Ovid Remains Provocative

This is an interesting interview that makes some good points about the timidity (to the point of dishonesty) of 19th century translations. Along the way, though, it provokes an astonishing admission from one of the interviewees.
And also [Ovid's Metamorphoses is] about the only real subject—it’s about power, and it’s about how power transforms, and that is almost the only interesting thing in the world, you know?
Well. I wish the young lady the opportunity to discover some of the other interesting things in the world, but ultimately that will be up to her to decide to pursue or not. Still, how sad -- how shocking -- how impoverished! It is sorrowful to think that someone might say that and mean it.

Still and all, it is an interesting interview. There's a lot of ground it doesn't explore, but exposes for those who might be more interested in it. Ovid remains worth reading, in part because he challenges us to consider a sexual morality so very different from our own. These are, after all, gods engaged in all this sexual violence; and humans, especially women, are expected by the moral order of the universe to suffer it. Yet the people, even the women, are not at all innocents, also engaged in brutal and extractive power, and the Victorians hid that too.
...Let’s talk about Leucothoe. You wrote about that so beautifully; let’s get into the specifics, word by word. That’s another story that stuck with me and flared back to life again when all the Weinstein stuff happened. The sun god comes in while everyone’s weaving; she’s with her friends.

SM: She’s spinning with her slaves, in fact—

JT: Oh f***. God. [Laughs]
They don't discuss Medusa, one of the most famous of the metamorphoses, but it's just as strange to our eyes. Ovid has Perseus recount the story of how she became a Gorgon.
They say that Neptune, lord of the seas, violated [Medusa] in the temple of Minerva. Jupiter’s daughter [i.e., Minerva/Athena] turned away, and hid her chaste eyes behind her aegis. So that it might not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon’s hair to foul snakes.
Athena is one of the virgin goddesses. Somehow Medusa being raped in her temple violates her, Athena's, sense of modesty or chastity. Medusa is punished for this violation of Athena's sensibilities, even though it was a god who was acting on her against her will. Neptune, of course, is not punished; he is immortal, as beyond human morality as he is beyond human mortality. Medusa is horribly transformed to punish her for offending the gods, but there was no way for her not to offend.

In a way this is worth exploring less in terms of raw power, or even in terms of male and female archetypes, than in terms of the relationship between the human and the divine that the Romans experienced. The divine are not human in a surprising way, given that we often think of the Greco-Roman gods as being anthropomorphic. The Judaeo-Christian God, though ultimately all-powerful to a degree that makes even ordinary language inapplicable except equivocally, turns out to have a more direct relationship to human morality. As we see in Sodom and Gormorrah, Abraham can argue with him and prevail. As Jesus, there is a capacity for perfectly human pity and engagement. The God Neptune, the Sea, is not human but only looks human. The Sea does with humans whatever it wishes, on whatever inscrutable whim, and they alone suffer for it.

But the sea is one of the beautiful things, and one of the interesting ones. It is not only its power that makes it so, though its power can be awesome to behold.

6 comments:

David Foster said...

"it’s about how power transforms, and that is almost the only interesting thing in the world, you know?"

What a pathetic view of life.

I've observed that this view is unwholesomely common among academics:...I actually wrote a post called 'Professors and the Pornography of Power'...

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56415.html

...and was surprised to see that this woman isn't in academia. But maybe she allowed herself to be unduly influenced by same.

Lars Walker said...

There's a real jump in moral sense apparent here. People are punished, not for what they do, but for being stained in some way, even unwittingly. Such things happen in the Old Testament too, but there's a progression of understanding there. The biblical turning points (like David condemning a man "because he had no pity," and a king of Israel declaring that no one might be punished for his father's sin) look so ordinary to us that we miss their revolutionary significance.

Eric Blair said...

Oh, but it all is about power. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness is big power. People just don't get what they have. Yon academic lady might be considering only power over others, but all of us seek power over ourselves, for many ends.

We cannot know what Ovid's writing meant to his contemporaries, though as my translation mentions in the introduction that other Roman writers and poets appear to be familiar with him, we also have to understand that his writings were read in a much smaller circle than today even, and it's likely a happy accident that any his works survived. You can read it and get something out of it, but the academic is making all the classic mistakes, by viewing the past as thought it is today. She ought to know better.

Grim said...

Power over the self is important. But death is interesting, just as it robs all power from the world. The sea is interesting. Physics is, though I guess some might call it a study of powers read as forces.

Love is. Beauty is. There’s no power over beauty. It comes and goes just as it does. But it’s interesting, even if no one had any power over it.

ymarsakar said...

There's more corruption of hte Roman/Greek texts than there is in the Old/New Testament books.

That's because there are far more credible sources for the scripture books than there are of Ancient Roman/Greek texts.

And those texts cannot be traced to the first century AD or the 5th century BC. Who knows what got changed by corrupt humans looking to "edit" something to make it sound more interesting or more expedient.

The Torah, one of the most stringent texts transmitted by the Hebrews and Jews (Jews are Tribe of Benjamine half and Judah, they are not the twelve tribes), was shown to have been corrupted in several spots by human editors, when the Caves of Qumran showed that there's a discrepancy between Deuteronomy 32 from the Masoretic to the Qumran version.

Strangely enough Isaiah is the most complete and accurate text. Maybe the fact that he was cryptic as heck, helped. Nobody knew what he was talking about, so nobody knew how to edit it.

ymarsakar said...

The Ancients, including the Hebrew sacrifice of a Judas sacrificial goat of Azazel, as well as the Japanese and Zoroastrian conception of "sin" is very strange. Or rather, it does not mean what we think it means. Or rather, it sorta means a combination of Original Sin and contamination on a spiritual and genetic level.

This contamination is seen as caused by your fate or existence, and thus it reverses cause and effect. When bad things happen to you, that is due to your "sin", not due to the moral agency of whatever.

It's a magical conflux of pre quantum entanglement and manifestation ideas exemplified through superstition, religious worship, and cultural power hierarchies.

It's whole modern American rape argument. Who is at fault? And even if someone is at fault, who is at fault for talking about it and what should be done about the guy talking about it?

It's like a whole new meta level of killing the messenger.