2 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider, 77
Dante, 9, 25, 114-5, 117 Hamilton, A.C., 116
Daphne, 7-8, 17, 30, 42-3,45-66, Handel, George Frideric, 46
70, 76 Hardy, Thomas, 28
Darwin, Erasmus, 107 'H.D.',60
Deianira, 35 Heath, John, 71
Denham, Sir John, 78 Helen, 29
Diana, 26, 34, 42, 67-83 Hermes, 133-4
Diana, Princess of Wales, 67-8, 72 Herse, 25
Dickens, Charles, 29 Hippolytus, 96
Dickinson, Emily, 63 Hitchcock, Alfred, 137-9
Dido, 21,29 Hofmann and Lasdun, After Ovid,
Disney: Hercules, 26, 51 21,46,144
Doctor Who, 125 Homer, 23
homosexuality, 31-2, 36, 80-3, 85-
Echo, 17
104 passim, 127, 131-6
Elizabeth I, 72
Hopkins, John, 97
Euripides, 88-9
Horace, 14
Europa,36, 106,109,110
Hovey, Kate, 107
Eurydice, 10, 35, 52, 127
Hughes, Ted, 10, 96-7, 140
Eve, 52, 86, 104
humour, 24-6, 31-2, 33,34-6, 37,
Fenton, Elijah, 103 48
Finch, Anne, 103, 118-19 Hussain, Saddam, 124
Fletcher, John, 78 Hyacinthus, 60
flood, 19,28,38,145
Forbes, Bryan, 137 Icarus, 7
Forbidden Planet, 11-12 incest, 81, 87-104, 128
Freud, Sigmund, 124 Io, 24, 30, 40, 70, 71, 119-20
Fulton, Alice, 45, 46-7, 56, 62-3 Iphis and Ianthe, 31-2
Isis, 32
Gascoigne, George, 93-5 ltys, 41, 86, 101
genre, 14-15
gods, 23-8, I 08 Jacob, 90
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 9 James, Henry, 131-6

156
 Index

Jentsch, Ernst, 124 metamorphosis, 15-18, 22, 27, 32,

John of Garland, 52 39-40, 56, 69, 76-7
Jonson, Ben, 112 metre, 15
Julius Caesar, 9, 13, 26 Miller, J.H., 131-2
Juno, 23-4, 30, 38, 108, 131-6 Milton, John, 86
Jupiter, 19, 24-5, 26, 27-8, 30, 36, Minerva, 32, 105-21
38,39,45.71,109-10 Moore, Thomas Sturge, 57
Motion, Andrew, 67-8, 72
Keats, John, 145 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 48
Kelly, Grace, 138 Mulciber, 126
Kemble, Fanny, 124-5 Muses, 117
Kipling, Rudyard, 14 Myrrha, 12, 17, 18, 128
Klindienst Joplin, Patricia, 102
Narcissus, 7, 15, 17, 145
Latona, 41-2 Neptune, 32, 109
Leda, 106 Nessus, 35
Lelex, 39, 40 Nicander of Colophon, 14
Levin, Ira, 137 Niobe, 22, 42
Liveley, Genevieve, 128-9 Nisus and Scylla, 41
Livia, 108 Novak, Kim, 137, 138
Lucian, 73-4
Lucretius, 14 Octavia, 108
Lycaon, 16, 24, 27-8, 71 Ocyrhoe, 145
Offenbach, Jacques, 10
Macfle, Pamela Royston, 115 Orestes, 120
Mack, Sara, 34 Orithyia, 145
Marlowe, Christopher, 82, 108 Orpheus, 10, 16, 17, 35-6, 37, 52,
Mars, 116 127, 132, 139
Marston, George, 126 Ovid,Arto[Love, 12, 13, 19, 29,
Marsyas, 42-3 50, 108; Heroides, 28-9
Marvell, Andrew, 56-7 Ovide Moralist, 12, 55
Mary, 12, 52
Mathias, Thomas, 78-9 Paglia, Camille, 82, 83
Matter ofLife and Death, A, 25-6 Pan, 30
Medea, 29-30 Pandion, 85
Medusa, 32, 34 Paris, 37
men, 33-6 Pasiphae, 31
Mercury, 25, 30, 39 Peneus, 45

157
 Ovid

Pentheus, 39, 40-1, 88-9 Rossetti, Christina, 87

Perseus, 21, 32, 34-5 Rushdie, Salman, 10
Phaedra, 96
Phaethon, 38 Saint, Eve Marie, 138
Philemon and Baucis, 39 Saje, Natasha, 85, 95
Philips, Katherine, 58-9 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 33
Philomela and Procne, 8, 41, 71, Sandys, George, 75, 96, 101
83, 85-104 Satan, 52-3
Philo-Philippa, 58-9 Sawday, Jonathan, 114
Pierides, 117 Scott, Ridley, 140-2
Pirithoils, 39 Scylla, 39
Plath, Sylvia, 65-6 Semele, 25
Plutarch, 89 Sexton, Anne, 63-5, 66
Pluto, 35 Shakespeare, 9, 10, 11-12, 22, 29-
Poe, Edgar Allen, 136-7 30,49, 50, 65,76-81, 110-11,
Pomona, 9 123, 126, 144
Powell and Pressburger, 25-6 Shelley, Mary, 78, 123-4, 139-40
Pratchett, Terry, 25 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 143
Propoetides, 128-9 Simpsons, The, 11
Proserpina, 35, 86, 104 Sisson, Charles, 81, 130-1
Proust, Marcel, 9 Slavitt, David, 69, 126
Pygmalion, 8, 14, 121, 123-42, Smith, Horace, 54-5
144, 145 sources, 11, 14
Pyramus and Thisbe, 10, 21, 22 Spencer, Earl, 67-8
Pyreneus, 34 Spenser, Edmund, 55, 72-4, 115-17
Pyrrha and Deucalion, 15, 38 Stepford Wives, The, 137
Pythagoras, 19-21, 39 Sterne, Laurence, 11
Stewart, James, 138
race, 21-3 Storer, Thomas, 113
Rachel, 90-1 Strauss, Richard, 46
Raiders ofthe Lost Ark, 35 Stravinsky, Igor, 144
rape, 28, 32, 48-50, 58, 61-2, 67, Straw Dogs, 48
70, 71-2, 86, 89-90, 98-100, structure, 9-10, 36-43
103, 106, 109, 128 Scuart-Wortley, Emmeline, 113-14
Richardson, Samuel, 48 style, 11-12
Robertson, James, 130, 137 Swift, Jonathan, 54-5
Roe, Sue, 29 Syrinx, 30
Ross, Alexander, 107
Ross, Katharine, 137 Tereus, 16, 71, 85-104

158
 Index

Terry, Philip, 13, 22-3, 119 Wadsworth, William, 52-3

Thatcher, Margaret, 13 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 88, 90,
Theseus, 37, 39, 111 92,96,98
Titian, 43 West, Paul, 13
~st Side Story, 22
Velazquez, 110 Wheatley, Phillis, 22
Venus, 8, 26, 37, 80-1, 108, 116, Williams, Tennessee, 103-4
125, 128-9, 131, 132, 138 wordplay, 74, 95, 105-6, 113-14
Vertigo, 137-9 Wright, Mrs, 59
Vertumnus and Pomona, 9, 39-40 Wyndham, John, 42
Vicious, Martha, 85, 86
Virgil, 11, 14, 15
Vulcan, 116 Zissos, Andrew, 38

159