Trustees of Boston University

Trustees of Boston University through its publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and
the Classics

Ovid's Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the "Metamorphoses"

Author(s): Charles Segal
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 3
(Winter, 1998), pp. 9-41
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163686
Accessed: 18-04-2020 09:39 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163686?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Trustees of Boston University, Trustees of Boston University through its publication

Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Ovid's Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and
Violence in the Metamorphoses
CHARLES SEGAL

c
v^/URRENT LITERARY criticism has
cerned with the ways in which the const
is, definitions of the self and the person, of
vidual's roles and functions in society?d
tions of the body. Serious study of th
literature begins with Lessing's Laoc
received fresh impetus from the work of M
insights into the representation of the bo
discourse, with its implicit hierarchies an
tions.1 It is peculiar that the Metamorph
subject, in one sense, is the body, has not
role in this discussion as it should. There a
complementary reasons for this neglect: a
poem as frivolous parody and a tendency t
the body too narrowly to sexuality. The
uses the. body as its focus for its view of
art, and of male and female identity. Part
side Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and S
ses is revealing for the ways in which the
becomes the focus for the conflict betwee
of the material world on the one hand and
transcendence on the other. In addition, r
in Roman society and art, including the ro
torial games, and corporal punishment in
have opened new and not altogether pleas
Metamorphoses, and indeed on Roman
whole.2
Given the Metamorphoses' brilliant style and coruscating nar
rative virtuosity, scholarship has concentrated, not unreasonably,
on literary form rather than conceptual issues: Ovid's problemati
cal relation to heroic epic, the elusive structure and design of his
kaleidoscopic poem, his use of allusion, wit and irony, his inter
textuality, his combination of different genres, and his "remythol
ogizing" of Lucretius and Virgil.3 Alongside this formalistic

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 10 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

approach, there has been renewed interest in Ovid's view of art

and the artist, his conception of the gods, and the problem of
violence, especially sexual violence.4 A perceptive critic (not a
professional classicist) has described Ovid as a "poetical anthro
pologist";5 and this essay, broadly speaking, is about Ovid's
"anthropology" and psychology in both its literary and cultural
context. My approach may be situated, in part, in a continental
tradition, concerned with Ovid's vision of the human condition
and his implicit definition(s) of identity.6 Any study of the Meta
morphoses, however, must avoid separating form from content
and so must attend to Ovid's wonderfully elegant surface.
Like his great predecessor in Roman didactic epic, Lucretius,
Ovid views the body as vulnerable, penetrable, and porous. But
whereas Lucretius' materialist philosophy seeks escape from anxi
ety about the body, the Metamorphoses exults in the body's seem
ingly endless subjection to physical change and continually finds
new metaphors and situations that intensify rather than allay anxi
ety. Lucan will go far beyond Ovid in the dissolution of corporeal
boundaries; his overheated rhetorical fantasy reflects a world on
the edge of total chaos, held in check precariously by the courage
and will of the Stoic hero, whose own existence, however, has no
certain extension beyond his doomed body.7 Ovid's metamorphic
world, for all its strangeness, retains a sense of coherence and con
trol that begin to dissolve in Lucan and Seneca. Yet in some essen
tial respects he challenges one of the pillars of the classical epic
tradition, that is, the classical definition of human nature, which,
from Homer through Plato and Aristotle, is founded on the antith
esis of human and bestial. In place of this view of a stable human
nature, Ovid presents a world where the boundaries between
humans and animals are dangerously fluid. Sometimes this fluidity
produces pathos, as in the case of Io turned into a cow by an
embarrassed Jupiter caught in flagrante delicto. Sometimes there
is a grotesque humor, as in the case of Europa, seduced by a hand
some bull (Jupiter in disguise), who allows himself to be patted
and kissed (2.866-69). Sometimes there is a Kafkaesque nightmare
of a human mind trapped inside an animal or a monstrous body,
as in the case of Callisto turned into a bear or Actaeon torn apart
by his own hounds. These last two episodes touch on some of the
most significant themes in Ovid's depiction of the body, its repre
sentation of a world in which reason and order decompose into
frightening confusion and chaos.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 11

Thoughout Western literature the body recurs as an expression

of just this kind of anti-order. From Aristophanes to Bosch, from
Rabelais to Swift, from Kafka to Fellini's Satyricon, writers and
other artists have used the grotesque physicality of the body to
comment on the darker, less organized, perhaps more primordial
or infantile visions of the self and the human condition. Indeed,
Jacques Lacan theorizes an early stage of human development in
which the infant struggles to make sense of himself corporeally
and so perceives himself as a corps morcel?, or "body in pieces."8
Ovid's poem, one could say, creates a kind of Bakhtinian carni
val world in which the metamorphic body occupies a precarious
place between creative exuberance and terrifying disorientation.9
Bakhtin describes this carnival world as "a temporary suspension
of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of cer
tain norms and prohibitions of usual life" (15). This freedom from
restraints has a positive side in the development of new types of
communication and new energies in language that create "new
forms of speech or a new meaning given to old forms" (16).
Although Bakhtin's primary concern is the high Renaissance, he
traces the carnivalesque spirit back to classical antiquity, to the
Menippean satire of the Hellenistic period (preserved and trans
mitted largely through the work of Lucian in the second century
A.D.), and to the Roman festival of the Saturnalia (6ff., 69ff.). In
Roman literature he notes strong carnivalesque tendencies in
Petronius, Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, and Apuleius, to which I
would add, following Alessandro Barchiesi, parts of Ovid's
Fasti.10 On the Roman Saturnalia Bakhtin remarks,

While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During

carnival time, life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws
of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special con
dition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal,
in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly
felt by all its participants. It was most clearly expressed and
experienced in the Roman Saturnalias, perceived as a true
and full, though temporary, return of Saturn's golden age
upon earth. (6-7)

Ovid's Metamorphoses creates an analogous freedom, releasing

the creative energy in which new forms are continually coming
into being and normal limits are suspended. Human and bestial,

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 12 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

animate and inanimate, male and female can flow into one
another. As in Bakhtin's carnivalesque world, this suspension of
the laws of life and matter can produce a golden age or a night
mare, miracle or monster.
Bakhtin's grotesque body, that is, the body in the culture of the
carnivalesque, is characterized by fluidity rather than sharp,
impermeable boundaries, by a blurring of the division between
inner and outer, by porosity or Ieakiness rather than contained and
defined units. To quote once more, "[...] the grotesque ignores the
impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate
and completed phenomenon. The grotesque image displays not
only the outward but also the inner features of the body: blood,
bowels, heart and other organs. The outward and inward features
are often merged into one" (318). Bakhtin's remarks fit Lucan
even better than Ovid, but the Metamorphoses too depicts the
body through its detached parts rather than the whole, through
distorted or exaggerated organs, and physical processes. By choos
ing metamorphosis as his theme, Ovid focuses on the moments
when stable forms and familiar norms dissolve in order to tap cre
ative, if necessarily disorderly, energies that are usually kept
beneath the surface, under the control of political, social, and sym
bolic systems that insist on coherence and order.
In one important respect, however, Ovid operates with an
underlying assumption of classical Greek poetry, namely that
there is a correspondence between our physical and our emotional
or spiritual life and that the art of language, and indirectly of the
visual arts, has the power of making visible the invisible move
ments of soul. The pervading trope of the Metamorphoses rests on
the premise that its world of myth and art can convert into physical
form some underlying quality of mind, character, or emotion,
whether these are a lasting feature of personality or a transient
mood or emotion. It is a corollary of this premise that through this
mechanism of physical convertibility the poet can reveal the hidden
essence of a personality?its needs, longings, passions, fears?in
a form that is closely tied to the physicality of the body.
Classical antiquity contains many discourses about the body,
from the Homeric battle scenes on to the medical writers of late
antiquity. The literary conventions of hexameter poetry permit
spectacular physical details, especially in the case of love and war;
but there is a certain inhibition about more trivial physical mat
ters, unless one is writing satire. Horace is one of the few classical

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 13

Latin poets to mention the nuisance of the common cold. Lucre

tius too is an exception, in part because he is expounding a scien
tific theory that attempts to account for all of the physical
processes in the universe, from microcosm to macrocosm. Hence
he can describe small corporeal details like the sensation of cold on
the teeth.
In the grander reaches of the poetic tradition stand Homer's
depiction of the body's physical suffering in war in the Iliad, the
disguising and clothing of the body in the Odyssey, Sophocles'
dramatization of the body in pain in Philoctetes, or Lucretius' pro
found and disturbing meditations on the physicality of the body in
its relation to death and the anxieties surrounding death that
derive from our sense of the vulnerability of human flesh. Virgil
had achieved a brilliant Roman synthesis of Greek poetry's lan
guage of the passions expressed in physical or physiological terms:
the seething of the blood in anger or love, fire running through the
veins or bones, a wound of longing fixed deep in the breast, desire
devouring the inmost marrows. He also borrowed and emulated
(in the full sense of the term) the Homeric battle scenes, with their
gory woundings and mutilations. Ovid draws on all these tradi
tions and brings them together in surprising ways and?being
Ovid?also in irreverent ways.
In Latin poetry, as in Greek, such descriptions of the body eas
ily become part of a discourse of mortality, infused by a general
ized compassion for the human condition, of which the specific
suffering is exemplary. To speak of the body in classical literature
is to speak of mortality. The body is the constant reminder of our
creatureliness, our kinship with other living, and dying beings,
and so our distance from the undying gods, who, in Ovid's highly
anthropomorphic world, have physical bodies with the needs,
desires, and satisfactions of our bodies, but with limitless power
and without death or decay. To contemplate the body is to become
aware of our pitiful mortal condition as much as to feel interest in
individual personal lives. Thus in the Iliad, although the dead and
wounded number in the hundreds, the deaths of individuals
remain moving because they are paradigms of mortal suffering and
loss; and the poem pauses to reflect on them with a combination
of distance and broad compassion that belongs to the wide, omni
scient perspective of this narratorial voice. The manner of the
death is itself part of the exemplarity of the life, and only the most
essential details are given?a grieving parent, a widowed wife, a

