Ovid’s Other Metamorphoses
A Poem and a Mistake
“Future generations, listen so that you may know of my fame,
The playful poet of tender verses, whom you are reading.” —Tristia 4.10
Before I was relegated to Tomis by the bitter mercies of Caesar Augustus, I was a Roman; before I was a Roman, I was a Sulmontini. Now I am half a Greek, delivered to a seaside city of barbarians far from my home and my wife, never to return to the Eternal City where my verses were widely praised. I was torn from my love and work, and my work and love were torn from me. Metamorphoses lies unfinished, rough-hewn, needing the poet’s final touch as a shaped block of cast iron needs the last smoothing touches of rasp and file. Ars Amatoria, the song I composed to instruct men and women in the art of love, is banned and burnt. Amores, my ode to the lovely maiden whom I called Corinna, was not thrown upon the pyre by the Caesar the censor; but the maiden herself, a maiden no longer, has perished in exile.
No crime did I commit, no judgment of the centumviri did I face. Caesar’s wisdom alone put me in my place, here surrounded by Scythians on the barest edges of civilization. Winters here are draped in snow, which Phoebus Apollo is scarcely warm enough to banish. Summers on the hospitable Sea are pleasant enough, but even pleasance in exile still palls. Twenty years and more have passed since I have seen my home or passed the time in the Forum, and gladly would I endure the most obstinate storm on Palatine Hill than face another innocuous summer day here.
From Tomis where I reside, it is many months to Rome. I compose letters and poems to all I can think of, but my banishment is not lifted. I have exhorted the First Citizen with all the law that I can recall, all the law I learned in my youth, all for nothing. Caesar’s will is implacable.
From Tomis where I reside, it is many months to Rome. I compose letters and poems to all I can think of, but my banishment is not lifted. I have exhorted the First Citizen with all the law that I can recall, all the law I learned in my youth, all for nothing. Caesar’s will is implacable.
Never before has Thalia, my Muse, commanded me to make known the specifics of my youthful indiscretion, for her art (and mine) is comedy, and this tale is not so comic. Even so, with or without her voice to grace my verse, it must be told: so attend, generations of the future, and hear of the song and of the error that banished poor Publius Ovidius Naso from Rome.
When I was a youth in Sulmo, just married at the age of sixteen, my father wished me to enter the public service, and this I did, following in the footsteps of my elder brother, Gaius Ovidius. My father felt it amusing to give us our nicknames: Silus for my brother, and Naso for myself. Little-Nose and Big-Nose. My brother Gaius, one year older than I, was sent to study the law. I was to study oratory. Both courses were considered admirable routes into the higher echelons of Roman government. Through our public service, my father hoped to navigate his family’s good fortunes from our solid equestrian station into greater wealth and power, possibly even securing us a seat in the Senate. This path suited my brother Gaius better than I, for I found that all my orations turned to verse, and all my speeches found meter and rhyme. I could not escape Thalia, my muse, for she followed me everywhere I went.
Gaius entered the courts as one of the centumviri. As civil matters arose among the plebians that required the attention of the law, all one hundred names of the centumviri would be entered into a lottery, Gaius’s among them. The men whose five names were drawn would sit in judgment on that case; as these names were drawn by lot, there could be no accusation by the petitioners that the judges of the pentumviri held any untoward bias.
This was not the life I would have chosen for myself, committed forever to the honorable course, shackled to the streets of Rome, but I could not object. My father was paterfamilias, and his word within our family was its own law. Still, when I was sixteen, I pleaded with my father for his permission to tour the Mediterranean just once before I was committed to this sober life of service and dignity. After seeing the hills of Athens, and absorbing the ancient atmosphere of dutiful democracy, I argued, I could hardly fail to be prepared to assume my rightful place. My father, seeing some wisdom in this, permitted me to go.
