Chronology and Anachrony in Ovid's Story of Scylla (Metamorphoses 13.730-14.74)

M.W. Musgrove: Chronology and Anachrony95 Chronology and Anachrony in Ovid's Story of Scylla (Metamorphoses 13.730-14.74) Margaret Worsham Musgrove The tale of Scylla in Metamorphoses Books 13 and 14 and the stories which branch offfrom it are a well-known case of Ovid's tendency to digress from his so-called main storyünes. As Aeneas approaches the region of Scylla and Charybdis, Ovid tells the readers about Scylla's history, and within this history tells several other episodes.1 The problem of die relationship between frame and inset stories is complicated by Ovid's wide use of internal narrators, sometimes on several levels of subordination,2 and by his habit of interrupting one story with a seemingly unrelated one, especially during long continuous episodes, such as that of Aeneas. The Scylla story raises questions about Ovid's pacing of his episodes and of his shrinking of some of his inherited material, questions of what G. Genette calls narrative "duration."3 Scholars of Ovid's Metamorphoses have long discussed the question of "main" stories versus "digressions": e.g.,M.M. Crump, The Epyllionfrom Theocritus to Ovid (Oxford 1931); B. Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge 1970); and R. Coleman, "Structure and Intention in the Metamorphoses," CQ 21 (1971) 461-76. 2 BR. Nagle, "Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Narratological Catalog," SyllClass 1 (1989) 97-138. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by 1£. Lewin (Ithaca 1980) 86112 . Genette (35-36) defines the term "anachrony" as "the various types of discordance between the orderings of story and narrative;" in other words, the ways in which events may appear in the narrative in an order different from the order in which they are assumed to have "happened" in time. 96Syllecta Classica 9 (1998) Time flies past in the passage just before the Scylla story, as Aeneas travels around the entire eastern Mediterranean in twenty-five lines (13.705-29). Then, when he reaches the site of Scylla and Charybdis, Aeneas' story apparently comes to a complete halt for the next three hundred lines.4 Aeneas is neither narrator nor narratee of the Scylla section. J.B. Solodow asserts that the huge size of the Scylla episode overwhelms the "Aeneid," and that the hero's absence from the narrative situation makes the Scylla episode thematically irrelevant.5 But Aeneas' technical absence from the narrative situation may not be fatal to his presence in the story or to his thematic relevance. This paper will explore the ways in which the temporal structure and the narrative situation of the digression help build a connection between the inset story and its frame. The story of Scylla begins ostensibly as an aition for the monster who, along with Charybdis, threatens sea-travelers around Sicily.6 The narrator halts the story of Aeneas' progress to Italy in order to inform the reader that Scylla was formerly a maiden plagued by numerous suitors, and that she had once complained of her problem to the nymph Galatea. Galatea takes the reader back in time by telling a story about when she herself was courted by the Cyclops Polyphemus. Within that story, she recalls an even earlier event, when the prophet Telemus had told Polyphemus that at some future day Ulysses was going to put out the Cyclops' eye. So within Ovid's aetiological flashback, the subject of the aition first begins to tell her own story, and then a second internal narrator looks back to a prophecy which itself looks forward to a time after her own story—that is, to the Cyclops episode we read in the Odyssey.1 Galatea also repeats the text of Polyphemus' love song to her and narrates his subsequent destruction ofher lover Acis.8 When Galatea's internal narrative is finished, the first-level narrator ("Ovid") then proceeds to tell us more of Scylla's story: after leaving Galatea, Scylla encountered Glaucus, who recounted 4 G.K. Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley 1975) 222: "Ovid moves Aeneas out of the picture ..." and Otis (above, note 1, 279, 281-82) on "superficiality" of connections between stories. 5 The World ofOvid's Metamorphoses...