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 14 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

youth that will not find fulfillment in marriage?enough to make

it possible to extrapolate the generality from the specific instance.
The modern literary sensibility, confronted with a body, tends
to elaborate a highly individualized life story, with all the pathos
of intensely personal details. In the Metamorphoses, however, it is
not the body that leads the narrator to the story, but the story that
is forced to end in something that happens to the body. This is
clear from the very first metamorphosis in the poem, the tale of
Lycaon, a man of wolflike savagery whose body, transformed into
a wolf, sums up what he is. Ovid's narrative works on two tempo
ral planes, history and exemplarity,11 On the one hand metamor
phosis provides an aetiological myth to answer the question of
origins: how did the first wolf, weasel, frog, or laurel tree come
into being? On the other hand, it is often the external realization
of a type of character.
Critics in search of a stable moral center in Ovid's poem can
point to such translations of character into physical state. The
stony-hearted Propoetides of Book 10, for example, are made liter
ally stones as the appropriate punishment for profaning Venus'
gifts by becoming the first prostitutes. But Ovid often explores the
discrepancy between the metamorphosis and the person changed,
as in the case of Dryope in Book 9 or Scylla in Book 14, More dis
turbing still, he shows us the body taking over the mind, matter
controlling spirit. In Book 2 Envy, Invidia, breathes a kind of psy
chotropic poison into her victim, the Athenian princess Aglauros,
jealous of Mercury's love for her sister; and in Book 8 Hunger,
Fames, changes Erysichthon in a similar psychosomatic way. Each
of these quasi-allegorical beings is envisaged as a kind of incubus
that visits her victim at night and, by distilling her poison into his
or her inmost veins and organs, fundamentally alters his or her
being.
For such effects the closest contemporary equivalent is the eerie
power of the vampire in the movies or of extraterrestrials in the
ever-proliferating accounts of alien abduction. In both Ovid and
the contemporary stories a monstrous or outlandish form, pos
sessed of supernatural power, takes control of the body in sleep
and infuses into the veins poisons or powerful drugs that act on
both mind and body, effecting a change in the personality so that
the victim loses control of his will or vital processes and gradually
sees himself becoming a kind of monster. Ovid conveys the horror
in part through a lurid mysterious atmosphere, often at night or in

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 15

sleep (the Ovidian equivalent of Hollywood's abundant carbon

dioxide), but mostly through concrete visual descriptions of parts
of the body; and the change is often morally or psychologically
appropriate. Envy enters Athens as a divine force that withers the
fields and dries the grass and brings a corrupting taint to human
life as her breath "pollutes cities and homes." Finding her way to
Aglauros' bedroom, she "touches (Aglauros') breast with a hand
tainted with rust and fills her breast with barbed briars and
breathes into her the noxious poison and spreads the pitch-like
venom through her bones and lungs" (798-801). The metaphors
of Aglauros' mental suffering visualize the emotional life of this
tormented girl in a nightmarish world of disease, blighted growth,
and poisonous effluences. By entering Aglauros' bloodstream and
vital organs, Envy transfers her own monstrosity to her victim.
Even when Mercury finally changes the jealousy-maddened girl
into stone, we still feel the infectious power of Jealousy working
within her. Here is a literal translation of the metamorphosis that
ends the episode (2.823-28):

But the joints of her knees grow stiff and the cold slips
through the toe- and fingernails, and her veins grow pale with
the loss of blood. And just as an evil, incurable cancer is wont
to creep in and add the uninjured parts (of the body) to those
that have been corrupted, so the deadly wintry cold little by
little comes into her breast and closes off the paths of life
and breath.

In the Erysichthon episode a cruel tyrant's internal monstrosity

is externalized by the visitation of a nocturnal demon, Hunger
herself, who transforms his entire identity into a new but truer
form of his inner being. His organs become "measureless entrails"
in their insatiability: per immensa viscera regnat, "Hunger rules
throughout his measureless vitals" (829).12Hunger's pallor, scab
rous skin, empty space instead of a belly, and swollen joints
(8.801-8) hint at what this murderous tyrant will become, but
they also point toward the monstrosity that is becoming visible in
him. The raging furor of his hunger (furit ardor edendi, 828) is lik
ened to an all-devouring conflagration (837-39) and then actually
becomes a "fire" that "flourishes in his insatiable gullet" (inplaca
taeque vigebat flamma gulae, 845f.). His body now becomes a ver
sion of the phantasmagoric anti-body of Hunger herself. In fact,

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 16 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

the expression semper que locus fit inanis edendo ("and by his
eating there is always made an empty place for eating," 842) recalls
the emaciated body of Hunger, in which "there was a place for a
belly instead of a belly" (ventris erat pro ventre locus, 805). The
monstrosity that is taking over Erysichthon now makes corpore
ally visible the homicidal fury that led him to chop down Ceres'
sacred tree and turn his axe against the pious servant who tried to
stop him. In an inversion of the corporeal and political, the king's
tyrannical power turns inwards against himself, and his "rule"
becomes the measureless kingdom that hunger has established
inside his own body (829). In the last stages of this transformation
his belly is a deep abyss or whirlpool that, like a sea-monster,
swallows all the goods of his house {altique vor?gine ventris, liter
ally, "the whirlpool of his deep belly," 843).

The Body and Art

The body, always ambiguously situated between nature and cul

ture, is the field for the intersection of the natural and the artificial
in the realm of art. Indeed metamorphosis itself is both natural and
artificial. In the Daedalus episode, for example, Ovid emphasizes
the transgressive nature of Daedalus' fashioning of wings and
simultaneously reveals the ambiguity that Daedalus' "imitation"
of nature becomes a dangerous violation of nature. Like Pygma
lion, Daedalus molds the softened wax with his shaping thumb
(8.198f.) in his wish "to imitate true birds" (ut veras imitetur aves,
8.195); but this juxtaposition of "truth" and "imitation," as in the
case of the phantasms in the cave of Sleep, only reveals the gap
between mimesis and reality when the false wings do not serve
Icarus as they do his father.13 This imitative art shows its darker
side in the simile that compares Daedalus' instruction of Icarus in
flight to a bird encouraging its "tender offspring" to leave the nest
and fly "and urges it (him) to follow and teaches it (him) the
destructive arts" (hortaturque sequi damnosasque erudit artes,
8.215). This simile is so placed that it can describe either the
mother-bird or Daedalus, and so skillfully suggests the ambiguous
unnaturalness of this "imitation" of nature.
In Ovid, then, metamorphosis is both an aetiology for natural
processes or events and itself a miraculous event that disturbs the
natural order. The painter or sculptor practices metamorphosis on
the human body and so makes us aware of our corporeality by

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 17

demonstrating how body's form can be rendered in an alien mate

rial. Yet the Ovidian artist is himself subject to those laws of mat
ter that human flesh must also obey, as Ovid shows in his tales of
Marsyas, Arachne, Daedalus, and Orpheus.14 On the other hand,
the artist, like nature, controls the creative energies that shape new
forms. The second creation of mankind after the Flood shows this
three-way connection between metamorphosis, the creativity of
nature, and the creativity of art. When Deucalion and Pyrrha
throw the stones to replenish mankind, the transformation is com
pared to unfinished statues. For both art and nature, the creative
process lies in giving "form" to inchoate matter, and Ovid signifi
cantly repeats the word forma (1.402 and 405). Thus metamorpho
sis, and especially the metamorphosis of bodies, parallels the
process of the poem itself, that is, it makes the change of bodies an
aesthetic object. Ovid's poem everywhere asserts the magical
power of art to cross the boundaries between solid and liquid,
inanimate and animate, and to make matter flow with supple vital
ity. This fluidity is a feature of what is sometimes called his
"baroque" style, the translation of a scene or image from one
medium to another, in the way that Bernini makes marble look like
cloth or the cupolas of seventeenth-century Italian churches
vaporize their ceilings into roseate clouds.15
Ovid's most famous treatment of the interrelations between the
materiality of the body and art is his story of Pygmalion in Meta
morphoses 10, which depicts the supreme power of the artist as the
ability to give warm life to the cold marble statue. Ovid's concern
here is not just the transformation of stone to flesh, but the cre
ation of a living and responsive human being from a lifeless work
of art. The softening of the ivory, like Hymettian wax, for Pygma
lion is the same process as the softening of Deucalion and Pyrrha's
stones to flesh so that they resemble half-finished marble statues
(cf. 1.402, mollirique mora mollitaque ducere formam, "the
stones are gradually softened and, when softened, take on [human]
form," and cera remollescit, "the wax grows soft," 10.285). Ovid
thus draws together remote anthropogonic creativity and a mythi
cal equivalent to contemporary artistic creativity. But Pygmalion's
miracle is as much about love as art; and without Venus' interven
tion he might have fared no better than his maddened prototype in
the Greek version.
Ovid leaves it open whether this love is pathological infatuation
(as it seems to have been in the Greek version of the myth, where a

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 18 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

king falls in love with a statue of Aphrodite and eventually goes

mad) or a comment on the artistic vision, the artist's deep invest
ment in his work and his power to transform his desires into
images of the beautiful. Pygmalion's first kiss of the statue sug
gests infatuation and delusion as he "thinks the kiss is returned"
and "believes that his fingers sink into the limbs that are touched"
(256f.). The mood of folly continues in the extravagant behavior of
addressing endearments {blanditiae) to the statue. In a parody of
the lover in Roman elegy, Pygmalion adorns it with precious jewels
and places it on a feathered couch (259-69). Ovid clearly marks
these gestures as silly, and in another mood they could be signs of
incipient madness. Here they project into remote, fantastic myth
the lover's exaggerated gestures of passion.16 Fortunately, Venus
intervenes to change the statue into a living woman, which gives
the story a happy ending (again in contrast to the grim myth that
Ovid seems to have inherited); but this ending also leaves it ambig
uous whether Pygmalion is just a lucky fool or a creative genius.

