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3. The Weaving Contest: Metamorphoses 6
- University of Wisconsin Press
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3 The Weaving Contest Metamorphoses 6 Lend Me Your Ears If a reader of the Metamorphoses were to begin with book 6 of the poem, the undertaking would be stalled by the first word on the page: praebuerat . With the pluperfect tense Ovid unmistakably directs us back to an earlier moment in the epic; followed by dictis Tritonia talibus aures, ‘Minerva (Tritonia) (had lent) her ears to words [a story] of this kind,’ we are invited to look back and discover just what kind of story the narrator might mean, and why Minerva was listening to it. If we search with particular care, we may notice that the line echoes the introduction to Calliope’s song at 5.334–35, where the deferential Muse asks Minerva, sed forsitan otia non sint / nec nostris praebere vacet tibi cantibus aures?, ‘but perhaps you haven’t the leisure or the time to lend your ears to our songs?’ The opening line of book 6 is a particularly economical example of the celebrated linking devices with which Ovid unifies his carmen perpetuum,1 in this case turning our gaze backward and insisting that book 6 be read in the context of the preceding episode. Ovid’s directional signals have not, by and large, been heeded by critics. While much has been made of the weaving contest and its eyecatching ekphrases over the years, few scholars other than Harries and Heckel have taken up Ovid’s challenge to pursue the relationship between the contests.2 In one of the most quoted book reviews in Ovidian criticism, Anderson only briefly mines both contests for clues about Ovid’s aesthetic principles.3 Leach’s landmark article on ekphrasis in the Metamorphoses discusses both contests in some detail but is primarily 74 interested in their demonstration of the differences between “human and divine viewpoints.”4 Lateiner’s similarly extensive survey of artists in the Metamorphoses does not weigh in on the relationship between the episodes, as he omits the Muses and Emathides from his study.5 Feeney has more recently argued that the weaving contest best demonstrates the “poles of fixity and flux” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (following Barkan ’s formulation of metamorphosis as a vehicle between the cosmic divisions of the universe), but refers us to Hinds on the poetic contest, whose excellent study focuses entirely upon the song of Calliope in the context of the Fasti and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.6 Scheid and Svenbro note connections between the episodes (e.g., that the Emathides and Arachne both begin their accounts of divine transformation with Jupiter in the form of a bull) but only to demonstrate Ovid’s use of weaving as a metaphor for poetic composition; they see “no parallel between the subjects of Calliope and Minerva.”7 Yet Ovid could hardly make the connection more explicitly. Our interest in an-episode-not-this-episode is deepened in the second line of book 6 by yet another pluperfect: carminaque Aonidum iustamque probaverat iram, ‘and she had approved the songs of the Aonides and their justifiable anger.’ Carmina Aonidum refers to the verbatim rendition of Calliope’s song in her book 5 competition with the mortal Emathides. In chapter 2 I discussed the appeal of this song to Minerva: the story of the rape of Proserpina by Pluto is recounted from the virginal perspective of the victims, shared by the chaste Minerva, and Venus, Minerva’s arch enemy, is made fully responsible for it. Moreover, as Barchiesi has recently observed, the traditional conclusion of the rape of Persephone in which Demeter and Triptolemus are largely responsible for the civilizing of Athens through agriculture and the establishment of the Eleusinian mysteries is replaced in Calliope’s account by Triptolemus’s adventures in Scythia, suggesting for Minerva/Athena an unrivalled auctoritas in her namesake city.8 It follows that Minerva was pleased by Calliope’s performance. The ira of the Muses in the second half of the line is striking. As we have seen, angry Muses are a novelty in ancient poetry;9 although approved by Minerva, their ira still requires the qualifying adjective iustam. It motivates the divine poena imposed by the Muses at the end of the poetic contest when the Emathides refuse to accept the judgment of the nymphs of Helicon against them. The indignation of the Emathides is not surprising; the narrator’s ambiguous description of the judgment reveals the judges’ potential for bias: at nymphae vicisse deas Helicona The Weaving Contest 75...