I left behind my wife and departed for Athens in the company of a friend, a fellow would-be poet by the name of Marcus Cornelius. He was a short and solidly built young man, so muscular as to resemble a square; his friends had nicknamed him Quadratus. We both yearned to see the glory of Athens, for it is from that famous city that all poetry sprang. Homer and Hesiod had told epic tales on its marbled streets; Sophocles and Euripides had produced tragedies to play from its amphitheaters; Aristophanes and Magnes had written the finest comedies. There was no place in the known world we would rather see.
We found a ship with its sails pointed toward the Aegean, and packed our bags. For the journey east we would bring clothing, papyrus, and pens for writing; when we returned home, our scrolls would be filled with every story and myth we could hear. Cornelius and I had resolved to drink in every poem and verse, straight from the sparkling fountains from which they sprang.
It was there in an Athenian agora that I first heard of the Bacchic Cordial, which the Greeks called the Amphora of Dionysus. The Cordial was a magical flask, so the Athenians said, which the Maenads had brought with them on their mad revelries. It had been blessed by the god of wine, Dionysus himself, an Athenian wine merchant told us earnestly. In great sincerity, with devout belief in every crease on his honest brown face, he assured us in a whisper that the flask possessed magical powers that would transform anyone who drank from it.
Cornelius scoffed, of course, which drew the stares of many of the shoppers in the agora. “A magical flask,” he spoke in Greek, laughing at the earnest merchant. “Do you hear this foolishness, Ovid? Surely any flask becomes magical if one drinks long enough from it — it transforms one into a drunkard.”
I was hesitant to support Cornelius too strongly, for if we offended the merchant, the tale would never be finished. And yet I, too, could not bring myself to believe him. Surely this backward Greek knew that the myths and tales were just that — stories. Any poet knew the license that a verse might take with the truth, surely? His own Greek poets had rarely ever agreed on anything.
The wine merchant simply gave Cornelius a long, indifferent stare. “Think as you will, Roman,” he said with a shrug. “It is all the same to me. Drink from the Amphora of Dionysus, and be transformed. Then, in moments, it is filled again.”
“Tell me, Nikandros,” Cornelius said, “does Dionysus himself come to fill it for you? A fine relic that would be for a wine merchant. How much wine would you sell then?”
“It is certainly true, whether you credit it or not,” Nikandros said stubbornly. “My grandfather’s grandfather saw it for himself in Corinth.”
“More foolishness,” said Cornelius. “Corinth was plundered over a century ago. If there had been a magical amphora there, we would have taken it back to Rome, eh, Ovid?”
I laughed, but not too vigorously; I did not wish the wine merchant to abandon his tale in the face of our united mockery. In the back of my mind, I had begun contemplating a poem that might encompass all of the metamorphoses of Greek myth, and this one was new to me. I determined not to let the details escape our attention. As Cornelius’s sarcasm did not please Nikandros, I attempted to encourage further answers from him with a more pleasant demeanor. “What could have happened to the Amphora, my friend?” I asked him. “Might it have been left behind in Corinth by the legions?”
The notion that the army might have overlooked captured treasure made Cornelius snigger, but I ignored him and remained attentive as the wine merchant explained, “My grandfather’s grandfather said the Amphora was taken to Syracuse, where the Corinthians still had allies. I was always told as a boy that the Amphora looked like a mere bottle, and had no special magic, unless one knew its secret. Your Roman plunderers would never have known it was anything but ordinary.”
Cornelius at once began to laugh loudly. “A worthy story, noble merchant,” he said, spreading his palms in a gesture of respect, but mockingly. “Such a tale compels me to buy two amphorae of your best date wine. But mind that I will pay no extra for magic spells.”
We purchased the wine from Nikandros at what were surely inflated prices. The earnest little merchant never resumed his story, so we left the agora with an unfinished tale.
“Why did you mock him, Cornelius?” I asked him in Latin as we departed the acropolis with our purchases. “Was it not our purpose to come to Athens to hear the tales of locals?”
