Metamorphoses: “He dropped like an ox/ Slaughtered in sacrifice”

1/ I don’t know if classical literature is more violent—graphic—than modern literature, but Metamorphoses is full of violent images. 

“… And, in his madness hunting her, tracked down

His wife and snatched Learchus from her arms, 

His little laughing son with hands outstretched, 

And wildly smashed the baby’s head against 

A granite block…” 

(Book 4)

(translated by A. D. Melville) 

Jeez. That’s from the myth of Athamas and Ino.

The myth of Perseus, who kills a monster and rescues Andromeda from the rocks and has to fight a bunch of men who want Andromeda and the kingdom, is reminiscent of the killings in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Full of vivid, horrible details. 

“Even so the weapon found a mark and struck 

Rhoetus full on the forehead. Down he fell 

And, as the iron was dragged out of his skull, 

His heels drummed on the ground and his red blood

Spattered the banquet board…” 

(Book 5) 

More graphic: 

“… this time, as he bent

The spring crescent, Perseus seized a brand

That smoked upon the altar there, and struck 

The lad and smashed his face to shattered bones.” 

(ibid.) 

The quote in the headline comes from the same scene. 

However, Ovid is not Seneca. Ovid may depict extreme violence, like Homer and Sophocles do, but Seneca seems to have a perverse delight in gore. When Ovid tells the myth of Niobe, who mocks the gods and has to see all her 7 sons and 7 daughters killed, he describes the killings quickly—some of the sons die from a single arrow, the deaths of the sisters are more or less grouped together—one can guess that Seneca would expand and add more horrific details. For instance, when Seneca retells the myth of Oedipus (creating a play much inferior to Sophocles’s version), he adds a scene of a ritual sacrifice, with gory visions:  

“MANTO Father, what is this?

Instead of gently quivering as they should,

They make my whole hand shake; there is fresh blood

Proceeding from the veins. The heart is shrunken,

Withered, and hardly to be seen; the veins

Are livid; part of the lungs is missing,

The liver putrid, oozing with black gall.

And here – always an omen boding ill

For monarchy – two heads of swollen flesh

In equal masses rise, each mass cut off

And covered with a fine transparent membrane,

As if refusing to conceal its secret.

On the ill-omened side the flesh is thick

And firm, with seven veins, whose backward course

Is stopped by an obstruction in their way.

The natural order of the parts is changed,

The organs all awry and out of place.

On the right side there is no breathing lung

Alive with blood, no heart upon the left;

I find no folds of fat gently enclosing

The inner organs; womb and genitals

Are twisted and deformed. And what is this –

This hard protuberance in the belly? Monstrous!

A foetus in a virgin heifer’s womb,

And out of place – a swelling in the body

Where none should be. It moves its limbs and whimpers

Twitching convulsively its feeble frame.

The flesh is blackened with the livid gore.…

And now the grossly mutilated beasts

Are trying to move; a gaping trunk rears up

As if to attack the servers with its horns.…

The entrails seem to run out of my hands.

That sound you hear is not the bellowing

Of cattle, not the cry of frightened beasts;

It is the fire that roars upon the altars,

The hearth itself that quakes.” 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

I’m giving you the whole speech so you can see how gross it is, but the sacrifice scene is longer. 

The main difference between Ovid and Seneca is vision: despite the violence, despite the rapes, despite the brutal acts, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses I find a lightness of touch and a kind of transcendence that I don’t see in Seneca’s plays. 

2/ However, Ovid’s version of the myth of Bacchus and Pentheus, because much shorter, is not as nightmarish and disturbing as The Bacchae by Euripides. I can’t claim to understand The Bacchae, having read it once, but it is a discomforting, haunting play and I can see why it’s said to be Euripides’s greatest play. 

3/ Now that I’m reading Ovid, I’m starting to think there’s something to the theory—is it Jonathan Bate’s?—that Shakespeare swaps the locations in The Winter’s Tale, erroneously giving Bohemia a coast, in order to reinforce the association of Perdita with Proserpina, who is taken by force from Sicily. 

“… Here Proserpine  

Was playing in a glade and picking flowers, 

Pansies and lilies, with a child’s delight, 

Filling her basket and her lap to gather

More than the other girls, when, in a trice, 

Dis saw her, loved her, carried her away…” 

(Book 5)

The scene of Perdita with the flowers evokes the image of Prosperina—she even directly names her. And her happy scene, as in Ovid, is interrupted by the violence of a man. 

The rape of Proserpina, by Nicolas Mignard. 

Now look at these lines in Metamorphoses: 

“Behold, the daughter I have sought so long 

Is found…” 

(ibid.) 

Do they not make you think of The Winter’s Tale? 

4/ Metamorphoses is a vast, colourful poem, but there are a few recurring themes: the lust of the male gods (especially Jove, the Roman equivalent of Zeus), the jealousy of Juno (Hera), the hubris of human beings, and the capriciousness of the gods. 

The myth of Arachne is one of my favourites in Ovid. 

PS: I’m currently in the US, on a work trip.