The Gendered Body

Another ancient model underlies the Pygmalion episode, however,

namely the Hesiodic Pandora. As in the Pandora myth, the female
body is a creation of a higher shaping power, an object of aesthetic
or erotic observation for the male gaze, and a beautiful decorative
surface (chr?s, Works and Days 74) to be adorned by baubles, fine
clothing, and jewelry (cf. Works and Days 73-75, Met. 10.259
75). Ovid removes Hesiod's deep misogyny in which the Pandora
myth is embedded (cf. Theogony 591-612) and transforms an
aetiological creation myth that blames women for the woes of
human life into an amusing parody of the Roman elegiac lover
offering gifts to his mistress (modo grata puellis I mu?era fert
Uli, 10.259L).
When Pygmalion's statue does come to life, it restores us to the
familiar hierarchies between male and female. Awakened by his
kiss, she becomes the ideal sex-object, submissive and erotic at the
same time (292-94). Her entire existence consists in her love for
her creator, to whom she owes her life: "She sees the heavens and
the lover at the same moment," cum caelo vidit amantem, 294.
Her sole future role, as far as this narrative is concerned, is to bear
Pygmalion a child. Yet these divisions are, as always in Ovid,
unstable. The dependency of the woman on her creator/husband

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 19

has been undercut by his own infatuated devotion. The child who
might perpetuate his name is a daughter, Paphos, not a son, and
she is in fact associated with Venus and love, not with art
([Paphos] de qua tenet insula nomen, "Paphos, from whom the
island holds its name," 297). The heritage of this birth, moreover,
is not glory but infamy, for Pygmalion's great-granddaughter is
Myrrha, a nefas, a source of evil and pollution, against whose
"unbelievable" crime the narrator warns daughters and parents as
the prelude to her story (10.300-10).
If Pygmalion's love-object is a statue, Perseus' beloved in Book
4 resembles a statue. His encounter with Andromeda is less
extreme, but equally revealing for the role of the female body. The
tale begins with the hero's "seeing her" chained to a rock, immobi
lized and statue-like, except for the hair blown by the wind and the
warm tears that flow from her eyes (4.672-75):

quam simul ad duras religatam bracchia comtes

vidit Abantiades (nisi quod levis aura capillos
moverat et tepido manabant lumina fletu,
marmoreum ratus esse opus), trahit inscius ignes
et stupet et visae correptus imagine formae
paene suas quatere est oblitus in a?re pennas.

Both of these signs of life, however, are not just objective descrip
tions but indications (with hints of parody) of an erotic mood.
Completely and helplessly exposed to his vision, Andromeda is the
inverse of Pygmalion's beloved, a living body made into a statue
like spectacle for a male viewer. So "seized" is Perseus at the
"image of this beauty so beheld" (visae correptus imagine formae,
676) that he nearly forgets to beat his wings. This phrase, with its
juxtaposition of "seeing" and beautiful "form," emphasizes both
the motifs of vision and of statue. Perseus makes her a pretty little
speech: "O you who do not deserve these chains but such chains as
join desiring lovers" (4.678L). His words translate heroic quest
into elegiac romance. In its metaphorizing of "chains," the passage
also eroticizes, almost allegorizes, the scene of bondage. It enlarges
and translates into literally corporeal terms the conceit of Ars
Amatoria 3.429-30: quid minus Andromedae fuerat sperare
revinctae i quam lacrimas ulli posse placer? suas ("What would
the chained Andromeda less have expected than that her tears
could be pleasing to anyone?").

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 20 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

Andromeda's response, given as the omniscient narrator's read

ing of her mind, far from making her a genuine subject, continues
her role as erotic object (4.681-84):

primo silet ilia nee audet

adpellare virum virgo, manibusque modestos
celasset vultus, si non religata fuisset;
lumina, quod potuit, lacrimis inplevit obortis.

At first she keeps silent, nor does she, a maiden, make bold to
address a man, and she would have hidden her modest face
with her hands if she had not been bound; but she filled her
eyes?which was all that she could do?with the tears that
rose up.

The editorial addition describing her eyes filling with tears in 684,
quod potuit, "which was all that she could do," repeats the open
ing situation (674) and strengthens its erotic tone with a sadistic
touch, even a hint of rape. Similar phrases, indicating hopeless
resistance, occur in the poem for actual rape, like Jupiter's rape of
Callisto, who "fights him as much as a woman could,... but fight
him she does" (2.434-36, ilia quidem contra, quantum modo fem
ina posset / . . . Ule quidem pugnat). As in the case of Pygmalion's
beloved, this statuesque role is Andromeda's only function in the
episode. Once her naked body has attracted Perseus, the action
shifts to the male contestants for her hand, and she is not men
tioned again except for the wedding.
Perseus' misrecognition of a body as a statue in a tale of love
corresponds in the next book to a misrecognition of statues as
bodies in a tale of war. The epic battle between Phineus' followers
and Perseus ends with the hero turning them into statutes with
Medusa's head. Phineus at first takes the statues to be his still liv
ing comrades, and he "addresses each one by name and, incredu
lous, touches the bodies nearest to him: they were marble (marmor
erant, 5.210-14). Through the combination of the elegiac-erotic
and the epic contexts of the body/statue confusion, Ovid enables
his metamorphic theme both to embrace and to contrast the dis
courses of love and war, except that what was figurative in Book 4
has become solidly literal in 5. As the two scenes bring together the
two genres, so they bring together male and female bodies, each in

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 21

its characteristic role. The woman as statue is an object of stupefy

ing beauty; the warrior as statue is arrested in the midst of violent
martial acts (see 5.200-6). Perseus also spans the two genres: we
see him as a lover winning his way by words and as a warrior victo
rious in his deeds. Truly one could say of him, milit?t omnis
amans ("every lover serves as a soldier").
To return to Andromeda, the immobilization of the female
body as a statue or in a statue-like pose helps to legitimize male
erotic viewing under the rubric of art; but this immobilization has
a more sinister side elsewhere in the poem, where the female victim
of rape is often described as "entrapped" or "enclosed." These
accounts run the gamut from the more or less conventional myth
of Danae "enclosed" when Jupiter "filled her with the fecundating
gold" {quam clausam inplevit fecundo luppiter auro, 4.698) to the
rape of Philomela, "enclosed" in her forest prison {includit, 6.524;
cf. 6.546, si silvis clausa tenebor, "if I am held shut up in the for
est"), where Tereus keeps her under guard (fugam custodia clau
dit, "he closes off her flight by guarding her," 6.572), until her
sister, Procne, leading a band of maenads, "breaks down the
gates" to rescue her (6.597, portasque refringit). The statuesque
immobilization that appears as elegiac play in the Pygmalion and
Andromeda episodes here emerges as sadistic detail as Tereus
grabs Philomela's hair, ties her hands behind her back, and forces
her "to endure bonds" when he cuts out her tongue (6.552L,
adreptamque coma flexis post terga lacertis I vincla pati cogit) ?
a scene that Seneca may have had in mind in Hippolytus' murder
ous response to Phaedra, also in an erotically charged atmosphere
{Phaedra 707 f.: en impudicum crine contorto caput I laeva reflexi,
"Behold, with my left hand I have bent back her head, twisting
her hair").
The exception to the pattern proves the rule, for it is only amid
the extreme gender reversals of aggressor and victim in the story of
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus that the female "enfolds" {inplicat)
her male victim as a snake entwines itself around an eagle, as ivy
twists itself around a tree, and as an octopus seizes and holds her
prey with its tentacles (4.361-67).17 As these similes imply, the sex
ually aggressive female is not only dangerous but potentially mon
strous, or capable of producing monstrous effects, like Circe in
Book 14 or, in different ways, Medea in 7 and Scylla in 14. Sal
macis, like Teiresias in the previous book, seems to suggest the flu
idity of gender divisions and to question their rigidity (cf.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 22 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