“Poems and myths, yes,” Cornelius said, “but not the idle gossip of a wine-addled Athenian. Mark my words, Ovid: that drunken fool was moments away from selling us the very flask itself, fifty drachma at the least. Surely he sells the Amphora of Dionysus to a hundred credulous idiots a day. Did you not see the woman in the agora selling the tunic that Diana had left beside the pool as she bathed? Or the grocer beside her that was selling the golden apples of Atalanta?”
I agreed that Cornelius may have been correct, but privately I wondered.
We squandered an idle summer in Athens, enjoying the warm weather and seeing as many outdoor performances as we could. The amphitheaters of Athens had seen better days, and better playwrights, but we saw enough of the old productions to fill our scrolls with notes twice over. When it came time to depart, Cornelius favored the idea of returning directly to Rome. I, on the other hand, still dreaded the life of dreary public service that awaited me in the Eternal City, and I suggested we try Sicily. Cornelius declined, and I went on to that island alone.
Sicily belongs to Rome now, but it hadn’t always. Messana had been taken under the eagle’s wing during our battles against Carthage, and slowly we had expanded our rule of the island until at last we had conquered it all. It hadn’t been easy, as General Marcellus had attested.
For a year I lived in Sicily, crossing the island from Messana to Palermo to Syracuse, and back again. It had all been Greek once, and they still told tales which interested me. I continued to take notes on everything I heard, and spent my evenings composing verse. Once I returned home, I would have to take up my father’s yoke, but here I was free to pursue a life of poetry under Thalia’s gentle rod.
Periodically, I heard whispers of the Bacchic Cordial, and diligently I copied them down. The Cordial was said to be a narrow pitcher of unstained alabaster one cubit tall, carved at the fore into the likeness of a voluptuous gowned maiden holding the spout above her head, and with a plain curved handle. The poets and tale-spinners knew it well, and each described it likewise. It had arrived into Syracuse out of Corinth, but no two stories agreed where the Cordial had been taken from there: back to Corinth, on toward Rome, east to Alexandria, or even to distant Parthia.
One thing I now knew about the Cordial, for on this point every tale was in accord: one drink of the fig wine from its depths, and any man alive would become a woman. So, thought I, as I affixed this into my memory: this explains why the Maenads loved the pitcher so. The mad women of Dionysus, who drank to his health, whose madness was legendary, perhaps had been neither mad nor women.
In Aprilis of the year 729 from the founding of the City, I returned, sun-browned and refreshed, and determined to face my future as a servant of the people. I had my verses, and my research, which might occupy my evenings and idle days, but henceforth my primary duty would be as a judge.
First, before bending to that task, I pursued Cornelius so I might inform him of my discoveries in Sicily. In the year since he had returned, Cornelius had begun to pen some verses of his own, an expansion upon the prelude to Homer’s Iliad, which had proved quite popular. When I cornered him on the Via Iugarius near the Temple of Jupiter, I advised him what the poets of Sicily had told me about Bacchus and the fig wine.
“You’re still chasing after that Cordial, eh, Ovid?” Cornelius asked me.
“It may exist still,” I assured him. “It has not yet passed out of living memory. All we have to do is discover it.”
“It may exist still,” I assured him. “It has not yet passed out of living memory. All we have to do is discover it.”
“And then what, Big-Nose?” he asked me, gently mocking. “I have no intention of making myself a woman. Why would I want such a treasure? No, Ovid, you had better keep it to yourself, if you ever find it.”
Also upon returning to Rome, I visited my brother Gaius Ovidius, who welcomed me back to civilized lands. He inquired after the weather in Athens, gave me all the latest news and politics of the Forum, and aimed me precisely at the patron I would want to visit in order to further my career in law: one Paullus Fabius Maximus.
“I will visit him tomorrow morning,” I promised.
“I will visit him tomorrow morning,” I promised.
“Not tomorrow,” Gaius said to me sternly. “Father will wish to see you first. I have heard him often lamenting at your long absence. You have been away from Rome for more than a year. A tour of the Mediterranean he promised you, not a permanent vacation there.”
“As soon as I am able,” I said, and I meant it. I had returned to the City with the every intention of obedience to his wishes.
