OVID'S

'HECALE':

DECONSTRUCTING

ATHENS

IN THE

METAMORPHOSES
By INGO GILDENHARD and ANDREW ZISSOS

I.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars have long recognized a cultural tension inherent in the scheme of Ovid's Metamorphoses: while most of the materia of the epic is Greek, Rome is its triumphant narrative telos.' The epic's Hellenic underpinnings have received abundant critical attention; rather less well documented and discussed is the subtle undercurrent of Romanitas that sustains Ovid's overarching cultural teleology throughout the poem.2 This Roman 'cultural vector' registers in all phases of the narrative, but nowhere more insistently than in the first two books: it is there that the poet brings the overall temporal and spatial thrust of his literary project - namely, to spin down a carmen from universal
creation to contemporary Augustan times ('ad mea . .. tempora', 1.4)
-

to the mind of his reader. In Metamorphoses i and 2 the unfolding cosmos suffers a series of near-catastrophes, and the ekpyrosis caused by Phaethon's erratic including a global flood (1.253-415) chariot-ride (1.748-2.400). But while the literary universe of the Metamorphoses lurches fitfully into being, a series of proleptic references to Roman civilization serves to keep the majestic terminus of the poem firmly in sight.3 Ovid weaves into his initial narrative sequence a number of seemingly off-hand and quirky anticipations of Roman history and also evokes the political realities of the Augustan Principate.* These strategic gestures announce and underwrite the Roman telos of Ovid's 'universal history' by subtly implicating it in the earliest stages of the narrative. The proleptic references in Books I and 2 stand in symmetrical balance with the striking pattern of cultural translation from Greece to Rome in the two final books of the Metamorphoses. In the wake of Aeneas' arrival in the West, Ovid focuses on Italian (or, more specifically, Roman) themes. Included in the latter category is the relocation of Greek gods and heroes in Italy. Book 15, for example, features the Samian exile Pythagoras who settled in Croton, the Euripidean hero Hippolytus who became the Italian deity Virbius, and Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing, who takes up residence on Tiber-island.

most forcefully

1 See e.g. H. Friinkel, Ovid. A Poet Between Two Worlds (I945), whose suggestive title could also be made to refer to the poet's cultural schizophrenia; M. von Albrecht, 'Mythos und r6mische Realitait in Ovids Metamorphosen', ANRW 2.31.4 (1981), 2328-42. 2 Ovid's overt 'Roman touches' have of course been noticed and commented upon: see, e.g., J. B. Solodow, The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1988), 74-89; S. M. Wheeler, A Discourse of Wonders.Audience and Performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses (i 999), 194-205. Nevertheless, the cumulative, strategic force of these gestures is still generally discounted: cf. most recently the remarks by A. Perutelli in his Introduction to G. Paduano (ed.), Ovidio Opere II. Le metamorfosi (2000), xii: 'Quella intrapresa da Ovidio e la storia del mondo, disposta in ordine dall'inizio fino ai suoi giorni, una storia poco romana, dove gli eventi di Roma hanno una parte limitata, che coincide anche con quella meno affascinante del poema.' This amounts to a variant of the well-known, but unpersuasive thesis of Ovid 'flagging' when he reached Roman subject matter. 3 D. C. Feeney, 'Mea tempora: patterning of time in

the Metamorphoses', in P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds (eds), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on at 27, insightfully addresses the purpose of these gestures in the larger scheme of the poem. Though in the end we shall suggest a somewhat different reading, we owe much to his probing analysis of the temporal ordering of the Metamorphoses. 4 The Roman teleology is advertised by the mention of triumphal processions and the residence of Augustus at 1.558-60, as well as the anticipatory reference
to 'nuribus ... Latinis' Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Reception (1999), 13-30,

realities are signalled most obviously in the concilium celebrantur apertis'; 176 'Palatia caeli'; 201-8). The most striking anticipation of the poem's Roman end occurs in the Ocyrhoe episode (2.633-75), where Ovid momentarily 'collapses' the strict temporal divide between the narrative present and the Roman episodes of Book 15: see I. Gildenhard and A. Zissos, 'Problems of time in Metamorphoses 2', in P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds (eds), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid's Metamorphoses and its Reception (1999), 31-47, at 42-6. deorum at 1.163-252 (e.g. 172 'atria nobilium valvis

at 2.365.

Roman

political

? World copyright reserved. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 2004.

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This shift in geographical focus corresponds to a translatio imperii in historical times. The end of the Metamorphoses celebrates the ascendancy of Rome to worldempire: 'terra sub Augusto est' (15.86o) observes Ovid laconically of the comprehensive sway of Roman rule, while linking his own eternal fame to the global reach of Roman power (15.876-7). But this was never the whole story: as the Romans conquered the world in military and political terms, they themselves arguably succumbed to a different type of imperialism. In the centuries before Ovid composed the Metamorphoses, Roman society underwent a profound process of Hellenization, variously depicted as 'a dramatic process of acculturation', 'the spread of civilization in Roman society', 'a cultural evolution under the conditions of contact with a higher developed culture', the forging of a 'transcultural sensibility with which we are still living', 'the maturation of a national culture'5 - or even an outright 'cultural revolution'.6 This complex dialectic of military and cultural interpenetration of Greece and Rome in the last three centuries before our era finds its most suggestive articulation in late Republican authors and Ovid's Augustan predecessors. Their interpretation of recent history revolved around the idea of a reciprocal imperialism, emanating from two distinct 'world centres'. Just as Rome evolved from urbs to orbis in geopolitical terms, so Athens became the font of a cultural koine that prevailed throughout the Mediterranean oikumene.7 In the well-known Horatian formulation, captive Greece conquered her barbarian conqueror with her arts.8 In this historical narrative, the military might of Rome finds its counterpart in the cultural power of Greece. Latin poets in particular liked to foreground their 'Greek' poetics as a hallmark of literary quality, at the expense of predecessors and rivals whom they polemically depicted as writing in a more 'rustic' (often synonymous with 'native') style.9 At first glance, the Metamorphoses appears to endorse the familiar notion of Roman civilization fundamentally derived from Greek culture - appropriated, adapted, transformed, to be sure, but Greek in origin nevertheless. Upon a deeper examination of the poem, however, a rather more complex picture emerges. Beneath the narrative surface of the Metamorphoses one can detect a determined Romanocentric impulse, which subtly and yet insistently articulates a sense of rivalry with the great centres of Greek civilization. Lurking behind Ovid's complex transformation of the Greek mythic and legendary material he inherited is a precise cultural agenda that privileges Rome and Romanitas over the civilization of Hellas. To avoid misunderstanding, it is worth stressing at the outset that we do not dispute the profound and thoroughgoing 'Greekness' of the epic. Both Ovid's Alexandrian sophistication and the Hellenic origins of much of his narrative material are evident throughout. But we suggest that the manner in which Ovid handles this foreign heritage in the Metamorphoses follows a double plot of 'competitive acculturation': just as in the course of the epic the rise of Rome eclipses the world of Greece, so the author 'conquers' his (Greek) poetic predecessors by 'rewriting' them from a Roman

I The quotations are respectively from P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1988), I I; M. von Albrecht, A History of Roman Literature (1996), io8; G. Vogt-Spira, 'Die Kulturbegegnung Roms mit den Griechen', in M. Schuster (ed.), Die Begegnung mit dem Fremden. Wertungen und Wirkungen in Hochkulturen vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart (1996), 11-33, at 12; D. C. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (1998), 5o; E. Gruen, Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (1990), I. 6 A. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Rome's cultural revolution', JRS 79 (1989), 157-64; T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds), The Roman Cultural Revolution (1997). 7 cf., e.g., the opening sentence of the De Officiis, in which Cicero ascribes summa auctoritas to the city of Athens in the realm of philosophy.

8 Hor., Ep. 2.1.156:

'Graecia

cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio.' This bipolar treatment is also famously expressed by Vergil's Anchises at Aen. 6.847-53. 9 Well discussed in S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (1998), of classical Athens also feature prominently in the art and architecture of the Augustan Age, though it is often difficult to determine whether the invocation is direct or mediated by Hellenistic or other Greek stages of reception. See P. Hardie, 'Fifth-century Athenian and Augustan images of the barbarian other', Classics Ireland 4 (1997), 146-56.
52-74. Appropriative gestures to the cultural nimbus

capta ferum uictorem

49 point of view."1 In this paper, we want to explore some of the complex strategies by which Ovid has scripted his literary assault on Greek civilization into the spatial and temporal articulations of his narrative. The primary focus will be Ovid's confrontation with Athenian culture in Metamorphoses 2, and his 'decentring' of Athens within the world-system of the poem."
OVID'S 'HECALE': II. CONFRONTING ATTHIS: THE LITERARY BACKGROUND

DECONSTRUCTING

ATHENS

IN THE METAMORPHOSES

In the wake of the Callisto episode (2.401-532), Book 2 of the Metamorphoses provides an intricately interwoven series of brief and often puzzling narratives, most of which are closely linked to the legendary origins of Athens. One could call this section of the poem Ovid's 'Atthidography' - by analogy to his 'Thebaid' in Books 3 and 4. The sequence opens with the tale of Apollo's rash slaying of his pregnant lover Coronis, after hearing the raven's report of her infidelity (2.533-632). Within this narrative is embedded the cautionary tale of the crow, punished by Minerva for informing the goddess of a transgression by the daughters of the Athenian king Cecrops (2.549-95). Then follows an account of the rescue from the dying Coronis of the foetus, the future healing god Aesculapius, whose illustrious career is foretold by Ocyrhoe, daughter of the centaur Chiron (2.633-75). After this intriguing prophetic sequence, the story of the theft of Apollo's cattle by Mercury is laconically related (2.676-704), following which the narrative series concludes with an account of Mercury's love for Cecrops' daughter Herse, and the punishment of the latter's interfering sister, Aglauros, by Invidia at the behest of Minerva (2.708-832). These stories have been investigated both individually and collectively from various literary-critical perspectives, including their intertextual affiliations and their intricate framing of narratological issues.12 In what follows we will consider these episodes from a somewhat different angle, examining how they collectively enact a crucial Ovidian engagement with Athenian culture. This engagement takes place on a number of different levels, but is particularly concerned with the topography of Athens. Like many other Greek cities, Athens came to be possessed of an intricate body of ktisis myths. These comprised a more or less coherent network of interrelated tales which supplied a myth of origins - starting with the dynasties of Cecrops and Erichthonius - and helped to account for the unique features of the Athenian landscape. This corpus, with its pronounced genealogical and topographical content, grounded the city, its culture, and its political institutions in their physical surroundings: it recreated in idealized form the space within which civic life took place. As Nicole Loraux has observed, Athenian topography constituted 'a symbolic order, a space in which the vital symbols of the polis [were] distributed and organized'.13 The on-going vitality and popularity of Athenian ktisis myths eventually gave rise to a dedicated literary form, the so-called Atthis. While some reservations have recently been voiced over Felix Jacoby's assessment of the genre as 'a weapon in the political

10 Ovid's conceptual treatment of Greece is thus not so much 'Horatian' as 'Ciceronian'. The most pertinent literary precursor for the policy of dispersal and subsumation pursued in the Metamorphoses is the Cicero of the Tusculan Disputations, who calls upon his fellow Romans to follow the practice of their ancestors in 'ripping out' the literary and intellectual spoils from a 'weakening Hellas' and transferring them to Rome (Tusc. 2.5: 'Quam ob rem hortor omnis qui facere id possunt, ut huius quoque generis laudem iam languenti Graeciae eripiant et perferant in hanc urbem, sicut reliquas omnis, quae quidem erant expetendae, studio atque industria sua maiores nostri transtulerunt.'). 11 In a subsequent article we hope to explore the

political ethnography of the poem, i.e. how Ovid has situated Rome in relation to the civic centres of Athens and Thebes; as well as the complex ways in which he constructs the barbarian other in the Metamorphoses- issues that can only be adumbrated here. For Ovid's treatment of Thebes, P. Hardie, 'Ovid's Theban history: the first anti-Aeneid?', CQ 40 (1990), 224-35 remains of fundamental importance. 12 The most detailed examination of these episodes is A. M. Keith, The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2 (1992). This paper is, in part, an attempt to build upon her narratological and intertextual study by considering the tales from the perspective of a poetics of culture. 13 N. Loraux, The Children of Athena (1993), 15.

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AND ANDREW

ZISSOS

combat of the day',14 there can be little doubt that these texts did indeed pack a powerful ideological punch. A type of prose chronicle, Atthides relied on a set of persuasive conceptual schemes - autochthony, continuity of past and present, a metaphysics of origins - to endow Athens' civic community with a strong sense of identity. These texts included 'such diverse material as the origins of religious festivals and cults, etymology of place-names, geography, ethnography, and the creation of financial and political institutions'.5s In short, these ktisis narratives served to establish a powerful linkage - at once both conceptual and physical - between the legendary past and the civic present.16 Atthides, then, comprised an ordered set of legendary tales which collectively emphasized the uniqueness of Athenian territory and history. They charted the peculiar combination of the providential and the aleatory through which the Athenians defined their polis and its special relationship with the gods. It was in these works that Athenian topography and culture were most systematically interwoven. They defined a landscape that was foundational and essential, and that was used to invest Athenian culture with much of its perceived distinctiveness and prestige. In more general terms, Atthides established a 'territorial ethos'; they constituted works of aesthetic nationalism which subjected geography to the service of ideology."17And it was this peculiar literary form that served as both source and inspiration for Callimachus' treatment of Athens in the Hecale.18 Since Ovid's own Athenian narratives constitute a studied literary response to the Hecale, it will be useful to establish a few basic facts about this work, which has unfortunately survived only in fragmentary form, before proceeding. The Callimachean epyllion is centred around the figure of an old Athenian woman, Hecale, whose cottage Theseus visits on the way to his encounter with the Marathon bull. The heroine is, or will be, the eponym of the Attic deme 'EKx&Xr.19 Thus, in an obvious sense, Hecale herself can be seen to embody the principle of the 'rootedness' of the Athenians in their own landscape. The programmatic importance of the Attic locale is established in the very first line of the poem: 'Once on a hill of Erechtheus, there lived an Attic woman' rti (fr. I Hollis: 'AKr~Tirl qvoatv Sv tnoreyouv6)t). Athens provides the Hecale with its literary and geographical 'EpX06og 'ground'; Athenian topography is nothing less than the poem's raison d'etre. Within the framework of the primary hospitality narrative, it is clear from the fragments that a substantial inset tale is told by a crow (frr. 70-4 Hollis). It is on this sequence in particular that we wish to focus. The crow is perhaps perched in a tree near the cottage of Hecale and is probably talking to an owl.20 In her narrative, the crow tells the tale of how she fell out of favour with Athena and was banished from the area of the Acropolis forever. In giving this account, the crow expounds on legendary subject matter unrelated to the action of the main narrative. She chronicles a number of related events, in various degrees of detail, which are briefly summarized below.21 The Olympian gods hold a contest between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of Athens, which is won by the goddess after Cecrops, the king of Athens, witnesses for her (fr. 70.10-Ii Hollis). Subsequently Erichthonius is born, an autochthonous halfserpent and future king of Athens, who perhaps results from Hephaestus' inept attempt
14 F. Jacoby, Atthis. The Local Chronicles of Ancient Athens (1949), 77. 15 OCD (2nd edn) s.v. 'Atthis'. 16 Thus Hellanicus of Lesbos (c. 480-395 B.C.E.),the first Atthidographer, traced Athenian greatness from the city's foundation to his own times in annalistic fashion by grafting the list of Athens' eponymous archons onto its series of legendary kings. As far as can be determined from the scant surviving fragments, his six successors in the genre - Cleidemus, Androtion, Phanodemus, Demon, Melanthius, and Philochorus - employed similar temporal schemes to celebrate and glorify their polls. 17 Formulations from A. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism. Mapping the Homeland (1995), 83. 18 Jacoby, op. cit. (n. 14), 84-6 argues that the term Atthis was popularized by Callimachus when he used it as a heading in his catalogue for 'the diverse body of writing that dealt with Attic lore and topography'; cf. P. E. Harding, Androtion and the Atthis (1994), 2. 19 On the uncertain location of Hecale's deme, see A. Hollis (ed.), Callimachus: Hecale (1990), 7. 20 This identification of the interlocutor was first proposed by Wilamowitz in 1893, and has generally been accepted by subsequent critics. See Hollis, op. cit. (n. 19), 225-6 and 241-2 for a balanced discussion of the issue. 21 This summary follows chronological order, rather than the sequence used by the narrator in the Hecale.

OVID'S

'HECALE':

DECONSTRUCTING

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IN THE METAMORPHOSES

51

at raping Athena. The lame god's sperm ended up on the ground, and Earth was thereby impregnated (fr. 70.7-8 Hollis). Although only indirectly connected to Erichthonius' birth, Athena assumes a measure of responsibility for the infant. She encloses it in a basket which she leaves in the care of the daughters of Cecrops, admonishing them not to look inside (fr. 70.5-6 Hollis).22 The goddess then attempts to provide for the defence of her newly-won city. She picks up an enormous chunk of Mount Hypsizorus in Pallene, and starts back to Attica with it, intending to place it beside the Acropolis and thus make Athens impregnable. But while she is engaged in this task, one or more of the Cecropides disregards Athena's admonition and peers into the basket - and is observed doing so by the crow (fr. 71 Hollis). The crow reports the discovery of Erichthonius to Athena while the goddess is passing by the gymnasium of Lycean Apollo with her immense load (fr. 72 Hollis). Upon hearing the news, a stunned and angry Athena drops the great piece of rock, which settles into the ground, never to be moved again. The goddess then banishes the crow, as the bearer of bad news, from the Acropolis forever (fr. 73 Hollis). Following this narrative, the crow goes on to prophesy that the raven will likewise be punished for informing Apollo of the infidelity of his lover Coronis (fr. 74 Hollis). It is clear that Callimachus uses this digression into bird-lore as a cunning stratagem whereby he may elaborate upon various features of Athenian culture and topography by including legendary material that is not strictly germane to the basic story-line.23 He thus manages to reproduce the rigorously Athenocentric world view to which the Atthidographers subscribed and which was indeed a defining and widespread feature of Hellenistic culture. The Hecale can be seen as an attempt, at the same time nostalgic and tongue-in-cheek, to convey something of the spirit of adulation with which Athens was treated in the Atthides. This is not to say that the witty and sophisticated Callimachus was 'just' another Atthidographer (though one should perhaps reckon with the possibility that Ovid polemically read him as if he were); but there can be little doubt that in the Hecale he relied upon precisely the material that the genre traditionally processed. The use of a bird narrator is a case in point. Callimachus' primary source for the inset narrative of the crow is an Atthidographer, the mysterious figure 'who called himself by a name unheard of for a human being, viz. "Amelesagoras" '.24 Jacoby argues that the crow-story may have been adapted from the Koronis tale of Hesiod (fr. 6o MW) and suggests that 'Amelesagoras invented the aition in order to establish a connection between the legend of the daughters of Kekrops and that of Lykabettos'.25 If Jacoby is correct in arguing that Amelesagoras generated the crow-aition out of the raven-aition, the fact that the Callimachean crow prophesies the fate of the raven constitutes a studied intertextual gesture.26 Callimachus' decision to turn the victim of Amelesagoras' aition into his own internal narrator is an ingenious ploy. With a life-span extending to nine human generations, the crow is a particularly apposite character to perform in a versified Atthidography set in the time of Theseus. Lists of Athenian kings had been a common feature of the genre since Hellanicus, and by letting the crow reminisce about her life Callimachus introduces into his poem a venerable figure of fun who has been a strategically perched eye-witness to all of Athenian history up to that point. Indeed, the bird must have hatched just before the divine ktisis-action began to unfold, and then
22 In earlier strata of the myth, this may have constituted an attempt by Athena to immortalize Erichthonius. 23 Hollis, op. cit. (n. 19), 8-9, where he further notes that the Hecale is our ultimate source for information on a number of Athenian demes other than that of Hecale. 24 Jacoby, op. cit. (n. 14), 85. Antigonus Carystius called the author 'ACLhqaxoy6poq 6 'Ailvoiog 6 'iilv 'ATOii6at ouyyypcxq?dg.Cf. Jacoby's comments: 'this man, who invented a name for himself, invented the title for his book as well, one of those fancy titles which began to become fashionable during the fourth century, a title which was to appear surprisingly new, and archaic at the same time.' Cf. Hollis, op. cit. (n. 19), 7. The Atthidographer's account of the episode is summarized by Antigonus Carystius (FGH 330), quoted below. 25 Jacoby, op. cit. (n. 14), 603. 26 i.e., either the prophecy was already in Amelesagoras, in which case Callimachus asserts his priority over the Hesiodic tradition; or the prophecy is his own invention, in which case he slyly signals that, while following the Atthidographer, he is aware of his literary tricks.

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witnessed the lives and times of the eight kings that ruled Athens before Theseus: Cecrops, Cranaus, Amphictyon, Erichthonius, Pandion, Erectheus, Pandion II, and Aegeus. In short, Callimachus' poem gives pride of place to an unusually compelling authority on hoary Attic lore. It is against this elaborate literary backdrop that the cluster of episodes in the second half of Metamorphoses 2 unfolds. Ovid's proto-Athenian narratives, and the group of bird-stories at 2.534-632 in particular, constitute an intricate engagement with and response to the Atthidographic tradition as mediated by the Hecale: the Callimachean affiliations of these passages are unmistakable, despite the fragmentary survival of the epyllion.27 At the same time, Ovid has transposed and distorted vital elements of his model in a curious and highly suggestive fashion. His narrative enacts a negative intertextual dialectic with the Callimachean model that subverts or obscures the cultural content of the Atthidography, in order to repress the evocative signification of the Athenian landscape which lies at the heart of this literary form. The discourse of Attic origins is thereby subjected to 'deconstructive' pressures that result in a subtle but enduring vitiation of Athenian cultural prestige within the world-system of the Metamorphoses. As mentioned earlier, the corollary to this denigration of Athens is the anticipation of Roman ascendancy and the subtle insinuation of a transcendent, allencompassing Romanitas.
III. FOWL TIPS: THE CAPITOLINE GEESE

Ovid signals this 'geopoetic' agenda at the very inception of the Atthidographic sequence. As the Metamorphoses lights upon the Attic narrative domain of the Hecale, a brief but significant redirection occurs. In a seemingly casual aside, the poet makes favourable mention of the Capitoline geese, legendary saviours of Rome: nam fuit haec quondam niveis argentia pennis ales, ut aequaret totas sine labe columbas nec servaturis vigili Capitolia voce cederet anseribus nec amanti flumina cycno. (Met. 2.536-9) The raven had once been a silvery bird, With snow-white wings, pure as the spotless doves, His whitenessrivalling the wakefulgeese, Whosevoice wouldone day save the Capitol, And the river-loving swans. (trans. Melville; our italics) With these verses, as earlier scholars have noted, Ovid reworks a three-point comparison found in Callimachus' Hecale:
epirot evzeK6pa5, 0qviv ye KmiXvK6KVOtcltv " K y lcXKt c xpotiv K]ci K6dzo Kpot. cPOtp,

tjr iYCti lTtEpOV ouhoov iEt ... KIXlVwoV7iov (fr. 74.15-17 Hollis) ... when the raven, who now at least could rival swans and milk in complexion, and the foam on the crest of a wave, will have on him a thick, pitch-black plumage ... While preserving one of the terms of comparison, the swan, Ovid has made two substitutions, the second of which injects a notable counter-current of Romanitas into the very opening of his Atthidographic sequence. The reference, of course, is to the
27 Keith, op. cit. (n. I2), 9-36 conveniently consolidates the analysis of earlier scholars.

53 salvation of Rome by the Capitoline geese around 390 B.C.E. According to the traditional account, Gallic invaders attempted, under cover of night, to scale the escarpment of the Capitol. This nocturnal raid would have spelled disaster for the city, had not the geese kept in the temple of Juno alerted the Romans to the presence of the Gauls, who were as a result decisively repulsed by the consul Marcus Manlius and his troops.28 This seemingly 'misplaced' and disorienting evocation of later Roman times has a programmatic force, inaugurating a privileging of Rome over Athens that will continue to operate throughout the sequence of Attic ktisis narratives. The evocation of Rome as a (positive) foil to Athens works on a variety of levels. To begin with, the cogency of the proleptic reference derives from an implicit contrast with the bird narratives that follow. Alison Keith has made the valuable observation that all of the tales in this section of the epic thematize the inappropriate use of the vox.29 The importance of holding one's tongue (and the transformative consequences of failing to do so) is a unifying theme in the second half of Book 2. Immediately following the reference to the Capitoline geese, Ovid sets the tone by noting of the crow: 'lingua fuit damno' (2.540). The brief allusion to the legend of the Capitoline geese thus stands in pointed juxtaposition to the stories that follow, momentarily inverting the leitmotif of the misused vox in a specifically Roman context. It is precisely the use of the vox by these geese that saves Rome: the transferred epithet of 'vigili ... voce' (2.538) underscores their necessary and appropriate verbal intervention. For the geese, no metamorphosis ensues: unlike the crow and the raven, they retain their unblemished whiteness. The reference thus sets the Athenian bird tales within a framework of implicit moralizing categories: in so doing, it effects a concomitant cultural inversion, hinting at the privileging of Roman over Greek legend that will occur in the subsequent narrative. Ovid's use of the so-called 'historical future' ('servaturis ... Capitolia ... anseribus', 2.538-9), a formulation ex persona poetae, also suggests a precise ideological purpose."s The identity of any community depends upon not only the conception of a collective past, but also the ability to place that past in relation to a future. The use of the future participle brings a specifically Roman destiny before the eyes of the reader at a point in the narrative when Athens is the ostensible focus. In effect, one defensive citadel is substituted for another: instead of describing the Acropolis and the fortification of Athens, which are treated in extenso in his Greek model, Ovid presents the Roman mons Capitolinus. The sack of the city by the Gauls was a moment of crisis in Roman history, a moment in which the fate of the 'eternal' city hung precariously in the balance. Without the timely intervention of the geese, the city would have lost its last defensive stronghold - and its future prospects along with it. The passage may contain one further pro-Roman nuance. Franz B6mer has suggested that Ovid's model for these verses is the argenteus anser on Vergil's shield of Aeneas, an ecphrastic sequence which likewise features the repulsion of the Gauls from the Capitol.31 If so, then this passage can be added to the list of programmatic allusions in Books I and 2 to the shield ecphrasis, a part of the Aeneid in which Roman geopolitical ascendancy is particularly closely associated with the triumph of order over chaos on a supernatural or cosmic level.32
OVID'S 'HECALE':

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ATHENS

IN THE METAMORPHOSES

The legend is reported at, e.g., Liv. 5.47.4. Keith, op. cit. (n. I2), passim. 30 cf. F. B6mer (ed.), P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen. WissenschaftlicheKommentare zu lateinischen und griechischen Schriftstellern (1969-86), ad loc. 31 Aen. 8.655-6: 'atque hic auratis volitans argenteus anser / porticibus Gallos in limine adesse canebat.' B6mer, op. cit. (n. 30), 372 usefully cites the intriguing remark of Servius on Aen. 8.655: 'prudenter argenteum anserem dixit, nam quasi et epitheton est coloris et significavit rem veram. nam in Capitolio in honorem illius anseris, qui Gallorum nuntiarat adventus, positus fuerat anser argenteus.' 32 As V. Buchheit, 'Mythos und Geschichte in Ovids Metamorphoses I', Hermes 94 (1966), 8o-io6 shows,
29

28

other 'forward references' and Roman allusions in the opening books of the Metamorphoses, as well as their narrative counterparts in Book 15, recall the ideological centre of Vergil's shield, where a primeval confrontation between the forces of order and chaos is depicted on both supernatural and human levels. Of particular relevance is his discussion of how the victories of Jupiter and Apollo over their chthonic enemies in Met. i prefigure the rule of the princeps Augustus in Met. 15. Although Buchheit misses the saucy impudence that pervades Ovid's imperialist poetics, his fundamental insights are extremely valuable. For the cosmic imagery and imperialist agenda of the Aeneid, P. Hardie, Virgil's Aeneid. Cosmos and Imperium (1986) remains pre-eminent.

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NARRATIVE 'ON THE FLY': THE CROW AND THE RAVEN

As already noted, the embedded aetiological tale of the crow (2.534-95) is a creative adaptation of the same episode in the Hecale. The numerous points of contact between the Callimachean and Ovidian treatments indicate a thoroughgoing intertextual engagement. In both cases, the narrative milieu is constructed around the same central figure, the crow, who, in the course of a conversation with another bird, provides an aetiological account of her fall from the favour of Minerva (2.534-95, cf. frr. 70-4 Hollis). Within this context of careful replication, however, the terms of the Ovidian version systematically invert or reorganize the content of its model.33 In Ovid's adaptation, the owl is displaced from its probable Callimachean role as interlocutor, and made the eventual subject of the crow's discussion with the raven; conversely the raven, the subject of the Callimachean crow's narrative, becomes the Ovidian interlocutor.34 As Alison Keith observes, 'Ovid ... thus retain[s] the three birds that Callimachus had used in the Hecale (the crow, the owl, and the raven), redeploying them in such a way as to point the doctus lector back to the modeling passage'.3s This is certainly a valuable observation, but Ovid's redeployment results in more than a mere shuffling of the dramatis personae: it generates a geographical displacement within a narrative for which geography is of fundamental importance. While the Callimachean crow is perched securely near Hecale's cottage as it expounds upon Athenian history, the Ovidian crow is situated - where? The narrative opens in a state of geographic indeterminacy: pulchrior in tota quam Larisseia Coronis non fuit Haemonia: placuit tibi, Delphice, certe, dum vel casta fuit vel inobservata, sed ales sensit adulterium Phoebeius, utque latentem detegeret culpam, non exorabilis index, ad dominum tendebat iter; quem garrula motis consequitur pennis, scitetur ut omnia, cornix ... (Met. 2.542-8) In all the land of Thessaly no girl Was lovelier than Coronis of Larissa. She certainly was Phoebus' favourite, So long as she was chaste - or not found out. But Phoebus' bird had found her faithlessness And hastened to his master to reveal The guilt she hid, ruthless to tell his tale. To learn the latest news a garrulous crow Flapped quickly after him ... (trans. Melville) It is evident (from 'tendebat iter' and 'consequitur pennis') that the two birds are going to be speaking 'on the fly'; the location of their conversation is literally and metaphorically up in the air. Even the aerial route is unclear: all that can be said with certainty is that the raven's journey starts in Thessaly - Ovid does not specify at what stage the crow tags along - and that the birds are covering ground as the inset narrative unfolds. We cannot be absolutely sure of the raven's destination, but Delphi is strongly suggested by the apostrophe 'Delphice' (2.543).36 If so, it follows that the two birds would not even be passing through Athens or its environs. In other words, by reordering the
33 Because of the fragmentary survival of the Hecale, it is not always a simple matter to tease out the fundamental thematic differences between the two versions. Recent scholarship has, nevertheless, removed a good deal of the obscurity surrounding the relationship between the two passages: see in particular Hollis, op. cit. (n. 19) and Keith, op. cit. (n. I2). 35 Keith, op. cit. (n. 12), Ig. 36 This would appear to be an Alexandrian footnote on Ovid's part, for in the Hesiodic version the destination is indeed Delphi: Schol. Pind. Pyth. 3.52 (b) = Hes. fr. 6o M-W.
34 Keith, op. cit. (n.
12),

15-16.

55 Callimachean sequence of bird tales, by starting with the raven rather than the crow, the Attic locale of the inherited tale is immediately forsaken. Given the pervasive Attic flavour of the Hecale, and the centrality of the Athenian setting to its narrative motivation, Ovid's geographic displacement of the crow's narrative is a noteworthy innovation. There is, in other words, a calculated intertextual irony in having a legendary tale so inextricably tied to the Attic soil told from the air by a geographically indeterminate narrator. A glance at the Metamorphoses version suffices to show that, in addition to the physical displacement of the internal narrator, the internal narrative itself has been detached from its Attic setting. Although clearly indebted to the Hecale, Ovid's inset tale forsakes the 'territorial ethos' of its model, consistently avoiding any ideologically coherent engagement of the Athenian legendary tradition, and thereby negating the original Callimachean motivation for the narrative digression. As the Ovidian bird launches into its story, it quickly becomes evident that the exclusion of meaningful aetiological elements is a systematic and pervasive strategy. The aerial narrator obscures, compresses, and elides crucial legendary material so severely that it would be difficult to infer from this account alone that the events described had any foundational significance whatsoever for Athens: 'quid fuerim quid simque vide meritumque require: invenies nocuisse fidem. nam tempore quodam Pallas Ericthonium, prolem sine matre creatam, clauserat Actaeo texta de vimine cista virginibusque tribus gemino de Cecrope natis et legem dederat, sua ne secreta viderent.'
(Met. 2.5551-6)

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'See what I was, what I am now, and ask Did I deserve it. Frank good faith you'll find Was my undoing. Once upon a time A baby, Erichthonius, was born Without a mother. Pallas hid the child Safe in a box of Attic wickerwork and gave The box to Cecrops' three daughters, With strict instructions not to pry inside.' (trans. Melville) The prelude to the misdeed of the Cecropides, including the remarkable story of the birth of Erichthonius, is covered in a scant four lines. There is no mention of the crucial contest between Minerva and Neptune for divine patronage of Athens, or of the important role of Cecrops in that contest. Thus Minerva's act of entrusting the infant Erichthonius to the daughters of Cecrops is shorn of its pertinent legendary motivation. Given the importance of the Callimachean model, it is striking that in this narrative there are few explicit topographical or cultural markers of the city itself. The contemporary audience, of course, would not fail to infer the Athenian setting from the mention of Minerva, Cecrops, and Erichthonius. But this inference registers negatively against Atthidographic norms, alerting the reader to the void at the heart of Ovid's narrative."37The poet offers vestigial traces of vanished cultural signifiers, thereby calling attention to a cancellation of meaning, a failed 'cognitive mapping' of the polis. As the account continues, the crow makes a further noteworthy elision:

37 Taken in this context, the phrase 'Actaeo ... de vimine' is indeed pointed, as Keith, op. cit. (n. 12), 18 suggests, but perhaps not because it 'specifies the Athenian setting of the tale'. Rather, the mention of 'Athenian osier' supplies a vestigial trace of the rich Athenian cultural and geographical content found in the Callimachean model. It provides an initial faint

gesture towards the Callimachean model - indeed, the epithet Actaeo may allude to the opening verse of the Hecale - a gesture that serves to highlight the insistent displacement of markers of Athenian culture and topography. Perhaps it is not too pedantic to note that 'Athenian osier' really specifies an (inherently exportable) Attic object, not an Attic setting.

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'abdita fronde levi densa speculabar ab ulmo, quid facerent: commissa duae sine fraude tuentur Pandrosos atque Herse: timidas vocat una sorores Aglauros nodosque manu diducit, et intus infantemque vident adporrectumque draconem. acta deae refero; pro quo mihi gratia talis redditur, ut dicar tutela pulsa Minervae et ponar post noctis avem .. .'
(Met. 2.557-64)

'I hid among the delicate foliage Of a large leafy elm and watched to see What they would do. Two, Pandrosos and Herse, Impeccably observed their trust; but one, Aglauros, called them cowards and untied The fastenings, and there inside they saw The baby, and beside him stretched a snake. I told the goddess. All the thanks I got Was to be banished from Minerva's sight, Reduced to rank below the bird of night!' (trans. Melville) In her account of these primordial events, the crow stunningly omits the crucial topographical fallout of her act, namely, that Athena/Minerva failed to complete the fortification of the Acropolis, leaving it surrounded by mountains on all sides except the south. As noted above, it is evident from the surviving Hecale fragments that the goddess was in the process of stacking mountains around the Acropolis. She was walking by the gymnasium of Lycaean Apollo38 carrying 'a great chunk of Mt Hypsizorus' (yCyao rp6uog eYTt cpou, fr. 71.I Hollis) when the crow made her report. Reacting in shock to the news, Minerva dropped the great rock on the spot, and thereby failed to finish her planned rampart. The enormous rock settled in the earth where it fell, and became the Lycabettus, a massive formation which dominates the Athenian landscape without affording the polis protection. The version of Amelesagoras used by Callimachus is preserved in a third-century B.C.E.writer, Antigonus Carystius:39 Amelasagoras the Athenian, who wrote the Atthis, says that the crow does not fly up to the Acropolis, nor could he say that he had seen one there; and he gives the reason in a story. For he says that Athena was given in marriage to Hephaestus, but when she had lain with him she disappeared and Hephaestus, falling to the ground, ejaculated his seed. Later the earth gave birth in that place to Erichthonius, whom Athena took into her keeping; she shut him in a chest, entrusted it to the daughters of Cecrops - Agraulos, Pandrosos, and Herse and instructed them not to open it until she returned. And, upon reaching Pellene, Athena carried off a mountain in order to set up a bulwark for the Acropolis; but two of the daughters of Cecrops, Agraulos and Pandrosos, unfastened the chest and saw two serpents around Erichthonius. He says that a crow met Athena carrying the mountain, which is now called Lykabettos, and told her that Erichthonius had been revealed. Upon hearing this, Athena threw down the mountain where it now stands and for reporting bad news she told the crow that it would no longer be lawful for it to approach the Acropolis. (Antigonus Carystius, Hist. mirab. I2; trans. Keith) This is clearly a fundamental Athenian aetiological myth, as well as a notable instance of the evocative power of Attic topography. It is thus striking that, in contrast to his
38 This interesting anachronism is discussed below, Section vII. 39 A fragment of the Hecale appears to offer much the same account: '.. . until the time when to the daughters of Cecrops ... secret, not to be spoken, and whence his lineage I neither knew nor heard ... [but a story reached the] birds, that Gaia bore him to Hephaestus. Then she [i.e., Athena], in order to set up a bulwark for her land, which she had recently

acquired by vote of Zeus and the twelve other immortals and by witness of the snake, came to Achaian Pellene. But during that time the girls, his guardians, planned to accomplish a wicked deed, to release [the bonds of] the chest ...' (fr. 70.5-14 Hollis; trans. Keith). These few damaged lines tell us more about the Attic mythological narrative than the entire Ovidian account.

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Athenocentric models, Ovid's treatment is wholly uninformative on this matter: the crow simply states 'acta deae refero' without further elaboration. The crucial point of her tale, namely the topographical consequences of interrupting Minerva's 'urban landscaping' goes unmentioned. Furthermore, in its original form, the crow's narrative served additionally to explain why crows are never seen on the Acropolis. In the Metamorphoses, however, she avoids any mention of the Acropolis, saying instead merely that she is 'banished from Minerva's favour' ('tutela pulsa Minervae', 2.563). This generalized statement again circumvents any explicit reference to Athenian topography. Ovid resists even configuring the symbolic space of the polis, let alone investing it with the preternatural qualities that the tale of the crow was originally designed to impart.40 The originality of Ovid's treatment, then, lies in the systematic suppression of topographical references in the context of a cultural narrative in which they are fundamental determinants of meaning. The neo-Callimachean internal narrator in the Metamorphoses renders the quintessential Athenian ktisis epyllion in such a way as to exclude virtually everything that is unique about Athens, both as a divinely-favoured human collectivity and as a divinely-fashioned topographical space. The narcissistic disposition of the crow causes the narrative to develop according to a peculiar inner logic that enacts a representational negation of precisely those ideologically marked contents within the Atthidographic tradition through which Callimachus and his predecessors had fashioned their distinctive 'cognitive mapping' of the Athenian landscape.
V. ATTIC SLIGHTS: THE CROW AND THE OWL

After a compressed and fragmented rendition of her own Hecale narrative, Ovid's winged narrator now provides a somewhat more elaborate account of her own past and that of the owl, Nyctimene (2.566-95). Their backgrounds are similar inasmuch as both were originally princesses who, when victimized by sexual violence, underwent prophylactic transformation into birds through Minerva's intervention. This pair of tales appears to have had no counterpart in the Hecale: it constitutes an Ovidian 'supplement' to the original Callimachean narrative complex. In strictly formal terms, of course, these personal histories serve to provide the episode with its requisite metamorphosis. On a deeper level, however, they can be seen to continue the strategy of geographical displacement that lies at the heart of Ovid's treatment of Athenian legend. The pair of tales shifts the narrative setting first to Phocis and then to Lesbos. Moreover, the crow's account of her own background exceeds the length of the previous Attic material, and is told with a measure of enthusiasm and detail that was noticeably absent in her earlier Atthidographic narrative: 'nam me Phocaica clarus tellure Coroneus (nota loquor) genuit fueramque ego regia virgo forma mihi nocuit ...'

divitibusque procis - ne me contemne - petebar;

(Met. 2.569-72) 'My father was the famous king of Phocis, Coroneus, as the world knows well enough, And I was a princess, and I was wooed (You must not laugh) by many a wealthy man. My beauty doomed me...' (trans. Melville)
40 cf. the general observation of S. Hinds, 'Landscape with figures: aesthetics of place in the Metamorphoses and its tradition', in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002), 122-49, at 136, that 'landscape in the Metamorphoses is an emphatic invita-

tion to view' (italics in the original). In contrast to his practice elsewhere, then, Ovid has told this tale in such a way as to suppress any such topographical visualization.

AND ANDREW ZISSOS INGO GILDENHARD 58 In certain respects this treatment stands in counterpoise to the crow's earlier 'official' Attic legendary tale of Erichthonius and the Cecropides. It constitutes a kind of rival narrative that shadows and deflates the Callimachean material by 'trumping' it at every turn. The crow's boastful description of her father ('clarus ... Coroneus'), used of a decidedly obscure figure,41 contrasts humorously with the near-total erasure of the vastly more significant Cecrops. The bird describes herself as a 'regia virgo'; by contrast, she earlier referred to the more impressively regal daughters of Cecrops merely as 'virginibus'. Moreover, she boastfully alludes to her own beauty ('divitibusque procis ne me contemne - petebar'), after having failed to mention the exceptional physical attractiveness of the Cecropides. Finally, she now provides explicit geographical

markers

('Phocaica

...

tellure',

2.569)

that were conspicuously

absent

in her earlier

account where they were of course so much more important. The crow's autobiography is centred upon her attempted rape by the god Neptune. This episode is found only here in ancient literature - a point Ovid archly signals by the crow's introductory parenthesis: 'nota loquor' (2.570).42 While continuing the familiar pattern of predatory divine rape that is so prominent in the early books of the poem, this sequence is atypical inasmuch as the victim is rescued by the intervention of Minerva ('mota est pro virgine virgo', 2.579). In the immediate narrative milieu an otherwise unattested mythographic variant whereby Minerva gets the better of Neptune is rather suggestive. It would appear subtly to echo and to substitute for the legendary contest between the two divinities for Athens itself, which is part of the crow's narrative in the Hecale. The contest proper is elided in this part of the poem, though it appears in ecphrastic form in the much later Arachne episode at 6.70-82.43 With this displacement, Cecrops' fateful arbitration of the contest - the most famous act of a central figure of Athenian ktisis myth - falls, for the time-being, into a narrative void. The final tale in the cluster of bird narratives is that of Nyctimene, the owl, who has replaced the crow as Minerva's favourite bird.44 The transformation of the owl from interlocutor in the Hecale to topic in the Metamorphoses once again distances the narrative from its requisite Attic setting. By relegating the owl to an inset narrative, Ovid makes it possible to focus almost exclusively on her pre-Athenian career. Nyctimene's biographical narrative unfolds in Lesbos, and indeed the story is pointedly described as having particular currency there ('per totam res est notissima Lesbon', Like the crow, Nyctimene undergoes a saving transformation at the hands of the 2.591). goddess - this time after being made an incest victim by her father. The crow, however, portrays Nyctimene in particularly hostile terms, offering a scandalous misrepresentation of her story: 'quid tamen hoc prodest, si diro facta volucris crimine Nyctimene nostro successit honori? an quae per totam res est notissima Lesbon,
41 B6mer, op. cit. (n. 30), ad loc. and J. J. MooreBlunt (ed.), A Commentary on Ovid Metamorphoses 2 44 This is perhaps a convenient moment to point out that with his presentation of bird-god interactions in this narrative sequence, Ovid has created an ornithological mirror of the 'pathology of (Roman) patronage', with gods and goddesses as patrons and birds as clients. The terminology and imagery of patronage emerges particularly forcefully at 2.547 ('ad dominum tendebat iter'); 2.552 ('invenies nocuisse fidem'); 2.562-4 ('pro quo mihi gratia talis/ redditur, ut dicar tutela pulsa Minervae / et ponar post noctis avem'); and 2.588 ('data sum comes inculpata Minervae'). At issue throughout is the relationship of characters with low social standing to their powerful 'friends', and the attendant problems of reciprocity, loyalty, reward, upward (and downward) mobility within a social hierarchy centred upon the patron, and the envy and careerism this generates, on which see C. Damon, The Mask of the Parasite. A Pathology of Roman Patronage (1997). Such unobtrusive 'Romanizing' touches occur throughout the poem, even in episodes situated decidedly to the east of Italy.

wise unknown. It seems reasonable to assume that he was at best an obscure figure in Ovid's time and quite possibly an Ovidian invention. 42 Keith, op. cit. (n. I2), 29. 43 A relief of the contest between Athena and Poseidon occupied a central place on the west pediment of the Parthenon. This crucial mythological episode was thus literally cast in stone at the very religious centre of Athens. Ovid's treatment, by contrast, not only postpones the episode, but 'inscribes' it, as it were, upon a flimsy tapestry, woven somewhere in Asia Minor. This, of course, is not to say that the Arachne episode, with its two tapestries, does not play an extraordinarily significant part in the thematic and poetological economy of the Metamorphoses as a whole. For a rich analysis of its metapoetic significance, see D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic. Poets and
Critics of the Classical Tradition (1991I), 190-4.

(1977),

I21-2

both note that this Coroneus

is other-

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non audita tibi est, patrium temerasse cubile Nyctimenen? avis illa quidem, sed conscia culpae conspectum lucemque fugit tenebrisque pudorem celat et a cunctis expellitur aethere toto.'
(Met. 2.589-95)

'But what good was it, if Nyctimene, She who was made a bird for her foul sin, Supplants me in my place of privilege? Or have you never heard the tale, renowned All over Lesbos, how Nyctimene Outraged her father's bed. Bird she may be, But shuns the daylight and the watching eye, Guilt-cursed, her shame shut in the dark unseen, An utter outcast from the sky's bright sheen.' (trans. Melville) This account follows the tradition that made Nyctimene the daughter of Epopeus, king of Lesbos.45 According to the conventional version, Epopeus became inflamed with lust and raped his daughter. As a result, she fled to the woods, hiding in shame until Minerva took pity upon her and transformed her into a night owl. In the crow's account, however, Nyctimene is characterized as a willing participant in the incest, rather than a blameless victim. The malicious narrator even goes so far as to imply (with 'patrium temerasse cubile') that Nyctimene was the sexual instigator. In the broader context, of course, the vital point is that the owl was the Athenian bird par excellence: it was sacred to Athena/Minerva and served as the goddess' emblem on Athenian coinage. In the crow's account, however, as Alison Keith notes, 'Minerva's favour is mentioned only briefly, and the goddess herself is not mentioned by name in this section of the narrative at all. Indeed the crow seems to do her jealous best to separate physically the names of Minerva and Nyctimene in her narrative'.46 Thus, once again, the crow takes a decidedly anti-Athenian stance, denigrating an important cultural symbol of the Greek polis. Before leaving these bird tales it is perhaps worth taking stock of how far removed the narrative is from a conventional treatment of the Athenian legendary material. From the ordered set of aetiological tales through which the city, its culture, and its political institutions were grounded in their physical surroundings, Ovid has fashioned a veritable geographical smorgasbord. The Atthidographic tales unfold in indeterminate or alien locations, as well in morally-ambiguous narrative milieux, and are almost entirely devoid of indices of past, present, or future Athenian greatness.
VI. CIVIL SERPENTS: ERICHTHONIUS AND AESCULAPIUS

The counterpart to the marginalization of ideologically-marked Athenian cultural content resides, as the initial reference to the Capitoline Geese would lead one to expect, in the validation of an emergent Romanitas. This latter strategy is particularly in evidence in the Ocyrhoe episode (2.633-75), which, in the wake of the cluster of Attic bird tales, provides a rather surprising narrative detour in the form of a prophecy detailing the career of Apollo's infant son Aesculapius, the future god of healing. The insertion of this 'alien' material into the Hecale sequence has been an on-going source of perplexity for critics. But this surprising narrative presence becomes more comprehensible when considered in the light of a no less significant absence. As we have shown elsewhere, when Ovid treats a large-scale sequence of interrelated narratives, he is sometimes given to making 'analogical' substitutions on the level of the individual tale.47 In the Theban Cycle, for example, the tale of Narcissus replaces that of Oedipus, which
45 This version is attested elsewhere at, e.g., Hyg., Fab. 204. 46 Keith, op. cit. (n. i2), 26. 47 See I. Gildenhard and A. Zissos, 'Ovid's Narcissus (Met. 3.339-51o): echoes of Oedipus', AJP 121 (zooo), 129-48.

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is not included in the Metamorphoses. Ovid avails himself of much the same strategy in reformulating the Hecale narrative complex, this time through the inclusion of the Ocyrhoe episode. The initial treatment of Athenian charter myths in the Metamorphoses generates a precise horizon of expectation concerning the central figure of Erichthonius, heretofore mentioned only briefly. What the narrative sequence seems to call for in the wake of the crow's tale is an account of Erichthonius' childhood under the supervision of Minerva, and his subsequent career as king of Athens, during which he instituted the city's most important religious festival, the Panathenaea. Indeed, given that this festival features prominently in the immediately following tale of Mercury and Herse, the absence of an account of its founding generates something of a lacuna. Ovid's curious exclusion of any treatment of Erichthonius and his remarkable career is thus rather striking. Moreover, Ovid deviates sharply from the narrative scheme of his sources by recounting the future career of Aesculapius when the legendary cycle and the Callimachean model would seem to call for the story of Erichthonius. But the poet does not simply efface this horizon of expectation: the glaring absence of Erichthonius and the curious presence of Ocyrhoe's prophecy on the career of Aesculapius are in fact flip-sides of the same problem. Within the narrative complex of Metamorphoses 2 the Ocyrhoe episode functions as an 'analogical' substitution for the Erichthonius story. The reader's apprehension of the substitution of Aesculapius for Erichthonius is triggered in part by narrative position: just where a chronicle of the latter is expected, an account of the former is provided. But in addition to the overall narrative patterning, there are a number of suggestive points of contact between the two figures that reinforce the effect. Most obvious is the analogy between the physical form and the circumstances of birth of the two figures: both are divine progeny who have strong serpentine associations. Erichthonius is often depicted as a snake-child, or at least serpentine in form from the waist down, and was worshipped in the guise of a snake at Athens. Similarly, as recounted at I5.622-744, Aesculapius migrates to Rome after assuming the form of a snake, in which form he was likewise worshipped. It is, moreover, significant that through Apollo's rescuing of the foetus from the dying Coronis' womb, Aesculapius is born to the world at precisely the point his mother perishes. This generates a suggestive parallel to the 'maternal void' at the heart of the legend of Erichthonius. In Ovid's only mention of him, Erichthonius is referred to as 'a child born without a mother' ('prolem sine matre creatam', 2.553).48 In addition, an important and well-known early event in the life of Erichthonius is Athena's entrusting of the child to a minder figure. This incident, a central element in the Attic legendary cycle, is deftly replicated in the Metamorphoses through Apollo's delivery of the infant Aesculapius to the care of the centaur Chiron: non tulit in cineres labi sua Phoebus eosdem semina, sed natum flammis uteroque parentis eripuit geminique tulit Chironis in antrum. semifer interea divinae stirpis alumno laetus erat mixtoque oneri gaudebat honore. (Met. 2.629-30, 633-4) But that his seed should perish in that fire Phoebus could not endure, and snatched his son Out of his mother's womb, out of the flames, And carried him to two-formed Chiron's cave.
48 It is of course not strictly true that Erichthonius was born without a mother; the Callimachean version alludes more precisely to events: 6' 'HfriocrniptKe Fait (fr. 70.8 Hollis). But more importantly, the father Vulcan/Hephaestus is left unnamed in the Ovidian version. This is certainly not because Ovid did not have a view on the subject; in a subsequent tale he supplies the Callimachean paternity: 'sine

matre creatam / Lemnicolae stirpem' (2.756-7). Rather, it momentarily occludes the divine genealogy of this crucial Athenian king and autochthonous ancestor. The paternity of Erichthonius is in part significant because as Hollis, op. cit. (n. I9), 235 notes, 'primeval kings are often strange children of the fire-god'.

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The centaur was delighted with that child Of heavenly stock, his honourable charge. (trans. Melville) As already noted, Aesculapius' impending medical career constitutes the first and most substantial theme of Ocyrhoe's prophecy:49 ergo ubi vaticinos concepit mente furores incaluitque deo, quem clausum pectore habebat, adspicit infantem 'toto' que 'salutifer orbi cresce, puer!' dixit; 'tibi se mortalia saepe corpora debebunt, animas tibi reddere ademptas fas erit, idque semel dis indignantibus ausus posse dare hoc iterum flamma prohibebere avita, eque deo corpus fies exsangue deusque, qui modo corpus eras, et bis tua fata novabis.' (Met. 2.640-8) When, enclosed within her breast, The heavenly fire glowed, she fixed her eyes Upon the child. 'Grow strong, dear boy', she said, 'Healer of all the world. Often to you Men shall owe health and life, and yours shall be The right to win again departed souls, And though you dare this once in heaven's despite, Jove's bolt will thwart that gift a second time. You, now a god, will become a lifeless corpse, And from a corpse will become divine again, And twice you shall renew your destiny.' (trans. Melville) In ideological terms, the crucial similarity shared by Erichthonius and Aesculapius and the essential point of Ovid's treatment - resides in the fact that both figures are providentially linked to the future of a great city. Like Cecrops and Theseus, Erichthonius is a fundamental figure in the mythical tradition of Athens. He provides the vital link between Athenian legend and history: with him begins an uninterrupted genealogical line down to historical times. As Nicole Loraux has observed, the legend of Erichthonius not only linked the Athenians to their glorious past but also guaranteed them an illustrious future.5o Much the same, of course, holds true for Aesculapius and Rome. Indeed, the god of healing guarantees the future of Rome in a quite literal fashion, as he is brought to the city at the recommendation of the Sibylline Books as a saviour deity after an outbreak of the plague in 293 B.C.E., an event described in the final book of the epic."5 As Alison Keith has convincingly argued, Ocyrhoe's reference here to Aesculapius as 'salutifer orbi' (2.642), underscoring his importance to the world, anticipates his characterization in the final book of the poem as the saviour of Rome, 'salutifer urbi' (15.744).s2 This gesture neatly insinuates that, in the sweeping narrative scheme of the Metamorphoses, Rome will come to conquer and subsume the world. The similarity of the two phrases implies an underlying equivalence between urbs and orbis which was, of course, the defining conception of the Romanocentric world view of Ovid's own day.53 In short, the Roman poet has strategically placed the Ocyrhoe episode, with its reference to the Roman terminus of the poem, at the heart of a narrative
49 For a 'political' reading of these lines which sees Aesculapius as a precursor to Augustus, see A. Barchiesi, 'Endgames: Ovid's Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6', in D. H. Roberts, F. M. Dunn and D. Fowler (eds), Classical Closure (i997), 181-20o8, at 191-2. 50 Loraux, op. cit. (n. 13), 277. s1 For the historical event, see the account of Liv. 10.47.6-7 and per. ii. Barchiesi, op. cit. (n. 49), 189 makes the suggestive observation that Ovid's later account of the Roman crisis at Met. 15.626-30 is similar to Lucretius' account of the plague in Athens in De Rerum Natura 6. 52 Keith, op. cit. (n. 12), 74. 53 cf. Barchiesi, op. cit. (n. 49), 191: 'A solemn, hymnlike harmony closes and sets in unison the destinies of the world and of the mother city ... [Aesculapius] is also guarantor of a cultural transference and of a translatio imperii.'

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sequence ostensibly concerned with the greatness and providentially-guaranteed destiny of Athens. The substitution of Aesculapius for Erichthonius is a particularly poignant gesture because, as Alessandro Barchiesi has observed, the transplanted god constitutes something like a 'sign of completion for Roman culture' in Ovid's epic.54 Ocyrhoe's second proleptic reference to the res gestae of Aesculapius at 2.645-6 once again constellates a specifically Roman future. At issue is his restoring to life of Hippolytus, an event which is recounted later in the poem at 15-532-46. The crucial point here is that in the course of his resuscitation Hippolytus will become Virbius, a Romanized Greek hero and hence exemplar of the process of cultural transference that will mark the culminating phase of Ovid's universal history.55 The dynamic of substitution and displacement that unfolds on both the poetic and thematic levels in the Ocyrhoe episode underlines a profound cultural difference between Athens and Rome, a difference neatly encapsulated in the migratory character of Aesculapius (and Hippolytus). The notion of autochthony, as embodied above all by Erichthonius, was of overpowering importance to the Athenians and served in large measure to account for and legitimate their hegemony in the Greek world. They considered themselves the most ancient people of Greece, born of the Attic soil, the only Greek people who had never migrated.56 The autochthonous origin of the Athenians constituted their central myth, and it proclaimed to the outside world the unique identity of their polis.57 It is thus significant that in the Ocyrhoe episode, the 'autochthonous aesthetic' of Athenian culture is displaced by the insistent internationalism of Roman civilization. Whereas Erichthonius was an autochthonous Athenian, Aesculapius is a 'naturalized' Roman, a cultural transplant who 'fills a final void in the Roman pantheon'.58 In a very important sense, then, he is an emblematic Roman divinity. Unlike the Athenians, the Romans did not regard themselves as an earth-born people, rooted in the soil.59 The unique status of the Roman people was not based on a special relationship to the earth; the legends of Aeneas and Romulus characterized them as refugees and settlers - the polar opposite of autochthons. Ocyrhoe's adumbration of Aesculapius' triumphant entry into the eternal city (which is described at length at reinforces this point. One of the fundamental differences between I5.622-744) Athenians and Romans was the willingness of the latter to create 'naturalized' citizens a principle that applies to the human community itself, as well as more abstractly on the level of culture and religion. Ovid's choice of Ocyrhoe to effect a displacement and transition from the specificity of Athens to the universality of Rome is a deft one: as a vates, she possesses access to the totality of history - the history that the Metamorphoses recounts. Therein lies an intrinsic danger to the poem's narrative economy. 'Fatorum arcana canebat' (2.639), says Ovid of her oracular discourse, but he soon stops her dead in her tracks: 'restabat fatis aliquid' (2.655). As we have shown elsewhere, Ocyrhoe is silenced just in time: her powerfully proleptic mind produces a kind of 'fast-forward' effect, an adumbration of 'the end' that threatens to impose a premature closure upon the narrative.60 Ocyrhoe, as it were, personifies the teleological drive towards Book 15 and Roman ascendancy that underwrites Ovid's composition: while she must not tell all, more than enough is revealed to signal an emergent Romanitas. Within his 'Divine Comedy', Ovid conjures a vision of universal, providentially-guaranteed history, of fates that will take their inexorable course, of narrative secrets (arcana) that the Metamorphoses itself will gradually unveil. The Ocyrhoe episode manifests a further cultural slippage in its presentation of notions of deity and cosmic law. Throughout this sequence Ovid substitutes Roman
54Barchiesi,op. cit. (n. 49), 190. 55See I. Gildenhard and A. Zissos, 'Somatic economies: tragic bodies and poetic design in Ovid's Metamorphoses',in P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi and S. Hinds (eds), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid's Metamorphosesand its Reception (I999),
162-81.
56 This belief is attested

57 Loraux, op. cit. (n. 13), 277. 58 Barchiesi, op. cit. (n. 49), 189. 59That the Romans ascribed special significance to the topography of their city, just as the Athenians did, is of course quite another matter: see C. Edwards, Writing Rome. Textual Approaches to the City (1996). 60 Gildenhard and Zissos, op. cit. (n. 4).

at, e.g., Hdt. 7.161.

63 and the religious concepts terminology, momentarily displacing undignified anthropomorphic divinities that otherwise populate this part of the epic. Thus, although the scene is charged with numinous energy, the gods are not named: Apollo, or some other god, appears as that awesome and ineffable divine force, familiar to readers of Aeneid 6, which invades the body of its vatic medium ('incaluitque deo, quem clausum pectore habebat', 2.641). Ocyrhoe herself speaks of 'fas' (2.645), 'dis indignantibus' (2.645), 'fata' (2.648 and 657), 'numina' (2.653), 'triplices deae' (2.654), and 'numinis iram' (2.659).61 There is a notable indeterminacy in the way Ovid empowers his prophetess: she seems to rely both on paternal artes (2.638-9; 659) and on metaphysical inspiration, but still incurs divine wrath when she oversteps her - rather ill-defined - boundaries of disclosure. In all probability, of course, it is the seer-god himself, in his 'Vergilian' incarnation, who intervenes here. This intervention constitutes a dramatic reversal of the portrayal of Apollo elsewhere in Metamorphoses i and 2: the eroticized figure of fun who doggedly pursues Daphne and slays Coronis in a fit of jealousy has momentarily been exorcized.62 The prophetic numinosity that suffuses the Ocyrhoe-episode constitutes a minor, but highly suggestive, variation on Ovid's version of the crow-tale. In Callimachus, as noted above, the crow was a prophet-figure in her own right, foretelling the fate of the raven as an 'external prolepsis', an event located beyond the chronological compass of the Hecale. Ovid archly alludes to the Callimachean pretext with the phrase 'meae praesagia linguae' (2.550). This serves as a negative intertextual marker, signalling precisely that absence which the Ocyrhoe episode makes good. In the Metamorphoses the crow does not so much foretell the pending fate of the raven as argue with her stubborn interlocutor, using her own chromatic transformation as an exemplum. As Alison Keith observes, her story constitutes a warning to the raven rather than a prophecy.63 In its response the raven picks up on this intertextual slippage:
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talia dicenti 'tibi' ait 'revocamina' corvus 'sint precor ista malo: nos vanum spernimus omen.' (Met. 2.596-7) In reply to all this the raven said: 'On your own head, I pray, be the evil that warning portends; I scorn the idle presage.' (trans. Miller) The raven dismisses the crow's attempt to warn it off and refuses to acknowledge her transformation as an index of the future ('omen'). In this way Callimachus' Attic birdprophet, who was in full command of both past and future, is deprived of her privileged insight and access to divine knowledge; in the Metamorphoses it is rather the Romanocentric figure of Ocyrhoe who is invested with these capacities. Ocyrhoe's elaboration of the career of Aesculapius introduces into the 'hermetically-sealed' legendary cycle of the Greek polis an alien cultural element, and thereby disrupts the organic unfolding of the Atthidographic narrative sequence. The substitution of Aesculapius for Erichthonius implicitly thematizes the subordination of Attic
61 cf. Barchiesi, op. cit. (n. 49), I91: 'There is much to recommend a political reading of [the Ocyrhoe episode]. Apollo, the father and healer of Aesculapius, has a central role in the assimilation of religious symbols that was so important to Augustan political discourse. Salutifer is an appropriate epithet for the image of a savior that the emperor projected onto the world stage. The omen cresce puer! makes one think of a politicized, Augustan interpretation of Virgil's fourth eclogue.' 62 In the Fasti version of Apollo and the Raven, the numinous and the anthropomorphic go hand in hand, thereby resolving - at least in this one instance - the divine paradoxes that Ovid explores in the Metamorphoses. The raven, having been ordered to fetch water by the god, espies from the air a fig-tree laden

with unripe fruit and decides, 'immemor imperii', to wait for it to ripen. Upon his return he lies to Apollo as to the cause for his delay. The god responds with indignation: '"addis" ait "culpae mendacia" Phoebus "et audes / fatidicum verbis fallere velle deum?"' (2.261-2). In the Fasti, then, the raven incurs personal guilt (instead of uncovering hidden guilt as in the Metamorphoses), and Apollo is not deceived. The tale thus illustrates the quasi-didactic principle that lying to the god of prophecy is not particularly wise. It is perhaps not by accident that the Fasti, a poetic celebration of Roman religion, inverts the terms of the Apollo-raven relationship as depicted in the Metamorphoses. 63 Keith, op. cit. (n. I2), 20.

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culture, of Hellenism as such, to a transcendent and all-encompassing Romanitas. As the narrative takes a prophetic turn and makes history its privileged object of scrutiny, there is a crucial shift from Hellas to Rome. Ovid's Attic narrative thus becomes teleologically charged - but the teleology is Roman. Through this ingenious mythographic legerdemain, it is Roman cultural and geopolitical emergence that is signalled rather than Athenian.64

VII.

DEADPAN ATHENAEA: MERCURY AND THE CECROPIDES

Following the Ocyrhoe episode, the narrative continues with a brief account of Mercury's theft of Apollo's cattle in Elis and his petrifaction of the double-dealing Battus (2.676-707). This sequence constitutes yet another spatial dislocation, once again deflecting the geographical focus from Attica. In the wake of this episode, however, Mercury, seemingly by chance, wings his way over Athens at precisely the moment when its citizens are celebrating their most important civic festival, the Panathenaea. Suddenly the polis, its topography, and a number of its cultural institutions emerge from the shadows of Ovid's narrative, like a 'return of the repressed': Hinc se sustulerat paribus Caducifer alis Munychiosque volans agros gratamque Minervae despectabat humum cultique arbusta Lycei. illa forte die castae de more puellae vertice subposito festas in Palladis arces pura coronatis portabant sacra canistris.
(Met. 2.708-13)

Then Mercury rose soaring on his wings, And in his flight looked down upon the land That Pallas loved and the Munychian fields And the Lyceum's cultivated groves. It chanced that day was Pallas' festival And virgins carried, in the accustomed way, In baskets, flower-crowned, upon their heads The sacred vessels to her hilltop shrine. (trans. Melville) These lines exude just the kind of 'territorial ethos' that is so strikingly absent in the earlier Attic narratives. Whereas the crow recounted a series of incidents shorn of their spatial coordinates, here toponymic phrases and topographical markers bring the Athenian landscape vividly before the reader's eyes. The polls itself is identified by way of two well-known landmarks: Munychia (a hill on the peninsula of Piraeus, which formed the citadel of the Athenian port area), and the Lyceum (a celebrated gymnasium near the junction of the Eridanus and Ilyssus rivers). Indeed, the anachronistic mention of the latter, a gesture indebted to Callimachus' Hecale, indicates a distinctly 'Atthidographic' touch.65 In this evocative account, with its emphasis on dynamic visual
64 A very similar effect is achieved on a much smaller scale in the Apollo and Daphne episode. Following his slaying of the Python, the god inaugurates the Pythian Games to commemorate the deed. Ovid notes that victors were then awarded oak leaves because 'nondum laurus erat' (1.450). At the conclusion of the tale, however, when Apollo addresses the newlycreated laurel tree, he mentions its leaves as forming the crowns worn by 'duces Latii' when celebrating triumphs (i.560-i) as well as serving as the 'fidissima custos' of the door-posts of Augustus' Palatine residence (1.562-3). Thus, where the narrative would seem to call for the elaboration of a Greek cultural

institution, the Pythian Games, the poet instead focuses on a Roman cultural institution celebrating Roman power. 65 i.e. Ovid preserves the sportive anachronism of the gymnasium of Lycean Apollo that is found in Callimachus: 'culti ... arbusta Lycei' (2.710); cf. Auiciou / ... iKcc 6p6gtov 'Arn6kcovog (fr. 71.2-3 Hollis). This constitutes an intertextual reference to the elided episode. In Callimachus, the informant crow meets Athena 'by the beautiful, ever-brilliant gymnasium of Lycean Apollo' (note the arch signalling of the anachronism by 'ever-brilliant').

65 experience, the Attic landscape has come to life, resuscitated, as it were, from its neardeath experience in the crow's narrative. Moreover, the polis is clearly prospering under the tutelage of Athena, and enjoys her favour ('gratamque Minervae ... humum'): the double mention of the deity underscores her protection and good-will. The procession of the Panathenaea is described in three solemn and evocative verses, wholly in keeping with its heightened ritual and symbolic importance. This festival was meant to enact and guarantee the reproductive cycle (and hence the future of the city) in both the agricultural and human spheres; its terminus was located in the very heart of Athens, at the top of the Acropolis, in the shrine of the goddess Athena. These introductory lines suggest that, after a sustained strategy of rupture and elision, the poet is at last using Mercury and his bird's-eye perspective to make good the scandalous omissions and denigrations of his earlier internal narrator, the Athenophobic crow. For a fleeting instant it seems as if the assertion of ideological priority for Roman cultural and geopolitical emergence might finally permit a more coherent presentation of the Athenian ktisis myth. It soon transpires, however, that even this belated vision of a vibrant Athens, enjoying divine protection and prospects of future greatness, will not be allowed to stand.66 When Mercury sets lustful eyes upon Herse the learned reader will expect that a positive outcome is in store. In Athenian legend the hieros gamos between the divine messenger and his Athenian beloved - traditionally one of the Cecropides - resulted in a son, Keryx, the eponymous ancestor of the priestly kerukes of Eleusis. Initial indications are propitious: a subtle generic displacement transforms the narrative from Atthidographic celebration to erotic voyeurism, an ostensible prelude to the consummation of divine desire (2.720-5). The scenario recalls a stock motif of Greek New Comedy, a genre that frequently depicts young men falling in love during religious festivals, since the latter provided one of the rare occasions when citizen women left the home and hence were 'available' to the male gaze.67 What ensues, however, is a further generic slippage from a New Comic rape-scenario to the more unpredictable dynamics of Roman love elegy. Ovid deftly refracts this quintessentially Attic material through the tropes of Roman erotics, as Mercury becomes the full-blown lover of Augustan elegy who ensures that his appearance is optimal before presenting himself as suitor:
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nec se dissimulat: tanta est fiducia formae. quae quamquam iusta est, cura tamen adiuvat illam permulcetque comas chlamydemque, ut pendeat apte, conlocat, ut limbus totumque appareataurum, ut teres in dextra, quae somnos ducit et arcet, virga sit, ut tersis niteant talariaplantis. (Met. 2.73 i-6) ... [Mercury] took no disguise Such trust in his good looks! Yet though his trust Was sound, he spared no pains; he smoothed his hair, Arranged his robe to hang aright, to show The whole long golden hem, saw that his wand, The wand he wields to bring and banish sleep, Shone with a polish, and his ankle-wings Were lustrous and his sandals brushed and clean. (trans. Melville)
66 It is worth noting in passing that Ovid disrupts the orderly evolution of Athenian culture by introducing a chronological rift into the ktisis cycle. This rift arises from the participation of the Cecropides in a ritual procession that was traditionally instituted after their deaths. Erichthonius founded the Panathenaea to commemorate his experiences with the Cecropides; in most versions they had gone mad and thrown themselves off a cliff well before he celebrated the festival for the first time (cf. Eur., Ion 21-2, 271-2, 1427-8; Apollod. 3.14.6; in another variant, preserved at Paus. 1.18, they were killed by the serpent; the

Ovidian version, in which the punishment is deferred and applied to only one of the sisters, appears to be his own invention). The consequent temporal rift is particularly significant, in that Erichthonius, a founding king of the polis, was the figure to whom, as Loraux, op. cit. (n. 13), 113 notes, the Athenians owed their 'uninterrupted past from time immemorial'. 67 The theme is also developed in the Greek novel, as well as in the story of Acontius and Cydippe, as told at Callim., Aet. fr. 67-75 Pf. and Ov., Her. 21.77-104.

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As Karl Galinsky observes, 'a touch of literary parody, which is combined here with some self-parody, adds to the humor as Ovid makes Mercury follow some of the advice which the poet had dispensed in the Ars Amatoria'.68 The alliterative phrase found at the close of line 73 1, 'fiducia formae', does indeed recall Ars 1.707, but derives ultimately from the famous opening of Propertius 3.24 ('falsa est ista tuae, mulier, fiducia formae').69 The expression thus takes on the character of a generalized generic marker, and, as such, signals a re-emergence of the elegiac in the Metamorphoses. The elegiac overtones are reinforced by Mercury's full commitment to persuasion rather than force; in earlier episodes both Apollo and Jupiter used the former merely as a prelude to the latter. Of crucial importance here is the fact that the generic and cultural slippage from Greek New Comedy to Roman elegy impacts negatively on the erotic and reproductive success of the liaison. Ovid enacts this sexual frustration in two stages. First, Herse's sister Aglauros assumes the role of gate-keeper to Mercury's elegiac suitor. Like any such figure, she demands a hefty bribe before granting the god admission to her sister's chamber. The ensuing negotiations are witnessed by Minerva, who suddenly recalls that this is not the first time that Aglauros has misbehaved. In her punitive zeal, the goddess summons Invidia, a drastic expedient that afflicts not only the offending daughter of Cecrops, but also the Attic lands through which she passes: vincula cingebant, adopertaque nubibus atris, quacumque ingreditur, florentia proterit arva exuritque herbas et summa papaveracarpit adflatuque suo populos urbesque domosque polluit ...
(Met. 2.789-94) ... [Invidia] took her staff, ... baculumque capit, quod spinea totum

Entwined with thorns and, wrapped in a black cloud, Went forth and in her progress trampled down The flowery meads, withered the grass, and slashed The poppy tops, and with filthy breath defiled Peoples and towns and homes ... (trans. Melville, emended) This remarkable (and much discussed) textual sequence introduces a discordant note into the 'close relationship that Athenians had with the eponymous goddess who presided over their destinies'.70 Minerva's chosen agent, who bears some resemblance to Vergil's Allecto, blights the landscape - a rather shocking development given the
earlier reference to 'gratamque Minervae ... humum'. The devastation

life that Ovid associates with Invidia's journey constitutes a striking thematic reversal, something in the order of an anti-Panathenaea.71 In this respect, it is significant that the final outcome of this divine intervention is the frustration of reproduction in the human sphere: the sexual envy that Invidia inspires in Aglauros curtails the liaison between her sister Herse and Mercury. This is all the more striking given that in other versions Mercury slept with at least one of the Cecropides, and often more than one.72 In Ovid's account, by contrast, the god simply flies off after Aglauros' petrifaction without consummating his desire. This is an extremely odd act, both within the immediate
68 G. K. Galinsky, Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (1975), 167, citing as examples Ars 1.269-70 ('prima tuae menti veniat fiducia, cunctas / posse capi: capiet, tu modo tende plagas'), and 1.513-14 ('munditie placeant: fuscentur corpora Campo; / sit bene conveniens et sine labe toga'). 69 See P. Fedeli (ed.), Properzio. II libro terzo delle Elegie (1985), 676. 70 Loraux, op. cit. (n. 13), 15. 71 This all but inverts Athena's action at the end of Aeschylus' Eumenides, where she presides over the transformation of the hellish Erinyes into the beneficial Eumenides. In a sense, Invidia undoes the blessings that Athena asks the Eumenides to bestow upon her city at Eum. 902-12. 72 As J. E. Harrison, 'The three daughters of Cecrops', JHS 12 (1891), 350-5, at 353 notes, the tradition on this score is very confused, with a sexual liaison between Mercury/Hermes and each of the sisters attested. A Hermes-Aglauros liaison is mentioned at, e.g., Paus. 1.38.3.

of agricultural

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67

narrative sequence (why does he not have his way with Herse after removing the obstacle?) and in the context of the Metamorphoses as a whole, this notorious 'epic of rape'. The inconclusiveness of the narrative is a curiosity: as Galinsky notes, '[a]fter building it up so elaborately, Ovid suddenly transforms our strained expectation into
nothing'.73

But it is not just the expectation of textual jouissance that is frustrated in this sequence. The lack of sexual consummation means no progeny, and hence no genealogy: by abruptly curtailing the narrative just before its seemingly inevitable finish, Ovid subverts the legend's traditional function of guaranteeing an illustrious future, and excludes from his narrative an important Athenian link to the divine realm. Once again, Attic legend is reduced to an incoherence that operates on a number of levels, and that forestalls its own use in the service of a properly Athenocentric ideology. This sequence, in other words, continues the strategic deconstruction of legendary Attic origins, thereby further vitiating the cultural prestige of Athens in the world-system of the Metamorphoses. The various strands of the foundation myth, glimpses of which Ovid affords us throughout this narrative stretch, stand in an obscured and problematic relationship to the polis itself.
VIII. CALLIMACHEAN ENCORES: PHILEMON AND BAUCIS

To this point our analysis has focused on the undermining of Athens in the second half of Metamorphoses 2; but such strategies are by no means confined to this part of the poem. While we cannot offer an exhaustive discussion, it will be useful briefly to consider how Ovid's 'culture wars' continue in subsequent books of the poem. In addition to the Atthidographic sequence in Book 2, the Hecale serves as the principal model for the tale of Philemon and Baucis (Met. 8.6I 1-724), an episode that, in more ways than one, lies at the centre of the poem. This story revisits a number of cosmogonic themes dealt with in the opening book of the poem. As in Book i, Jupiter (now accompanied by Mercury) makes trial of human morality by walking the earth in disguise and seeking hospitality. Once again, all fail the test, barring their doors to the mendicant divinities, save a single aged couple: Philemon and Baucis gladly entertain the disguised divinities in their humble cottage, and as a result they are the only survivors of a punitive flood that drowns the inhabitants of the inhospitable region. This all stands in clear analogy to Deucalion and Pyrrha, who were likewise uniquely spared from the wrathful deluge of Jupiter on account of their exceptional piety. But Philemon and Baucis, in addition to being saved from the flood, reap further rewards for living up to Jovian standards of theoxeny: their humble cottage is turned into a temple of gold; they live out their lives as priest and priestess of this temple; and - their dearest wish they eventually 'die' together, being transformed into trees (an oak and a linden-tree, respectively). The strong moralizing subtext and the reappearance of important themes from the opening book of the epic (divine wrath, human misdemeanours, questions of theodicy) are perhaps not coincidental in a story situated just about halfway between beginning and end. But what turns 'Philemon and Baucis' into a veritable beacon of metaliterary self-awareness is the way in which Ovid frames the episode. The story is told by an internal narrator, Lelex, noted for his age and wisdom, in the dwelling of the river god Acheloiis. Lelex offers 'Philemon and Baucis' in response to a scoffing Pirithotis, who has just dismissed a tale of metamorphosis recounted by the host as nothing but a fairy tale, adding the further blasphemy that the power of the gods could not change the shape of things (8.614-15). In effect, this deorum spretor (8.6 I12-I 3), beloved companion of fellow-guest Theseus, questions the entire 'truth-value' of Ovid's poem. By calling

73 Galinsky, op. cit. (n. 68), I68.

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into question the foundational premise of the Metamorphoses, Pirithotis gestures back negatively to its very beginning - and triggers a response that anticipates its end.74 The theme of a powerful but unrecognized xenos receiving hospitality in a humble dwelling clearly appealed in antiquity and can be traced back to Odysseus' stay with his swineherd in the Odyssey.75 But Ovid's more immediate model here is the visit paid by Theseus to Hecale in Callimachus' eponymous poem. Again, the state of transmission prevents a detailed appreciation of the intertextual engagement. Nevertheless, as Adrian Hollis has established, 'Ovid's debt to [the Hecale] is obvious even from the meagre fragments remaining'.76 The entertaining of Jupiter and Mercury by Philemon and Baucis replays the hospitality granted to Theseus by Hecale, with the same poignant contrast between 'great' and 'humble'. In both episodes, moreover, the hosts end up 'merging' with the landscape: Hecale gives her name to an Attic deme, Philemon and Baucis are turned into trees. Given the clear indebtedness to the Hecale, a noteworthy feature of the Philemon and Baucis inset is that it is told in the presence of Theseus. The intertextual transformation that this figure undergoes from protagonist in Callimachus to passive auditor in the Metamorphoses is at once amusing and symptomatic. As Sara Mack has demonstrated, Books 7 and 8 contain a variety of fragmentary references and allusions to the extensive body of myths that revolve around this archetypal Athenian hero.77 With the Philemon and Baucis episode, then, Ovid continues a pattern of narrative displacement of Theseus in this part of the Metamorphoses. The way in which the episode is framed adds insult to injury: the Athenian hero finds himself listening to what is, in intertextual terms, a 'knock-off' of his own epyllion. As in Book 2, the marginalization of Athens and her 'synecdochical' champions is set against allusions to Roman greatness - an effect again realized through geographic displacement. Callimachus' Hecale, of course, is set in Attica; the tale of Philemon and Baucis, on the other hand, unfolds in Phrygia: as Philip Hardie usefully observes, Ovid's audience would not fail to be reminded of what came from 'Phrygia'. 8 The connection with Rome is strengthened by the characterization of Philemon and Baucis: they are paragons of the sort of peasant values, pietas and parsimony in particular, that Augustus enshrined as the ethical underpinnings of his res publica restituta. As Adrian Hollis points out, 'in many ways Philemon is a type of the traditional Italian peasant, with a cottage which he has lived in all his life . . ., his ideal marriage ... and the Italian meal which he lays before his guests'.79 Put another way, in a morally charged context in the very centre of the poem, Ovid offers his readers an allegorical preview of Rome, more specifically Rome as defined by Augustan ideology. Indeed, at the heart of 'Philemon and Baucis' lie two fundamental motifs that are widespread in Augustan literature: 'moral fibre' as the source of imperial greatness, and the transformation of humble dwellings into monuments of marble and gold. The metamorphosis of the cottage into a temple plays out in miniature what Augustus claimed to have done to the entire city of Rome. Among other passages, it finds a suggestive precursor in Aeneid 8, where Vergil thematizes the rise of Rome from prehistoric village to world capital. This, of course, is the book in which Aeneas visits the future site of Rome, and receives the same sort of hospitality from Evander that Hecale extends to Theseus and Philemon and Baucis to Jupiter and Mercury. Upon arrival, Aeneas and his men only 'see walls and a citadel, and scattered roof tops', but
74 cf. Met. 1.1-3: 'in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora: di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa) / aspirate meis ...' Lelex asserts the veracity of his tale several times. Cf. esp. 8.622: 'ipse locum vidi' (i.e. he has performed an autopsy on location) and 'haec mihi non vani (neque erat, cur fallere 720-I: vellent) / narravere senes'. From Ovid's point of view, all such assertions are inevitably tongue-in-cheek and enact a sophisticated epistemological play with truth, fiction, and falsehood. It is nonetheless important that the poet uses the Philemon and Baucis episode to raise these problems explicitly, thereby reflecting in the very middle on the key theme of the epic.
75 For a survey of the motif in Greek and Latin literature, see A. Hollis (ed.), Ovid, Metamorphoses Book VIII(1970), 76 Hollis, op. cit. io6-7. (n. 75), 107, who also discusses possible Near-Eastern parallels. 77 S. Mack, Ovid (1988), 136-41. 78 Per litteras. Cf. Met. 8.620-1: 'tiliae contermina quercus / collibus est Phrygiis, medio circumdata muro'; and I5.444-5 (Pythagoras predicting the future rise of Rome): '"urbem etiam cerno Phrygios debere nepotes, / quanta nec est nec erit nec visa prioribus annis" ' 79 Hollis, op. cit. (n. 75), II I.

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Vergil immediately adds ex persona poetae that Roman power has by now exalted these modest dwellings to heaven (Aen. 8.98-IoI). This is not the first time in the poem we have seen Ovid engaged in intertextual dialogue with both Callimachus and Vergil. As with the reference to the Capitoline geese, the simultaneous allusion to both a Greek and a Roman model allows Ovid to play off one against the other. On the one hand, by inserting traces of Vergil's Augustan ideology into a Callimachean setting, he is able both to signal and to transcend the cultural heritage of Athens that his Greek model celebrates. On the other, he manages to elaborate a vision of Rome that is rather more subtle and nuanced, more sophisticated and witty - in short, more Alexandrian - than the Rome adumbrated in Vergil's Aeneid (which is not to deny Vergil's own debt to Hellenistic poetics). What remains crucial, however, is that in Book 8 Ovid once again superimposes upon his Greek subject matter an anticipation of Roman greatness. And, as in Book 2, this cultural 'overwrite' is achieved through geographical displacement: instead of the Attic setting of the Hecale, the narrative unfolds in a proto-Roman Phrygia.
IX. PYTHAGORAS ON THE RISE (AND FALL?) OF ROME

In the course of a lengthy disquisition in the final book of the poem, the philosopher Pythagoras recalls and perhaps recontextualizes the world-historical changes reported in the earlier narrative. The 'geopolitical' section of the speech reads in part as a kind of encapsulation of the literary strategies by which Ovid has confronted and undercut the great centres of Hellenic civilization: 'clarafuit Sparte, magnae viguere Mycenae, nec non et Cecropis, nec non Amphionis arces: vile solum Sparte est, altae cecidere Mycenae; Oedipodioniae quid sunt, nisi nomina, Thebae? quid Pandioniae restant, nisi nomen, Athenae? nunc quoque Dardaniam fama est consurgere Romam, Appenninigenae quae proxima Thybridis undis mole sub ingenti rerum fundamina ponit. haec igitur formam crescendo mutat et olim immensi caput orbis erit. sic dicere vates faticinasque ferunt sortes .. .' (Met. 15-426-36) was famous, strong, Mycenae great 'Sparta And strong the walls of Cecrops and Amphion. Now Sparta lies a waste, Mycenae's towers Have tumbled down. What but a name is left Of Oedipus' brave Thebes, or what endures Of proud Pandion's Athens but a name? Today from Trojan stock a city rises, Rome, where the Tiber flows from the Apennines, And with vast efforts founds her destiny. Her change is increase; she one day shall reign, The boundless world's great empress; so foretell Prophets and oracles ...' (trans. Melville) Since Heinsius, a number of scholars have been tempted to athetize verses 426-30, owing to their obvious anachronism: in Pythagoras' lifetime, Athens, Thebes and Sparta were still vibrant and powerful poleis.? Such arguments do not convince - if only
80so See Birmer, op. cit. (n. 30), ad loc. for discussion and bibliography.

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because the Metamorphoses is full of teasing chronological inconsistencies.81 Besides, in a certain sense, Pythagoras' observations are not entirely anachronistic: within the skewed literary universe of the Metamorphoses, the perfect tense used by Pythagoras to refer to the once-great centres of Greek civilization seems to reflect the eclipse they have already undergone. Ovid has long since reduced the Greek poleis and their cultural heritage to conquered provinces of his imperialist imagination - not only Athens, but also Thebes, a city, which, as Philip Hardie has shown, is subjected to a kind of tragic which follows hard upon his disintegration. In Ovid's 'Thebaid' (Met. 3.1-4.603), a Thebes as veritable of unfolds the anti-Aeneid, making of ktisis-story 'Atthidography', the polis a would-be Rome that failed and establishing that 'Jupiter has no immovable capitol at Thebes'.82 Pythagoras' catalogue of fallen Greek cities serves as a prelude to the geopolitical emergence of Rome. It is the expatriate philosopher himself who defines the telos of both Roman history and Ovid's epic, and he does so in noticeably Vergilian language. His vatic determination of 'the end' combines elements from both the prophecy of Helenus at Aen. 3.374-462, with its strong Hellenophobic thrust and its final admonition 'vade age et ingentem factis fer ad aethera Troiam', and the prophecy of Anchises in Aeneid 6, again a passage that celebrates Rome's fated conquest of Greece. The latter passage in particular provides the impetus for Pythagoras' specification of when the rise of Rome to caput orbis will occur: 'hanc [sc. urbem] alii proceres per saecula longa potentem, sed dominam rerum de sanguine natus luli efficiet; quo cum tellus erit usa, fruentur aetheriae sedes, caelumque erit exitus illi.' (Met. 15.446-9) of the length years '... Through Other princes shall build her power, but one born From the blood of lulus shall make her Sovereign mistress of the world; and when on earth His work is ended, the sky's palaces shall welcome him And heaven shall be his final destination.' These verses recall Vergil's 'parade of heroes', the final, climactic section of Anchises' discourse. But the summi viri who feature so prominently in Vergil's historical survey receive short shrift: the allusive focus is Anchises' definition of the reign of Augustus as the completion of Rome's historical mission (Aen. 6.789-97). Ovid's philosopherprophet reproduces the ideological outlook of his Vergilian predecessor in three crucial respects: the destiny of Rome to rule the world; the completion of this mission in the reign of Augustus, conceived as a world-historical caesura; and the apotheosis of members of Rome's ruling dynasty. The reading proposed here may appear to be at variance with current critical approaches that see Pythagoras, notorious theorist of perpetual change ('cuncta fluunt', 15.178), as an intrinsically subversive figure in the context of a city that takes great pride in its eternity. We would argue, however, that, to the extent that such views are valid, they must operate on a rather different conceptual plane, a more distant horizon of human history, from the 'culture wars' that are the focus of this paper. Whatever the broader implications of his theories, Pythagoras clearly articulates a vision of a supreme and transcendent Roman civilization, thereby neatly encapsulating the treatment of Hellas in earlier parts of the poem. The Pythagorean theorem of perpetual rise and fall

81 Athetizing the verses would also eliminate an allusion to the speech of Anchises in Vergil's nekyia. A very similar play with temporal perspectives and the rise and fall of cities is found at Aen. 6.773-6, and this Vergilian reminiscence sets the tone for Ovid's

sustained engagement with Vergil's parade of heroes throughout this section of Pythagoras' speech (see below). 82 Hardie,op. cit. (n. i1), 235.

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may well be meant to apply to Rome in due course. The possibility of decline is, after all, always present, and was deeply ingrained in the Roman mentality. At the same time, though, we are dealing with a Pythagorean (not necessarily an Ovidian) theory of history which, in the Metamorphoses, is never explicitly applied to Rome itself. The stated teleology of the poem is clear enough: Augustan Rome at the end of Book 15, poetic immortality, linked to the global sway of Roman power, in the epilogue.83 To what extent Ovid invites us to complicate this vision through the doctrines of his vegetarian philosopher remains an open question.
X. CONCLUSION

Ovid's repeated deconstruction and subversion of crucial narrative strands from Athenian foundation myths, as well as his interpolation of Roman material, are part of an overarching poetic and cultural agenda. The legends treated in Book 2 might be said collectively to comprise the charter myth of Athenian civilization; the cumulative effect of Ovid's treatment is to divest them of much of their ideological vigour. In these as well as later episodes, the Athens of the Hecale is alienated from its vital cultural symbols, and thereby drained of its evocative power and ideological coherence. Neither Athens nor the Hecale are chance targets of Ovid's subversive poetics. A vibrant cultural centre with a rich history and mythology, Athens continued to emit strong ideological signals long after its effective geopolitical eclipse, and was inevitably a source of ongoing Roman anxiety. Throughout the period of Roman domination, this Greek city more than any other retained an unmistakable prestige, basking in a residual but widespread Athenocentrism and continuing to shadow Rome as an international capital.84 In the larger narrative scheme of Ovid's epic of universal history, moreover, Athenian ascendancy lay between the opening cosmogony and the poem's triumphant Roman conclusion. It is thus unsurprising that in its reformulation of Greek myth, the Metamorphoses singles out Athens for particularly close attention, effecting a strategic marginalization of the polis, and subjecting its associated legendary materials to deconstructive pressure. The notion of Rome as the single, triumphant, universal capital is expressed in the thematic transposition of orbis into urbs. This theme, powerfully adumbrated in the Ocyrhoe episode, is climactically developed in the final books of the Metamorphoses. Ovid's careful, systematic account of Roman origins at the end of the epic stands in pointed contradistinction to his earlier treatment of Athens.85 In the international, largely urban, culture of Ovid's own day there could be but a single urbs, a single world capital. Thus, insofar as it is able, the Metamorphoses undermines the status of a city that championed Hellenic civilization and which, on the cultural level at least, continued to challenge the privileged, hegemonic status of Roma aeterna. With respect to eternal
83 For an 'imperialist' reading of the epilogue, see now T. Habinek, 'Ovid and empire', in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2oo2), 46-61. 84 cf. S. Alcock (ed.), Roman Athens (1997), 3: 'Thanks to its perceived glorious history and the notable past achievements of its citizens, Athens, more than any other Greek city, possessed a stock of symbolic capital with which to negotiate its position with Rome.' 85 The loss of spatial and temporal coherence in the treatment of Athenian subject matter in Metamorphoses 2 contrasts sharply with the distinct annalistic record that Ovid supplies for the Roman kings and the care with which he maps out the city of Rome and her destiny in the final books of the poem. Considered in this light, the annalistic catalogue of Roman kings at Met.
14.609-2I

tion of Hersilia, wife of Romulus, into the goddess Hora, divine spouse of the deified Romulus, i.e. the Roman patron deity Quirinus. Time, it would seem, is wedded to Rome. For this portion of the poem, see now P. Hardie, 'The historian in Ovid. The Roman history of Metamorphoses 14 and 15', in D. S. Levine and D. P. Nelis (eds), Clio and the Poets. Augustan Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient Historiography S. Kyriakidis, 'The Alban kings in (2002), 191-209; the Metamorphoses: an Ovidian catalogue and its historiographical models', in ibid., 21 1-29; G. Tissol, 'The house of fame: Roman history and Augustan politics in Metamorphoses I1-15', in B. Weiden Boyd striking articulation of Roman destiny is found in
Jupiter's prophecy (ed.), Brill Companion to Ovid
(2002),

305-35.

significance. We note also the remarkable transforma-

acquires

an almost programmatic

(and partially unveils) the rerum tabularia - a phrase neatly translated by von Albrecht as 'das Archiv der Weltgeschichte'.

at Met. 15.807-42,

which refers to

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cities, the ideology of the Metamorphoses is unambiguous: in the end there can be only one. Kings College, London (I.G.) University of California, Irvine (A.Z.) ingo.gildenhard@kcl.ac.uk pzissos@uci.edu