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Introduction

© Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0073.01

1. Ovid and His Times

Ovid, or (to give him his full Roman name) Publius Ovidius Naso, was born in 43 BCE to a prominent equestrian family in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), a small town about 140 km east of Rome. He died in banishment, a resident of Tomi on the Black Sea, in 17 CE. Ovid was one of the most prolific authors of his day, as well as one of the most controversial.1 He had always been constitutionally unable to write anything in prose — or so he claims in his autobiography (composed, of course, in verse). Whatever flowed from his pen was in metre, even after his father had told him to put an end to such nonsense:

saepe pater dixit ‘studium quid inutile temptas?
Maeonides2 nullas ipse reliquit opes’.

motus eram dictis, totoque Helicone3 relicto
scribere temptabam verba soluta modis.

sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
et quod temptabam dicere versus erat.

(Trist. 4.10.21–26)

My father often said, ‘Why try a useless
Vocation? Even Homer left no wealth’.

So I obeyed, all Helicon abandoned,
And tried to write in prose that did not scan.

But poetry in metre came unbidden,
And what I tried to write in verses ran.

(tr. Melville)

Students of Latin may well be familiar with Naso senior’s banausic attitude: classics graduates, some wrongly assume, have similarly dismal career prospects. But eventually Ovid would shrug off paternal disapproval in pursuit of his passion. After dutifully filling certain minor offices, he chose not to go on to the quaestorship, thereby definitively renouncing all ambition for a senatorial career. In his case, the outcome was an oeuvre for the ages. For quick orientation, here is a time-line with the basics:4

Time-line	Historical Events	Ovid’s Biography	Literary History
50s BCE			Catullus, Lucretius
44	Julius Caesar murdered
43	Cicero murdered	Ovid born
30s			[Gallus Amores 1–4 (lost)], Horace Epodes
35			Virgil Eclogues Horace Satires 1
31	Battle of Actium
29			Virgil Georgics
27	Octavian becomes ‘Augustus’
Time-line	Historical Events	Ovid’s Biography	Literary History
Early 20s			Livy 1–10
20s			Propertius 1–3, Tibullus 1, Horace Odes 1–3, Epistles 1
19			Virgil Aeneid, Tibullus 1–2
18	Leges Iuliae (initial Augustan marriage legislation)
17	Secular Games; Augustus adopts Gaius and Lucius		Horace Carmen Saeculare
16			Propertius 4
10s–0s		Amores 1–3, Heroides, Medicamina faciei femineae, Medea (a lost tragedy)	Horace Ars Poetica, Epistles 2, Odes 4
2 BCE		Ars Amatoria 1–2
1 CE	Birth of Jesus
2		Ars Amatoria 3 and Remedia Amoris
4	Augustus adopts Tiberius
8	Scandal at court; Augustus relegates Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea	Finished just before the relegation (?): Metamorphoses 1–15, Fasti 1–6
8–17		Tristia 1–5, Epistulae ex Ponto 1–4, Ibis, Double Heroides
14	Augustus dies; Tiberius accedes
10s			Manilius Astronomica
17 (?)		Ovid dies	Livy dies

Ovid was born when the Republic, the oligarchic system of government that had ruled Rome for centuries, was in its death throes. He was a teenager at the time of the Battle of Actium, the final showdown between Mark Antony and Octavian that saw the latter emerge victorious, become the first princeps, and eventually take the honorific title ‘Augustus’ by which he is better known to posterity. Unlike other major poets of the so-called ‘Augustan Age’ — Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus — Ovid never experienced a fully functional form of republican government, the libera res publica in whose cause figures like Cato and even Cicero ultimately died. There is another important difference between Ovid and most of the other major Augustan poets: he did not have a ‘patron-friend’, such as Maecenas (a close adviser of the princeps who, in the 30s, ‘befriended’ Virgil, Horace and Propertius) or Messalla, the amateur poet and power-politician to whom Tibullus dedicates his poetry. Ovid came from a prominent family and was financially self-sufficient: this left him free — or so he must have thought — to let rip his insouciant imagination.

A consummate urbanite, Ovid enjoyed himself and was an immensely popular figure in the fashionable society of Augustan Rome. He was more than happy to endorse the myth that the founding hero Aeneas and thus the city itself had Venus in their DNA (just spell Roma backwards!). For him Rome was first and foremost the city of Love and Sex and his (early) verse reads like an ancient version of ‘Sex and the City’.

Eventually, though, Ovid ran afoul of the regime. In 8 CE, when he was fifty years old, Ovid was implicated in a lurid court scandal that also involved Augustus’ niece Julia and was relegated by the emperor to Tomi, a town on the Black Sea (the sea-port Constanța in present-day Romania).5 The reasons, so Ovid himself tells us, were a ‘poem and a mistake’ (‘carmen et error’, Trist. 2.207). He goes on to identify the poem as the Ars Amatoria — which had, however, been published a full ten years earlier — but declines to elaborate on the ‘mistake’, on the grounds that it would be too painful for Augustus. He maintained this reticent pose for the rest of his life, so what the error was is now anybody’s guess (and many have been made). In any event, despite Ovid’s pleas the hoped-for recall never came, even after the death of Augustus, and he was forced to pine away the rest of his life far from his beloved Rome. He characterizes Tomi as a primitive and dreary town, located in the middle of nowhere, even though archaeological evidence suggests that it was a pleasant seaside resort. And while his poetry continued to flow, it did so in a very different vein from the light-hearted exuberance that characterizes his earlier ‘Roman’ output; the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto explore the potential of the elegiac distich (a verse-form consisting of a six-foot hexameter and a five-foot pentameter in alternation: the metre of mourning as well as love) to articulate grief. But on his career trajectory from eros to exile, Ovid made forays into non-elegiac genres: tragedy (his lost play Medea) and, of course, epic. In the following section we will explore Ovid’s playful encoding, in a range of texts, of his longstanding epic ambition and its final realization in the Metamorphoses.

2. Ovid’s Literary Progression: Elegy to Epic

When the first edition of the Metamorphoses hit the shelves in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city.6 His official debut, the Amores (‘Love Affairs’) lured his tickled readers into a freewheeling world of elegiac love, slaphappy hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery.7 His subsequent Heroides (‘Letters written by Heroines to their absent Hero-Lovers’) were also designed to appeal to connoisseurs of elegiac poetry, who could here share vicariously in stirring emotional turmoil with abandoned women of history and myth: Ovid, well attuned to female plight, provided the traditional heroes’ other (better?) halves with a literary forum for voicing feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing resentment for the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, the Medicamina Faciei (‘Ointments of the Face, or, How to Apply Make-up’). Once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic exposition, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimed erotodidaskalos (‘teacher of love’) presented in his Ars Amatoria (‘A — Z of Love’) his male (and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true ‘jouissance’ (the French term for orgasmic bliss, for the sophisticates among you) in the act of reading a work, which is, as one critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’.8

After these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, Ovid’s ancient readers, by then all hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote he offers in the form of the therapeutic Remedia Amoris (‘Cures for Love’), a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid. To cut a long story short: by the time the Metamorphoses were published, Ovid’s devotees had had ample opportunity to revel in the variety of his literary output about the workings of Eros, and each time, the so-called elegiac distich provided the metrical form. Publius Ovidius Naso had become, apart from a brief flirtation with the genre of tragedy (the lost Medea, written in Latin iambic trimeters), a virtual synonym for the composition of erotic-elegiac verse. But picking up and un-scrolling any one of the fifteen books that contained the Metamorphoses, a reader familiar with Ovid’s literary career is in for a shock. Here are the first four lines of the work, which make up its proem:

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas

corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa)

adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi

ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

(Met. 1.1–4)

My mind compels me to sing of shapes changed into new bodies: gods, on my endeavours (for you have changed them too) breathe your inspiration, and from the very beginning of the world to my own times bring down this continuous song.

A mere glance at the layout (no indentations in alternate lines!) suffices to confirm that Ovid has definitively changed poetic metiers (as the ‘change’ of verse between formas and corpora makes a ‘new’ syntactical role for the opening phrase In nova).9 In his newest work the foreshortened pentameters, which until now had been a defining characteristic of his poetry, have disappeared. Instead, row upon steady row of sturdy and well-proportioned hexameters confront the incredulous reader. Ovid, the celebrated master of the distich, the notorious tenerorum lusor amorum (‘the playboy of light-hearted love-poetry’ as he calls himself), the unrivalled champion of erotic-elegiac poetry, has produced a work written in ‘heroic verse’ — as the epic metre is portentously called.

But once the initial shock has worn off, readers familiar with Ovid’s earlier output are bound to experience a sense of déjà vu (as the French say of what they have seen before). Ovid, while devoting his previous career to versifying things erotic, had always shown an inclination towards epic poetry. Already in the introductory elegy to the first book of the Amores, the neophyte announced that he was writing elegies merely by default. His true ambition lay elsewhere; he had actually meant to write an epic:

Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.

par erat inferior versus — risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

(Am. 1.1.1–4)

About arms and violent wars I was getting ready to compose in the weighty hexameter. The material matched the metrical form: the second verse was of equal length to the first — but Cupid (they say) smiled and snatched away one of the feet.10

As can be gathered from pointed allusions to the Aeneid (which begins Arma virumque cano: ‘I sing of arms and the man’) at the opening, the poem Ovid set out to write before Cupid intervened would have been no routine piece of work, but rather an epic of such martial grandeur as to challenge Virgil’s masterpiece. Ovid’s choice of the hexameter for the Metamorphoses signals that he has finally realized his long-standing ambition to compose an epic. But already the witty features of the proem (starting with its minuscule length: four meagre lines for a work of fifteen books!) indicate that his embrace of the genre is to be distinctly double-edged. And, indeed, his take on epic is as unconventional as his efforts in elegiac and didactic poetry had been. Just as the Amores spoofed the more serious output of his elegiac predecessors Propertius and Tibullus and his string of didactic works (the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei) spoofed more serious ventures in the genre such as Virgil’s Georgics (a poem on farming), so the Metamorphoses has mischievous fun with, while at the same time also outperforming, the Greco-Roman epic tradition from Homer to Virgil. It is arguably the most unusual epic to have come down to us from antiquity — as well as one of the most influential.

3. The Metamorphoses: A Literary Monstrum

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid parades a truly dazzling array of mythological and (as the epic progresses) historical matter before his audience. Aristotelian principles of narrative unity and ‘classical’ plotting have clearly fallen by the wayside. In breathtaking succession, the fast-paced narrative takes his readers from the initial creation myths to the gardens of Pomona, from the wilful intrusion of Amor into his epic narrative in the Apollo and Daphne episode to the ill-starred marriage feast of Pirithous and Hippodame (ending in an all out brawl, mass-slaughter, and a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ scene between two centaurs), from the Argonauts’ voyage to Colchis to Orpheus’ underworld descent (to win back his beloved Eurydice from the realms of the dead), from the charming rustic couple Philemon and Baucis to the philosopher Pythagoras expounding on nature and history, from the creative destruction of Greek cultural centres such as Thebes in the early books to the rise of Rome and the apotheosis of the Caesars at the end. As Ovid proceeds through this remarkable assortment of material, the reader traverses the entire cosmos, from the top of Mount Olympus where Jupiter presides over the council of the gods to the pits of Tartarus where the dreadful Furies hold sway, from far East where, at dawn, Sol mounts his fiery chariot to far West where his son Phaethon, struck by Jupiter’s thunderbolt, plunges headlong into the Eridanus river. Within the capacious geographical boundaries of his fictional world, Ovid’s narrative focus switches rapidly from the divine elegiac lover Apollo to the resolute virgin Diana, from the blasphemer Lycaon to the boar slaying Meleager, from the polymorphic sexual exploits of Pater Omnipotens to the counterattacks of his vengeful wife Juno. At one point the poet flaunts blameless Philomela’s severed tongue waggling disconcertingly on the ground, at another he recounts the dismemberment of the Thessalian tyrant Pelias at the hands of his devoted daughters. On a first encounter the centrifugal diversity of the narrative material which Ovid presents in his carmen perpetuum (‘continuous song’) is bound to have a disorienting, even unsettling effect on the reader. How is anyone to come to critical terms with the astonishing variety of narrative configurations that Ovid displays in this ever-shifting poetic kaleidoscope?11

3a. Genre Matters

The hexametric form, the cosmic scope and the sheer scale of the Metamorphoses all attest to its epic affiliations. As just discussed, the poem’s opening verses seem to affirm that Ovid realized his longstanding aspiration to match himself against Virgil in the most lofty of poetic genres. But as soon as one scratches the surface, myriad difficulties emerge. Even if we choose to assign the Metamorphoses to the category of epic poetry, idiosyncrasies abound. A tabular comparison with other well-known instances of the genre brings out a few of its fundamental oddities:

Author	Title	Length	Main Theme	Protagonist
Homer	Iliad	24 Books	Wrath and War	Achilles
Homer	Odyssey	24 Books	Return/Civil War	Odysseus
Apollonius Rhodius	Argonautica	4 Books	Travel and Adventure	Jason
Ennius	Annals	15/18 Books	Men and their deeds	Roman nobles
Virgil	Aeneid	12 Books	Arms and the Man	Aeneas
Ovid	Metamorphoses	15 Books	Transformation	?

The tally of fifteen books, while deviating from the ‘multiple-of-four-or-six’ principle canonized by Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and Virgil, at least has a precedent in Ennius’ Annals.12 But Ovid’s main theme and his choice of protagonist are decidedly peculiar (as will be discussed in the following sections). And then there is the playfulness of the narrative, its pervasive reflexivity, and its often arch or insouciant tone — elements largely absent from earlier instantiations of the genre. ‘The Metamorphoses is perhaps Ovid’s most innovative work, an epic on a majestic scale that refuses to take epic seriously’.13 Indeed, the heated and ultimately inconclusive debate that has flared up around the question of whether the Metamorphoses is an epic, an eroticization of epic, a parody of epic, a conglomeration of genres granted equal rights, an epic sui generis or simply a poem sui generis might seem to indicate that Ovid has achieved a total breakdown of generic conventions, voiding the validity of generic analysis altogether. Karl Galinsky once cautioned that ‘it would be misguided to pin the label of any genre on the Metamorphoses’.14 But does Ovid, in this poem, really dance outside genre altogether? Recent scholarship on the Metamorphoses suggests that the answer is ‘no’. Stephen Hinds articulates the issue at stake very well; in reconsidering the classic distinction between Ovidian epic and elegy, he remarks that

… in the opening lines [of the Metamorphoses], the epic criterion is immediately established as relevant, even if only as a point of reference for generic conflict … Boundaries are crossed and recrossed as in no poem before. Elements characteristic of elegy, bucolic, didactic, tragedy, comedy and oratory mingle with elements variously characteristic of the grand epic tradition and with each other … However, wherever its shifts may take it, the metre, bulk and scope of the poem ensures that the question implied in that opening paradox will never be completely eclipsed: namely in what sense is the Metamorphoses an epic?15

In other words, denying the Metamorphoses the status of epic (or at least epic aspiration) means depriving the text of one of its most intriguing constitutive tensions. Ovid needs the seriousness, the ideology and the reputation of epic as medium for his frivolous poetics, as the ultimate sublime for his exercise in generic deconstruction and as the conceptual matrix for the savvy of his metageneric artistry (i.e. artistry that self-consciously, if often implicitly, reflects on generic matters). Within this epic undertaking, most other genres find their place as well — not least in the set text where elements of epic, oratory, hymnic poetry, tragedy, and bucolic all register (and intermingle).