3.330-35); but in fact her story reinstates sexual difference by a

nightmarish enactment of what happens when the familiar gender
roles are reversed.18
In the Proserpina episode of Book 5 Ovid brilliantly interweaves
three parallel and complementary tales of male sexual violence
against a more or less helpless and passive female body. All three
tales gloss over the raw violence by metaphorical or symbolic rep
resentation: Pluto's forced passage through Cyane's watery home,
the floating belt of Proserpina, and Alpheus' pursuit of Arethusa
after her watery transformation "so that he may mingle himself
with (her) waves" (5.638). In the case of Cyane and Arethusa,
moreover, the violence is further elided by the mythical metamor
phosis of the nymphs into springs. Nevertheless, both of these tales
also use this miraculous event to suggest a psychological equiva
lent to physical violation. Cyane "wastes away" (5.427) as a result
of Pluto's aggressive overriding of her rights and dignity as he
drives his thunderous steeds back to Hades with Proserpina as his
prize. Arethusa, terrified by the pursuit of the river-god Alpheus,
liquefies into a cold sweat before Diana completes her rescue and
transports her to Sicily. Pluto's wounding and penetration inflicts
on Cyane an "inconsolable wound," and so she "is entirely con
sumed in tears and is dissolved into those waters of which she was
just now a great divinity" (lacrimisque absumitur omnis I et,
quarum fuerat magnum modo numen, in illas / extenuatur aquas,
5.428-29). This "inconsolable wound" is both the physical injury
caused by the violence of Pluto's forceful entry and the psychologi
cal wound of her helplessness and ineffectuality. Unable to defend
her waters, she undergoes an irremediable insult to her divinity,
and she "grieves at the flouted rights of her spring" (425f.). In her
metamorphosis she becomes just what Pluto has made of her body,
a yielding passage to his force and his will.19 Like so many other
female victims, Cyane bears her "inconsolable wound in silence"
(inconsolabile vulnus I mente gerit tacita, 5.426f.). Like Io, Cal
listo, Philomela, and many others, her body speaks where her
"mind" cannot; and it is through these elaborately enumerated
changes in her corporeal substance that both her physical and emo
tional suffering become visible.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 23

The Male Body

If the female body in the Metamorphoses is characterized by its

status as a visual object, its passivity, its appropriation by the male
libidinal imagination, and its role as a vessel to be "filled" by male
seed to continue a heroic lineage, the ideal of the male body is
impenetrability. The stories of Cygnus and Caeneus, both in Book
12, are paradigm cases. Both figures are introduced in the midst of
the Trojan war. Cygnus is Achilles' antagonist in the first and only
major Trojan battle. Ovid obviously delights in effacing Homer's
war-poetry with his own fantastic, metamorphic narrative. He
calls attention to his non-Iliadic approach by having the raging
Achilles "seek out either Cygnus or Hector" (12.75), as if they
were equivalent in poetic fame and martial glory. This exaggera
tion, however, cleverly enables Ovid to replace Homer's Iliad with
his own, for he adds in the next line that Hector's death "was post
poned to the tenth year" (12.67f.), thereby embracing the entirety
of the Homeric poem. He also links his own version up with the
death of Protesilaus at the hands of Hector a few lines earlier
(12.68f.), following the Iliad, with the exception that in Homer his
slayer is a nameless "Trojan hero" and not Hector (//. 2.698-703).
Because in the Cypria the death of Cygnus takes place at the begin
ning of the war, Ovid can also lay claim to covering the whole Epic
Cycle, thereby again challenging traditional epic with his meta
morphic quasi-epic.20
By replacing Hector's death with Cygnus', Ovid re-envisages
the Iliadic wounds and mutilations through a metamorphic theme
of physical invulnerability, which is the total negation of the heroic
sufferings of epic warfare. The destructive wounds of war become
only an incidental feature of this tale of marvels. Achilles, puzzled
and frustrated by Cygnus' invulnerability, finally tests his spear on
a minor Lycian warrior named Menoetes (not accidentally the
name of Patroclus' father in the Iliad), and the spear "bursts
through the breastplate and the chest placed beneath, and as he
[this Menoetes] strikes the heavy earth with dying breast, Achilles
draws forth the weapon from the warm wound and says, This is
the hand, this the spear with which we have now conquered'"
(12.117-20). Then, hurling it at Cygnus, he is delighted at the
mark of blood that it leaves, only to become even more enraged
when he realizes that the blood is that of his previous victim, Men
oetes (117-27). At this point Achilles takes on the full furor of the

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 24 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

enraged epic warrior, in the Homeric and Virgilian modes {turn

vero praeceps curru fremebundus ab alto I desilit. . . , "Then in
truth in full fury he leaps headlong from the lofty chariot,"
12.128ff.). Ovid's Achilles here behaves like Homer's when he is
frustrated by Apollo's rescue of Hector and then turns his rage
upon lesser men {II. 20.339-54, 455ff.) or when he encounters
Lycaon still alive and wonders at "those Trojans whom I killed ris
ing up from the murky darkness . . . But come, let him have a taste
of my spear's point, so that I may see in my mind and learn if he
will escape equally from here too, or if the life-giving earth will
hold him, the earth that holds down even the strong man" (//.
21.54-63). Ovid's ensuing details of the torn armor, the chest, the
still warm wound, the blood, all evoke the physical reality of the
body's suffering in Homer; but Ovid turns Homer upside down.
His atmosphere is one of miracle rather than realism or the high
heroism of defying a painful death. Achilles finally has to resort to
the non-Homeric expedient of strangling his foe (140-43). When
Cygnus' body is then changed into a white swan, the narrative
not only deprives Achilles of the Iliadic triumph of stripping the
body (143f.) but also flaunts its non-epic tone as a tale of
metamorphosis.
Nestor would trump this story of one who is a "scorner of iron,
penetrable by no weapon" (12.170) with the tale of Caeneus,
whom he introduces in a more or less familiar martial setting as
"enduring a thousand wounds with body uninjured" (12.171-73).
Then comes the startling genealogy, "He was born a woman."
These grizzled, macho veterans are, not unreasonably, "moved at
the novelty of the monstrous event," as Ovid says, and they ask for
details (174-76). The sequence of the two stories overdetermines
the theme of male invulnerability (cf. 170f. and 206f.) and provides
the strongest possible negative definition of the female body. It is
penetrable, as the male is not (166), is subject to iniuria, outrage
(202), and to rape.
Caeneus' story is held in suspense, characteristically, for some
250 lines, during which the physical details of battle that were
muted in the account of the Trojan war are given full scope in the
fight between the Centaurs and Lapiths. If you were feeling
cheated of blood and guts by the ineffectuality of Achilles' spear at
Troy, Ovid seems to say, you can now take your fill of outrageous
woundings and watch the free flow of blood and brains, hear
bones crack, and enjoy a fine display of disembowelments, gouged

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 25

out eyes, burnt beards, and assorted other mutilations (12.210

458). Even here, however, there is a shift of tones analogous to that
in the Marsyas episode, to be discussed later. The quasi-epic battle
between Centaurs and Lapiths contains a pastoral love-story,
complete with the death of two lovers together (12.393-428). The
Centaurs, instead of being uniformly brutal, savage males, prove
to be diversified both in sex and conditions of life. Cyllarus and
Hylonome are an amorous centaur couple whose story relieves the
extreme physical violence. Yet this equine version of the Pyramus
and Thisbe episode, for all its idyllic-comic coloring, still takes its
tone from the mutilations that enframe it. The amusing account of
Hylonome's toilette is followed by the Homeric death of her mate
(12.419-22), to be succeeded in turn by the Liebestod of her sui
cide with the weapon that killed him.
When Ovid returns to Caeneus, he uses the stock epic motif of
insulting one's foe as a woman (470-76), which in this case hap
pens to be true, but Caeneus fully proves his manhood by the mar
moreal impenetrability of his skin on the one hand and by
plunging his own sword deep into his enemy's vitals on the other
(12.482-93). After a second round of emasculating insults, how
ever, Caeneus is overwhelmed by the trees that the Centaurs pile
on top of him and is suffocated in a way that recalls the death of
Cygnus (cf. 508f. and 142). Like Cygnus, he escapes the epic inevi
tability of the fated end and is miraculously transformed into a
bird.
These two tales, which are carefully linked by the narrator, are
exemplary not only of the maximum and most essential difference
between the male and female body but also of the tendency in the
Metamorphoses to pay rather more attention to the male body
when it is dealing with what psychologists have come to call pri
mary boundary anxiety?that is, anxiety about maintaining the
integrity of the body, keeping its surface areas intact, and pro
tecting its cavities from painful penetration. When this boundary
anxiety gets played out with the female body, it is accompanied,
and often overshadowed, by anxiety of another kind, namely
about female sexuality. Scylla, as we shall see, is the most striking
instance. Such boundary-disturbing images as dismemberment,
decapitation, disembowelment, and other grisly events receive
extended treatment in the two great battle scenes, obviously
involving male warriors, namely Perseus' combat in the house of
Phineus in Book 5 and the Centauromachy in Book 12.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 26 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

