The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Segal 1998, 9–41, examines in particular metamorphoses as manifestations of psychological drives and as illustrations of widely held views about gender in antiquity in which the female body is perceived as an object and the recipient of male aggression and the male body is associated with invulnerability. 2. Ovid asks the gods to “lead down” (“deducite” [4]) the poem, employing a metaphor derived from spinning; deductus, the participle form of the verb deduco, was used to describe a refined Hellenistic aesthetic in the Augustan period. Wheeler 1999, 8–30, discusses these opening lines of Ovid’s poem at length and specifically addresses the metaphor of spinning for refined poetry in the manner of Callimachus. 3. Tissol 1997, esp. 13–15 and 52–61, observes that paradox is especially prevalent in the Metamorphoses with respect to characters who are, for various reasons, unable to act. See also Kenney 2002, 76–77, on Ovid’s facility with paradox , implemented especially in forms of double theme and variation. 4. Ranging through Ovid’s elegiac works as well as his epic, Hardie 2002, 143–72 and 272–92, provides nuanced discussions of this theme in the episodes of Narcissus and Ceyx-Alcyone, respectively. 5. See Wheeler 1999, in particular, on the relevance of book divisions to the distinction between the narrator as oral poet and the implied poet as writer of a text and on the narrator’s use of addresses to an unspecific second person, the first-person plural, apostrophes, and rhetorical questions in constructing the fiction that he is performing orally to his “narratorial audience” (Wheeler’s term). Throughout his study, however, he tends to focus more on the audience side of the equation. 6. My use of the terms “centripetal” and “centrifugal” derives from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the concept of “dialogism” in narrative. Bakhtin 1981, 272–73, associates the “centrifugal” forces with the powerless, the popular, and 137 the carnivalesque, with types such as the trickster, and with low literary genres. Here, Ovid makes even Arachne’s birthplace symbolic of the low as he sets it in contrast with her nomen memorabile: “quamvis / orta domo parva parvis habitabat Hypaepis” (“although she was born in a small home and lived in small Hypaepa” [12–13]). The name Hypaepa in Greek itself connotes restriction, as it means “under the lofty”: Ovid reinforces its meaning in the verse by using the device of anadiplosis with parva parvis, the first adjective modifying domo and the second, Hypaepis. 7. Rosati 1999, 251, notes that the young woman includes a particularly thoughtless allusion to the violation of Minerva’s temple by Neptune’s rape of Medusa (119–20). 8. On Arachne’s limitations as evidenced by her arrogance toward Minerva, see Barkan 1986, 2, and Harries 1990, 65. Lateiner 1984, 17, stresses Arachne’s flaw of failing to admit the “debt of the artist to something greater than himself ”; Barkan 1986, 2, takes a similar position. Leach 1974, 115, suggests that the young woman’s desire for widespread fame and her pride in her success are a consequence of her humble background, which leads her to reject a sense of indebtedness and to insist on her autonomy. 9. Referring to her transformed state, Ovid says that Arachne “works at her webs of old as a spider” (“antiquas exercet aranea telas” [145]). The word aranea in Latin, significantly, means both spider and spider’s web. The phrase, furthermore , points up the aetiological function of the myth by mentioning the Latin word for “spider,” which is close to its Greek equivalent, arachnê (or arachnês). 10. In evoking Envy, the poet may well imply empathy with Arachne. Ovid in the Amores brought up the problem of Livor vis-à-vis his own poetry (e.g., 1.15.1 and 39), and in his exile poems he returns to this theme (e.g., Epistulae ex ponto 3.1.65, 3.3.104, 3.4.74). The poet here appears to recall Callimachus’s comments in the Hymn to Apollo that Phthonos maligns him because his works do not go on at length. See Hofmann 1986, 233, on the correlation of Livor with Phthonos, a figure who is identified in Hymn 2 with traditional epic and who maligns the refined work of poets like Callimachus. 11. See, in particular, Barkan 1986, 4–5, and Harries 1990, 66–67. 12. Hofmann 1986, 223–41. 13. On Ovid’s affiliation with Callimachean aesthetics, see esp. Lyne 1984...