Father was the picture of elegance and propriety on the first day of my visit. We reclined in the triclinium and took our lunch, while he asked me what I had learned of civic duty and democracy on my grand tour of the Hellenic colonies. In truth, I had not paid any heed to the subject while abroad. I had learned a minimal amount, more than I had realized, and he seemed satisfied with my data. But he had one inquiry for which I had no answer.
“Publius,” he said sharply one day during my visit, “how is your wife?”
To this I could only stammer. “I divorced her, Father,” I explained, “before I began my expedition to Athens.” It was the best answer I could devise, for it was the truth; when I left Rome I had been but sixteen, and my marriage then had been ill-advised. At that age I had been unprepared for matrimony.
“Publius Ovidius,” he said, and his voice was stern, “you are a boy no longer. You must have a wife. That is the proper thing to do. Caesar Augustus has decreed that every man between twenty-five and sixty be married, and every woman over twenty. You are only eighteen, but you are about to enter the service of Rome, and your future will be determined by the diligence by which you adhere to the laws and customs of your peers.”
“But father,” I objected, “I have no prospects for a wife. I haven’t even been in Rome a week—”
“That is your own doing,” my father reminded me. “As it happens, I have been inquiring on your behalf. There is a woman available to you, whose father already approves of the match. Romance her, marry her, and tend to your duty.”
“I don’t know her, father! Must it be so soon?” I asked.
“Yes, it must, Publius,” he said. “Duty first. You will have time later to learn the arts of love.”
Her name was Geminia Flavia, and when she became my bride, she was known as Geminia Flavia Nasi. Her father, Manius Geminius, had also compelled her to marry, so if we were not a happy couple, at least we were united in equal unhappiness. I know now that Flavia was a special woman in many respects, but we did not begin with love. We learned love over the year that followed, but not enough to hold us together. For this, I must consider Flavia blameless, for our marriage was not her decision. I know who bears the blame for that.
From Aprilis through the month of Iulius, I held my position on the body of centumviri, giving my judgments whenever I was selected among the five to represent the court. In the evenings I composed poetry that would soon become Ars Amatoria. It was just as my father had said: I must learn the Art of Love, and how better a way to do that, than to hear it from my Muse?
Though we served together as judges, never did my brother Gaius serve with me on any court. The random lots by which our names were drawn conspired against it. Nevertheless, we found time to consult together in private.
Often Flavia and I were called to an early supper, which Gaius served at four, following the afternoon baths. There at his modest residence, an insula on the ground floor near the Aqua Virgo, I met his wife, and he mine; and we discussed the issues of the day. My brother and I reclined each to a couch; our wives sat in chairs opposite us, as was formal and proper. While slaves served supper, Gaius communicated the information he had accumulated during his tenure, and I regaled them with tales of my adventures abroad.
Eventually the topic one evening turned to the gods, as they always did in any properly pious household, and soon from there to more barbarous customs. Gaius’s wife Sophia expressed a polite, civilized horror at the Bacchanalia, the wild and degenerate carouse which had been revived under Julius Caesar.
“They say wild women roam the streets at night, in the manner of Maenads,” she reported, her face flushed. “There is an excess of wine, and debauchery of every sort. In the baths, the ladies tell me that the Bacchanalia is a haven for adulteresses and prostitutes.”
“The Senate should take steps to eradicate such practices,” Gaius said stiffly. “It gives the city of Rome a bad name.”
“They have, they have,” Sophia insisted, and I imagined I saw a twinkle in her eye. She was obviously too informed on the subject for discreet disinterest. “The Senate passed laws against it, but the revelers simply will not be stopped.”
Gaius was unmoved. “They shall be stopped,” he said, “I guarantee it. The law allows for the verdict of execution, for any who are apprehended in that crime. Their depravity has expanded since Julius Caesar foolishly — I should say, unwisely reinstated the Bacchanalia. Caesar Augustus has personally made it a priority to restore sound, moral behavior to the citizens of Rome — Bacchus or no Bacchus. Already I have seen two cases before the pentumviri, and I have heard of a third.”
