scire futura dedit: Metamorphoses 3.316 - 38 as a pronouncement of Ovidian poetics

Introduction

There is good reason as to why Ovid has endured as arguably the most celebrated and captivating poet of the classical world. Living and writing during the reign of Augustus from 43 BC to 17/18 AD, his unpredictably meandering meditations on love and power through traditionally sidelined voices, inflected with crass humour, have lent themselves to the European artistic imagination from the Middle Ages right up to postmodernity. Ovid haunts our libraries and galleries in figurations of nature, art, gender and a constant sexuality that vitalises his poetic realm with an endless fluidity of identity and form – this is arguably most prevalent in his magnum opus, the Metamorphoses, which is the most important sources of classical mythology today. 

The Metamorphoses

This 15-book poem explores the seemingly endless corporeal transformation of Graeco-Roman gods and heroes through orbiting forces of desire, wrath, defiance, order, curiosity, ignorance and many more in its 250+ stories which flow into each other with frequently tenuous connecting threads. In depicting these transformations, Ovid spans the timeline of classical literary history, from mankind’s creation to the birth of the gods, Homer’s Trojan War and closing on the deification of Julius Caesar. However, the Metamorphoses is not historiography... well, sort of. Ovid relays a mythological history through frequent semantics of his historian contemporaries. But it’s also an epic in the poetic metre of dactylic hexameter. Yet, compared to other epics, its generic hallmarks of heroism and the battlefield pale as desire and the conventions of love elegy permeate Ovid’s verse. And the Metamorphoses is dramatic with long speeches that echo Shakespearian soliloquies – it is no wonder that Ovid was the blueprint for Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Genre is a complex question for this poem as Ovid oscillates, integrates and transforms forms with the same intensity as the bodily transformations in his narratives.      

Background to Tiresias

The Tiresias episode serves as a pronouncement of these unique and beloved Ovidian poetics, encompassing an underlying sexuality with transformations of gender and genre in the extension of a traditionally minor character’s narrative. It is situated in Book 3 as part of the cursed House of Thebes narrative following the birth of the god Bacchus from a womb sewn to Jupiter’s thigh. Tiresias is famously a gender-hybrid blind prophet of both the Greek epic and lyric traditions: in the Odyssey, he reveals to Odysseus how he might return home from Troy while, in Callimachus’ oeuvre, we learn that his blindness stems from witnessing naked Athena bathing. Contextually, therefore, he is immediately appropriate for Ovid’s interests as he blurs gender and, rather comically, the identities of the epic prophet and lyrical voyeur. 

Lines 3.316 - 23

The opening with the succinct connective ‘dumque ea’ (3.316) establishes ideas of transition from the previous narrative and a likely foreshadowing of the generic transformation to come in Tiresias’ characterisation: instantly, we are in a space of flux. Ovid’s language choices expand this space into generic ambiguity as ‘memorant’ (3.318) evokes historiography, ‘vacuaque’ (3.319) is a characteristically Horacian strain of lyrical lovelessness, all while the epic metre persists. The chaotic language order immediately reflects intoxication as Jupiter is ‘diffusum nectare’ (3.318), yet simultaneously, its generic amalgamation and distortion. Considering alcohol is a key component to Plato’s Symposium where adult men would drink together to consolidate their elite male identity, Ovid’s ‘iocos’ over the explicitly feminine ‘voluptas’ ‘vestra’ (3.320-21) appears to destabilise both gender binaries and traditional philosophical constitutions: perhaps this is a layered critique of the Augustan regime which enforced strict gender roles and regulations of sexuality the defiance of which allegedly precipitated Ovid’s own exile. If so, then this represents a divergence too from the tradition of Roman epic wherein Virgil’s Aeneid explicitly endorses and celebrates Augustan rule. 

Such political points resonate as judicial language becomes implicated in ‘negat’ (3.322). Ovid follows this with a juxtaposing pun conflating justice and sexual pleasure in ‘placuit’ (3.322): the underlying sexuality of his poetics comedically here complicates genre and gender roles (as it is Juno who defends the traditional order in Jupiter’s dissatisfaction among ‘maribus’ (3.321)). It is through this generic distortion that we witness the aetiology of Tiresias’ hybridity of gender – a strange, yet somehow fitting connection that only Ovid could successfully achieve. 