That such violations should involve the male rather more than
the female body may result simply from the division of sexual roles
in the ancient world: men are the warriors, exposed to these physi
cal risks; women lead more sheltered and private lives. The greater
emphasis on the suffering of the male body may also reflect the
point of view of a male-authored text.21 Philomela is the only
woman in the poem to undergo anything approaching the extreme
mangling suffered by Actaeon, Pentheus, and Marsyas; and that is
perhaps why her story stands out with such stark horror. Even in
her case, however, Ovid in the sequel gives an equally horrible
account of the Fury-like Procne contemplating the castration and
dismemberment of her criminal husband, Tereus; and this is fol
lowed by the gory scene of Procne actually dismembering her
young son. This description almost rivals the flaying of Marsyas in
the slitting of the throat and the tearing apart, spitting, and cook
ing of the "limbs that still retained some life" (6.643ff.). Procne
strikes her child as he cries "mother, mother," "nor does she turn
her face away" (642). The killing of Pelias by his daughters, engi
neered by Medea in the next book, receives a similar fullness of
description (7.328-49).
Where there are simultaneous male and female victims, the
males tend to get more attention. The sons of Niobe, for example,
die in more painful and physically vivid ways than the daughters
(6.235-38, 244-51). Only one of the daughters receives a detailed
wound as "she draws forth the arrows sticking in her flesh," but
even she collapses rather gently (relanguit) in a dying embrace
with a brother (6.290L). Thisbe in a sense dies twice, first in Pyra
mus' mistaken inference, and then in fact (4.107-18, 162f.); but
the physical details are limited to falling on the still warm blade
(162f.), whereas Pyramus, as he dies, "draws the knife forth from
the hot wound," and then has his blood shoot out like water from
a broken pipe (121-24), another of those passages whose tone is
hard to gauge. The story of Cephalus and Procris in Book 7 has
many parallels with that of Pyramus and Thisbe. A lover's mistake
leads to the fatal wounding of the woman. In this case, however,
only the woman dies; and, despite her Dido-like suffering at the
end (cf. 7.845, 854f., and Aen. 4.686), Cephalus, not Procris, is the
emotional focus of the tale, which he recounts in the first person.
Scylla, of whom I shall speak later, is a partial exception to this
tendency to concentrate details of mutilation on the male body;
but her story, like Philomela's, belongs to the area of sexuality

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 27

rather than violence per se; and in that realm the female body, as
the primarily sexualized body, is dominant.
Yet Ovid is unusual among classical authors, and especially epic
authors, for his attention to one uniquely female experience, birth
and motherhood. The act of impregnation itself remains firmly in
the tradition of male-centered heroic conquest. The female body is
a vessel to be filled by male seed to continue a heroic lineage. Ovid
regularly uses words of filling, like plenus or impleo, for impreg
nation. One heroic impregnation is noteworthy for Ovid's parody
of the heroic tradition, namely the climax (in every sense) of
Peleus' wooing of Thetis in Book 11. Defeated by his entrapment,
"the hero embraces her as she admits (defeat), and he possesses
what he prayed for and fills her with huge Achilles" (11.264f.).
Thetis is then forgotten; and the narrative continues in the next
verse with Peleus as a success story where heroism and triumph
remain ambiguous: "Happy Peleus, happy in his son, happy too in
his wife, a man who got everything?if you should remove the
crime against his brother Phocus whom he murdered" (267f.). In
many of these episodes the act of birth is omitted or only briefly
mentioned (so, e.g., Callisto, Liriope, Pygmalion's bride, Chione,
Thetis), even in the proto-caesarian deliveries of Bacchus from
Semele and Aesculapius from Coronis.22 Two episodes, however,
dwell at length on the pain of childbirth: Alcmena giving birth to
Hercules in Book 9 and Myrrha in Book 10.
Alcmena's giving birth to Hercules interestingly juxtaposes
both the male-centered heroic view of the birth of an heir and a
more woman-oriented point of view. The abrupt shift from Jupi
ter's palace on Olympus to the women's quarters at Argos under
cuts the grandeur of the great hero's ultimate triumph, with its
high ideological implications of augusta gravitate ("august solem
nity," 9.270).^Immediately after the gods decree Hercules' apo
theosis, we encounter the aged, long-suffering Alcmena, with her
old-woman's worries and complaints {longis anxia curis and
questus a?iles, 9.275-76), conversing with her daughter-in-law,
Iole, who is now pregnant by Hyllus. The scene begins with the
heroic view: Hyllus has "filled (Iole's) womb with the noble seed"
(9.280). But we turn suddenly to the intimacy of women's talk as
Alcmena recounts her exceptionally hard labor and gives the
expectant mother precise physical details: the heaviness of her
womb that so weighed her down that she was sure the child was
Jupiter's (288f.), the pain for seven days and nights, her cries and

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
28 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

prayers (292-94). Even in remembering she feels a chill shudder

and pain (290f.).
Alcmena's conversation then shifts from the domestic to the
mythical as she tells how Juno's enmity kept the birth goddesses,
Lucina and the Nixi, from aiding her (294-96). The suffering
woman's condition receives a graphic representation in the con
stricted posture of Lucina, sitting by the altar with her knees
crossed and her fingers tightly interlocked, (298f.). In her pain
Alcmena shouts insults at Jupiter, weeps, and wants to die. Ovid
vividly describes the disturbance in the household: the ladies of
Thebes offer prayers and encouragement, until finally the maid
Galanthis tricks Lucina into releasing her knees, and for this help
to her mistress is changed by Juno into a weasel. Now the mythical
slips into folk belief and practice, where untying knots or similar
acts of freeing the body from constraints belongs to popular sym
pathetic magic supposed to aid birth. But despite the mythical and
folkloristic detail, Alcmena's relief in giving birth (315) sympa
thetically conveys the difficulty of her travail.
Ovid uses this episode for one of his sharpest contrasts. On one
side is the Olympian apotheosis granted to the greatest of the
heroes, with its obvious reverberations of Augustan ideology and
its foreshadowing of the divinizations of Julius and Augustus Cae
sar at the end of the poem; on the other side is an old woman's
advice about childbirth to a pregnant daughter-in-law. The con
trasting realms of men and women are thus forced into the same
frame. The story of Lucina and Galanthis brings a set of secondary
contrasts between mythical personification and domestic realism
and between plausible human experience and folktale. Yet the
degree of detail accorded to a scene of childbirth and the intrusion
of the woman's experience and point of view into high heroic nar
rative are remarkable and characteristic of the "baroque" quality
of the poem. It also reminds us of Ovid's spirit of innovation. We
may recall his two poems on Corinna's abortion in the Amores
(2.13 and 14), again a subject not treated by other elegists, even if
here the point of view is strictly masculine. In dealing with such
subjects, Ovid, as often, may be experimenting with the limits of
the genre, but he may also be writing with an awareness of an audi
ence of women readers.
Dryope's story, coming directly after Alcmena's, is also about
motherhood, especially the intimacy between mother and infant
child and the pathos of their separation. As the transformation

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 29

begins, the child feels his mother's breasts drying up and the flow
of milk stopping {9356-58). A few lines later Dryope herself, in
the last speech that she can utter, requests that the child's nurse let
him drink his milk and play under the tree into which she is now
being transformed so that he may know his mother's presence
(376-79). Dryope's arboreal transformation resembles Daphne's,
but with a very different twist: instead of a virgin fleeing rape,
there is a mother surrounded by her family: husband, father, and
sister (363f.).
The tale of Dryope was narrated by Iole, and the tearful
response of her audience testifies to the emotional tone (9.394
96); but Ovid again exploits the contrast between the human
pathos and the fabulous event, especially in details like Dryope's
request to keep the sheep away (384) and to reach up to her for the
final kiss since she is now immobilized (385f.). Yet the particular
circumstances of the narrative frame?a young wife expecting a
child and learning about giving birth from her elderly mother-in
law?makes the contrast between myth and ordinary reality espe
cially piquant. It is a part of Ovid's amusing humanizing of myth
that he allows these intensely female concerns to appear at the
acme of macho achievement and reward, the divinization of
Hercules.
Myrrha's giving birth to Adonis in Book 10 resembles the Alc
mena episode both in the combination of fantasy and realistic
physical detail and in the radical shift of mood. Myrrha's story
begins as a characteristically Hellenistic tale of desperate passion,
guilt, and incest but ends in a gentler sympathy and pathos. The
criminal portion is essentially completed with her flight and meta
morphosis into a myrrh tree (10.476-572). Her conception of a
child belongs to the criminal atmosphere of the incest (469f.), but
her nine months of wandering leave this behind, and the narrative
arouses sympathy through her flight and the physical details of the
burden of her womb that she can scarcely endure (481). This sym
pathy continues in her contrite prayer, her mixture of fear of death
and disgust with life (482f.), and her feeling of being cut off from
all creatures, living and dead (485f.). In her metamorphosis, "the
tree covered over her heavy womb" {iamque gravem crescens
uterum praestrinxerat arbor, 495) and so keeps her pregnant con
dition in view, especially as praestrinxerat implies a tight covering
of the surface of her body that would keep the pregnancy visible.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 30 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

