The Violent Gods

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a new translation of Ovid.

One day in the thirteenth century, James I of Aragon, not only a great conqueror but a king famous for his powers of memory, made a revealing slip: "We got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam quaerere parta tueri."

“It takes no less talent to keep what you’ve got than to acquire it”: for a crusading medieval monarch, what more convenient justification for territorial consolidation could there be than “Sacred Scripture”?

The problem is that that line of Latin doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. It comes, rather, from a notoriously risqué book of poems, published during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, whose narrator doles out advice on how to seduce women—preferably married ones.... That these lines of Roman erotic verse had become indistinguishable from Scripture by the Middle Ages isn’t really all that surprising. More than those of any other poet of ancient Rome, the works of Publius Ovidius Naso—we know him as Ovid—have insinuated themselves into the mind of Europe, influencing its literature, art, and music.

The translation is of the Metamorphoses, a long poem that introduces new twists to what were already old stories. For example, the story of Medusa was ancient even then; Ovid's new variation turns the goddess Athena ("Minerva" to the Romans) into a bad actor, who executes the transformation of a beautiful young woman into a monster in order to punish the woman for having resisted a divine rape by Poseidon ("Neptune," of course, for the Romans; (or, given that Athena was a virgin goddess, it may have been that Medusa failed to resist the rape; there is some scholarly debate about exactly what it was that offended Athena, the sex or the mortal defiance of a divine will).

That doesn't turn up in the review, but a lot of similar stories made the book.

Above all, Ovid’s presentation of Jove—the king of the gods and the obvious counterpart of Augustus himself—is almost uniformly disparaging in its contempt for the god’s use of his power. The Metamorphoses often reads like a catalogue of Jove’s violent offenses: Jove transforming himself into a bull in order to abduct Europa, Jove becoming a swan to get at Leda, Jove taking the form of an eagle in order to snatch up Ganymede....

In the Arachne episode, Minerva weaves a tapestry that celebrates her victory over Neptune, her uncle, in a long-ago contest for possession of Athens—an egotistical bit of divine P.R. Arachne’s weaving, by contrast, depicts nine rapes committed by Jove, six by Neptune, a few by Apollo and Bacchus, and one by Saturn, Jove’s father. 

The new translation abandons 19th and 20th century habits of euphemizing what exactly these gods were doing.  Numerous chapters are, the reviewer notes, titled in the form "X Rapes Y." The translator, Stephanie McCarter, writes:

The inclusion of so many stories of rape in the epic suggests, in fact, that Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation. . . . To read Ovid with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality—allows us to scrutinize our own thorny relationship with the past and with the ambivalent inheritance we have received from it. To wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination.

A fair point. Ovid arguably used this not merely to play with violence, but to criticize his (very dangerous) political overlords. Who could object to being likened to a god, and the highest of gods in your pantheon, no less than Jove himself? When Ovid celebrates Augustus as being like Jove, he is not -- or not merely -- paying a compliment.