Lines 3.324 - 31

The language of epic permeates Tiresias’ interaction with the snakes as ‘violaverat’, ‘ictu’ (3.325) and ‘percussis’ (3.330) recall activity on the battlefield. Moreover, ‘mirabile’ (3.326) almost directly alludes to the Virgilian phrase ‘mirabile dictu’ whereby the gods interfere to help Aeneas. However, Ovid is not depicting an epic battle or divine guidance but rather a confused man who happens to strike two snakes ‘coeuntia’ (3.324) and (mirabile) becomes a woman. Considering epic is the genre of masculine violence, honour and identity, his language choices could not be more inappropriate in heightening the scene’s comedy. Moreover, the allusion to the Aeneid could further the teased scepticism of Augustan legislation: Virgil portrays Aeneas as Augustus’ direct ancestor, making the events ‘mirabile dictu’ culminate in his authority which, in the case of gender roles, involved the strict Leges Juliae. Ovid’s ‘deque viro factus (mirabile) femina’ (3.326) directly opposes such a notion of binary gender, the epic tradition and feasibly therefore Augustan authority. The manner in which this is realised is as ambiguous and strange as the comedic paradox presented (‘factus femina’), suggesting that maybe Ovid just wants to have some fun in ways perhaps not socially acceptable. We must remember that his exile could have been due to his thematic explorations and implicit encouragement of forbidden adultery in the Ars Amatoria. All these complications, contexts and entanglements register in the sexually tessellating word order: 

‘nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva

corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu.’ (3.324-25)

Lines 3.332-38

The closing and resolution of the episode furthers these poetic strategies as the comedy ‘de lite iocosa’ (3.332) is conflated with a serious judicial lexis in ‘arbiter’ and ‘firmat’ (3.332-33). Juno’s implied loyalty to tradition becomes manifest in the use of the patronymic ‘Saturnia’ (3.333) to suggest that she upholds ideas of the patriarchal law-court, family structure and the gender politics of the epic genre (where it is emphatic that men experience the world on voyages or in battles while the women wait at home). Perhaps her acceptance of this position contributes to the self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘fertur doluisse’ (3.334), posing the question of the value in tradition, binaries and the possibility of female power within these structures as her damnation of Tiresias restores order. In contrast, Jupiter remains ‘pater omnipotens’ (3.336) and bestows Tiresias ‘honore’ (3.338) despite both their transgressions – a humorous end to the aetiology, yet one that makes us question after all the transformations of genre, gender and expectations: can we ever truly resist the authority of traditions and binaries? Ultimately, I think that was a key question of Ovid’s time both as an epic poet in the aftermath of the patriotic Aeneid and Homeric epics, but also as a victim of Augustus’ rigid moral regulations of gender and sexuality.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.316-38

dumque ea per terras fatali lege geruntur

tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi,

forte Iovem memorant diffusum nectare curas

seposuisse graves vacuaque agitasse remissos

cum Iunone iocos et “maior vestra profecto est,

quam quae contingit maribus” dixisse “voluptas.”

illa negat. placuit quae sit sententia docti

quaerere Tiresiae: Venus huic erat utraque nota.

nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva

corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu

deque viro factus (mirabile) femina septem

egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem

vidit, et “est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae”

dixit, “ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,

nunc quoque vos feriam.” percussis anguibus isdem

forma prior rediit, genetivaque venit imago.

arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa

dicta Iovis firmat: gravius Saturnia iusto

nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique

iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte;

at pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam

facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto

scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.

A queer, Butlerian translation by James Carney

And while his upbringing was tended to by the law of fate on earth,

and the cradle of twice-born Bacchus was safe,

by chance, sources recall that nectar-flushed Jove

aborted his swollen worries, and performed soft flirtation

with barren Juno, and he said ‘yours is undoubtedly more majestic

than that which skims husbands. Pleasure.’

She is in denial. It is arousing to discover 

what the palate of colourful Tiresias might be:

Venus has illuminated sex to him on both wings. 

For in a green forest, he slashed two copulating bodies

of great snakes with the crack of a stick; 

and from a man, a miraculous woman is crafted,

and she performed for seven Autumns. In the eighth, she saw the same snakes again

and said, ‘if the power in your tear is so powerful 

that it might transform the fate of the tending into the opposite,

now I will strike you again.’ After the same snakes were impaled

the previous form returned, and an unsullied disposition emerged.  

