The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth

M. Alganza Roldán - P. Papadopoulou (eds.) LA MITOLOGÍA GRIEGA EN LA TRADICIÓN LITERARIA: DE LA ANTIGÜEDAD A LA GRECIA CONTEMPORÁNEA Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas ÍNDICE Prólogo ........................................................................................................................ 11 Introducción ............................................................................................................. 15 I. Los mitos en la literatura antigua: historia, retórica y mitografía La recepción de los mitos en la primera mitografía Jordi Pàmias........................................................................................................ 23 El mito de Diomedes en los libros V y VI de la Geografía de Estrabón: colonización y propaganda imperial José Vela Tejada ................................................................................................ 35 El mito en la escuela griega: el testimonio de los rétores José Antonio Fernández Delgado ................................................................ 51 La mitología clásica en el Contra el cínico Heraclio del emperador Juliano Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas ............................................................................. 67 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Greta Hawes ............................................................................................................. 79 Récit mythographique et intrigues. Le cas d’ Antoninus Liberalis Charles Delattre ................................................................................................. 99 II. Tradición mitográfica medieval y humanista La mitología clásica en el Liber monstrorum Álvaro Ibáñez Chacón .................................................................................. 123 Théologie poétique et syncrétisme mythographique chez Boccace Françoise Graziani ....................................................................................... 145 Mitos de las Metamorfosis de Ovidio en el comentario de Iacobus Pontanus María Consuelo Álvarez Morán - Rosa María Iglesias Montiel ..... 165 Juan Tzetzes, exégeta de Paléfato Minerva Alganza Roldán ............................................................................. 181 III.La mitología en Bizancio ... “ et le mythe s’est fait histoire ”. Des interprétations byzantines du passé mythique Paolo Odorico .................................................................................................. 207 Mitología legendaria de Constantinopla Encarnación Motos Guirao ........................................................................ 229 Héroes mitológicos y héroes bizantinos. Mitología griega y orígenes del caballero cristiano bizantino en los procesos de heroificación de Juan Troglita, Belisario y Heraclio (530-630) José Soto Chica ................................................................................................ 247 La mitología en la obra de Jorge de Pisidia Gonzalo Espejo Jáimez ................................................................................. 265 La mitología en la Alexiada de Ana Comnena Mª Salud Baldrich López ............................................................................. 293 El testimonio de León Diácono sobre los tauroescitas y Aquiles Matilde Casas Olea ........................................................................................ 303 La mitología como elemento literario en la novela bizantina Moschos Morfakidis Filactós ..................................................................... 319 IV. Mitos griegos en las literaturas europeas contemporáneas La mitología grecolatina en la poesía de la revista Grecia (1918-1920) Antonio Barnés Vázquez .............................................................................. 335 La actualización mítica como recurso compositivo en los Epigramas helenísticos de Gabriel Celaya Rafael J. Gallé Cejudo .................................................................................... 357 Las figuras mitológicas como representación del dolor nacional en la obra poética de Ioanna Tsatsos Maila García-Amorós ................................................................................... 377 El mito griego en la obra de Ángelos Sikelianós Panagiota Papadopoulou ........................................................................... 393 La literatura de mujeres después de la Dictadura de los Coroneles: antiguos mitos y censura Theodora Polychrou ..................................................................................... 407 De Eurípides a Kakoyiannis: el destino de la mujer después de una guerra (Hécuba, Casandra, Andrómaca y Helena) Leonor Pérez Gómez ..................................................................................... 419 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Greta Hawes* Abstract Comparison of ancient accounts of the myth of Actaeon shows that, while the nature of his offense differs markedly between sources, the form of his death is stable throughout antiquity. This chapter uses observations from Nick Lowe and Ada Neschke-Hentschke about the paradigmatic functioning of myths to consider how the inevitability of Actaeon’s end could be harnessed to lend specific narrative colouring to retellings. It uses Ovid’s account of Actaeon in the Metamorphoses to examine the broader ancient tradition, arguing that the identification of Actaeon by name functioned in a meta-poetic manner to hasten his death, and that the inevitability of this death brought with it implicit consideration of the workings of justice in the mythic story-world. Key Words: Actaeon, Ovid, paradigm, divine justice, exemplum. Introduction: how stories end A good story, so the saying goes, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end1. Stories thus have a basic linearity: we expect narrated events to take place sequentially, in proper order, just as they do in reality. Take the story of Actaeon. Its beginning establishes the scene: Actaeon, a grandson of Camus, was an avid hunter. Its middle raises the stakes: one day he did something to anger the gods. And its end follows on logically: he was transformed into a stag and killed by his * Australian National University. This research has been funded by the Project FFI201452203-P (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain). I take this opportunity to thank Prof. John Davidson and Dr Marco Sonzogni, who supervised my masters dissertation on the myth of Actaeon at Victoria University of Wellington many moons ago, and who may recognise some its ideas re-appearing here in –I hope– more mature form. I also thank Fiona Sweet Formiatti, who read carefully through the draft for publication. 