Scholars are again divided on how best to handle the multiplicity of generic voices that Ovid has included in the Metamorphoses. Are we perhaps dealing with ‘epic pastiche’? One critic answers in the affirmative: ‘For my purposes … the long poem in hexameters is a pastiche epic whose formal qualities are shaped by an invented genre that is at once ad hoc and sui generis, one with no real ancestors but with many and various offspring’.16 But another objects that ‘it is a mistake often made to identify one section of the Metamorphoses as “elegiac”, another as “epic”, another as “comic”, another as “tragic”, as if Ovid put together a pastiche of genres. Actually, elements of all these genres, and others as well, are as likely as not to appear together in any given story’.17 Arguably a more promising way to think critically about the generic presences in Ovid’s poem is to see the genres in dialogue with one another in ways that are mutually enriching.18 All genres have their own distinctive emphasis and outlook, and to have several of them at work at the same time challenges us, the readers, to negotiate sudden changes in register and perspective, keeping us on our toes.

3b. A Collection of Metamorphic Tales

Its hexametric form aside, the most striking formal feature of the Metamorphoses is that, as its title announces, it strings together a vast number of more or less distinct tales, each of which features a metamorphosis — that is, a magical or supernatural transformation of some kind. In composing a poem of this type, Ovid was working within a tradition of metamorphic literature that had blossomed a few centuries earlier in Hellenistic culture. In terms of his apparent generic aspirations, Ovid’s main theme (and hence his title) is unequivocally — and shockingly — unorthodox: before him, ‘transformative change’ was a subject principally cultivated in Hellenistic catalogue poetry, which is about as un-epic in scope and conception as literature can get.19

Nicander’s Heteroeumena (‘Changed Ones’), datable to the 2nd century BCE, is the earliest work dedicated to metamorphosis for which we have reliable attestations. The surviving fragments are scant, but valuable testimony is preserved in a prose compendium written by Antoninus Liberalis. The Heteroeumena was a poem in four or five books, written in dactylic hexameters, which narrated episodes of metamorphosis from disparate myths and legends, brought together in a single collection. An overarching concern was evidently to link tales of metamorphosis to the origin of local landmarks, religious rites or other cultural practices: Nicander’s stories were thus predominantly aetiological in orientation, very much like Callimachus’ Aetia. At the close of the Hellenistic period, Greek metamorphosis poetry evidently found its way to Rome, along with its authors. So, for example, Parthenius, the Greek tutor to Virgil, who came to Rome in 65 BCE, composed a Metamorphoses in elegiacs, about which we unfortunately know next to nothing.

Considered against this literary backdrop, Ovid’s initial announcement in the Metamorphoses that this would be a poem about ‘forms changed into different bodies’ (in nova … mutatas formas | corpora, 1.1–2) might well have suggested to a contemporary reader that Ovid was inscribing himself within a tradition of metamorphosis poetry tout court — setting himself up, that is, as the Roman exemplar of the sub-genre of Hellenistic metamorphosis catalogue poetry represented by such works as Nicander’s Heteroeumena. But Ovid’s epic was vastly more ambitious in conception, and proved to be no less revolutionary in design. Nicander’s Heteroeumena and other ‘collective’ metamorphosis poems from the Hellenistic period are characterized by a discontinuous narrative structure: each included tale constitutes a discrete entry, sufficient unto itself, so that the individual stories do not add up to an organic whole. Ovid’s Metamorphoses marks a radical departure from these predecessors: while each individual tale sports the qualities we associate with the refined and sophisticated, as well as small-scale and discontinuous, that Callimachus and other Hellenistic poets valued and cultivated, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.

What distinguishes the Metamorphoses from these precursors is that it is chronologically and thematically continuous. In strictly formal terms, it is this chronological framework that constitutes Ovid’s innovation within the tradition of ancient catalogue poetry. He marshals into a continuous epic narrative a vast assortment of tales of transformation, beginning with the creation of the cosmos and ending in his own times. Every ‘episode’ within this narrative thus needs to satisfy two conditions: (i) it must follow on from the preceding episode in some kind of temporal succession; (ii) it must contain a metamorphosis. The second condition is sometimes met by resort to ingenious devices. The set text is a case in point: the story of Pentheus, as inherited from Euripides and others, did not contain an ‘orthodox’ instance of metamorphosis, i.e. of a human being transforming into flora, fauna, or an inanimate object (though of course it does feature the changeling god Bacchus in human disguise and hallucinating maenads who look at Pentheus only to see a wild animal). To make good this deficiency, Ovid includes an inset narrative told by the character Acoetes, who delivers, as a cautionary tale for Pentheus, a long-winded account of how Bacchus once transformed a group of wicked Etruscan pirates into dolphins. Now some readers, particularly those coming to Ovid from the earlier tradition of metamorphic catalogue poetry, might regard this as ‘cheating’; others, however, might appreciate the ingenuity with which Ovid explores the limits and possibilities of metamorphosis, combining orthodox instances of transformative change with related phenomena, such as divine allophanies (‘appearances in disguise’) or hallucinations (‘transformations in the eyes of a beholder, based on misperception of reality that is nevertheless frightfully real in its consequences’). What is at any rate remarkable is that such ‘tricks’ as Acoetes’ inset narrative are comparatively rare: on the whole, the Metamorphoses meets the daunting, seemingly impossible, challenge of fashioning, in the traditional epic manner, an ‘unbroken song’ (perpetuum … carmen, 1.4) from disparate tales of transformation.

3c. A Universal History

Ovid’s epic is a work of breathtaking ambition: it gives us nothing less than a comprehensive vision of the world — both in terms of nature and culture (and how they interlock). The Metamorphoses opens with a cosmogony and offers a cosmology: built into the poem is an explanation (highly idiosyncratic, to be sure) of how our physical universe works, with special emphasis on its various metamorphic qualities and possibilities. And it is set up as a universal history that traces time from the moment of creation to the Augustan age — or, indeed, beyond. In his proem Ovid promises a poem of cosmic scale, ranging from the very beginning of the universe (prima ab origine mundi) down to his own times (ad mea tempora).20 He embarks upon an epic narrative that begins with the creation of the cosmos and ends with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. The poet’s teleological commitment to a notional ‘present’ (the Augustan age in which the epic was composed) qua narrative terminus is subtly reinforced by frequent appeals to the contemporary reader’s observational experience. The result is a cumulatively compelling sequence that postures, more or less convincingly, as a chronicle of the cosmos in all its pertinent facets.

Taken in its totality, Ovid’s epic elevates the phenomenon of metamorphosis from its prior status as a mythographic curiosity to an indispensable mechanism of cosmic history, a fundamental causal element in the evolution of the universe and the story of humanity: the Metamorphoses offers not a mere concatenation of marvellous transformations, but a poetic vision of the world conceived of as fundamentally and pervasively metamorphic.

The claim that the Metamorphoses amounts to a universal history may well sound counterintuitive, and for two reasons in particular. First, chronology sometimes seems to go awry — not least through the heavy use of embedded narrative — so that the audience is bound to have difficulty keeping track of the trajectory that proceeds from elemental chaos at the outset to the Rome of Augustus at the end. But upon inspection, it turns out that Ovid has sprinkled important clues into his narrative that keep the final destination of his narrative in the minds of (attentive) readers.21 The second puzzle raised by the historical orientation of Ovid’s epic concerns its principal subject matter: instances of transformative change that are clearly fictional. Ovid himself concedes as much. In one of his earlier love elegies, Amores 3.12, he laments the fact that, owing to the success of his poetry, his girlfriend Corinna has become the toast of Rome’s would-be Don Giovannis. Displeased with the prospect of romantic competition, he admonishes would-be rivals to read his love elegies with the same incredulity they routinely bring to bear on mythic fabulae — and proceeds to belabour the point in what almost amounts to a blueprint of the Metamorphoses (Am. 3.12.19–44). Ovid’s catalogue of unbelievable tales includes Scylla, Medusa, Perseus and Pegasus, gigantomachy, Circe’s magical transformation of Odysseus’ companions, Cerberus, Phaethon, Tantalus, the transformations of Niobe and Callisto, Procne, Philomela, and Itys, the self-transformations of Jupiter prior to raping Leda, Danaë, and Europa, Proteus, and the Spartoi that rose from the teeth of the dragon slain by Cadmus at the future site of Thebes. The catalogue culminates in the punchline that just as no one really believes in the historical authenticity of such tales, so too readers should be disinclined to take anything he says about Corinna at face value:22

Exit in inmensum fecunda licentia vatum,
obligat historica nec sua verba fide.

et mea debuerat falso laudata videri
femina; credulitas nunc mihi vestra nocet.

(Am. 3.12.41–43)

The creative licence of the poets knows no limits, and does not constrain its words with historical faithfulness. My girl ought to have seemed falsely praised; I am undone by your credulity.

The same attitude towards tales of transformative change informs his retrospect on the Metamorphoses at Trist. 2.63–64, where Ovid adduces the implausibility of the stories contained within his epic: Inspice maius opus, quod adhuc sine fine tenetur, | in non credendos corpora uersa modos (‘Look at the greater work, which is as of yet unfinished, bodies transformed in ways not to be believed’). As one scholar has observed, ‘a critic could hardly wish for a more explicit denial of the reality of the myth-world of the Metamorphoses’.23

In light of how Ovid presents the theme of metamorphosis elsewhere (including moments of auto-exegesis, where he tells his own story), it comes as no surprise that ‘the Metamorphoses’ challenges to our belief in its fictions are relentless, for Ovid continually confronts us with such reminders of his work’s fictional status’.24 But this feature of his text is merely the result of his decision to write fiction as history. Put differently, what is so striking about his project is not that Ovid is writing self-conscious fiction. Rather, it is his paradoxical insistence that his fictions are historical facts. From the start, Ovid draws attention to, and confronts, the issue of credibility. A representative instance comes from his account of how Deucalion and Pyrrha replenish the earth’s human population after its near extermination in the flood by throwing stones over their shoulders:

saxa (quis hoc credat, nisi sit pro teste vetustas?)

ponere duritiem coepere …

(Met. 1.400–01)

The stones (who would believe this if the age of the tale did not function as witness?) began to lose their hardness …

In his parenthetical remark Ovid turns vetustas (‘old age’) into a criterion for veritas (‘truth’), slyly counting on, while at the same time subverting, the Roman investment in tradition, as seen most strikingly in the importance afforded to exempla and mores maiorum (that is, ‘instances of exemplary conduct and ancestral customs’). His cheeky challenge to see fictions as facts (and the ensuing question of belief) accompanies Ovid’s characters (and his readers) throughout the poem, including the set text, where Pentheus refuses to believe the cautionary tale of Bacchus’ transformation of the Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins — with fatal consequences.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that some of the narrative material is historical. The reader must remain ever alert to the programmatic opening declaration that the Metamorphoses will proceed chronologically from the birth of the universe to the poet’s own times (Met. 1.3–4, cited and discussed above). Ovid is, in other words, combining myth and history, with the latter coming to the fore in the final books, which document the rise of Rome. The end of the Metamorphoses celebrates the ascendancy of Rome to world-empire: terra sub Augusto est (‘the world lies under Augustus’, 15.860) observes Ovid laconically of the comprehensive sway of Roman rule in his own day (15.876–77). This is presented as a culminating moment in world history.

The combination of myth and history was, of course, hardly new. The Hebrew Bible, to name just one precedent, began in the mythological realm with Genesis, proceeded to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the deluge, and so on before moving on to more overtly historical material. And whereas this was long considered (and in some quarters still is considered) a historical document throughout, Ovid, as we have seen, is more willing to probe the implausibility of the traditional mythological tales that he has placed side-by-side with historical material. But readers of the Metamorphoses should be wary of placing too much stock in the dichotomy of myth and history. From an ideological perspective, the real issue is less the truth-value of specific events narrated in the epic, than the way they make sense of — and shape perceptions of — the world. The subtle anticipations of Roman geopolitical domination in Ovid’s early books are scarcely less significant for being embedded in Greek mythology. A case in point arises in the opening book, where Jupiter summons all the gods in assembly in reaction to perceived human depravity, as epitomized in the barbarous conduct of Lycaon. Here, it would appear, Ovid puts on display his generic bona fides: any ancient epic worthy of the name could hardly omit a concilium deorum. From Homer onwards an assembly of the gods had been an almost compulsory ingredient of the genre.25 But for all the seeming conventionality of his set-up, Ovid provides a decidedly eccentric rendition of the type-scene. The oddities begin with a striking account of the summoned divinities hastening along the Milky Way to the royal abode of Jupiter:

Est via sublimis, caelo manifesta sereno;

lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso.

hac iter est superis ad magni tecta Tonantis

regalemque domum: dextra laevaque deorum

atria nobilium valvis celebrantur apertis.

plebs habitat diversa loca: hac parte potentes

caelicolae clarique suos posuere penates;

hic locus est, quem, si verbis audacia detur,

haud timeam magni dixisse Palatia caeli.

(Met. 1.168–76)

There is a highway, easily seen when the sky is clear. It is called the Milky Way, famed for its shining whiteness. By this way the gods come to the halls and royal dwelling of the mighty Thunderer. On either side the palaces of the gods of higher rank are thronged with guests through folding-doors flung wide. The lesser gods dwell apart from these. In this neighbourhood the illustrious and mighty heaven-dwellers have placed their household gods. This is the place which, if I made bold to say it, I would not fear to call the Palatine of high heaven.

