Wisconsin (2024) h/b 332pp £99 (ISBN 9780299348748)
This book reasserts ‘the significance of the ancient hymnic tradition’ as a key element in our reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, drawing on the Homeric Hymns and especially on the six hymns of that most iconic of Alexandrians, Callimachus. Ovid—like everyone else in the Roman literary canon—fell under his spell, and C. claims that her book shows ‘how the Callimachean hymn collection provides a suite of sustained inspiration for Ovid’s narrative dynamism’.
Hymns routinely praise gods by describing their achievements, and the first pentad (books 1-5) of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is heavy on divine actions and interactions. This is a literary study and is not engaged with the Hymns as religious texts or with the religious substructure: after all, the Ovid of Ars 1.637 (‘it is useful for gods to exist so let’s believe in them because it is useful’) could well use religious language if it suited his poetic purposes, and so (perhaps) did Callimachus.
Ovid starts with creation, and C. argues that he sets up a dynamic between the forces of Love (Venus/Cupid) and Jupiter (king of the gods) as ‘essential to understanding the world of Ovid’s epic’ (p.14), leading us to ask ‘who is in ultimate control of [Ovid’s] poetic cosmos’. Ovid’s unnamed ‘divine powers’ behave like a Platonic demiourgos with elements of Stoic cosmogony. C. argues that Ovid is also thinking of the Eros of Plato’s Symposium who is the true creator of all living things (Plato Smp. 197a). C. tells us that ‘this rerouting of Zeus’ praise to the glory of Eros is a textual strategy of immense relevance to Ovid’s construction of his epic universe’ (p.21). It also turns Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus—which priorities Zeus over all other gods—on its head.
There are some neat observations here: Jupiter, turning Io into a cow (1.610-11), is the first shape-changer of the poem, and if the anonymous divine force’s first act was to separate land from sea, Jupiter’s first act is to reverse this with the flood. Jupiter’s power over Love is more apparent than real, of course, as the randy god spends much of his immortality chasing girls, and Venus knows her power only too well as shown in her speech to Cupid at Met. 5.365-79. Her goal is a universe under Cupid’s rule (p.37), and her use of deception puts her in the territory of the Muses (p.40: see also pp.209-10 for some excellent remarks on Lucretius’ proem). Callimachus ‘borrows the modality of Aphrodite’s power (persuasion, deception) for the hymnic voice he uses’ (p.41) but does not write a hymn to her and aims to mitigate the challenge that Aphrodite poses to Zeus’ divine authority. Ovid however puts Venus and Cupid centre-stage, just as Apollonius Rhodius (3.91-144) showed us Eros (whom C. nicely calls a ‘greedy little hellion’) bribed with a toy ball once belonging to Zeus. Eros now rules the ‘globe’ and he and Jupiter are the ‘divine polarities upon which Ovid’s cosmic determinacy is strung’ (p.44).
Apollo and his virgin sister Artemis/Diana sometimes come as a harmonious pair—as in the infamous treatment of Niobe in Homer Iliad 24.604-7—but not always in Homer (see e.g. Iliad 21.470-77 for a splendid sibling spat) and certainly not in Ovid who sees them as competitive rivals in a tradition looking back to Callimachus. Diana/Artemis was clearly the icon for virginal folk (such as Euripides’ Hippolytus) and Callimachus (Hymn 3.4-6) tells us that her craving for virginity went back to her infancy. Ovid’s Daphne likewise begs her father Peneus for the same virginity as Diana enjoyed and becomes in Ovid a ‘poetic figure designed to dramatise the rivalry between the gods’ (p.89) as she adores the virgin sister but is amorously pursued by the brother. Diana’s starring role in the myth of Actaeon in Met. 3 is one of the most memorable narratives of the poem and it is no surprise that Ovid drew on Callimachus: what is surprising is how Callimachus had put the tale of Actaeon in the ‘Bath of Pallas’ (Hymn 5) into the mouth of Athena as a ‘tone-deaf’ consolation to the grieving mother of Tiresias. Tiresias had stumbled on Athena bathing but the goddess pleads that she ‘only’ blinded him (Hymn 5.78), whereas Actaeon was torn to bits by his own dogs for a similar offence to Artemis/Diana. At this point C. might have pointed out how (and why) at Met. 3.332 Ovid corrects Callimachus by following the alternative account of Tiresias’ blindness as the work of Juno rather than Pallas Athena.
Another intertextual source for Ovid is the Augustan didactic poet Grattius, for whom Diana was the Muse (p.149), and we see how Ovid’s wonderful catalogue of dogs (3.206-224) draws on hints in both Grattius and Callimachus. Ovid thus takes a tale from one Callimachean hymn and reconfigures it to ‘form a creative supplement to the Hymn to Artemis’—(almost) telling Callimachus what he could have done. Grattius is used ‘like a hunting dog, to uncover the traces and sources of the Callimachean hymn that inspired his own version of the goddess’ (p.172).
Callimachus is, however, more than a repository of stories for a Roman poet: his literary influence was above all on aesthetic priorities and poetic style, and it is interesting to see how Ovid in his one excursion into epic poetry made such use of the anti-epic Alexandrian, whose own narrative poems (such as Hecale) were more like the small-scale epyllia which populate this huge poem. Ovid becomes ‘a poetic collaborator and colluder in promoting the Callimachean aesthetic, yet for epic purposes’ (p.230).
The contest of the Muses and the Pierides in Ovid Met. 5, as narrated by Minerva/Athena, is a major set-piece of poetic rivalry. The Pierides are anti-Callimachean ‘Muses’, their name evoking the swollen poetic forms which are the antithesis of Callimachus’ lean and elegant art: they even choose to sing of the bloated Gigantomachy, while the Muses sing of the rape of Proserpina—a tale which Callimachus had tactfully rejected in his Hymn to Demeter in favour of the dark comedy of Erysichthon. The opening chapter questioned the nature of who was in charge of the action—Jupiter or Love—and it is fitting that in the song of Calliope in Met. 5 it is Venus who takes the reins of power over Proserpina and even over Jupiter’s brother Dis. Her song thus enables the reader to find closure at the end of the first pentad.
C. largely limits herself to the first pentad for reasons of economy, but it would have been good to point out how Ovid uses Callimachean material elsewhere—Erisychthon for example is a major star of Callimachus Hymn 6 but does not appear until Met. 8.738-842, as acknowledged (but not explored) on page 197. Callimachus uses his story as part of his proof of the power of Demeter (and Schadenfreude at her enemies’ demise). Ovid eschews the genuinely hilarious material in Callimachus, who describes Erisychthon’s parents as they make lame excuses for their greedy son’s inability to attend dinners as he would embarrass them all by eating the whole room (Hymn 6.70-88), and shows again that his intertextual use of Callimachus does not impugn his poetic independence.
This brings me to make a general point about the book. Ovid, the self-confessed ‘player’ of love and poetry (Tristia 4.10.1) looks back at his wonderfully artful and humorous Alexandrian predecessor, and yet C. gives us little sense of the hugely playful and witty side of either of these two poets.
There is a bibliography, a general index and an index locorum. The book is mostly well proof-read and produced—although ‘Euripedes’ crept into the index on page 318—and certainly succeeds in its aim of making us engage with the creative process at work in these two inexhaustible poets. The great achievement of this thought-provoking and challenging book is to make the reader go back to these poets and read them again with fresh eyes and renewed pleasure.
John Godwin