CLAS 353
November 22, 2023

Birth of Dionysus, Apulian red-figure krater (ca. 405-385 BCE)


*Group Projects:Wednesday, November 29 (Groups 1-3) & Monday, December 4 (Groups 4-6)*


Ovid, Metamorphoses: Alison's "Ruined" motif

• some pairings: Semele ~ Glaucus & Scylla (desire & dangerous power); Tereus, Procne & Philomela ~ Scylla (desire & familial disruption); Hyacinth ~ Adonis (brevity of desire)
  
  Pittoni the Younger, Diana & Actaeon (1722)
  
  
• Semele: Metamorphoses 3 (Theban book)
  
  Metamorphoses 3.253-5 (reaction in Thebes to preceding Actaeon story)
  The talk goes two ways: the goddess seems too harsh
  to some, but others like what she’s done, says it suits
  her stern virginity; each side argues its case.
  
  Rubens, Death of Semele (ca. 1630)
  
  
• Juno's jealousy & Jupiter's foolish promise; power imbalance (cf. Jupiter as shape-shifter)
  
  Metamorphoses 3.302-9 (Jupiter grants Semele’s wish)
  As much as he can, he tries to pen in his strength—
  he won’t pick up the blazing bolt that atomized
  hundred-armed Typhon: that one’s too ferocious.
  There’s a more delicate bolt the Cyclops forged
  in which he poured less ravaging fury, less fire:
  gods call this second-tier arms. With it, Jove enters
  the House of Agenor. Semele’s body is stormed—
  she can’t manage this gift and explodes into flame.
  
  Silenus and infant Dionysus (Roman copy of 4th-3rd century BCE marble)
  
  
• compensation (?): birth of Bacchus
  
  Rosa, Glaucus and Scylla (ca. 1650)
  
  
• Glaucus and Scylla: nested sea-monster story (Sicilian sea-nymphs) within Ovid’s Aeneid (Trojans reach Sicily, Scylla & Charybdis @ Strait of Messina; avoided at Aeneid 3.684ff., as Circe at Aeneid 7.10ff.)
  
  L: Paestan red-figure krater, (4th century BCE); R: Boeotian red-figure bell krater (ca. 450-425 BCE)
  
  
• Circe's jealousy over merman rejected by Scylla (girl on seaside); desire repulsed; Scylla's loss of form & self
  
  Metamorphoses 14.59-69 (Scylla’s horrific metamorphosis in her pool)
  Now Scylla appears. She dips herself to the hips
  and suddenly sees her loins deformed to barking
  beasts. At first she can’t believe these creatures are her,
  tries to get away—or get them away—afraid
  of the snapping jaws. But what she flees follows,
  and as she flails for her body—thighs, shins, or feet—
  She touches the fangs and muzzles of hell-hounds.
  She stands amid raving dogs that once were her hips,
  struggling to tame the wild bodies beneath her.
  Glaucus wept for the girl he’d loved, and he kept far
  from Circe, too cruel with her powerful potions.
  
  
  
• Tereus, Procne, Philomela: Ovid does tragedy (cf. lost Medea): cursed wedding of Tereus & Procne attended by Furies, screech-owl (6.428ff.); Procne's fateful request (6.440ff.)
  
  
• catalyst: Thracian Tereus' (un)"natural lust" (6.458) > deception, undervalued kin relationships, further tragic turns
  
  Metamorphoses 6.475-82 (Philomela pleads with her father to visit her sister; Tereus' gaze)
  What, when Philomela wants this as well, wrapping
  arms around her father, coaxing—can’t she go see
  her sister?—pleading for (but against!) her own good?
  Tereus watches and prefondles in looking,
  Seeing her kisses, her arms circling a neck—
  it all kindles and stirs and flares him up hot.
  Each time she embraces her father, he wishes
  he were her father (it would be no less obscene).
  
  
• predatory & tyrannical Tereus seizes ownership of Philomela, "'I've won! What I want I now hold' / . . . like Jove’s hunting eagle that drops in the aerie / the hare it’s got trapped in hooked talons" (6.514ff.)
  
  
• Philomela raises voice to Tereus after rape in forest ("I'll find people and tell", 6.546); reaction?
  
  Procne, Philomela & Itys, Attic cup (ca. 490 BCE)
  
  
• Philomela regains her voice
  
  Metamorphoses 6.575-86 (Philomela’s narrative tapestry)
  But pain is ingenious; sadness breeds brilliance.
  On a foreign loom she deftly hangs a web
  and on it weaves purple figures in white:
  record of her outrage. She gives it to a maid
  and bids with hands it reach her mistress. The bidden
  woman takes it to Procne, not knowing what she bears.
  The brutal tyrant’s wife unrolls the cloth
  and there reads her ruined sister’s story—
  but (amazingly) says nothing. Fury seals her lips,
  and her tongue can't find words raging enough.
  No space in her for crying: what's right and wrong
  explode within, and all she sees is punishment.
  