In these lines, Ovid describes a celestial Rome. Jupiter’s abode, the palace of the great ruler, is situated on a heavenly Palatine; the Milky Way is like the Sacer Clivus which led from the Via Sacra to the Palatine Hill in Rome, where of course Augustus lived. As with the Romans, the gods are divided into nobles and plebeians; the former have magnificent and well-situated abodes, complete with atria teeming with clientes; the latter must make do with more humble and obscure quarters. More strikingly, celestial patricians and plebs alike have their penates (household gods).26 And the analogies don’t end there. The assembly that meets in Jupiter’s palace follows procedures that are recognizably those of the Roman Senate.27 Indeed, ‘the correspondence with Augustan Rome is particularly close at this point, since we know that Augustus held Senate meetings in the library attached to his temple of Apollo on the Palatine, which was itself intricately linked with his residence’.28

The comical audacity of this sequence has elicited reams of commentary. Since Homer, the traditional epic practice was to model divine existence on human analogy, but to attribute household gods (penates) to the Olympian gods themselves is humorously to extend and expose the convention.29 At the same time, though, Ovid achieves a more profound effect, for the episode hints at a kind of politico-historical telos: the Olympian political structures and those of contemporary Rome are in homology. For all the humorous touches — and we certainly do not wish to deny them — Ovid has inscribed Augustan Rome into the heavens. Since Jupiter’s rule is to be eternal, there is an implication, by association, of a corresponding political-historical closure in human affairs. From the very beginning, then, the disconcerting thematic implications of potentially endless metamorphosis — which Pythagoras will assert as axiomatic for geopolitical affairs — are being countered or ‘contained’ with respect to Roma aeterna. Heaven has stabilized — the final challenges to the Jovian cosmos, those of giants and their like, are now ‘in the books’ — and will suffer no further political upheavals of significance. An equivalent state of affairs is subsequently to be achieved on the terrestrial level. The human realm will, over the course of Ovid’s narrative, evolve into the Jovian paradigm — which is already, by the comic solipsism just discussed, the Roman paradigm. The majestic declaration in the final book terra sub Augusto est (15.860) neatly signals that the princeps has achieved the Jovian analogy; this is the language of divine power, which is to say, the earth being ‘beneath’ Augustus makes both his power and figurative vantage point god-like.30

In writing a universal history, its eccentric narrative voice and hexametric form notwithstanding, Ovid is performing a peculiarly Roman operation. For some scholars, indeed, history first became universal in Roman times; on this view it was the creation of the Roman Empire that allowed history to become ‘global’ in a geographical sense.31 This version of history adopted more or less consciously an ethnocentric or ‘Romanocentric’ perspective that freely incorporated mythical elements in explaining Roman supremacy in terms of both surpassing virtus (making the Romans superior imperialists) and surpassing pietas (guaranteeing them the privileged support of the gods).

Together, the record of supernatural powers and transformed human beings that the Metamorphoses chronicles adds up to a unique combination of ‘natural’ and ‘universal’ history, in which cosmos and culture evolve together and eventually (in the form of a Roman civilization that has acquired global reach under Augustus) coincide.

3d. Anthropological Epic

To use the theme of metamorphosis as the basis for a universal history did not just strain, it shattered prevailing generic norms. From Homer to Virgil, the stuff of epic was war and adventure, heroes and their deeds; in Ovid, it is — a fictitious phenomenon.32 A related curiosity arises over the question of protagonist. In the other epics of our tabular comparison (see above, §3a), it is a simple matter to identify the main character or characters.33 That is decidedly not the case in the Metamorphoses: Ovid’s frequently un-heroic personnel changes from one episode to the next, to the point that some scholars have suggested that the hero of the poem is the poet himself — the master-narrator who holds (and thinks) everything together and, in so doing, performs a deed worthy of immortality.34 There is, to be sure, much to be gained from focusing on the ‘composition myth’ in this way, but it does not rule out pinpointing a protagonist on the level of plot as well. As Ernst Schmidt has argued, a plausible candidate for this designation is ‘the human being’.35

There are some difficulties with this suggestion (one might well ask: what about the gods?); but all in all the thesis that humanity as such takes centre-stage in the Metamorphoses is attractive and compelling. At its core, the poem offers a sustained meditation on what it is to be human within a broader cosmic setting shaped by supernatural agents and explores the potential of our species for good and for evil. These concerns (one could label them ‘anthropological’) are set up by the various forms of anthropogenesis (‘accounts of the origins of humanity’) in the early episodes, which trace our beginnings to such diverse material as earth and a divine spark, stones cast by mortal hands, and the blood of slain giants. From an ethical point of view, the outcomes are as diverse as the material: Ovid explores a wide gamut of possibilities, covering the full range from quasi-divine and ethically impeccable human beings (witness the blissful rectitude of the golden age at 1.83–112) to bestial and blasphemous (the version of our species that descended from the blood of giants, described at 1.156–62). In the Deucalion and Pyrrha story (a ‘pagan’ variant on the tale of Noah’s ark), Ovid makes the aetiological connection between the kind of material from which humanity is manufactured and our respective qualities explicit: originating from stones, ‘we are hence a hard race, experienced in toil, and so giving testimony to the source of our birth’ (inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum | et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati, 1.414–15). As the reader proceeds through the poem, encounters with such atrocious human beings as Tereus or such admirable individuals as Baucis and Philemon serve as vivid reminders that accursed and salvific elements are equally part of our DNA. A ‘rhetoric of origins’ also plays an important role in the set text: Pentheus tries to rally the citizens of Thebes against Bacchus and his entourage by reminding them of their descent from the teeth of the dragon of Mars (3.543–45) — a belated anthropogenesis on a local scale that re-enacts the opening theme at a later stage of cosmic history.

In line with both Ovid’s elegiac past and his ‘anthropological’ interest in humanity, the Metamorphoses is chock-full of sex and gender issues — though readers will have to venture beyond the set text to discover this: the chosen episode is relatively free from erotic entanglements. In fact, Ovid has in many ways ‘de-eroticized’ earlier versions of the Pentheus-myth, such as the one we find in Euripides’ Bacchae, which features cross-dressing, prurient interest in orgiastic sexuality, and voyeurism. But browse around a bit before or after the set text and you’ll see that Ovid never departs for long from erotic subject matter. You’ll find that, as discussed below (§5b-i), the sober figure of the blind seer Tiresias who introduces the Pentheus-episode first features in the poem as a divinely certified ‘sexpert’ on male and female orgasms. More generally, sex and gender are such pervasive preoccupations that one scholar has plausibly characterized the Metamorphoses as a ‘hymn to Venus’.36

3e. A Reader’s Digest of Greek and Latin Literature

In the process of laying out a vast body of mythic tales, both well known and recondite, Ovid’s Metamorphoses produces something like a ‘reader’s digest’ of Greek and Latin literature. Whichever authors came before him — Homer, Euripides, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, Ennius, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, you name them — he worked their texts into his own, often with a hilarious spin or a polemic edge. In Ovid, the literary heritage of Greece and Rome begins to swing. His poetics — his peculiar way of writing poetry — is as transformative as his choice of subject matter. In the Metamorphoses, one intertextual joke chases the next as Ovid puts his predecessors into place — turning them into inferior forerunners or footnotes to his own epic mischief. To appreciate this dimension of his poem requires knowledge of the earlier literature that Ovid engages with. In the set text, Ovid’s partners in dialogue include, but are by no means limited to, Homer, the author of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, Euripides, pseudo-Theocritus, Pacuvius (a 2nd-century BCE Roman tragic playwright whose work survives only in scant fragments), and Virgil. Even this partial enumeration, consisting as it does of authors and texts that have come down to us more or less intact as well as those that have all but vanished, points to an occupational hazard for anyone interested in literary dialogue: so much ancient literature that Ovid and his readers would have known intimately is lost to us. Literary critics (including the present writers: see below, §5a) will inevitably tend to stress the intertextual relationships between texts that have best survived the accidents of transmission (in our case: the Odyssey, Euripides’ Bacchae, the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, the pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 26, and Virgil’s Aeneid). So it is worth recalling that, as far as, say, tragic plays about Bacchus and Pentheus are concerned, Ovid would have had at his disposal not only Euripides’ Bacchae, but a number of other scripts that are lost to us or have only survived in bits and pieces, notably Pacuvius’ Pentheus. This does not invalidate the exercise of comparing Euripides and Ovid — far from it. Even if it is salutary to bear in mind that we are almost certainly seeing only part of the full network of intertextual relationships, we should take solace from the fact that, as John Henderson points out, ‘plenty of ancient Roman readers were in the same boat as us: Ovid catered for all levels, from newcomers to classical studies to impossibly learned old-stagers. And the main point remains, that, just as verse form always brings change to a tale, so too a myth can never be told in anything but a new version — stories forever mutate’.

The ‘reader’s digest’ effect of the Metamorphoses works in tandem with its cosmic scope, totalizing chronology and encyclopaedic ambition to endow it with a unique sense of comprehensiveness. More fundamentally still, Ovid’s epic codified and preserved for evermore one of antiquity’s earliest and most important ways of making sense of the universe: myth. As a result, it has become one of the most influential classics of all time: instances of reception are legion, as countless works of art that engage with the mythic heritage of antiquity found their ultimate inspiration in Ovid’s poetry. The Metamorphoses has been called ‘the Bible of artists and painters’ and ‘one of the cornerstones of Western culture’.37 It is virtually impossible to walk into any museum of note without encountering artworks that rehearse Ovidian themes; and his influence on authors, not least those of the first rank — from Dante to Petrarch, from Shakespeare to Milton — is equally pervasive.38 ‘Bible’ and ‘cornerstone’, though, with their implications of ponderous gravity and paradigmatic authority, are rather odd metaphors to apply to Ovid’s epic: they capture its importance through the ages, but unwittingly invert why the Metamorphoses has continued to resonate with so many creative geniuses (as well as the average reader). After all, Ovid’s intense exploration of erotic experience in all its polymorphous diversity and his vigorous celebration of transformative fluidity (or, indeed, eternal flux) in both nature and culture make of the poem a veritable counter-Bible, offering a decidedly unorthodox vision of the universe and its inhabitants.

It is a fundamental principle of narration, as John Henderson reminds us, that ‘a tale tells on its teller — all these stories came into Ovid’s mind-and-repertoire, and these are his versions, so “about” Ovid’. And (he adds) ‘tales mean to have designs on those on the receiving-end, and now that includes us, and that means you. There are many reasons why the Metamorphoses (plural) keep bulldozing their way through world culture, but this (singular) is what counts the most. As Horace put it: de te fabula narratur’.39

4. Ovid’s Theban Narrative

While some themes can be encountered virtually anywhere in the Metamorphoses, others cluster in certain parts and generate a distinctive narrative ethos. The first two books, for instance, have attracted the label ‘Divine Comedy’: they feature various sexual adventures of the Olympian gods — mostly rapes of mortal women. All cry out for a feminist critique, even if — or, better, because — the narrative tone remains fairly light throughout. With the beginning of Book 3, Ovid’s literary universe takes on a darker complexion. The first protagonist of the book is the Phoenician prince Cadmus, whose appearance is a carry-over from the concluding rape/abduction tale of the previous book. At the behest of his father Agenor, Cadmus attempts to track down his sister Europa, whom Jupiter had carried off at the end of Book 2 — a veritable mission impossible. Unsuccessful in his search and forbidden by his father to return home empty-handed, Cadmus heads into voluntary exile. His wanderings bring him to Boeotia where he founds Thebes, a city in which tragic and ultimately hellish energies are unleashed.40

Considered from the perspective of the ancient literary tradition, it is hardly coincidental that Ovid’s epic takes a ‘tragic’ turn as it turns to Theban myth. For in Attic drama, as Froma Zeitlin has demonstrated in a seminal essay, ‘Thebes consistently supplies the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.41 The city indeed epitomizes what Greek tragedy is all about. Judging from the surviving scripts of Athenian playwrights, daily life in ancient Thebes featured incessant civil strife, repeated autochthonous disaster, miscellaneous forms of sexual perversion (rape, sodomy, incest), and even the occasional human dismemberment (sparagmos) — in short, the entire range of transgressions that upset the normal order of things. To quote Zeitlin again: ‘Thebes, we might say, is the quintessential “other scene”, as Oedipus is the paradigm of tragic man and Dionysus is the god of the theatre. There Athens acts out questions crucial to the polis, the self, the family, and society, but there they are displaced upon a city that is imagined as the mirror opposite of Athens’.42 Ovid’s version of Thebes fully lives up to the anticipation of calamity evoked by the city’s longstanding tragic associations. As the fates of Cadmus and Harmonia, Actaeon, Semele, Narcissus, Pentheus, and Ino and Athamas show, the myths that Ovid here incorporates into his epic world have lost none of the sinister and fateful character that they had acquired on the tragic stage. These dramatis personae embark once more on a literary destiny within a tragic dystopia that inexorably leads them to their doom.

There is, indeed, a striking coherence to Met. 3.1–4.603, the narrative stretch that begins with Cadmus’ exile and ends with his and his wife Harmonia’s transformation into snakes (stories concerning the city’s founder and his offspring are in italics):

3.1–137	Foundation: Cadmus, his companions, the dragon of Mars, the Spartoi
3.138–252	Actaeon, son of Autonoe
3.253–315	Semele (birth of Bacchus)
3.316–38	Teiresias (and his sex-changes)
3.339–510	Echo and Narcissus
3.511–733	Pentheus, son of Agave (including the inset tale of Bacchus and the Tyrrhenian sailors)
4.1–415	The daughters of Minyas and Bacchus
4.55–388	Tales of the Minyeides:
	4.55–166	Pyramus and Thisbe
	4.169–270	The Love Affairs of the Sun
	4.276–388	Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
4.416–562	Ino and Athamas with Learchus and Melicertes
4.563–603	Cadmus & Harmonia: exile and transformation into snakes

Met. 3.1–4.603 has been termed Ovid’s Thebaid, insofar as it is the city of Thebes (and its environs) that provides a unifying thematic and topographical focus. Even when the narrative veers off — as in the case of Tiresias, Echo and Narcissus, and the daughters of Minyas (the ‘Minyeides’) — Thebes remains an important point of reference. So, for example, the Minyeides, who reside in the near-by city of Orchomenos, while in many ways forming a self-contained narrative unit within Ovid’s Thebaid, are unable to escape the tragic forces that emanate from Thebes. Not unlike Pentheus, they fall victim to the powers of Bacchus, whom they unwisely choose to disregard.