Despite the magical transformation, Myrrha goes through a

recognizably normal pregnancy, and Ovid's mixture of arboreal
and human features is a tour de force, ingeniously combining myth
and realism. In the tree's straining and bending Myrrha "is like a
woman giving birth {nitenti similis, 10.508: nitor, "to strain with
effort," is the regular verb for giving birth in the poem); and her
"groans" and "tears" convey the physical pain (508f.). Even the
branches are in pain (dolentes, 510). The birth-goddess Lucina of
course has to be present for birth to take place. Thus in the sympa
thetic mood of this portion of Myrrha's story, the goddess is "gen
tle" (mitis) and "applies her hands to the suffering branches and
speaks the words that effect childbirth" (51 If.). The splitting of
the tree and its bark and the wailing of the newborn take us back
to the physical realities, but the role of midwife is here taken over
by the nymphs, who bring us back to myth. They anoint the child
with his mother's tears, which of course are the perfume, myrrh.
Among the nymphs, however, these tears are the perfume appro
priate to the "soft grass" where the Naiads lay the baby (quern
mollibus herbis I naides impositum lacrimis unxere parentis,
"whom the Naiads anoint with the tears of his mother when he is
lain in the soft grass," 10.513L).
This mythical atmosphere dominates the closing lines of the epi
sode, which compare the beautiful baby Adonis to Cupid with his
quiver of arrows (515-18), and thus moves the narrative back to
the image-world of Graeco-Roman myth and art. But the emphasis
on the delicate male beauty may also be a reminder that the narra
tor is Orpheus, the poet who has turned pederast after his disap
pointment with Eurydice. Yet Orpheus' shift from accusation to
compassion within his tale is remarkable, especially as he began
with such dire warnings about Myrrha's crime (10.300-15). Given
the fact that Orpheus' narrative voice is so strong throughout this
book, we may wonder whether Ovid is suggesting that the greatest
poet of the literary tradition is able to view a human life, even one
as dark as Myrrha's, from different perspectives and encompass an
area of experience so far from his own. Does Ovid thereby suggest
something about his own poem's breadth of sympathies when he
makes his archetypal poet change his mind about this girl and
show pity for her mute suffering, fantastic though it is? After all,
Ovid is among the most sensitive of poets to the ways in which a
narrative can take a direction and meaning beyond an author's

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 31

avowed intentions and contain diverse, even contradictory points

of view.
At the opposite extreme from these sympathetic accounts of
birth is the monstrous version of parturition in Scylla's story in
Book 14, one of the uglier metamorphoses in the poem. Circe, jeal
ous of Scylla's beauty, poisons her cove transforming her into a
monster with barking dogs protruding from her lower parts. Ovid
describes her as virtually giving birth to these creatures
(14.63-65):

sed quos fugit attrahit una

et corpus quaerens femorum crurumque pedumque
Cerbereos rictus pro partibus invenit Ulis.

But she drags along with her (the creatures) that she flees, and
looking for the bodily substance of her thighs, legs, and feet,
she finds Cerberus-like gaping jaws in place of those parts.24

The unusual sense of corpus, here in the meaning "bodily sub

stance" rather than "whole body," depicts Scylla's alienation from
herself. In place of the familiar corpus, "body," that she knows,
she finds only the alien flesh of "thighs, legs, and feet" that is both
hers and not hers as she "finds Cerberus-like gaping jaws" replac
ing her own "body parts." In the densely entangled syntax of the
closing lines, she is puzzled by her new state as she tries to check
the beasts that are part of her. Yet she is also a monster who "con
trols" (coercet) these multiple creatures:

statque canum rabie subiectaque terga ferarum

inguinibus truncis uteroque exstante coercet.

She stands there amid the rage of the dogs and with her muti
lated thighs and protruding womb she checks (contains) the
backs of the beasts thus placed beneath her.

Scylla is thus both one and many, both a confused victim (cf. quae
rens) and an active force. Her monstrous metamorphosis confuses
bestiality and humanity on the one hand and associates female sex
uality and maternity with monstrosity on the other. In the poem's
other descriptions of birth, the maternal woman tends to be sepa
rated from the sexual woman, as in the case of the elderly Alcmena

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 32 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

and Dryope nursing her small child. Myrrha begins as a paradigm

of female lust and becomes sympathetic when she is no longer in
human form but is only an arboreal womb trying to give birth. In
the story of Scylla, however, female sexuality is presented through
a polar opposition of reluctant virginal nymph (Scylla as we see her
at the beginning of her story in Book 13) and sexually aggressive
enchantress in the figure of Circe.25 Birth is here perverted into
another instance of the terrible violations of the interior of the
body that divine or semi-divine, arbitrary power can inflict.

Bodily Parameters, Stable and Unstable

Metamorphosis is in itself anxiety-provoking, and Ovid's choice

of his poem's subject probably has something to do with the indi
vidual's sense of losing autonomy and control as Augustus' regime
became more authoritarian. As the center of power seems increas
ingly remote, the abrupt transformation of one's life by sudden,
arbitrary violence seems more possible, and orientation seems
more difficult in an ever-expanding bureaucratic and autocratic
government. Metamorphosis is the fantasy projection of such con
cerns into a distant mythical realm; and the violation of personal,
physical boundaries serves as an especially intense form of these
anxieties about one's control of one's movements in a larger
world.
This explanation, which, of course can only be partial and in
any case speculative, would also hold for the increasing level of
boundary-violating acts in the poetry of the Empire. Glenn Most
has collected some interesting statistics on the increase of amputa
tions in the Neronian poet Lucan. Lucan has approximately one
amputation for every puncture wound, whereas in Homer the ratio
is 1 to 13.5, in Virgil 1 to 4.3. The figures even out again in Silius
Italicus (5.4) and Statius (4.1). Most does not include the Meta
morphoses; but in any case it is clear that Roman epic prefers
increasingly complicated and bloody deaths, even by comparison
with Homer's already none too gentle descriptions.26 Most is
probably right to interpret these figures as reflecting the great
increase in gladiatorial combats and brutal exhibitions in the cir
cus during the Nero's reign;27 and the same factors perhaps also
influence Ovid to a lesser degree; but I don't think that this can be
the entire reason, at least for the Metamorphoses.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 3 3

It is the pervasive corporeality of the Metamorphoses that keeps

the threat of violence so close and so present. Where the body is so
prominent, its pain or injury is always a possibility. A poem about
bodies is almost inevitably also about violence to the body. The
vulnerability of the human body stands out all the more in contrast
to the gods' absolute power, invulnerability, and human bodily
desires. Ovid's proem, on the creation of the world, reveals an
interesting irony in this relation between the human and divine
body. One version of the creation privileges the human form
because of its closeness to the divine substance (1.80f.); and Ovid,
following Plato and Platonizing stoicism, singles out man's erect
posture and his consequent ability to gaze upward at the heavens
and the stars (1.78-86):

So man was born, whether the artificer of the world, the

world's better origin, made him of divine seed, or whether the
new earth, only recently separated from the lofty aether,
retained seeds of the kindred heavens. This earth Iapetus' son
[Prometheus] mixed with the moisture of rainwater and
formed into the image of the gods who rule all things; and,
although the other creatures look face downward at the
earth, he gave to man a lofty visage and bade him to behold
the sky and to lift his countenance on high toward the heav
ens (os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre / iussit et
erectos ad sidera tollere vultus).

The word vultus, visage or countenance, in this passage (1.86) sug

gests that this heavenward glance is connected with the particular
form of the human countenance (erectos ad sidera tollere vultus,
1.86). That human countenance (vultus) is deformed in the bestial
metamorphoses of Lycaon, Io, Callisto, Actaeon, etc. (e.g., 1.238,
1.738, 2.481, 3.241). Io is allowed to become "erect" again in her
reverse metamorphosis from cow to girl (erigitur, 1.745); but Cal
listo is thrown "face downward on the earth" in the double humili
ation that Juno inflicts on her (prensis a fronte capillis I stravit
humi pronam, 2A76?.).
The body can be the ideally beautiful object; but it may equally
be an object of horror or disgust. Hellenistic art typically explores
these limits (we may recall the statue of the Old Market Woman in
the Metropolitan Museum or of the Drunken Woman in the
Munich Glyptothek), and so does Ovid, although epic decorum

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 34 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

obviously keeps him far from, say, the no-holds-barred exuber

ance of Rabelais. Still, he goes far beyond Homer and Virgil in
mixing high and low styles. The ugly wounds of Homer and Virgil,
after all, are ennobled by the heroic atmosphere and the grandeur
and seriousness of the issues. Ovid, on the other hand, can concen
trate on the physicality of a grotesque figure like the satyr, Mar
syas, himself half human and half bestial; and he highlights the
grotesqueness by juxtaposing him with one of the handsomest of
the gods, Apollo. Marsyas' ugliness makes him a more appropriate
victim for the ghastly punishment of being flayed alive. Ovid
shows us the throbbing flesh laid bare beneath the skin and forces
us to become spectators of the "pulsing entrails" (salientia viscera)
and the exposed organs "shining in the breast" (6.388-91). "You
would be able to count them," possis numerare, Ovid says,
addressing the reader in his accustomed break with the epic con
vention of third-person narration (6.391 f.). The cries of the victim
just preceding make this a scene of torture as well as of anatomical
dissection. True, Marsyas is not human, and the myth is a well
known subject for artistic representation. Yet Ovid has gone out of
his way to emphasize the violation of the body's cavities and the
pain. Titian's Flaying of Marsyas adds a little dog lapping up the
blood while Apollo or Orpheus plays a violin just above?an
interpretation that responds both to the divine cruelty and the
sheer physical horror of the scene.
The ending of the Marsyas episode is a particularly good exam
ple of Ovid's probing of aesthetic boundaries. This is a tale where,
literally, blood is everywhere (cruor undique manat, 6.388); but
the forest nymphs and running water that follow immediately
afterwards belong to the traditionally "beautiful place," the locus
amoenus, associated with pastoral, the landscape of art, and an
atmosphere of gentle loss and sweet, mild sadness (6.392-400).
Ovid's little scene upsets the traditional categories. He makes us
ask whether he is just aiming at shock effects, or experimenting
with a range of stylistic registers, or enjoying a display of a
"baroque" or "anti-classical sensibility" that jumps abruptly from
one mood or one genre to another. None of these is to be excluded;
but Ovid uses these vivid details of the body to raise the question
of what constitutes ugliness and beauty. The jarring effect is simi
lar to that of the death of Actaeon, where the pastoral locus amoe
nus precedes rather than follows the violence (3.155-82). It is
similar too to the Acis and Galatea episode in Book 13, where the