  Rubens, Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itys (1636–8)
  
  
• Procne as silent agent of revenge: powerful emotions & bad choices; cannibalism, further tragedy & undervaluing of kin-relationship
  
  Metamorphoses 6.652-73 (Tereus dines alone, "a grave family practice")
                  “Fetch Itys,” he says.
  Procne can no longer hide her bitter delight;
  wanting to announce her ruin herself, she says,
  “You have what you want right there.” He glances about,
  looks for the boy; and as he looks and calls again,
  Just as she is, hair spattered from savage slaughter,
  in bursts Philomela. She throws the boy’s bloody head
  at his father’s face, and she’s never wanted so
  much to speak, to find the right words for her joy.
  With a roar the Thracian shoves the table away
  and shouts to the snaky sisters of underland Styx.
  First he's crazed and would if he could slit open his gut,
  dig out the hideous meal and half-eaten flesh;
  then he weeps and says he's his boy's tragic tomb;
  now with bare sword he hunts Pandion's daughters.
  But the sisters suddenly seem fluttering, feathered:
  they do flutter with feathers! One flies to the forest,
  one up to the roof, and on their breasts they still bear
  the markings of murder: plumage speckled with blood.
  And he in his rage and rushing lust to avenge
  becomes a bird, too: on his head stands a crest
  and his oversized beak juts out like a sword.
  
  
  
• metamorphoses: hopooe (Tereus), nightingale (Philomela), swallow (Procne)
  
  [thrush nightingale singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdlIbNrki5o]
  
  
• Scylla, daughter of Nisus: desire vs. kin-relationship
  
  Europa & Zeus, Attic red-figure krater (490 BCE)
  
  
• Minos of Crete, son of Jupiter & Europa: purple lock?
  
  Metamorphoses 8.36-42 (Scylla’s gaze & desire)
  . . . Oh, how lucky the spear
  he touched, how lucky the straps tight in his hand!
  If she could, she was dying to wend a delicate
  way through enemy lines, dying to cast herself
  from this high, high tower into the Cretan camps,
  throw open the bronze doors, ask the enemy in,
  and do anything else Minos liked.
  
  
• moment of rationalizing desire & betrayal (cf. Medea)
  
  Metamorphoses 8.72-5 (Scylla deifies her desire)
  I wish to god I had no father! We’re each our own
  god, really. Fortune’s disgusted by lazy desire.
  Any other girl burning like this would have long
  since demolished whatever hindered her love.
  
  Osprey ("sea hawk")
  
  
• nighttime theft of lock; Minos' reaction, pursuit of ship & metamorphosis of Nisus & Scylla into sea-birds (Ciris?)
  
  
• Hyacinth & Apollo (Orpheus' tale): young Spartan athlete cut down in prime; a god's unpossessable desire (cf. Adonis)
  
  Metamorphoses 10.189-95 (Hyacinth dies before Apollo)
  But his skills did no good: the wound couldn’t be healed.
  As, in a fresh garden, you snap stems of violets
  or poppies or lilies with long golden tongues
  and they wilt and soon droop their heavy, creped heads
  and can no longer stand but gaze at the ground:
  so, as he died, his face was cast down and his neck,
  with no strength for itself, slumped down to his chest.
  |
  Jean Broc, Death of Hyacinthos (1801)
  
  
• Hyacinth's short-lived flowering monumentalized in midsummer Spartan ritual (10.214-19)
  
  John William Waterhouse, The Awakening of Adonis (1899-1900)
  
  
• Adonis (Orpheus' final story, Mets. 10): son of incestuous Cinyras & Myrrha (born from her tree); Venus infatuated ("Like Diana", 10.536); embedded cautionary tale of Atalanta & Hippomenes (mutual desire, race/courtship & brief marriage)
  
  Metamorphoses 10.594-6 (Atalanta running)
  A flush runs over the girl's pearly skin,
  as when a red awning over a marble hall
  suffuses it with the illusion of hue.
  
  Metamorphoses 10.679-80 (3rd golden apple & end of race; Ovid's Orpheus' Venus' meta-narrative)
  So my story won't be more slow than the race,
  the girl was outrun; the winner led off his prize.
  
  
• Atalanta & Hippomenes morphed into lions; Venus' warning? Adonis' death?
  
  
• brevity of desire/pleasure/beauty; cf. Adonia (aetiology of women's festival, short-lived plants)
  
  L: Women at the Adonia, Attic red-figure vase (ca. 425 BCE); R: anemone ("wind") flowers
  
  Metamorphoses 10.731-9 (Adonis’ metamorphosis into short-lived flower)
               And saying this, she sprinkled
  scented nectar on his blood. With every drop
  the blood began to swell, as when bubbles rise
  in volcanic mud. No more than an hour had passed
  when a flower the color of blood sprang up,
  the hue of a pomegranate hiding ruby seeds
  in its leathery rind. But the pleasure is brief:
  the anemone barely clings and falls at a breath,
  shaken free by the wind that lives on its name.
  
  

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