Therefore, this judge, who was charmed for the playful lawsuit 

confirmed Jove’s arguments: more harshly than by legality, Saturn’s daughter

was brought to grief, and not in proportion to the performances, 

and she cursed the bright eyes of mature Tiresias with eternal darkness.

But illustrious Jove (for it is not licensed for each god

to corrupt what another god has done), instead of the hacked eye,

gifted Tiresias knowledge of the future, and he lightened the punishment with the honour. 

Notes on the translation

In translating this episode, I wanted primarily to explore the creative potential of Ovid’s ambiguity of gender and accentuate the erotic quality of its presentation, which I find frequently overlooked in other translations. Maybe this has to do with the Met’s history of adaptation to medieval Christian allegory or classical literature’s place in conservative Victorian pedagogy. I was inspired specifically by two primary writers: the queer literary theorist Judith Butler and the non-binary poet Kae Tempest. 

Butler conceives of gender as a social construct coded as masculine or feminine that we perform, much like theatre actors. Her theories have been influential in recognising and dismantling often oppressive gender binaries. I wanted to recognise her influence on my own thought and exploit the connections I found between her theory and Ovid’s language choices. This started for me with ‘egerat’ (3.327) which comes from the verb ‘agere.’ ‘Agere’ can mean ‘to do’, ‘to drive’, ‘to pass time’ but, crucially, ‘to act.’ It has theatrical connotations. Ovid deploys the perfect tense of the verb to describe Tiresias’ experience as a woman, which is feasibly prophetic of Butler’s theory if we interpret the verb in terms of performance. From this telling choice of verb, I considered the possibility of further Butlerian readings to fascinating results. 

As Tiresias transforms ‘deque viro’, he is ‘factus femina’ (3.326) - ‘factus’ can be a deponent verb meaning ‘became’ or ‘made.’ The latter meaning is significant – it implies that gender is constructed. However, ‘factus’ could also be verbally adjectival here acting almost like a Homeric epithet that traditionally demarcates admiral male qualities or exemplary women in epic, in relation to their male partners. Yet here its masculine form is paired jarringly with the feminine ‘femina’ translating as ‘(masculine) crafted woman.’ The ambiguity of gender both grammatically and the potential epithetic function transferred to a woman independently emphasises gender’s fluidity, demonstrating ample scope for a Butlerian reading. I reflected this in my translation by referring to Tiresias’ behaviours and experiences through theatrical semantics. 

The idea that ‘factus’ could be epithetic (mirabile) made me think of Kae Tempest’s recent collection Hold Your Own where they explore their non-binary gender identity through the story of Tiresias. Tempest depicts the performance of gender, their queer sexuality and coming of age in late-stage capitalism as a brutal process of raw survival, oscillating between didactic polemics and intimately sexual love poems. As the US Supreme Court has legalised discrimination against LGBT+ people, the UK government and media repeatedly spread misinformation about transgender people, and violence against queer youth reaches unprecedented heights, I thought it important to emphasise the epic quality of Ovid’s poetry. Exploring one’s identity can be a battle, so layer on the epithets like ‘nectar-flushed’ and battle imagery in ‘slashed’ and ‘impaled’!

Tempest’s collection closes with three socially critical poems decrying the diagnosis of difference outside rich, white heteronormativity institutionalised in capitalism. The ironically titled ‘Radical Empathy’ exhibits how political apathy violates possibilities of future peace, equality and justice through the prophetic speaker’s visceral corporeality: 

‘Why should I concern myself with people that I’ve never met?

And no one’s got my back, so why should I have theirs?

My heart throws its head against my ribs,

It’s denting every bone.’

Tempest’s interpretation of Tiresias in terms of his acquired social consciousness through queer experiences intrigued me as a concept, with his blindness being deliberately defensive because of alienation: in the final poem ‘Prophet’, they write ‘All my life I’ve watched men wrestle/Stealing land to fly their flags./He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag.’ I wanted to revisit the Ovidian original with a perspective of love and kindness for this character whom Tempest receives as troubled. To match the absence of ‘Radical Empathy’ in contemporary crises of cruel capitalism, I accentuated Ovid’s erotic undertones to advocate for exploration, transformation, and power of identity to come from a place of love that we, hopefully, as a global community can actualise. Abort the ‘swollen worries’ as is your choice, and be aroused to discover your ‘colourful palates’!