ClSt / ComL 200:
Notes for Wednesday, February 21

The Return of (the Return of) the Golden Age

Introduction

On Monday we heard about the peculiar relationship that the Romans had with the Greeks. In the earliest period of Roman culture, a number of Greek institutions were in fact borrowed and informed many aspects of Roman life (politics, religion, communications, etc.); but despite this influence, the Romans maintained a strong sense of separate identlity and resisted wholesale adoption of Greek culture. But by the middle of the first century BC, Rome had become the dominant power in the entire Mediterranean world, controlling the international relations and a good part of the internal govenrment even of the great Hellenistic kingdoms that grew out of Alexander's conquests. At this point something truly remarkable happens. The Romans did exercise control over the political life of the Greek world; but instead of imposing its language and culture along with this contol, the Romans actually began to import Greek culture and as it were to transplant it to their own soil. Roman education was modeled along Greek lines, even to the extent that educated Romans all studies Greek for many years. They used Greek poetry, either in the original Greek or in Latin translation, as their textbooks. They wrote their own Roman history in Greek, translated Greek literature into Latin, wrote Latin literature in imitation of Greek models. It is sometimes said that the Romans, despite their enormous political power, had a cultural inferiority complex vis a vis the Greeks. This idea is easy to exaggerate, but it certainly is true that the Romans had tremendous respect for Greek culture-even though they often expressed contempt for the contemporary Greeks whose political affairs they managed and who in many cases lived in Roman households as slaves.

The Age of Augustus

Most scholars consider the reign of Caesar Augustus, which spanned the turn of the last century BC into the first century AD, as a period of central importance in European history. It was Augustus who managed Rome's transition from a Republican form of government into in which many powerful members of the nobility struggled for control of the state as a whole as well as its various parts, into an empire with a strong central authority and a hierarchical system of responsibility and control. Both the administrative system itself and the very idea of a unified imperial authority exercised a strong influence on subsequent European politics and culture.

The "Age of Augustus" was also important for its literary and artistic achievements. Many of the poets who wrote during Augustus' regime-most of them under his direct or indirect sponsorship-have traditionally been regarded as the best that Rome even produced, and among the few who can stand comparison with the canonical authors of classical Greece. These poets seem to have been conscious that they were competing with the greatest poets of Greek antiquity, and they spoke of themselves as faring well in this competition. Their self-confidence is not unlike Augustus' own characterization of his regime as a rebirth or restoration of traditional Roman greatness. One difference is, however, that the poets tended to stress the idea that they were not restoring Latin literature to its original grandeur-in fact, they often spoke disparagingly of earlier Latin literature as rough and formless in comparison with theirs-but rather, they represented themselves as the true successors of the classical Greek poets who had flourished centuries before. This is in fact one of the most important ideas embodies in classical Latin literature, an idea that we have seen anticipated in especially in the plastic arts of the Hellenistic period: the idea that cultural superiority actually migrates over time from one state to another-that the artistic and cultural supremacy of Greece in general and of Athens in particular had moved first to Pergamum and Alexandria, but then to Rome. As we shall see, this potent idea did not die with the ancient Romans, but was adopted by culturally ambitious states in later times.

Vergil's Fourth Eclogue The idea that Augustan culture had in some sense succeeded that of classical Greece is clearly expressed by Vergil in his Fourth Eclogue. In this poem Vergil predicts the birth of a miraculous child whose life will coincide with the return of a Golden Age. In speaking of the Golden Age, Vergil alludes clearly to Hesiod's Works and Days, where the myth of the Golden Age first appears; but he alters the structure of Hesiod's myth, asserting that after the Iron Age a new Golden Age will appear. In this age, the great, heroic events of Greek mythology will occur again: there will be a new voyage of Argo, a new Achilles, a new Trojan War. Significantly, this brave new era is connected with the consulate of a specific individual, Gaius Asinius Pollio. One influential interpretation of the poem, then, is that under Roman political leadership events comparable to those of mythical Greek antiquity will be realized. On this reading, the Fourth Eclogue is a potent illustration of the idea current among Vergil's contemporaries that they were living in one of the great periods of human history, and of the Roman habit of expressing such ideas in terms of the mythology that they had borrowed from the Greeks.

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Vergil's Fourth Eclogue was written in about 40 BC, the year in which Pollio was consul and several years before Augustus actually came to sole power in Rome. Upon Vergil's death in 19 BC his masterpiece, the Aeneid, was published in unfinished condition. This epic poem is considered the most important artistic meditation on the cultural aspirations of Augustan Rome. At the time of its publication, Ovid was in the artistic and cultura his early twenties and had not yet established himself as a poet; but within about ten years' time he would become the leading poet of the day, and by the year 1 BC he would have composed his own masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, which is together with the Aeneid one of the most influential products of Latin literature and Roman culture.

A Mythological Handbook?

The Metamorphoses can be and often has been read as a mythological handbook, and with good reason: there are relatively few important Greek myths with which Ovid does not deal and, becasue he is such an entertaining racconteur, his poem is much more enjoyable to read than any other mythological handbook produced in antiquity. Its influence in Europe was nearly unchallenged when, in later antiquity and the middle ages, knowledge of Greek became rare and other classical mythological texts and handbooks were consequently unavailable. But now we have access to ancient Greek mythological handbooks as well as to modern compilations, and it is a useful exercise to compare Ovid's telling of a particular myth or mythic cycle with what we find in works intended mainly for reference purposes. In the first place, as I have already said, Ovid is much more entertaining. But beyond this, Ovid, despite the seeming simplicity of his narrative style, hardly ever tells a story in a straightforward way. Almost always some detail reveals an interesting bias, interpretation, or other aspect of his thought that will be found lacking in a real handbook of mythology.