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 35

buffoonish Cyclops of Theocritean and Virgilian pastoral sud

denly reverts to his ugly, homicidal Homeric counterpart?as if
Ovid suddenly runs the track of literary history backward, from
Theocritus to the Odyssey?and has the Cyclops crush the unfor
tunate Acis with a piece of the mountainside.28
Ovid explores the limits of aestheticized violence even where
that violence is firmly fixed in the literary tradition. In the dis
memberment of Pentheus that ends Book 3, for example, the sym
metry of the two aunts, the sisters of Agave, tearing off the right
and left arms in the previous lines becomes a cartoon-like, choreo
graphed stylization of the act of dismemberment (3.721f.). As
Actaeon earlier in the book tried to supplicate his attackers with
arms that he no longer has (3.240f.), so Pentheus "does not?O
woeful man?have arms to stretch forth to his mother, but shows
her his mutilated wounds where the limbs have been torn away and
cries out to her, 'O my mother, behold.'" One is tempted to trans
late, irreverently, "Look, Ma, no hands!"?a flippancy that (for
once) is not in Ovid's text; but a clash of tones is very much pre
sent in the closing simile (3.729-31):

non citius frondes autumni frigore tactas

iamque male haerentes alta rapit arbore ventus,
quam sunt membra viri manibus direpta nefandis.

Not more quickly does the wind snatch away the leaves tou
ched by the autumn's cold and now scarcely clinging to the
lofty tree than were the limbs of the man snatched apart with
the criminal hands.

The lines echo Virgil's famous simile describing the multitude of

the dead on the bank of the Styx whom Aeneas encounters on his
entrance to the Underworld (Aeneid 6.309-12):

quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo

lapsa cadunt folia . . .

As many as the leaves in the forests at the first cold of autumn

slip down and fall . . .

It is hard to gauge Ovid's effect; but he certainly juxtaposes the

emotional and physical violence of the Euripidean scene that is his

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 3 6 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

immediate source with the calmer epic distance and compassion

of Virgil.29
Virgil's simile, like its imitation in the third canto of Dante's
Inferno, belongs to the poetry of mortality in the epic tradition
that goes back to Homer, acknowledging the suffering inherent in
human life. Ovid changes the gentle falling of leaves in Virgil?
lapsa cadunt folia?to the wind's violent tearing (rapit); but by
echoing this famous Virgilian passage he is doing all he can to call
attention to the literariness of his text, reminding us that the scene
itself was once part of a play and we readers are also in a play of
sorts. The intertext within the intertext is like a play on a play, a
kind of game. Perhaps too Ovid means to imply that we can take
in only so much horror and that after a certain point such scenes
become self-conscious spectacle, a literary equivalent of the games
and gladiatorial combats in the circus. In any case, this simile,
which comes two lines before the end of the book, destabilizes our
expectation of resolution and renders problematical any closure or
palliation of these bloody events. The ending is a good example of
what Ralph Johnson called the anti-classical sensibility; and here,
as elsewhere, Ovid adopts Virgil's classical style to create exactly
the opposite effect.

Conclusion

I conclude with some generalizations and speculations. Through

out the poem, the body is the means whereby Ovid evokes men
and women's subjection to arbitrary violence, their helplessness
and the abrupt tearing away of everything that makes their lives
worthwhile. They often lose the power of speech and become
totally disoriented in an unfamiliar, sometimes savage world. This
is a world in which one's life can be overturned by a sudden, unex
pected intervention from above, as Ovid's was to be by Augustus'
order of exile. Indirectly, animal metamorphosis may also reflect
broader cultural anxieties, though still specifically Roman anxie
ties, for example, the horror of a free person's reduction to slave
status, in which he or she is only a body, and a body subject to
physical punishment or sexual exploitation by the master. The
body is also central to the poem's main themes and motifs: love
and art, but also violence and pain.
It is hard to know whether Ovid is just opportunistically
exploiting the tastes of his time?tastes formed by the brutality of

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 37

the amphitheater and circus?or whether he protests against

them. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Most of the
suffering is inflicted by remote, powerful gods or by psychopathic
rulers like Tereus or Erysichthon, and occasionally by crazed or
murderous women. Generally, the human perpetrators are in some
way punished, but the gods get away with their crimes, although
Ovid sometimes raises the question of divine justice, as he does in
the case of Actaeon or Niobe. Of course there are numerous cases
of condign punishment (Lycaeon, Arachne, Tereus, Erysichthon)
and some cases (though not many) of virtue rewarded (notably the
couples Deucalion and Pyrrha, Philemon and Baucis, and, in a
rather mixed and sad way, Ceyx and Haley one). The suffering
seems divided about equally between men and women: but, while
men suffer more direct physical violence, some of the worst suffer
ing is the sudden, arbitrary loss of human form inflicted on com
pletely innocent women: Io, Callisto, Cyane and Arethusa,
Dryope, Scylla.
The fate of the body in the poem resembles the fate of the land
scape. In both cases beautiful, innocent forms are evoked, only to
be unexpectedly violated or transformed into suffering, loss, and
sorrow.30 One of the surprising things about this poem, in fact, is
how little joy or pleasure the body affords. It shows little interest
too in the ideal or beautiful body as cultivated in fifth-century
Greece or twentieth-century California. The poem alludes to a
huge amount of sexual activity, but rarely presents it as enjoyable,
except for the male rapist-gods who quickly take their pleasure
and depart, often with terrible consequences, direct or indirect, for
their victims, as in the case of the fourteen-year old Chione, raped
on the same day by both Mercury and Apollo and killed by being
shot through the tongue by a jealous Diana, to the inconsolable
grief of her father (11.301-45).
This is a very different world from elegy; and we never approach
anything like the sensual abandon of a poem like Amores 1.5
(aestus er at), the happy lover's afternoon, or the rare moment of
postcoital oblivion in the union of Venus and Vulcan in Aeneid 8.
Even when Ovid might linger over a moment of conjugal bliss, as
in the union of Pygmalion and his new bride (10.291-97) or of Ver
tumnus and Pomona (14.770f.), he compressed the hints of pleas
ure into a few words, like the mutua vulnera, the "mutual
wounds," of Pomona and Vertumnus (14.771).

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 3 8 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

Ovid, so fond of exploring the limits of genres, positions him

self in a post-elegiac or anti-elegiac world. The vagueness and ide
alization of the female body in elegy here change to an explicitness
of physical detail that recalls Horace's Epodes and satire, at least
insofar as it suggests the ugly and the grotesque (as in the meta
morphoses of Callisto or Scylla) rather than the beautiful. Even the
detailed enumeration of Corinna's naked charms in Amores 1.5,
for example, ends with the generalized singula quid referam: nil
non laudabile vidi ("why should I relate individual details: I saw
nothing that was not worthy of praise").
Elegy views the female body in terms of a more or less homoge
neous, stable elegance of cultivated surface; the Metamorphoses
depicts a wide variety of female bodies?young and old, virginal,
and pregnant, human and divine?and draws on the classical tra
dition where physical change and process tend to be marked as
female. Hence the monstrosity of parturition in Scylla or its gen
tler form in Myrrha, or the representation of Envy and Hunger as
grotesque female bodies whose inner organs are horribly exposed
to view. The female body of the Metamorphoses is the body given
us by nature, in all its subjection to the physical processes of
change and corruption, rather than the body of elegy, adorned by
ars and cultus (see A. A. 3.261ff.). In the Metamorphoses it is the
unadorned, uncultivated body that attracts, like Daphne's or Ata
lanta's, but the attention is unwelcome. In such settings the arts of
feminine adornment are grotesque or misplaced, as in the Pygma
lion episode or in the story of the female centaur Hylonome, who
will soon die alongside her centaur-husband and whose cultus, "as
much as was possible" in such a form, consists in washing in
mountain streams and wearing the most becoming skins of "select
wild beasts" (12.408-15 and see above). Beauty of countenance or
grace of carriage, far from being the center of attention, are only
precarious states of a vulnerable physical surface, all too easily vio
lated and destroyed. In elegy, by and large, the male viewer and the
male perspective are taken for granted (though some might contest
this); in the Metamorphoses that male gaze is much more aggres
sive (as in the Daphne and Philomela episodes) and so far more
problematical, even though Ovid gives it a counterpart in aggres
sive or illicit female sexual desire, as in the stories of Salmacis,
Byblis, or Circe. For all of the poem's emphasis on the erotic, it is
not flirtation and seduction per se, but the very unelegiac experi
ences of impregnation and birth that carry the plot forward,

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 39

another feature that the poem shares with the tradition of epic
rather than erotic poetry.
Although the poem is all about bodies, the body, ultimately, is
only a trope for something else, that is, the instability and vulnera
bility of the human condition. The body is our clearest hostage to
the vicissitudes of fortune and the power of nature. It is the most
visible sign of a human being's subjection to forces over which he
or she has no control. This is a world polarized between those who
have absolute power (the gods) and those who are powerless to
defend their bodies against force majeure, whether that comes
from an unforeseen storm at sea or a violent passion that suddenly
and obsessively takes over one's life. This is a poem of extraordi
nary beauty of language and setting and yet of extraordinary pain.
Should we read the Metamorphoses as the darker side of what the
author of the Ars Amatoria saw as he walked about this center of
empire, with its opulence and its poverty, its emperor and its
slaves, its pleasure-loving crowds in the theaters and circuses and
the bleeding beasts and gladiators in the amphitheaters? The Met
amorphoses, like the Ars Amatoria, reflects the witty, urban world
that Ovid loved so much; but perhaps it also reveals aspects of that
world that Ovid did not or perhaps could not fully acknowledge,
even to himself.