Clearly, then, Thebaid is an appropriate label for Met. 3.1–4.603; no less appropriate, though, would be Cadmeid (‘an epic poem about Cadmus and his offspring’), inasmuch as Ovid chronicles the fates of Cadmus and Harmonia, along with their four daughters and five grandsons:

Cadmus and Harmonia
Daughters	Autonoe	Semele	Agave	Ino
Grandsons	Actaeon	Bacchus (father: Jupiter)	Pentheus (father: Echion)	Learchus and Melicertes (father: Athamas)

Twice Cadmus himself comes into focus: his heroics get the Theban narrative going at the beginning of Book 3; and his despairing exit from the city together with his wife and the transformation of the couple into snakes brings this particular narrative unit to a close. This ‘frame’ is worth a more detailed look since it defines the thematic terms for the episodes it encloses, including the set text.

The opening sequence treats events up to the foundation of the city: Cadmus’ arrival in Boeotia, the slaughter of his companions by the dragon of Mars, Cadmus’ revenge-killing of the beast, his sowing of its teeth at the behest of a divine voice, the rise of the Spartoi and their mutual slaughter, which leaves only a handful of survivors — Thebes’ citizen population.43 Ovid skips over the actual foundation (and the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia), restricting himself to what amounts to a tragic prologue for the subsequent narrative:

Iam stabant Thebae, poteras iam, Cadme, videri

exilio felix: soceri tibi Marsque Venusque

contigerant; huc adde genus de coniuge tanta,

tot natos natasque et, pignora cara, nepotes,

hos quoque iam iuvenes; sed scilicet ultima semper

exspectanda dies hominis, dicique beatus

ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet.

Prima nepos inter tot res tibi, Cadme, secundas

causa fuit luctus …

(Met. 3.131–39)

And now Thebes stood; now you could seem, Cadmus, a happy man even in exile. Mars and Venus had become your parents-in-law; add to this children of so distinguished a wife, so many sons and daughters and, pledges of your love, grandchildren, these too now at the brink of manhood. But of course man’s last day must ever be awaited and no-one ought to be called happy before his death and funeral rites. Among such favourable circumstances, Cadmus, the first cause of grief was one of your grandsons …

After recounting the wretched fates of Cadmus’ children and grandchildren, Ovid returns to the royal couple: his Theban history ends with Cadmus and Harmonia heading off into self-imposed exile and eventually transforming into snakes (Met. 4.563–603). Cadmus himself prays for this metamorphosis as he recalls how it all began, thus bringing the narrative full circle:

Nescit Agenorides natam parvumque nepotem

aequoris esse deos; luctu serieque malorum

victus et ostentis, quae plurima viderat, exit

conditor urbe sua, tamquam fortuna locorum,

non sua se premeret, longisque erroribus actus

contigit Illyricos profuga cum coniuge fines.

iamque malis annisque graves dum prima retractant

fata domus releguntque suos sermone labores,

‘num sacer ille mea traiectus cuspide serpens’

Cadmus ait ‘fuerat, tum cum Sidone profectus

vipereos sparsi per humum, nova semina, dentes?

quem si cura deum tam certa vindicat ira,

ipse precor serpens in longam porrigar alvum’.

dixit, et ut serpens in longam tenditur alvum.

(Met. 4.563–76)

Cadmus was unaware that his daughter (Ino) and little grandson (Melicertes) had been changed to gods of the sea. Overcome with grief and the sequence of calamities and because of the many portents he had seen, the founding father left his city, as if the fortune of the site rather than his own were oppressing him. Driven on through long wanderings, at last the exile and his wife reached the borders of Illyria. At that point, heavy with woes and years, while they went over the early calamities of their house and their own troubles in conversation, Cadmus said: ‘Was that a sacred serpent which my spear transfixed back when, recently departed from Sidon, I scattered his teeth, a novel type of seed, on to the earth? If the care of the gods is avenging him with such unerring wrath, I pray that I, too be stretched into snaky form as a serpent’. And as he spoke he was stretched into a snaky form as a serpent …

A nexus of verbal correspondences correlates the beginning and end of Ovid’s Cadmeid. At 3.131–42, Cadmus’ apparent good fortune is quantified via his abundant progeny: he might seem enviable, the poet portentously observes, in view of his numerous daughters (natas), sons (natos), and grandchildren (nepotes). This initial plurality contrasts sharply with the singulars of the phrase natam parvumque nepotem at 4.563. The words refer to Cadmus’ daughter Ino and grandson Melicertes, the only members of his family not yet visited by catastrophe — though Cadmus believes himself to have just witnessed their hellish destruction as well. For him they are the final link in the long chain of misfortunes which began with the gruesome demise of Actaeon (prima … causa fuit luctus, 3.138–39), continued through Book 3 (including Pentheus) and came to its bitter end with the lethal madness of Ino and her husband, recounted at 4.481–542. It is precisely this long sequence of dreadful calamities (luctu serieque malorum, 4.564) which drives Cadmus from the city that he himself founded (exit | conditor urbe sua, 4.565–66).

We thus start and end with Cadmus in exile; but the two exiles could hardly be more different. At the beginning of Book 3 Cadmus is in his prime, about to perform the deeds which brought him heroic renown, i.e. the killing of the dragon of Mars and the founding of Thebes. In Book 4, by contrast, we encounter a man broken down by age and suffering who is desperately trying to come to terms with the series of misfortunes that has plagued his family. Ovid underscores the bleak transformation of Cadmus from the active protagonist of Book 3 into the despairing and gloomy figure we meet in Book 4 through pointed verbal play. Most strikingly, in assuming the shape of his erstwhile victim Cadmus fulfils the prophecy uttered immediately after his triumphant slaying of Mars’ serpent:

Dum spatium victor victi considerat hostis,

vox subito audita est; neque erat cognoscere promptum,

unde, sed audita est: ‘quid, Agenore nate, peremptum

serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens’.

(Met. 3.95–98)

While the victor surveys the size of his vanquished foe, suddenly a voice is heard; it was impossible to recognize from where, but it was heard: ‘Why, son of Agenor, do you gaze upon the serpent you killed? You too will be gazed upon as serpent’.

Through its startling prediction, the unattributed voice implicitly proclaims the dreadful law that in a tragic universe each source of good fortune contains the seeds of its own undoing. Like the serpent in this early scene, at 4.565 Cadmus is described as defeated (victus). In the later passage, moreover, Cadmus has, through bitter experience, come to understand the typically Theban proximity of victory and disaster at which Ovid already signalled, both overtly through the prophecy of Cadmus’ ultimate transformation into the very shape of his conquered enemy, and more subtly through the collocation of victor and victi at 3.95. Cadmus’ final realization that he killed a sacred beast closes down Ovid’s Theban narrative by returning it to the point at which it all began. In a traumatic reversal, the very objects that once promised a prosperous future for Thebes, the teeth of the dragon — compare 3.103 vipereos dentes, populi incrementa futuri with 4.571–73, where Cadmus ponders the possibility that the vipereos dentes he used come from a sacred beast — in hindsight turn out to bear within them the burden of a curse that was bound to blight developments from the outset. Cadmus’ wish to be transformed into a serpent arises from the painful realization that only a metamorphic ‘return’ to the origin of his city will put an end to his agony: it is a culminating illustration of the fact that Thebes is ever unable to differentiate itself from its troubled beginnings.44

In the course of the narrative arch that Ovid traces in his Theban history, we thus get a tragic conflation of human and beast and an equally tragic inversion of victor (‘conqueror’) and victus (‘conquered’) as Cadmus rises from a condition of exile to become king of his own city, and progenitor of a prosperous family, before being reduced again to his original status as a childless outcast. Yet the transformation of Cadmus into a snake might also elicit the cleansing laughter of a Satyr play after a day of tragic performances.45 In this respect also it might be seen as a fitting Ovidian conclusion to the Theban saga. As Cadmus’ wish to assume the shape of a dragon is incrementally realized, his horrified wife bemoans his vanishing human features and, more importantly, the unbearable zoomorphic divide that now sunders the couple (Met. 4.576–94). No sooner said than remedied: she promptly undergoes the same metamorphosis and joins her husband on the ground. While at the end of Euripides’ Bacchae, the prophetic anticipation of Cadmus’ transformation into a dragon sets up new horrors since he is to lead a foreign army against the Greeks (Bacch. 1330–43), Ovid’s snakified Cadmus and Harmonia are truly peaceful creatures (cf. 4.602–03). In the Metamorphoses at least, the tragic energy of Thebes is spent.46

5. The Set Text: Pentheus and Bacchus

It will be clear from our discussion so far that the Pentheus episode lies at the heart of Ovid’s Theban narrative in a number of important respects. The setting for this episode is the city of Thebes, which, as we have seen, was founded by Cadmus, after his search for his abducted sister Europa proved fruitless.47 Cadmus is now an old man, and has abdicated the throne of his city in favour of his grandson Pentheus. Early in the reign of the young king, a new religious cult sweeps in from the East, that of the god Bacchus (Greek Dionysus), son of the god Jupiter and the Theban princess Semele (their explosive affair and Bacchus’ unusual birth were described earlier in Book 3, at 253–315). While nearly all Thebans welcome the new cult, Pentheus is obstinate in his scepticism and resistance, an attitude that leads to his doom.

5a. Sources and Intertexts

The story of Pentheus and Bacchus was well established long before Ovid’s day. The myth was a popular subject with writers and artists alike, and is famously the subject of the Bacchae, a tragedy by the 5th-century BCE Athenian playwright Euripides. This tragedy was, as far as we can tell, Ovid’s most important source and model.48

Euripides begins his play with Bacchus’ arrival at Thebes and a detailed exposition of his world, carefully elaborated in the prologue (1–63, spoken by the god himself) and the chorus upon their entry onto the stage (64–169, sung by Lydian women). The enthusiastic celebration of the Maenads in particular introduces the entire range of imagery and motifs commonly associated with Bacchic frenzy, highlighting notions of excess and boundary transgression.49 In the subsequent scenes, Euripides proceeds to delineate the character of Pentheus, who flatly denies Bacchus’ divinity and rejects his worship, and so resents all the more the enthusiastic reception of the god and his cult by the Theban populace. Euripides places particular emphasis on the Theban king’s obsession with the sexual license he associates with the worship of Bacchus.50 The story continues with Pentheus giving orders to his henchmen to capture Bacchus, who is presently brought on stage (Bacch. 432–42). In the initial interview Bacchus conceals his true identity, claiming merely to be one of the followers of the new deity, and he remains incognito until his final epiphany. His exchanges with Pentheus culminate in the key scene in which the god convinces Pentheus to cross-dress as a woman so he can spy on the Maenads on Mount Cithaeron — a grave offense given that their rites were both secret and an exclusively female matter. This leads to the grim denouement, in which Bacchus distorts the perception of Pentheus’ mother Agave and her sisters, as well as the other Maenads, so that they misrecognize the disguised king as a wild beast which, in accordance with Bacchic rites, they proceed to tear limb from limb with their bare hands. Euripides’ gruesome and haunting account of Pentheus’ dismemberment comes in the form of a messenger’s speech:

‘Then were a thousand hands laid on the fir tree [sc. in which Pentheus was perched], and from the ground they tore it up, while he from his seat aloft came tumbling to the ground with lamentations long and loud; for well he knew his hour was come. His mother first, a priestess for the occasion, began the bloody deed and fell upon him; whereon he tore the snood from his hair, that hapless Agave might recognize and spare him, crying as he touched her cheek, “O mother! it is I, your own son Pentheus, the child you bore in Echion’s halls; have pity on me, mother dear! oh! do not for any sin of mine slay your own son”. But she, the while, with foaming mouth and wildly rolling eyes, bereft of reason as she was, heeded him not; for the god possessed her. And she caught his left hand in her grip, and planting her foot upon her victim’s trunk she tore the shoulder from its socket, not of her own strength, but the god made it an easy task to her hands; and Ino set to work upon the other side, rending the flesh with Autonoe and all the eager host of Bacchanals; and one united cry arose, the victim’s groans while yet he breathed, and their triumphant shouts. One would make an arm her prey, another a foot with the sandal on it; and his ribs were stripped of flesh by their rending nails; and each one with blood-dabbled hands was tossing Pentheus’ limbs about. Scattered lies his corpse, part beneath the rugged rocks, and part amid the deep dark woods, no easy task to find; but his mother has made his poor head her own, and fixing it upon the point of a thyrsus, as if it were a mountain lion’s, she bears it through the midst of Cithaeron, having left her sisters with the Maenads at their rites. And she is entering these walls exulting in her hunting fraught with woe, acclaiming Bacchus her fellow-hunter who had helped her to triumph in a chase, where her only prize was tears’.
(Eur. Bacch. 1109–47)

This is the ‘classic’ account of Pentheus’ demise, but here as elsewhere, Ovid is in literary dialogue with multiple predecessors. In certain respects his version of the horrific event bears closer resemblance to that of a poem included (probably wrongly) in the Theocritean corpus as Idyll 26. This deals with the initiation of a young boy into the mysteries of Dionysus, with the father giving the following account of Pentheus’ death and dismemberment:

[1] Ino, Autonoe and white-cheeked Agave, themselves three in number, led three groups of worshippers to the mountain. Some of them cut wild greenery from the densely growing oak trees, living ivy and asphodel that grows above ground, and made up twelve altars in a pure meadow, three to Semele and nine to Dionysus. Taking from their box the sacred objects made with care, they laid them reverently on the altars of freshly gathered foliage, just as Dionysus himself had taught them, and just as he preferred.

[10] Pentheus observed everything from a high rock, hidden in a mastic bush, a plant that grew in those parts. Autonoe, the first to see him, gave a dreadful yell and with a sudden movement kicked over the sacred objects of frenzied Bacchus, which the profane may not see. She became frenzied herself, and at once the others too became frenzied. Pentheus fled in terror and they pursued him, hitching up their robes into their belts, knee-high. Pentheus spoke: ‘What do you want, women?’ Autonoe spoke: ‘You will know soon enough, and before we tell you’. The mother gave a roar like a lioness with cubs as she carried off her son’s head; Ino tore off his great shoulder, shoulder-blade and all, by setting her foot on his stomach; and Autonoe set to work in the same way. The other women butchered what was left and returned to Thebes all smeared with blood, bearing back from the mountain not Pentheus (Πενθῆα), but lamentation (πένθημα).