“And were they executed?” I asked, with professional interest, even as Sophia’s face turned pale. The law was now my business, even if it were a much-detested one.
Gaius chewed his lip. “No,” he admitted. “But if the carousing gets any worse, I shall petition my patron to bring the matter up in the Senate.”
My wife Flavia ventured a question. “What would you call their crimes?” she asked of my brother.
“The two cases presented to me,” Gaius said with a certain smug self-admiration — as if he were the only keeper of the law! I thought — “were both of a similar nature. Wild women, both of them; each claimed a husband who was not to be found. We could not prove any adulterous behavior by either of them, but both were clearly guilty of wearing scandalously loose clothing and of public drunkenness. We levied a fine against each husband in absentia and remanded each of them back to her home in custody of the city cohort. We warned them not to appear before the courts again with any unfounded babble about nonexistent men and magic wine.”
I took a moment to compose myself before responding. “Magic wine?” I asked.
“Supposedly, yes,” Gaius snorted. “Can you credit it? They could not be accountable for their actions, they said, because they had drunk wine from a magic cordial. Have you ever heard such a ridiculous story?”
“Cornelius,” I said to my friend urgently in the street the following day, “we must get into the Bacchanalia.”
“Into the Bacchanalia,” he said, “and you a judge? What happened to the probity and dignity of office?” He sounded amused.
Before responding, I examined the faces around us. We were on the street called Clivis Orbius, at the foot of Palatine Hill. The Curia was near. Any one of six hundred Senators may be anywhere around us.
There was nothing for it; I lowered my voice, and said, “They have the Cordial of Bacchus.”
Cornelius Quadratus laughed once, then saw my serious face. “You’re sure?”
I nodded. “It exists.”
“This magic flask,” he mused. “The revelers have it? And they use it? How is it we haven’t seen any proof of it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Perhaps they don’t know what it does. Perhaps they do. My brother has seen two cases before the pentumviri, but the evidence is inconclusive — garbled stories, missing men — I suspect the truth only because I’ve heard the tales from Sicily. In any event, even if the Bacchae have plumbed its secrets, I don’t expect they’d confess it to the courts, do you?”
“I would say not,” Cornelius said. “All right, since your brother knows these cases so well, why don’t you ask him yourself, Ovid?”
“I don’t dare!” I said.
“Ah yes,” he said, “probity and dignity again. The gravitas of judgeship suits you, Big-Nose. And for the same reason, you’re not going to go gallivanting around Rome asking every maiden in the street if she’s a midnight reveler.”
“No, indeed,” I said. “The Bacchanalia is a mystery cult ruled by women; only women will know where and when they celebrate next. Unless we have a confederate on the inside, it can happen at any time, without our least suspicion. I have no such allies, Cornelius, and if you do not, I don’t know what I shall do next.”
Cornelius smiled tolerantly at my passionate desperation. “I do not imagine I know why you desire to find this relic for yourself,” he said. “It seems unusual that you should pursue this magic flask all the way from Athens, for more than a year.”
I desired to explain that a true relic, a bona fide artifact of the gods themselves, would be confirmation that the world in which we lived was more than colonnades and triumphant arches. What poet could aspire more than to examine the works of Heaven itself? But I was unable to speak more than a few stammers before Cornelius held up one hand.
“Disregard that for now, Ovid,” he said. “It is unimportant for the moment. Let us suppose I have the acquaintance of someone who may know more of the Bacchanalia than either of us. Then let us presume she may be convinced to reveal those fatal secrets to one of the centumviri. What shall I tell her, Ovid? What charms could you put into verse that would convert a definite enemy to a cautious ally?”
“The tale of the Bacchic Cordial is told by no other poet in the Republic,” I said fervently, having located my voice. “I have pursued it for a year and I do not resolve to abandon it now. It was created by the gods, Cornelius. If it is real, imagine what we could learn about them.”
He nodded solemnly. “I will tell her that, then. We shall see.”
No comments:
Post a Comment