Ovid's Interpretation of Greek Mythology

How does Ovid develop his own interpretation of the Greek myths? This is not an easy question to answer, but there are a number of poetic devices that he employs in order to comment on the material he presents:

Structure. Like any work of art, the Metamorphoses has a particular structure: it is divided into fifteen books and claims to embrace everything that has ever occurred "in one continuous song from nature's first beginnings to our modern times." And in fact, it begins with the formation of the universe and ends with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar in 43 BC. It thus presents itself as a universal history of human experience. There is more to be said about this, but keeping for the moment strictly to the principle of structure, consider how Ovid handles transitions between books. The first book seems to end witht he story of Io, but then goes on to narrate only the beginning of the story of Phaethon, which then takes up a considerable portion of Book 2. It would have been easy for Ovid to make the boundary between Books 1 and 2 a point of sharp division between the stories of Io and Phaeton, but he did not. Instead, he violates what would seem to be one of his main structural principles, the division of the poem into books. It is worth asking what his reasons for doing so might be. Furthermore, it is clear that Ovid sets himself the task of narrating his material in "chronological order." He therefore adopts the generational structure developed by Greek mythographers before him. What becomes interesting, however, is the way in which this structure occasionally slips into the background. At the end of Book 5, for instance, Minerva listens to a report of a singing contest between two teams of sisters, the Pierides and the Muses. The stories told here-the battle between the gods and the giants and the abduction of Persephone (or Proserpina)-both concern events that chronologically "belong" much earlier in the poem. By appearing here, out of sequence, and by being framed as entires in a singing contest, they receive a special kind of emphasis. These are two examples of the sometimes misleading way in which Ovid writes: by first establishing and then ostentatiously violating clear structural principles for his narrative of Greek mythology.
Theme. More than a universal history, the Metamorphoses is unified, or claims to be unified, by the theme of change. The myths that Ovid relates are all told as if they were stories about some sort of change. In practice, the element of change sometimes seems tenuous or illusory, and even when it occurs its meaning may not be straightforward. Consider some of the "changes" that take place in Book 1:
- The cannibalistic Lycaon is transformed into a wolf. Is this a form of punishment, or merely an externalization of the inner savagery that is his personality?
- The nymph Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree (daphne in Greek) at her own request so that she may avoid Apollo's amorous advances. Unable to possess her sexually, Apollo makes her leaves and branches his personal emblem, first asking her permission. Ovid says "the laurel in assent inclined her new-made branches and bent down-or seemed to bend- her head, her leafy crown." "Seemed", the reader should ask, to whom? Is Daphne, who resisted Apollo's sexual advances, really agreeing to his request now? Did metamorphosis really rescue her from a fate that she did not desire, or did it deprive her of the means to protest against Apollo's finally having his way with her after all?
- Io is transformed into a cow to hide from Juno the fact that Jupiter had seduced her. How does this transformation relate to the previous two, in which some sort of punishment or reward seems to be at stake, but in which the reality of the transformation is open to question?
Clearly Ovid uses the theme of metamorphosis in various ways, not only to unify his poem, and to facilitate the telling of so many stories as a "continuous" narrative, but also to raise questions of many different kinds and to provoke the reader's active cooperation in determining the meaning of the stories he tells.
Cultural Translation The Metamorphoses begins with the origin of the universe-as told be Greek poets. It then tells a long sequence of Greek myths. But it concludes with episodes from Roman mythology and even Roman history. The move from Greek mythology to Roman history recalls Vergil's move in the opposite direction in the Fourth Eclogue. Like Vergil, Ovid is operating under a general cultural awareness that Augustan Rome was in some sense the cultural successor of classical Greece.
How else does this awareness manifest itself in the poem? Answering this question sometimes leads to surprises. Consider first the council of the gods in book 1. In many ways this is a conventional scene, similar to many in Homer and other Greek poets. But Ovid uses language that represents Mt. Olympus as the Palatine hill in the center of Rome, where many politically prominent Romans, including Augustus, had their homes. This connection between the Olympian order and the political order, and specifically between Zeus or Jupiter and a particular political ruler, is not uncommon, as we have seen from the Hellenistic material dealing with Alexander and the successor kings of the Hellenistic world. But Ovid goes farther in representing the greater and lesser divinities as patricians and plebeians, according to the social structure of the Roman people; and he represents the procedures followed in this council as identical to those of the Roman senate.
This close correspondence between Olympus and Rome leads to some interesting moments. For instance, when Apollo attempts to force himself on Daphne, one should perhaps ask what it means for one of the greater (patrician) gods to treat a lesser (plebeian) immortal in this way-and, by extension, what does such a relationshp imply about relations between gods and humans? Further, after what we have seen about Daphne's treatment at Apollo's hands, why does Ovid connect the symbolism of the laurel specifically with Augustus himself? To what kind of conclusions is he provoking us as we consider the meaning of Rome's adoption of the Greek myths?