[27] This is no concern of mine, nor should anyone else care about an enemy of Dionysus, even if he suffered a worse fate than this, even if he were nine years old, or just embarking on his teeth. May I myself act piously, and may my actions please the pious. The eagle gained honour in this way from Zeus who bears the aegis. It is to children of the pious, not to those of the impious, that good things come.

[35] Farewell to mighty Dionysus, for whom on snowy Dracanus mighty Zeus opened up his own great thigh and placed him inside. Farewell, too, to beautiful Semele and her sisters, daughters of Cadmus, much admired by women of that time, who carried out this deed impelled by Dionysus, so that they are not to be blamed. Let no one criticize the actions of the gods.
([Theoc.] Id. 26)

All three texts share the same basic plot; but there are noteworthy variations on the level of detail. In Euripides and Ovid, for instance, Pentheus spies upon the maenads from a tree; in the Theocritean Idyll, by contrast, he is poised on a prominent rock. And whereas in Euripides Agave initiates the slaughter, in the Idyll and Ovid it is Agave’s sister (and Pentheus’ aunt) Autonoe. If Ovid conforms closely to Euripides’ tragedy in narrative outline, then, there are clearly departures that look to other texts or versions.

Ovid’s most striking innovation vis-à-vis Euripides has to do with the captive arrested by Pentheus’ henchmen. This figure has a precedent in the Bacchae, but he is never explicitly identified as Bacchus-in-disguise, as he is in the earlier text. Indeed, he gives his name as Acoetes and provides a comparatively detailed autobiography that begins by describing his rise from the lowly profession of fisherman to that of helmsman (more on this in the following section). More crucially still, in explaining how he became a follower of the god, he tells the tale of how a group of wicked Tyrrhenian sailors, his erstwhile shipmates, were transformed into dolphins by Bacchus. This inset tale conveniently supplies the episode with the requisite metamorphosis (which was lacking in the narrative Ovid inherited from Euripides). It also constitutes a radical — and, it should be added, ingenious — departure from the tragic model.

Fig. 1 The Tyrrhenian Pirates change into dolphins (drawing after a black-figure vase, 6th/5th century BCE, Museum of Art, Toledo).

The inset narrative is, in essence, an extended version of a Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.51 More specifically, it is a rendition of the longest of three hymns honouring Dionysus in a collection of some thirty such compositions, all anonymous, known as the Homeric Hymns. These Greek hexametric hymns vary in length from a handful of verses to several hundred lines. Each celebrates an individual deity. The collection’s titular epithet Homeric is misleading, as the Hymns do not share authorship with the Iliad or Odyssey (nor, for that matter, with each other in most cases, for they are not the work of a single hand).52 Here is the Hymn in question:

[1] I will tell of Dionysus, the son of glorious Semele, how he appeared on a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, seeming like a stripling in the first flush of manhood: his rich, dark hair was waving about him, and on his strong shoulders he wore a purple robe. Presently there came swiftly over the sparkling sea Etruscan pirates on a well-decked ship — a miserable doom led them on. When they saw him they made signs to one another and sprang out quickly, and seizing him straightway, put him on board their ship exultingly; for they thought him the son of heaven-nurtured kings. They sought to bound him with rude bonds, but these would not hold him, and the ropes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes.

[15] Then the helmsman understood all and cried out at once to his fellows and said: ‘Madmen! What god is this whom you have taken and bind, strong that he is? Not even the well-built ship can carry him. Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympus. Come, then, let us set him free upon the dark shore at once; do not lay hands on him, lest he grow angry and stir up dangerous winds and heavy squalls’.

[25] So said he, but the master chided him with taunting words: ‘Madman, mark the wind and help hoist sail on the ship: catch all the sheets. As for this fellow we men will see to him; I reckon he is bound for Egypt or for Cyprus or to the Hyperboreans or further still. But in the end he will speak out and tell us his friends and all his wealth and his brothers, now that providence has thrown him in our way’.

[32] When he had said this, he had mast and sail hoisted on the ship, and the wind filled the sail and the crew hauled taut the sheets on either side. But soon strange things were seen among them. First of all, sweet, fragrant wine ran streaming throughout all the black ship and a heavenly smell arose, so that all the seamen were seized with amazement. And all at once a vine spread out both ways along the top of the sail with many clusters hanging down from it, and a dark ivy-plant twined about the mast, blossoming with flowers, and with rich berries growing on it; and all the thole pins were covered with garlands. When the pirates saw all this, then at last they bade the helmsman to put the ship to land. But the god changed into a dreadful lion there on the ship, on the bow, and roared loudly: amidships also he showed his wonders and created a shaggy bear which stood up ravening, while on the forepeak was the lion glaring fiercely with scowling brows. And so the sailors fled to the stern and crowded terrified about the right-minded helmsman, until suddenly the lion sprang upon the master and seized him; and when the sailors saw it they leapt out overboard one and all into the bright sea, escaping from a miserable fate, and were changed into dolphins. But on the helmsman Dionysus had mercy and held him back and made him altogether happy, saying to him: ‘Take courage, good mariner; you have found favour with my heart. I am loud-crying Dionysus whom Cadmus’ daughter Semele bore from union with Zeus’.

[58] Hail, child of fair-faced Semele! He who forgets you can in no wise order sweet song. (Hymn. Hom. 7)

Bringing the narrative matter of the Hymn in contact with Euripides’ tragic plot is an inventive touch, and not just from the point of view of Ovid’s metamorphic programme, as the tale told by Acoetes serves in addition as a cautionary tale for Pentheus.53

Fig. 2 ‘Vine Ship’ with dolphins (drawing based on Attic black-figure kylix attributed to Exekias, c. 540–35 BCE, Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich).

5b. The Personnel of the Set Text

The set text abounds with colourful characters, many of whom make only fleeting appearances. There is the heterogeneous crowd of Thebans who, having fallen under the spell of Bacchus, rush to perform his rites (3.529–30): men (viri), married women (matres), unmarried women (nurus), common people (vulgus), aristocrats (proceres). There are Pentheus’ relatives who vainly attempt to bring him to his senses, chief among them his grandfather Cadmus (avus) and his maternal uncle Athamas (3.564–65). There are the henchmen whom Pentheus sends out to capture Bacchus and who return, blood-spattered, with someone identifying himself as Acoetes (3.572–76). Within Acoetes’ inset narrative, we encounter a gang of wicked shipmates, many of whom are named (and some briefly delineated) with mock scrupulousness: Opheltes, Dictys, Libys, Melanthus, Alcimedon, Epopeus, Lycabas, Proreus, Aethalion, and Medon.54 In the grim denouement on Mount Cithaeron, Pentheus’ mother Agave and her sisters Autonoë and Ino, together with a miscellaneous crowd (turba) of fellow-maenads, lay violent hands on him. Ovid also reports in the episode’s concluding verses that all the women of Thebes (designated Ismenides, after a local river) flock to Bacchus’ altars to venerate his godhead (3.733–34). We may also add the old (senes) and young men (iuvenes) of Thebes whom Pentheus tries to rally against Bacchus (3.3.538–42), as well as a fleeting reference to the Bacchus-defiant Acrisius, king of Argos (3.559–60). Amidst this kaleidoscopic assortment of dramatis personae, four principal figures stand out: Tiresias, Pentheus, Bacchus, and Acoetes. Or perhaps we should say three, since the last two may in fact be one and the same figure.

(i) Tiresias

The prophet Tiresias is a quintessential Theban character found in numerous texts in both Greek and Latin literature. Thebes is his ancestral home: Tiresias’ paternal grandfather, so tradition has it, was one of the five surviving Spartoi who comprised Cadmus’ first citizen cohort, though Ovid, in line with his cursory treatment of the foundation sequence, omits details of his genealogy. He makes his earliest literary appearance in Odyssey 11, as the seer whom Odysseus seeks out in the Underworld in order to receive advice on his homecoming. But many of Tiresias’ most memorable appearances are in Attic drama, where his special insight into the workings of the universe ensured him a stellar career. In four surviving scripts — Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, and Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Bacchae — he unerringly predicts the tragic doom of his royal interlocutors (and perhaps even helps to move events along, since his predictions are typically met with suspicion, denial, or even wrath). If Homeric epic and Attic tragedy foreground his privileged access to divine knowledge late in life (or even after death), other texts put the emphasis elsewhere, not least to explain how Tiresias acquired the gift of foresight in the first place. Here another aspect of his mythical CV comes to the fore: his unusual proclivity for sex changes. Tradition has it that the perambulating Tiresias once struck copulating snakes with his staff, whereupon he mysteriously morphed from male to female — only to return to his original sex when he did likewise several years later. Given his ‘ambisextrous’ past, one can see why Jupiter and Juno turned to him as uniquely qualified to settle their ambrosia-induced quarrel over which of the two sexes derives more pleasure from the act of love-making. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jupiter insisted on women’s greater sexual gratification, whereas Juno no less adamantly asserted the contrary. Upon being summoned, Tiresias adjudicated the dispute in Jupiter’s favour, and was promptly struck blind by the infuriated Juno. Forbidden by cosmic law to undo the punishment inflicted by his wife, the well-pleased Jupiter granted Tiresias the gift of prophecy in recompense. Our earliest witness for this tale is pseudo-Hesiodic Melampodia, a fragmentary epic poem probably dating to the 6th century BCE.55

Ovid draws on this tradition and the more sober tragic antecedents in fleshing out Tiresias’ biography in the Metamorphoses, thereby making of him ‘an emblematic figure of both divine wisdom and sexual ambiguity’.56 Tiresias initially floats into the narrative in his role as ‘sexpert’. When first encountering him midway through Book 3, we get the tale of copulating snakes, sex changes, and erotic expertise, with the ensuing loss of sight and gain of fore-sight (Met. 3.316–38). Shortly thereafter, Tiresias proves his surpassing vatic ability by correctly, if riddlingly, foretelling the fate of Narcissus (an ingenious stand-in for Thebes’ most famous son, Oedipus, who does not appear in propria persona in Ovid’s Theban History).57 The seer warns Narcissus’ mother Liriope that the beautiful boy will only reach old age ‘if he does not come to know himself’ (si se non noverit, 3.348). Ovid frames the episode of Narcissus — who does come to know himself — with two references (one proleptic, one retrospective) to Tiresias’ unquestioned and well-deserved renown throughout Greece.58 This quasi-universal acceptance of Tiresias as a prophetic authority serves as cue for the Pentheus-episode: the Theban king is the odd-man-out, whose ill-considered mockery of Tiresias sets the stage for his tragic downfall (Met. 3.511–25). Tiresias’ vatic prognostications concerning Narcissus thus serve as pivot towards more ‘weighty’ narrative roles. In the Pentheus-episode, he appears in the guise of omniscient seer who confronts the reigning tyrant of Thebes — a scenario familiar from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. This is, however, a noteworthy departure from Euripides’ Bacchae, in which, remarkably, the legendary seer utters no prophecies, but merely offers Pentheus advice, all the while acknowledging the scant hope that the young king will heed it (Bacch. 309–27). In this respect, then, by insisting on Tiresias’ prophetic role — note the seer’s explicit use of the verb auguror at 3.519 — Ovid ‘corrects’ the idiosyncratic choice of his primary model, and uses Tiresias’ vatic utterances as a unifying motif in the elaboration of his Theban History.

Overall, then, in the Metamorphoses, as elsewhere, Tiresias presides over dramas of blindness (literal and mental) and insight, (royal) power and (divinely privileged) knowledge, concealing and revealing, riddling speech and hidden meanings (not least in contexts of sexual deviance).

(ii) Pentheus

Like Tiresias, Pentheus is descended from the Spartoi: he is the son of Agave, one of the four daughters of Cadmus and Harmonia, by Echion, one of the five survivors of the Sown-men’s fratricidal slaughter, whose name means ‘serpent’ in ancient Greek.59 ‘Pentheus’, too, is a speaking name, being connected etymologically to the Greek word πένθος (‘grief, distress’), and so meaning something like ‘man of sorrows’.60 Given his gruesome demise, immortalized by Euripides in the Bacchae, the name can be considered an index of his destiny. To get a purchase on the figure of Pentheus in the Metamorphoses, it is useful to set Ovid’s characterization of the young Theban king against his delineation in the Bacchae.61

As already noted, Euripides places special emphasis on Pentheus’ obsession with the sexual license he associates with the worship of Bacchus. From his first reaction to the exodus of Theban women, who quit their homes for the mountains in order to take part in Bacchic rites, to his later rather puerile desire illicitly to catch a glimpse of these same rites, the issues of sexual transgression and the concomitant violation of household stability dominate Pentheus’ imagination.62 In the Metamorphoses Pentheus’ character is delineated rather differently. As in the Bacchae, the Theban king deeply resents Bacchus’ takeover of his city; but Ovid’s Pentheus conceives of the god’s advent in martial terms, tantamount to a military assault upon his city, which he, as king, is called upon to repel. He is dismayed by the inability of the citizenry to stand up to what he regards as a feeble and unworthy foe. The very idea that a group of revellers known for orgiastic noise, magical tricks, female ululations, alcoholic excess, and sexual license can overpower the population of a city descended from a dragon of Mars offends his martial pride (3.531–37). In his vain exhortation to his fellow Thebans he goes so far as to adduce the dragon of Mars, which his grandfather Cadmus slew, as a paragon of virtue that bravely gave its life in defence of its lair, fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds (3.543–46). Imagery of the battlefield dominates both Pentheus’ rhetoric and Ovid’s presentation of Pentheus to us in the narrative. So, for example, the response of Pentheus to the caterwauling of the Maenads on Mount Cithaeron is likened to that of a warhorse hearing the trumpeter of an army giving the signal to fight (3.701–07).

The shift away from the Euripidean preoccupation with sexual license (as well as Pentheus’ own subliminal erotic desires) is achieved in part through intertextual engagement with Ovid’s great Roman epic predecessor, Virgil.63 The Ovidian Pentheus enriches his rallying cry to the citizens of Thebes with allusions to the Aeneid:

vosne, senes, mirer, qui longa per aequora vecti

hac Tyron, hac profugos posuistis sede penates,

nunc sinitis sine Marte capi?

(Met. 3.538–40)

‘Should I wonder about you, old men, who, having crossed boundless seas, re-founded Tyre in this place, re-established your exiled household gods in this place, that you now allow yourselves to be captured without armed resistance?’

The obvious parallels to the Aeneas-story are all the more striking for being in overt contradiction with the earlier narrative, where it was reported that Cadmus’ Phoenician companions were slain to a man by the dragon prior to the foundation of Thebes. But Pentheus here fashions Cadmus himself as an Aeneas avant la lettre, a leader of an exiled people, profugi from the East, who traversed the sea to settle his people and their penates in a new homeland. The Romanizing touches continue with the characterization of Thebans as a proles Mavortia (3.531).64 Somewhat later in his speech, Pentheus again uses language reminiscent of the Aeneid in chastising his derelict citizen body, deploring what he sees as its unconditional surrender to Bacchus, derisively styled as an unarmed and utterly unwarlike boy:

at nunc a puero Thebae capientur inermi,

quem neque bella iuvant nec tela nec usus equorum,

sed madidus murra crinis mollesque coronae

purpuraque et pictis intextum vestibus aurum.

(Met. 3.553–56)

‘But now an unarmed boy will conquer Thebes, whom neither weapons, wars nor horses delight, but hair drenched in myrrh, soft garlands, purple and gold woven into embroidered robes’.

Pentheus’ language here recalls that of the pugnacious African king Iarbas, who in a prayer to Jupiter denounces Aeneas when the latter has forgotten his epic calling and degenerated, together with Dido, into the world of illicit love (Aen. 4.215–18).

Ovid follows Euripides in having Pentheus issue orders for Bacchus’ arrest, and in both texts his henchmen return with one of the god’s followers instead (Bacch. 432–42; Met. 3.564–76) — though in the Greek drama this is in fact the god in disguise, and, as discussed below, the same may hold in the Metamorphoses. In the Bacchae, Pentheus’ interrogation of the prisoner leads to the latter convincing him to don female attire in order illicitly to witness the proceedings on Mount Cithaeron. This scene, with its emphasis on theatrical cross-dressing and gender-bending is crucial and emblematic for Euripides.65 It is thus significant that Ovid omits it from his account as not pertinent to his delineation of Pentheus. Instead, after the lengthy inset narrative of the prisoner Acoetes, the narrative focus returns to Pentheus, now more bellicose than ever. The defining emotion is wrath (ira). Without further ado, he storms to his doom. Ovid’s Pentheus, then, unlike his Euripidean counterpart, never succumbs to the temptation of gender-bending or any other ‘Bacchic’ impulses. Rather, the emphasis on the king’s martial disposition coupled with allusions to the Aeneid serve to recast the Euripidean tragedy in a more Roman and a more epic key.66

Why does Pentheus resist Bacchus so vehemently? As ruler of Thebes, he identifies himself with his city; he is convinced that he is acting in the interest of the civic community (as the lone representative of law and order), entertains feelings of moral and intellectual superiority, and is beholden to the pursuit of power and honour. Although, as we have seen, Ovid chose not to develop some of Pentheus’ ‘Euripidean’ character traits, he retains other qualities, in particular those that speak to a somewhat tyrannical disposition, so that E. R. Dodds’ assessment of the Pentheus of the Bacchae holds true for his counterpart in the Metamorphoses: the Theban king exhibits an ‘absence of self-control, … willingness to believe the worst on hearsay evidence … or on none whatsoever, … brutality towards the helpless …; and a stupid reliance on physical force as a means of settling spiritual problems’.67 In a detailed study of Euripides’ Pentheus, Bernd Seidensticker characterizes the Theban king not just as a tyrant, but an ‘authoritarian personality’.68 A number of the traits adduced by Seidensticker recur in Ovid’s Pentheus, and contribute to his undoing in the confrontation with Bacchus:69

(a) Ethnocentrism, i.e. the belief in the superiority of one’s own nation or community, which coincides with fear of ‘the other’ and the irrational belief that contact with the foreign contaminates the self or the society one lives in. In both Euripides and Ovid, this is a key theme, as Pentheus endeavours to repulse Bacchus and his cult as something alien, Eastern, and corrosive of the norms and values he holds dear.70 He exhibits a xenophobia that manifests itself in the chauvinistic rejection of the non-Greek as inferior and decadent.

(b) Aggressiveness bordering on brutality to protect the self against others, i.e. ethnocentrism coupled with a tendency towards violence. While Euripides’ Pentheus takes a ‘camp’ turn into cross-dressing, Ovid’s figure remains a robust, masculine, independent individual who sticks to his views and escalates violence when met with resistance.71

(c) Belief that men are superior to women, who are conceived of as passive and as tied to traditional roles of wife and mother. In Euripides, female (sexual) license is a major concern for Pentheus, and whereas Ovid plays down the importance of gender, his Pentheus too is beholden to a narrow set of martial and masculine values.72

(d) Conventionalism, conformity, commitment to conservative values, which often goes along with thinking in prejudices and stereotypes, the tendency to generalize, the use of clichés, and a limited degree of creativity and flexibility. In both Euripides’ play and Ovid’s epic, Pentheus is committed to preserving the status quo and unable to adjust to new situations.73 He does not listen to his advisers and the warnings of his kin and proves incapable of viewing the world from another perspective. Confronted with the arrival of a new god, he mounts a stubborn resistance that includes the rhetorical denigration of his perceived adversary via a familiar set of prejudices about Easterners.

All in all, then, Pentheus is particularly lacking in the flexible intelligence that enables a person to respond in a healthy and balanced manner to the kind of divinity that is Bacchus — polymorphous, subversive of norms, destructive of boundaries, challenging the conventional order of things, and defying orthodoxy — in particular in the realm of gender-relations. Instead of pursuing a path of accommodation, Pentheus fatally opts for confrontation; instead of embracing his divine kin (Bacchus, after all, is his cousin — Semele and Agave are sisters), he chooses blanket rejection, turning himself into a blasphemous theomachos (‘someone who assaults the gods’) — and ultimately a victim of divine wrath.

(iii) Bacchus

Bacchus/Dionysus, god of wine, mystic ecstasy and theatre, is one of the oldest Greek divinities to leave a trace in our literary record: his name (di-wo-nu-so) features on linear-B tablets from Pylos and Crete, datable to c. 1250 BCE.74 Homer, too, knows of Dionysus, mentioning his female entourage (Il. 6.133), and alluding to his birth (Il. 14.325). Hesiod, in his Theogony (940–42), likewise recounts the birth of Dionysus, highlighting that a mortal woman gave birth to an immortal child. This is one of many remarkable aspects of the god: product of the sexual union of Jupiter with the Theban princess Semele, his foetus is in fact brought to term in his father’s thigh after his mother dies in pregnancy.75 Following a period of infancy, the god wanders the earth seeking recognition of his divinity. Unlike other Olympian deities, he encounters human defiance, deriving in large part from scepticism as to his godhood. Given his parentage, this is not altogether surprising: as the offspring of a mortal mother and a divine father, he might well have been expected to belong to the class of semi-divine ‘heroes’.76 There are many individuals with similar parentage who fall short of divine status, even though they may receive worship after death in the form of hero-cult.

With respect to the broader mythological background, modern philology has shown that Greek mythology is at least to some degree inherited from a set of stories that were originally common to all Indo-European cultures. The name of the supreme Olympian deity, the sky god and father ‘Zeus’ has cognates in other Indo-European languages.77 Many of the other divinities worshipped by the Greeks seem to have been imported from other cultures. Those of importance tended to be placed in some kind of familial relation to the sky father Zeus/Jupiter. The last major such addition to the pantheon was the god Dionysus/Bacchus, who became one of many of Zeus’ children born outside of the supreme god’s marriage with Hera/Juno. A good deal of Greek mythology tells of the struggles of Zeus’ progeny born, as it were, out of wedlock to gain recognition and assert their rights and status on either the divine or the human level; the story of Bacchus and Pentheus is a cautionary tale dealing with the latter.

Bacchus is then, despite the antiquity of his cult, a belated addition to the pantheon, a notorious latecomer, or ‘new arrival’ from the East. Ovid calls him advena, and the attributes novus (‘new’) and ignotus (‘unknown’) are programmatic.78

One of the unusual aspects of Bacchus’ cult is that he had predominantly female attendants and devotees (‘maenads’) to perform his rites, contrary to the overarching principle that women were restricted to the active worship of female deities. His physical representation is also noteworthy for its variation: early artistic depictions of Dionysus/ Bacchus show him as a fully developed man, complete with beard, but already by the 5th century BCE it had become the norm for writers, painters and sculptors to depict him as a more boyish figure, beardless, and with a softer, almost feminine, physique — which is how he is described in Ovid’s Pentheus episode.79 That this trend continued beyond antiquity can be seen in, for example, Michelangelo’s sculpture ‘Bacchus’ (fig. 3) and the painting of the same name (fig. 4) by Caravaggio.

Fig. 3 ‘Bacchus’ by Michelangelo (1496–97). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bacchus,_Michelangelo,_1496-97,_Bargello_Florenz-04.jpg

Fig. 4 ‘Bacchus’ by Caravaggio (1593–94). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_Caravaggio_007.jpg

The god’s proverbial androgyny and his entourage of maenads defy entrenched gender stereotypes and were thus bound to occasion anxiety in a patriarchal world. As such, writers and artists found Bacchus to be an ideal figure for the interrogation of notions of masculinity and related cultural norms. It has already been noted that Euripides makes fear of female sexual license, perceived as a threat to the patriarchal order of the city-state, one of the primary motivations for Pentheus’ resistance to the new cult. As we have seen, this aspect is toned down in the Metamorphoses, but it is not altogether effaced. Thus, even in Ovid’s version there are glimmers of the cult’s utopian appeal arising from the collapse of the distinctions that define the socio-political order.80 In the worship of Bacchus the indiscriminate mixing of categories means that age, gender, socio-economic class, and legal status become irrelevant. Ovid highlights this principle at the very beginning of the Pentheus episode:

Liber adest, festisque fremunt ululatibus agri:

turba ruit, mixtaeque viris matresque nurusque

vulgusque proceresque ignota ad sacra feruntur.

(Met. 3.528–30)

Ovid recalls this joyful beginning at the grisly end when Agave summons her maddened sisters: ‘o geminae’ clamavit ‘adeste sorores!’ (3.713) and shortly thereafter lets rip with ritual shrieking (ululavit Agave, 3.725). The indiscriminate crowd that initially rushed to worship Bacchus has become a band of Maenads rushing upon Pentheus: ruit omnis in unum | turba furens (3.715–16). Pentheus is singled out here, just as at the outset, when he was the lone individual (ex omnibus unus, 3.513) who refused to believe Tiresias’ prophecy about Bacchus. Such emphatic ring composition highlights the inherent duality of Bacchus’ nature, which combines carefree revelling with baneful doom, and once more exemplifies the ‘conversion of Dionysiac celebration into madness, death, and destruction’81 that is repeatedly fated to occur at Thebes. In his train, Bacchus brings hallucination and paranoia — surreal dissolution of identity, collapsing and re-doubling roles at will — and the story of Pentheus is a classic and exemplary case. The set text acts out one of the starkest instances in literature of consciousness made prey to delirium unknowingly beside itself.

Bacchus’ overt narrative presence is much reduced in the Ovidian episode vis-à-vis the Euripidean model. Ovid offers a brief notice of the god’s arrival at Thebes, simply declaring that the god has come (Liber adest, 3.528) and received a warm welcome as a new divinity that reaches across boundaries of class and gender (cf. 3.528–30). But we do not get the god himself as a speaking character — at least not at the outset. Indeed, a suggestive feature of the set text is that Bacchus, arguably the episode’s most important character, has no explicit narrative presence. Acoetes’ embedded narrative is the only place in the entire episode where the god appears in person. Bacchus nevertheless looms over narrative events as an ‘absent presence’. Given this curious state of affairs, Acoetes’ account of the god’s transformation of Etruscan pirates into dolphins takes on added significance. As we have seen, the embedded narrative is based on the account in the longest Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.

(iv) Acoetes

The internal narrator Acoetes is the last major character of the set text. In the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, the helmsman, the one member of the crew not transformed into a dolphin, remains anonymous and devoid of background. Ovid’s internal narrator, the figure captured by Pentheus’ henchmen, claims to be this helmsman; he goes on to identify himself as a certain Acoetes from Lydia (3.582–83), an acolyte of the god (accessi sacris Baccheaque sacra frequento, 3.691). He provides a fairly detailed autobiography, culminating in the narrative of the Hymn. He claims to be of very humble origins, with a father so poor that he bequeathed to his son nothing beyond the art of fishing. Not wishing to win his livelihood in this humble manner, Acoetes learns the helmsman’s art and plies his trade on the sea until his encounter with Bacchus, which leads to him joining the god’s entourage. The encounter takes place when, en route to Delos, the ship puts in on the island of Chios. There, members of Acoetes’ crew kidnap a beautiful young boy who, according to Acoetes, turned out to be Bacchus (tum denique Bacchus | (Bacchus enim fuerat) …, 3.629–30). As in the Hymn, Acoetes is the lone member of his ship’s crew to recognize the divinity of the captive and, having been spared the metamorphic fate of his comrades, proceeds to join Bacchus’ entourage. The question arises: is Acoetes really who he claims to be? There is much to suggest otherwise.

The first point to observe is that, as noted in the previous section, Pentheus’ capture of Acoetes in Ovid has a precedent in Euripides’ play, where the stranger who is brought before Pentheus is undoubtedly Dionysus himself, though disguised as one of his followers. Euripides prepares this scene in which the god of the theatre dons a mask (as it were) from the outset.82 To ensure that the audience is able to follow along, the god broadcasts his subterfuge in the prologue speech:

μορφὴν δ᾽ ἀμείψας ἐκ θεοῦ βροτησίαν

πάρειμι …

(Eur. Bacch. 4–5)

And having taken a mortal form instead of a god’s, I am here …

Towards the end of the same monologue, the deity reiterates the point, to make quite sure that everyone in his audience has grasped what he is up to:

ὧν οὕνεκ᾽ εἶδος θνητὸν ἀλλάξας ἔχω

μορφήν τ᾽ ἐμὴν μετέβαλον εἰς ἀνδρὸς φύσιν.

(Eur. Bacch. 53–54)

On which account I have changed my form to a mortal one and altered my shape into that of a man.

When later on in the play Pentheus’ henchmen bring the anonymous stranger on stage (Bacch. 434–519), even the least attentive audience member will have been able to identify the stranger as Dionysus.