NOTES

1. See especially M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, vols.

1-3 (New York 1980, 1985, 1986). For more recent work see, for example, Peter
Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, Mass. 1993); David B. Morris, The Culture of
Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1991); Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York
1994); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York 1985).
2. On this very large subject see, e.g., Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris
1975); Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and
the Monster (Princeton 1993); K. M. Coleman, "Fatal Charades: Roman Execu
tions Staged as Mythological Enactments," JRS 80 (1990), 44-73; Keith Hopkins,
Death and Renewal (Cambridge 1983), 1-30.
3. Frederick Aftl, Meta formations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other
Classical Poets (Ithaca, N.Y. 1985), is probably the extreme of the formalist
approach to Ovidian language. Of recent work see, e.g., A. M. Keith, The Play of
Fictions (Ann Arbor 1992), and Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature (Princeton 1997),
with his programmatic statement, 3-10, and Chapter 1.1 make no attempt at bib
liographical completeness. For a survey of recent trends see Michael von Albrecht,
"Ovidian Scholarship: Some Trends and Perspectives,'* in Karl Galinsky, ed., The
Interpretation of Roman Poetry, with Comment by Elaine Fantham (Frankfurt am
Main 1992), 176-99.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 40 OVID'S METAMORPHIC BODIES

4. See, for example, Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven 1986),
D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford 1991), and Amy Richlin, "Reading Ovid's
Rapes," in Amy Richlin, ed., Pornography and Representation in Greece and
Rome (Oxford and New York 1992), 158-79, respectively.
5. Richard Lanham, Motives of Eloquence (New Haven 1976), 59f.
6. See Hermann Fr?nkel, Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds (Berkeley and Los
Angeles 1945), especially 80-101, and Ernst Schmidt, Ovids Poetische Menschen
welt (Heidelberg 1991), 48ff.
7. See Shadi Bartsch, Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil
War, forthcoming.
8. J. Lacan, "Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je," Ecrits
1 (Paris 1966), 93-95.
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge
1968). References are given in the text.
10. Cf. Alessandro Barchiesi, // poeta e il principe (Rome and Bari 1994), 226
41; see also Bakhtin (note 9), 150.
11. On the interaction of chronology and exemplarity, see Schmidt (note 6),
21ff., 31ff., 44ff. ("Es geht Ovid um thematische Analogie, nicht um Geschichte,"
45).
12. Heinsius' incensaque for the manuscripts' inmensaque of 8.829 is ingenious
but unnecessary.
13. Note the similar collocation of "truth" and "imitation" in the "dreams that
by their imitation equal true forms" {somnia, quae veras aequant imitamine
formas, 11.626), in a context that emphasized the insubstantiality of these phan
toms (11.612ff., 633ff.).
14. See, e.g., Eleanor W. Leach, "Ecphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in
Ovid's Metamorphoses" Ramus 3 (1974), 102-42.
15. For "baroque" in Ovid see, e.g., Henri Bardon, "Ovide et le baroque," in
Ovidiana, ed. N. I. Herescu (Paris 1958), 75-100; W. R. Johnson, "The Problem of
the Counter-Classical Sensibility and Its Critics," CSCA 3 (1970), 123-51; Charles
Segal, "Senecan Baroque: The Death of Hippolytus in Seneca, Ovid, and Euripi
des," TAPA 114 (1984), 311-25.
16. See Alison Sharrock, "Womanufacture," JRS 81 (1991), 39ff.; also Eric
Downing, Artificial Ts: The Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas
Mann (T?bingen 1993), 57ff.
17. On these reversals see, e.g., Richlin (note 4), 165f.; Mario Labate, "Storie di
instabilit?: L'episodio di Ermafrodito nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio," MD 30
(1993), 54ff.
18. The sex-changes of Teiresias end with Juno's blinding of him at his judg
ment that women have greater pleasure in sex, and Jupiter's amelioration of that
punishment (3.320-38). Both the dispute and its aftermath confirm the division of
the sexes, here embodied in the quarrel of Jupiter and Juno. The first two similes
that describe Salmacis' sexual aggression also restore the familiar gender divisions.
In the first she is serpent to Hermaphroditus' eagle, and in the second she is the
clinging ivy, he the tree. On the fluidity of gender in this passage see Georgia
Nugent, "This Sex Which Is Not One: De-constructing Ovid's Hermaphrodite,"
Differences 2.1 (1990), 160-85, especially 163ff.
19. Feeney (note 4), 235 describes Cyane's end as "a final collapse of numen into
physicality," although it should be noted that nymph's numinous status is not

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Charles Segal 41

clearly defined in the poem. On Cyane's suffering as implict rape see also 5.492 and
see Leo C. Curran, "Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses," Arethusa 11
(1978), 222.
20. See Proclus' summary of the Cypria {Homeri Opera, OCT, vol. 5, p. 105,
1-3, ed. Allen), where Hector's killing of Protesilaus and Achilles' of Cycnus are
conjoined as the two opening events of the battles at Troy. Pindar, Isthmian 5.39,
also joins Cycnus and Hector as two of the great triumphs of the Aeacid line ("Who
slew Cycnus, who Hector . . . ?"); and the following references to the slaying of
Memnon and the wounding of Telephus makes it clear that he means Achilles.
21. This is rather different from Greek tragedy where, although there is abun
dant physical suffering by men, there is also a tendency to project the consciousness
of the suffering, vulnerable body upon women: see, e.g., Nicole Loraux, "Le lit, la
guerre" (1981) in Loraux, Les exp?riences de Tir?sias: Le f?minin et l'homme grec
(Paris 1989), 29-53, especially 48ff.
22. Met. 2.609-30, 3.308-14. There is some recognition of the pain and effort
of childbirth in Ovid's recurrent use of the verbs nitor or enitor for the woman's
travail; cf. Lucr. 5.210ff. In Met. 5.259 Ovid describes the bloody birth of Pegasus
from the neck of the decapitated Gorgon {materno sanguine nasci), an upward dis
placement of the pain and violence of birth (developed even further in Fasti 3.450
52); but these are tempered by the mythical unreality of the setting. The classical
poetic tradition generally does not go into details of birth, even though it sometimes
recognizes its dangers and pain, as in the Homeric Hymn to (Delian) Apollo 91-126
(cf. 91 f., "for nine days and nine nights Leto wsa pierced by hopeless birthpangs"),
or Euripides, Medea 250f. ("I would rather stand three times by the shield [in war]
than give birth once"). On the other hand Ovid gives Semele's death, which coin
cides with Bacchus' birth, barely a line and a half (3.308f.).
23. Although critics generally give Hercules' apotheosis a prominent place in
their discussions, they rarely mention Alcmena or the contrast with her travail: so,
e. g., Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge 1970), 166ff., 217,325,
349ff.; Feeney (note 4), 206f. Otis does not even list Alcmena's story in his table of
narrative events on 168.
24. In describing Scylla's combination of girlish beauty (pulchro pectore virgo)
and monstrosity, Virgil also describes the lower parts as a "womb" {uterus) from
which the wolves come forth {Aen. 3.426-28).
25. For the contrast within Scylla cf. Met. 13.735-37, where she is a beautiful
nymph who rejects her many suitors.
26. G. W. Most, "Disiecti membra poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in
Neronian Poetry" in Daniel L. Seiden and Ralph J. Hexter, eds., Innovations of
Antiquity (New York 1992), 398-400.
27. Most (note 26), 401ff.
28. On the multiple literary echoes in the Cyclops see Joseph Farrell, "Dialogue
of Genres in Ovid's 'Lovesong of Polyphemus' {Metamorphoses 13.719-897),"
AJP 113 (1992), 240ff. and especially 259f.
29. The relevance of the simile also becomes clearer in the next book (4.420ff.),
when Juno descends to Tartarus to punish Athamas and Ino, with echoes oiAeneid
7. Here she explicitly cites Bacchus' revenge on Pentheus as a model for her own
vengeance (4.429-31 ).
30. See Charles Segal, Landscape in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hermes Einzel
schriften 23 (Wiesbaden 1969), 74ff.

This content downloaded from 223.223.142.196 on Sat, 18 Apr 2020 09:39:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms