Mythology
Delahoyde & Hughes

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Book III

The House of Fathers continues with the House of Agenor. In contrast to the benevolent fathers in Book I and Book II, we now see Agenor's love for his daughter--Europa--lead to the cruel exile of his son Cadmus, who roams the world--at his father's command--looking in vain for his lost sister. (We met Cadmus as an old man in Euripides' Bacchae.) We learn of Cadmus' battle with the serpent, of civil war, and the aftermath, the founding of the city of Thebes. Yet, Cadmus' life is defined by sorrow. . . as is the life of Pentheus, the grandson of Cadmus. This book of Metamorphoses begins the story of the descendants of Agenor.

Questions for Book III

What has happen to Europa?

What is Cadmus' ultimate weapon against the serpent?

What is the final, even ironic, connection between Cadmus and serpents? See Book IV.

Book III, lines 135-136. These lines are in Euripides' play "The Trojan Women." How might these lines apply to Cadmus?

The Story of Actaeon: What is Actaeon's attitude toward "the hunt"? What are he and his friends like as hunters?

Is Actaeon's punishment fair?

What happens to Semele? Who is her child and how is it that he is twice born?

What is the jesting controversy between Jove (Zeus) and Juno (Hera) about lovemaking and why do they ask Tiresias to decide?

What is the purpose of the story of Narcissus?

Cadmus' grandson Pentheus scorns the seer Tiresias and he also scorns the god Bacchus. What does Pentheus fear?

The tale that Ovid tells about Pentheus and Bacchus is strikingly similar to Eurpides' tragedy Bacchae, but simultaneously quite different. Describe at least three differences and suggest the implication of these differences.

Book III begins the saga of the House of Agenor. The parental actions of fathers continue to shape the lives of their descendants in powerful and tragic ways. The stories in Book III about Actaeon and Narcissus are well-know and serve a didactic purpose. Ovid's exploration of nature and the treatment of species living in the natural world continue as thematic, for Actaeon is a sport hunter interested in blood and the trophy. His transformation parallels the tragic results we see in earlier Greek drama where great art, as Aristotle said, contains three things: recognition, reversal, and a tragic flaw. We can apply this definition of art to Actaeon. How does the story show us these three characteristics?

Ovid continues also with the topic of love, playfully describing a controversy over the pleasures of lovemaking. In the opening stanza of Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us his intention: to describe all changes from the world's beginning until our day. And obviously a sex change is part of "bodies changed to other bodies," and it seems some of this sex reversal can make you go blind, as in Tiresias' case. Ovid gives us archetypal representations of the bedrooms, battlefields, and gardens of gender politics, with perspectives that are undeniably sharp.

CONTEXT

Anima / animus

The masculine principle under primary edict moves in a quest-motif towards a goal or telos (as the ancient Greeks would say). The final outcome is an ethical change in the mental fiber of the hero; the revitalized masculine, through transformation or transcendence, claims ownership of culture and morality in all aspects--law and order and the enforcement power in the world. The extremes of the animus include the ability to kill and this killing, through inhumanity, gives men the power to name God; the heroic warrior comes complete with heroic codes and burial rituals and the bard's tales of apotheosis. And as setting, the earth, the immortal and the inexhaustible, is always present. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2700 B.C.) the bard tells the story of the first massive clear-cut. King Gilgamesh slays the forest guardian Humbaba and cuts down the cedar forest for fame and glory, the basics of figurative immortality. The king's energies are aimed at making permanence in the world.

In her essay "The Gender Principles," Marilyn French suggests that this permanence is directly threatened by the cyclical forces of Nature, i.e. the feminine entity or anima. So as to control this formidable force, Christianity, French says, splits the feminine principle in two. The stratagem: Divide and Conquer. Conquest is the centerpiece of the animus. The anima persists in actual women, persists in a man's perceptions of women as either/or--the outlaw or the inlaw.

Ovid's Metamorphoses acknowledges, so to speak, the dimensions of the feminine principle before the split. For afterward, the cult of the goddess is driven underground, into the subculture of the earth itself. The females in Ovid tend to live beyond the either/or dichotomy that commonly defines the behavior of women in literature and Christian tradition. Daphne goes where Apollo--the god of patriarchal civilization--cannot follow. And where is this place? Ovid exalts the realm and presence of Themis, the goddess who founded the oracle of Delphi long before Apollo seized the temple. She rises out of the post-diluvian creation and teaches (through the power of riddle) Deucalion and Phyrra that the earth is the source of life. And what is so different? In Book I of Metamorphoses, after the waters have receded, Themis tells the surviving couple, "Go to the temple, cover your heads, loosen your robes, and throw your mother's bones behind you." The human soul lives inside these stones, the bones of the Mother Earth. The riddle solved, Deucalion and Phyrra throw stones over their shoulders and the children of the earth are born. "The Earth is generous with her provision, and her sustenance is very kind; she offers, for your tables, Food that requires no bloodshed and no slaughter, Meat is for beasts to feed on" (Book XV, lines 81-84). In the Bible, the patriarchal deity proclaims to Noah: "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you" (Genesis 9:2-3). In Ovid's post-diluvian narrative, salvation is more closely associated with ecological harmony (biocentrism) than dominion and conquest (anthropocentrism), for "life came into being, generated Out of the earth" (Book I, lines 419-20). In Genesis, the law of human mastery is handed down as decree by an external, patriarchal abstraction called God. And therein lies all the ideological difference.

It is then interesting to learn that Tiresias knows exactly what it is like to actually be a woman and then a man. The closest we can come--without surgery--is to dream we are a member of the opposite sex. How many of you have ever dreamed you were a member of the opposite sex?

The only famous person I know of that has had this kind of dream is Salvador Dali. What does that tell you? The original title of the painting in the previous link was "Salvador Dali dreams he is a young girl, lifting the peel of water to reveal the sleeping dog underneath."

The presence of the child is significant. As we read on in Book III, we learn that Ovid portrays Bacchus as a child.

Bacchus and Pentheus: In Euripides' play the captured and imprisoned priest of Bacchus is Bacchus himself in disguise. He destroys Pentheus by first getting the King to cross-dress as a woman with the promise that only then will Pentheus be able to witness the ritual of the female bacchanals. Pentheus' mother Agave beheads the King and in the end Euripides creates one of the more powerful recognition scenes in Greek drama when she realizes that the head upon a stick is the head of her own son. She is exiled in great sorrow by Bacchus.

How is Ovid's tale different? Well it is not clear if the captured disciple of Bacchus is Bacchus or not. In the story within a story, the storyteller tells Pentheus that Bacchus is a child held captive on a ship by sailors with greed and other foul things in mind. This deity-child changes the sailors into other species. Pentheus never cross-dresses when he seeks out the women in the woods and Agave never has her recognition scene, nor is she banished. What might be the implications of Ovid's changes to the story of Pentheus and Bacchus?

The fate of Pentheus serves as warning: now
the Theban women bearing incense, crowd
these new rites; at these holy shrines, they bow.