In a poignant exchange later in the tragedy, Pentheus asks the stranger, who claims to have seen Dionysus, of what nature he was (477). The disguised god’s response, ‘whatever person he wished’ (ὁποῖος ἤθελ᾽, Eur. Bacch. 478), archly evokes his own protean nature. If Euripides’ god is explicitly a master of disguise and deception, Ovid’s would appear to be so by implication — and with the effect, by a characteristic stroke of metapoetic ingenuity, projected beyond the narrative frame. In the Greek tragedy the riddle of Bacchus’ identity remains confined to characters within the play (in particular, of course, Pentheus) and does not concern the audience, for whom, as we have just seen, Euripides clarifies the situation before the action begins. In the Metamorphoses, by contrast, the god remains an enigmatic and elusive figure for us, the readers.83 Ovid provides nothing equivalent to the prologue scene in Euripides that would give the game away, but rather tantalizes us with the possibility that Bacchus does appear in the narrative in disguised form. This possibility is raised when Pentheus’ henchmen, having been ordered to arrest Bacchus, return instead with a captured stranger who, as we have just seen, identifies himself as Acoetes. But the fact that Acoetes has the same narrative function as the disguised Euripidean god strongly suggests, by intertextual parallelism, that Acoetes is indeed Bacchus.84 Further support for this view can be found in his statement of Lydian origins (3.582–83) and the miraculous circumstances of his liberation (3.699–700). But while this identification seems probable for various reasons, the fact remains that Acoetes is never explicitly equated with the god anywhere in the text. Indeed, apart from the narrator’s general pronouncement that Bacchus has reached Thebes (Liber adest, 3.528), the only moment in which we encounter the god in person in the entire episode occurs during the inset narrative about the Tyrrhenian sailors told by Acoetes. Paradoxically, if we accept that Acoetes is indeed the god in disguise, then the veracity of his inset narrative — which again features a deceptive and dissembling Bacchus — would be thrown into doubt, inasmuch as it would then be nothing more than the autobiography of a mortal persona assumed by the deity.

The plot thickens further if we take into account a piece of information preserved in Servius’ ancient commentary on the Aeneid. The crucial titbit concerns a Virgilian simile featuring Pentheus as ‘vehicle’:

… Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus

et solem geminum et duplicis se ostendere Thebas …

(Aen. 4.469–70)

… even as raving Pentheus sees the bands of the Furies, and a double sun and twofold Thebes rise to view … 

In his annotation to this simile, Servius reports that Virgil derived this image from the (now lost) tragedy Pentheus by the early Roman playwright Pacuvius, arguably modelled on Euripides’ Bacchae. The commentator goes on to mention that in Pacuvius’ play the name of the stranger who was brought on stage by the henchmen happened to be Acoetes:85

Pentheum autem furuisse traditur secundum Pacuvii tragoediam. de quo fabula talis est: Pentheus, Echionis et Agaves filius, Thebanorum rex, cum indignaretur ex matertera sua Semele genitum Liberum patrem coli tamquam deum, ut primum comperit eum in Cithaerone monte esse, misit satellites, qui eum (i.e. Bacchum) vinctum ad se perducerent. qui cum ipsum non invenissent, unum ex comitibus eius Acoeten captum ad Pentheum perduxerunt. is, cum de eo graviorem poenam constitueret, iussit eum interim claudi vinctum; cumque sponte sua et carceris fores apertae essent et vincula Acoeti excidissent, miratus Pentheus, spectaturus sacra Liberi patris Cithaerona petit … (Serv. on Aen. 4.469)

Pentheus’ madness is drawn from a tragedy by Pacuvius. The plot of which is as follows: Pentheus, son of Echion and Agave, king of Thebes, resented that Father Liber, born from his aunt Semele, was worshipped as a god; as soon as he heard that Liber was on Mount Cithaeron, he sent servants to bring Liber bound to him. When they did not find Liber himself, they captured Acoetes, one of his comrades, and brought him to Pentheus. While Pentheus pondered a worse punishment for him, he ordered him to be locked away in the meantime, bound as he was, when out of their own accord the doors of the prison flew open and the bonds fell off Acoetes. Pentheus was astonished and set out for Mount Cithaeron to spy on the rites of Father Liber …

This annotation, while not solving the riddle of Acoetes’ identity in the Metamorphoses account, offers some interesting insights into the metaliterary game of hide-and-seek being played here. In essence, Ovid endows his Acoetes with a triple intertextual identity, insofar as he recalls three literary figures at once: (i) the helmsman of the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (who, in the hymn, remains anonymous); (ii) the disguised god Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae (who operates in human guise but doesn’t assume a pseudonym); and (iii) the homonymous character from Pacuvius’ tragedy Pentheus (since the play has survived only in pitiful fragments, it is impossible for us to know whether Acoetes in Pacuvius was Bacchus in disguise).

Faced with this intertextual jigsaw puzzle, some scholars consider the solution to be obvious: ‘Ovid does not identify Acoetes with the god, but clearly expects his readers to do so’.86 Others feel that Ovid has constructed his text in such a way that an unequivocal resolution of the riddle remains deliberately beyond our reach:

The narrative parallels to Euripides’ play strongly suggest that we take Acoetes to be the god in disguise, but he is never identified as such directly. There are hints in this direction, but by leaving out an epiphany and keeping his god firmly offstage, Ovid ensures that we recognize Bacchus only when he appears as what he is not, as a character who recedes ever further back into the realm of miraculous narrative.87

Taking Acoetes to be Bacchus results in some delicious ironies, while offering degrees of metaliterary enrichment. To begin with, as Acoetes, Bacchus would perform an ingenious generic encroachment by incorporating into the central part of his own tragedy (Euripides’ Bacchae) the very Hymn in which his transformative powers are celebrated — a shift in emphasis very much in line with the thematic outlook of the Metamorphoses, i.e. the text in which he is currently operating. While the author of the Hymn to Dionysus disposed of the transformation of the crew into dolphins in two and a half words (δελφῖνες δ᾽ ἐγένοντο, ‘they became dolphins’ Hymn. Hom. 7.53), Acoetes gives one of the most striking descriptions of transformation in Ovid’s entire epic (3.671–82).

Concerning the hymn narrative, Philip Hardie well observes that ‘as a god whose identity is founded on doubling, Bacchus has the space within himself to address a successful hymn to himself … (“Acoetes” speaks)’.88 If Bacchus hymns himself, as it were, then several places in the hymnic narrative, in which he refers to himself, sparkle with Dionysiac wit. For example, ‘Acoetes’ reports that the first time he set eyes on the drunken Bacchus he immediately recognized his (own) divine essence:

ille mero somnoque gravis titubare videtur

vixque sequi; specto cultum faciemque gradumque:

nil ibi, quod credi posset mortale, videbam.

(Met. 3.608–10)

Somewhat later, ‘Acoetes’ sounds another arch note in professing the veracity of his account:89

per tibi nunc ipsum (nec enim praesentior illo

est deus) adiuro, tam me tibi vera referre

quam veri maiora fide …

(Met. 3.658–60)

If Acoetes is indeed Bacchus, then there is an amusing double-entendre in his parenthetical remark that ‘no god is closer than he’ (nec enim praesentior illo | est deus), appended to an appeal to his own godhead for the veracity of his tale. At the same time, the duplicitous nature of Acoetes-as-Bacchus gives the overall utterance a rather ominous force. Within Ovid’s Pentheus episode, the story of the Tyrrhenian sailors functions anyway as a speech-genre the Greeks called ainos (the English ‘enigma’ and ‘enigmatic’ derive from it), i.e. ‘an allusive tale containing an ulterior purpose’.90 The understanding or misunderstanding of the ainigma (‘riddle’) in the ainos (‘riddling tale’) can serve as a kind of ethical litmus test, dividing people into ‘better’ and ‘worse’ categories. By not understanding the message implicit in the embedded narrative, namely that Bacchus is a god who demands recognition and respect, Pentheus proves that he belongs among the latter. It is undoubtedly significant that he never considers the possibility that there may be more to the stranger than meets the eye, thus committing an offense with fatal consequences in classical literature, from Homer to tragedy and beyond.91

While the hymnic material displaces the tragic from the narrative center of the episode, Ovid, by creating an intertextual ‘mask’ with metapoetic significance for Bacchus, nevertheless manages to rehearse crucial preoccupations of the Euripidean play. The god’s status as author figure who coordinates the generic terms of his narrative existence closely resembles the ‘metadramatic’ powers Vernant ascribes to the god in Euripides’ Bacchae: ‘It is as if, throughout the spectacle, even as he appears on stage beside the other characters in the play, Dionysus was also operating at another level, behind the scene, putting the plot together and directing it towards its denouement’.92

The ambiguities of identity surrounding Acoetes-Bacchus are also emblematic of Bacchus’ presence in Ovid’s Theban History more generally:

Bacchus’ presence is problematic: it is not always easy to tell when he is present, or in what shape or form, and a suspicion arises that he has been present in Thebes from the beginning. We know already of his earlier intermittent presence in the city, at first in Semele’s womb before the embryo was snatched up to heaven to gestate in Jupiter’s thigh, and then again briefly as the nursling of Ino, before being whisked off to India for the rest of his infancy (310–15). But as the god of drama, he has been present from the first act of the Theban story, the birth of the Sown Men, compared in a simile as they rise from the earth to the figures appearing on a theatre curtain as it is raised (3.111–14). Like the famous simile at Aeneid 4.469–73 comparing Dido in her frenzy to mythological characters on stage, Ovid’s simile alerts us to a generic switch within a hexameter epic into a dramatic mode.93

By not featuring Bacchus (explicitly) as a protagonist in the Pentheus-episode, Ovid captures something important about the god: ‘Dionysus wants to be seen to be a god, to be manifest to mortals as a god, to make himself known, to reveal himself, to be known, recognized, understood … But Dionysus reveals himself by concealing himself, makes himself manifest by hiding himself from the eyes of all those who believe only in what they see’.94 In Ovid’s narrative, Bacchus’ presence is thus pervasive yet elusive: he (as it were) invites you to spot and capture the god in his text! And this is not a challenge to be undertaken lightly — or in the ham-fisted fashion of a Pentheus.

6. The Bacchanalia and Roman Culture

The story of Pentheus and Bacchus comes out of Greek myth and is situated in a Greek milieu. But we have already seen (above, §3a) that Ovid’s treatment of these tales is often refracted through Roman cultural experience. In the case of the set text, one such influence, which does not register explicitly in the narrative but is judged to be of some importance by commentators, is a senatorial intervention against the cult of Bacchus in 186 BCE (i.e. nearly two centuries before Ovid composed the Metamorphoses), as well as its repercussions in literary texts — dramatic plays initially (tragedies and comedies that have unfortunately only survived in fragments) and then also in Livy’s monumental history of Rome, which Ovid would have known. The distinction between the (religious) politics of 2nd century BCE Rome, specifically the measures taken against followers of the Bacchic cult in 186 BCE and the literary account of Livy, written in the Augustan period, is, of course, important to keep in mind.

Mid-Republican Rome experienced something quite similar to Ovid’s Thebes: the arrival of a cult of Bacchus, which merged with Italy’s cult of Liber, most likely sometime towards the end of the 3rd century BCE.95 Not much is known about the so-called Bacchanalia: as with all mystery religions, the doings of the worshippers have remained mysterious. But it is clear that, after an initial period of toleration, which allowed the rites to spread throughout Italy, the Roman senate concluded that certain boundaries of law and order had been breached by cult members and issued a decree against the Bacchic associations responsible for organizing the worship. A copy of this decree has survived, and offers precious insight into the affair.96 To begin with, it is clear that the senatorial intervention was not directed against Bacchus as a foreign divinity. Rather, the senate seems to have been ‘acting in particular against the behaviour of cult members in relation to each other, and not in relation to the god: Rome wished, therefore, to preclude the possibility that cults could serve as vehicles for achieving local solidarity’.97 The prohibitions of the decree suggest that the target was less the religious practice as such than the possibility of political fraternization afforded by a cult community.98 Indeed, ‘the decree makes no effort to ban the worship of Bacchus entirely, only to specify the conditions of worship’.99 What Roman officials seem to have feared was the possibility that, unless brought under senatorial control, the cult might serve as a vehicle for anti-Roman political associations and activities. Arguably, the shift from Euripides’ emphasis on illicit sex to Ovid’s focus on power politics (mirrored in the way their respective figures of Pentheus react to the arrival of Bacchus) reflects this concern.

The account of the historian Livy is also extant (Liv. 39.8–19), offering the modern reader a vivid and salacious chronicle of the affair, in which sex, intrigue, and xenophobia register insistently. It is, in fact, shot through with Augustan anachronisms; whether consciously or not, Livy has inflected his treatment with contemporary concerns (such as Augustus’ moral legislation). The idiom in which he describes the activities of those involved in the worship of Bacchus has interesting parallels with Pentheus’ characterization of Bacchants and their rites in Ovid’s account. The theme of sexual license registers with particular emphasis:

When wine had inflamed their minds, and night and the mingling of males with females and young with old, had destroyed all sense of modesty, every variety of debauchery began to be practiced, since each one had to hand the form of pleasure to which his nature was most inclined. (Liv. 39.8)

Later in the account, Livy has one of the consuls inveigh against the veneration of ‘those gods who would drive our minds, enthralled by vile and alien rites (pravis et externis religionibus), to every crime and every lust’ (39.15). The denigration continues with accusations of trickery and fraud (cf. Pentheus’ imputation of magicae fraudes at Met. 3.534), political conspiracy and even ritual murder (followed by the sacrilegious disposal of the victims’ bodies). Livy’s rhetoric against this ‘evil’ finds an analogy in Pentheus’ outrage against Bacchus and his followers in Ovid; both conceive of the cult’s propagation in terms of territorial encroachment, though Pentheus’ metaphor of choice is military conquest, whereas Livy’s is a spreading pestilence: ‘the destructive force of this wickedness spread from Etruria to Rome like a contagion’ (huius mali labes ex Etruria Romam veluti contagione morbi penetravit, Liv. 39.9).

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1 Introductions to Ovid abound. See e.g. Mack (1988), Holzberg (2002), Fantham (2004), Volk (2010), Liveley (2011). There are also three recent ‘companions’ to Ovid, i.e. collections of papers designed to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the poet and his works. See Hardie (2002b) (by far the best and most affordable), Weiden Boyd (2000) and Knox (2009).

2 Maeonides means ‘a native of Maeonia’, a region in Asia Minor, from which Homer was in antiquity believed to have hailed: hence Maeonides = Homer.

3 Mount Helicon in Boeotia is said to be the place where the Muses do dwell; hence toto Helicone relicto = ‘all Helicon abandoned’ = ‘having abandoned the writing of poetry’.

4 A good way to get a sense of his life and career is to read his highly spun autobiography Trist. 4.10, which begins with a charming couplet addressed to you: Ille ego qui fuerim, tenerorum lusor amorum, | quem legis, ut noris, accipe posteritas … (‘That you may know who I was, I that playful poet of tender love whom you read, hear my words, you of times to come …’)

5 Technically speaking, Ovid suffered the punishment of relegatio (‘deportation’) rather than the more severe penalty of exilium (‘exile’) — the poet himself stresses the distinction at Trist. 2.137. This meant that Ovid retained citizenship and many of the rights that went with it, and his property was not confiscated. His (third) wife Fabia did not accompany him to Tomi, but seems to have remained faithful to him.

6 The following is adapted from Gildenhard and Zissos (2000b).

7 You can read the first book of the Amores on-line in another OBP edition. See http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/348

8 Sharrock (1994) vii.

9 Initially, the reader might be inclined to take the first four words (In nova fert animus: ‘my mind carries me on to new things’, with the adjective nova used as a noun) as a self-standing syntactic unit; only after reaching the opening of line 2 do we realise that nova in fact modifies corpora and the phrase goes with the participle mutatas (‘forms changed into new bodies’).

10 By removing one of the feet from the second verse, Cupid in effect changed the genre of the poem Ovid was composing from epic (in which all verses are hexametric — i.e. contain six feet) to elegy (in which every second verse contains five feet).

11 On varietas (‘variety’) in Latin literature more generally see now Fitzgerald (2016).

12 Annals, as the name suggests (from annus = year), are year-by-year chronicles. Ennius (c. 239–c. 169 BCE) wrote his epic history of Rome towards the end of his life.

13 Mack (1988) 27.

14 Galinsky (1975) 41.

15 Hinds (1987) 121.

16 Johnson (1996) 9.

17 Tissol (1996) 151–52.

18 For generic dialogue see Farrell (1992); for ‘generic enrichment’ Harrison (2007).

19 Gildenhard and Zissos (2013) 49–51.

20 Or, by a pun on tempora, to Ovid’s ‘temples’ (i.e. to his cranium).

21 More on this matter below; for detailed discussion see Gildenhard and Zissos (2004).

22 Any mention of Amores 3.12, as John Henderson reminds us, has also to invoke the Liar’s Paradox at work here: the person whose only true claim is that he is lying is — lying. ‘So whatever else Ovid “challenges” us to read, it is all tainted with mendacity. There is no true instruction for the reader coming from this author: I’d be lying, wouldn’t I, if I said that we’re on our own, with “myth”, fictions that (like histories) tell truths by lying (esp. by telling [hi]stories)’.

23 Little (1970) 347.

24 Feeney (1991) 229 with reference to earlier scholarship in n. 152.

25 Lee (1953) on Met. 1.167ff., citing Hom. Il. 8.1ff., 20.1 ff.; Od. 1.26ff., 5.1ff; Enn. Ann. 51–55 Sk; Aen. 10.1ff. One could add Lucilius, who, in his Satires, also featured a concilium deorum (‘Council of the Gods’), at which an individual called Lupus (Latin for ‘wolf’ — a distant intertextual relative of Ovid’s Lycaon, surely) was put on trial. Ovid here follows the example of Homer’s Odyssey and Ennius’ Annales in placing his concilium deorum at the beginning of his narrative.

26 Lee (1953) on Met. 1.167ff.

27 Ginsberg (1989) 228.

28 Feeney (1991) 199, citing Suet. Aug. 29.3 and the discussion of Thompson (1981).

29 The notion of penates makes a suggestive appearance in the set text as well: see Comm. on 538–40.

30 Which is not, of course, to deny the rich ironies inherent in Ovid’s parallelism between Jupiter and Augustus: see e.g. Johnson (1970), 146. John Henderson offers some characteristically trenchant observations here: ‘The ugly indiscriminate speciescide perpetrated by the Almighty is … just the first modelling of the exercise of autocratic power in Ovid’s poem: the set text will picture one young monarch among the horde populating mythland attempting to play the tough guy. In the Julio-Claudian Rome of the Caesars, myths were becoming (a way to get) real, all over again’.

31 Ingelbert (2014) 256.

32 That Ovid chose to write, for the most part, fiction did not prevent him from presenting his fictions as facts: see the previous section on ‘universal history’.

33 Ennius’ Annals features several main characters, and a case could be made for Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica featuring a collective protagonist, i.e. the Argonauts as a group.

34 For this approach to the poem, see Solodow (1988) 37–55, also discussed at Comm. on 568–69.

35 Schmidt (1991).

36 Barchiesi (1999).

37 Brown (1999) 1.

38 For specific examples in the set text, see Comm. on 568–71 (Shakespeare) and 664–65 (Seneca); 670–72 (Marlowe).

39 For the cautionary tale of how some classical students took the Euripidean Bacchus all too close to heart, see Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

40 See Comm. on 513–14 for a fuller account of these preliminaries.

41 Zeitlin (1990) 131.

42 Zeitlin (1990) 144.

43 For details of these developments, see Comm. on 513–14.

44 See again Zeitlin (1990) passim.

45 See Bömer (1976), 183 for the possibility that Ovid constructed the scene with actual Satyr plays in mind.

46 Cadmus’ grandson Bacchus, however, provides the jumping-off point for the next mythic nucleus, centred on Perseus (4.604–10); and neither Bacchus nor ‘Cadmean’ Thebes will ever wholly recede from the background: they are on the map, permanent stock, and Ovid revisits Theban myths elsewhere in the Metamorphoses, notably in Book 6 (with the tale of Niobe and her sons and daughters), Book 9 (the Hercules saga) and in Book 13 with the daughter of Anius and the Theban cup that travels on to Rome. As John Henderson puts it, ‘on the overarching grand scale, the Metamorphoses diagrams the formulaic triangulation of (tragically self-obliterating) Thebes vs. (tragically re-generating) Troy vs. (redemptively renaissant and self-perpetuating) ROME’.

47 See Comm. on 513–14 for a fuller account of these preliminaries.

48 It needs to be borne in mind, though, that, as discussed earlier (§3a), the vicissitudes of textual survival do not allow absolute certainty on this point. Many other ancient tragedians, both Greek and Roman, wrote plays about the confrontation of Pentheus and Bacchus; but only Euripides’ has survived in full.

49 See Otto (1933) on Dionysiac religion in general and Segal (1982) on Euripides’ Bacchae.

50 Cf. Seidensticker (1972) 42.

51 Other versions or references to the tale include Apollod. 3.5.3; Prop. 3.17.25; Sen. Oed. 449.

52 The titular epithet arose from a misattribution by the Greek historian Thucydides (3.104), which has remained immune to correction through the ages.

53 John Henderson offers a valuable observation here: ‘Setting a hymn in a narrative context, which is precisely lacking in the “prayerbook” Homeric Hymn collection, dramatizes the nature of hymns as motivated “in the moment” vehicles for rhetorical intervention. The same goes for all tales, not least mutant myths about mythmaking and mutation’.

54 For discussion of this group, see Comm. on 605–07.

55 Hesiod’s poem has not survived, but Apollod. 3.6.7 offers a summary of the tale (with attributions). Another tradition explains his loss of eyesight as the result of seeing the goddess Athena naked at her bath; infuriated, she struck him blind, but then felt remorse and granted him the gift of prophecy in recompense.

56 Michalopoulos (2012) 236, arguing earlier in the same work (p. 229) for an interrelation between Tiresias’ sexual oscillations and his predictive powers: ‘since prophetic knowledge stands on the verge between “here” and “there”, between the human and the divine, we might argue as well that the seer’s bisexuality becomes an emblem, or better, constitutes a metaphor for Tiresias’ prophetic transcendence’. On the other hand, John Henderson cautions that ‘even referring to Tiresias’ “bisexuality” is already to fall into the trap set by the riddle of gendering sex!’

57 For Narcissus as a substitute for Oedipus see Gildenhard and Zissos (2000a).

58 Met. 3.339–40; 3.511–12, i.e. the opening two lines of the set text. ‘Typically, however, Ovid’s Tiresias is first to tell Narcissus’ tale, and to let our bard make Echo try to “get it together” with Narcissus in one impossible dis-joint tale of love scorned and twisted (see 386–87). New fame, then, for the old seer’. (John Henderson)

59 See Comm. on 513–14.

60 See Eur. Bacch. 367 with Dodds (1960) ad loc. Note also the etymological figure on ‘Pentheus’ (Πενθῆα) and ‘lamentation’ (πένθημα) at [Theoc.] Id. 26.26 (the poem is quoted in full above, §5a): πένθημα καὶ οὐ Πενθῆα φέροισαι.

61 That Pentheus has come to the throne at a very young age is evident in Ovid’s as in Euripides’ account: see Comm. on 540–42.

62 Cf. e.g. Bacch. 233–38, 260–62, 352–54, 453–59, 487, 957–58.

63 The lives of Virgil (70–19 BCE) and Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) overlap, but only during the latter’s youth. In any event, Virgil’s Aeneid became an instant ‘classic’ and is treated as such in the Metamorphoses — that is to say, it is frequently the focus of Ovid’s intertextual engagement.

64 A point emphasized by Hardie (1990) 229. Ovid similarly characterizes Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, as Martia proles at Fast. 3.59.

65 Cf. Zeitlin (1990) 74–75.

66 At the same time, as John Henderson points out, ‘Ovid’s merging of Thebes and Troy threatens the “triangulation” formula for ROME (see above, n. 46) — while picking up on the way Virgil has merged his “Thebes” (tragic Carthage) with Troy to-be-reborn-as-ROME’.

67 Dodds (1960) xliii and ad 214.

68 Seidensticker (1972) 57.

69 The following is based on Seidensticker (1972) 57–61.

70 See e.g. 3.555–56 with Comm.

71 Pentheus’ lack of self-control is apparent throughout the episode, and in particular at 3.566–67 (with following simile), 578–79, 692–95, 704–07. For Euripides’ treatment, see e.g. Bacch. 214 with Dodds (1960) ad loc.

72 See Comm. on 531–63, 532–37 and 536–67.

73 See Comm. on 520.

74 Der Neue Pauly III (1997) 651–52 (Schlesier).

75 Ovid provides a decidedly salacious version of this birth story earlier in Book 3 at 253–315.

76 There was, in fact, a tradition that presented Dionysus/Bacchus as a vigorous demigod who won a place in heaven through military conquest and the bestowal of benefits upon humankind (e.g. Cic. Leg. 2.19, Virg. Aen. 6.804–05; Hor. Carm. 3.3.13–15, Val. Fl. 1.566–67). A legendary cycle (gradually assimilated to the career of Alexander the Great) featuring eastern expeditions and, above all, conquests in India, rose to prominence in the Hellenistic period and passed into popular art, as well as the iconography of various Hellenistic kings and Roman generals: see further Zissos (2008) 325.

77 Compare ‘Zeus pater’ and ‘Jupiter’, whom the Romans also called ‘Diespiter’ and understood as ‘Dies pater’, i.e. ‘father of the day’ or ‘sky father’.

78 Cf. Pentheus’ sneering reference to τὸν νεωστὶ δαίμονα | Διόνυσον [‘the new god Dionysus’] at Eur. Bacch. 219–20; on the god’s newness and strangeness, see also Comm. on 520.

79 See Comm. on 607 virginea … forma.

80 This utopian appeal works in tandem with various Golden Age motifs, such as life without toil, that were associated with the god.

81 Zeitlin (1993) 158.

82 Acting a part is of course appropriate to the god’s identity as divine patron of the theatre. Cf. Cole (2007) 234: ‘Dionysus is a god who plays many roles, and he can change his appearance at will. As god of the theatre, he is associated with the process of transition actors undergo when taking on a new role, because the actor puts on a new identity with each new mask’.

83 The point is made by Feldherr (1997) 29: ‘the audience of this narrative … faces the same challenge as the characters within it’.

84 Note that in Euripides’ play Bacchus/Dionysus states that he hails from Lydia both in his own form (Bacch. 38–39) and when disguised (Bacch. 464): see further Comm. on 582–83.

85 The issues surrounding this testimonium are complex (some scholars have even suggested that Servius Auctus draws on Ovid for his summary of Pacuvius’ play!); Schierl (2006) 418–22 offers a survey of the secondary literature on Pacuvius’ Pentheus (vel Bacchae).

86 Kenney (1986) 394.

87 Feldherr (2010) 187.

88 Hardie (2002a) 170.

89 Cf. Eur. Bacch. 500 (Dionysus speaking about himself): καὶ νῦν ἃ πάσχω πλησίον παρὼν ὁρᾷ (‘Even now he is near and sees what I am experiencing’).

90 Verdenius (1962) 389, cited by Nagy (1979) 237 in his discussion of the term.

91 Cf. Murnaghan (1987) 68: ‘Both in the Homeric epics and in the Homeric Hymns, failure to recognize a disguised god often brings mortals to disaster, and this disaster is frequently accompanied by a display of divine anger, as in the case of the sailors in the Hymn to Dionysus or of Metaneira in the Hymn to Demeter’.

92 Vernant (1988) 381–82.

93 Hardie (2002a) 166–67.

94 Vernant (1988) 391.

95 For the native Italian deity Liber, see also Comm. on 520.

96 The senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (‘senatorial decree concerning the Bacchanalia’), CIL 12.581.

97 Ando (2007) 437.

98 The pertinent section of the senatorial decree stipulates: ‘None of them shall seek to have money in common. No one shall seek to appoint either man or woman as master or acting master, or seek henceforth to exchange mutual oaths, vows, pledges or promises, nor shall anyone seek to create mutual guarantees. No one shall seek to perform rites in secret, nor shall anyone seek to perform rites in public or private or outside the city, unless he has approached the urban praetor and is given permission with a senatorial decree … No one shall seek to perform rites when more than five men and women are gathered together, nor shall more than two men or more than three women seek to be present there, except by permission of the urban praetor and the senate …’ (trans. Beard, North and Price).

99 Orlin (2010) 64.