1 Although my usage here is deliberately generalising, the formulation derives ultimately from Aristotle’s ideal of the tragic plot: Poetics 1450b24-34. 79 Greta Hawes hounds2. But simultaneously with this syntagmatic rendering, the myth operates on a paradigmatic axis. So, for John Heath, the myth of Actaeon is the story of “a young hunter transformed into a stag and torn to shreds by his own hunting dogs”; to P. M. C. Forbes Irving, its salience resides in “the reversal and disorder of Actaeon’s death”3. These summaries subordinate the sequential linearity of the story to a single recognisable “fact” about it: the latter description reduces the story to its thematic features; the former makes the most pertinent aspect of this hero his death. In doing so, it illustrates Ada NeschkeHentschke’s observation that, quite apart from their narrative instantiations, myths circulated as traditional material recognisable through the pairing of a name (“Actaeon”) with an acte identifiant (“was killed by his own hounds in the form of a stag”)4. In ancient images of Actaeon, this close association is plainly in evidence. Greek artists, almost without exception, depict the hunter at the moment of his death. Their key interest resides in the challenge of representing a hunter-now-prey, and a man-now-stag5. This is a paradigmatic, not syntagmatic, rendering. But in literary sources, the opposite pertains: no extant poetic account before Ovid’s 2 A dénouement is also possible: we learn of the mourning of Actaeon’s parents (e.g. Callim. Hymn 5.107–109, 115–118), the restlessness of his shade (Paus. 9.38.4; Nonn. Dion.5.475– 494) and the fate of the dogs (e.g. P.Oxy 2509, Armenidas FrGH 378 F8, Pollux 5.37). 3 4 Heath (1992) description on blurb; Forbes Irving (1990) 80. Neschke-Hentschke (1987) 53–55: “la base du récit est un seul ou deux actes du personnage qui est ou bien l’acte identifiant du personnage ou acte relié à cet acte identifiant (Oedipe qui a tué son père et épousé sa mère ou/et Oedipe qui a résolu l’énigme de la Sphinx). … Le mythe a été, de tous temps, une représentation de personnages traditionnels qui confère une nouvelle interprétation aux actes qui les identifient. Or, la tradition n’est ni une répétition ni une adaptation extérieure ni une déformation du récit original. La tradition se présente comme une succession de recréations de l’acte identifiant qui est interprété par des récits.” (Emphasis in original.) In his summary of Neschke-Hentschke’s model, Berman (2007) 20–21 uses ‘Actaeon’s violent death’ as an example of an acte identifiant. 5 For discussion of the metamorphosis of Actaeon in Greek vase painting, see FrontisiDucroux (1997); Buxton (2009) 98–107. Two further ancient representations should be noted here: paintings on an external wall flanking a door leading from the garden at the house of Octavius Quartio at Pompeii pair the naked Diana with the death of Actaeon; and an ecphrasis in Apuleius describes a sculptural group which depicts Actaeon spying on the goddess (2.4). In both cases, the illustrations of Actaeon’s “crime” cue the “voyeuristic” viewer / reader to engage personally with the dangers implied in narrative. 80 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Metamorphoses explicitly states that Actaeon was transformed into a stag6; further, the death is typically treated in the most cursory of ways. Poetic attention was lavished most notably on Actaeon’s offence, and herein the major points of variance within our sources. In fragments from the archaic period, Actaeon provokes divine wrath by desiring to marry Semele, whom Zeus wants for himself7. In Euripides, he boasts of being a better hunter than Artemis (Bacch. 337– 341)8. Diodorus records both Euripides’ variant, and the unique idea that he attempted to marry Artemis (4.81.4)9. From Apollodorus (3.4.4), Pausanias (9.2.3), Callimachus (Bath of Pallas 107-118), and Ovid we have the most familiar version, that he saw Artemis naked she was bathing. For the poets the frisson of Actaeon’s story lay in the offence. His punishment, always a given, was overshadowed in narrative terms by whatever Actaeon did to deserve it. My argument is that the relative obscurity of Actaeon’s metamorphosis and death in our literary sources is in fact a mirage; poets could omit Actaeon’s metamorphosis entirely and narrate his death only briefly precisely because they are so closely identified with him. In essence, death is the natural outcome of the mention of his name; his paradigmatic existence makes this part of his story inevitable in syntagmatic terms. This interplay between syntagmatic and paradigmatic forms of myth requires further consideration. Valuable here are the observations 6 This metamorphosis is mentioned only once in pre-Ovidian prose: Palaeph. Peri Apiston 6. 7 These sources are all fragmentary: The story appeared in Hesiod’s Catalogue of women (fr. 217a MW = P. Mich. inv 1447 verso, first published by Renner (1978)), fr. 346 MW), in Acusilaus (fr. 33 FGrH = Apollod. 3.4.4), and in Stesichorus (Paus. 9.2.3). P. Oxy. 2509 and the fragment of verse interpolated into Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca after 3.4.4 perhaps also have archaic origins (see Casanova (1969); Cirio (1977); Janko (1984); West (1985) 88 n. 129 denies the Hesiodic authenticity of the latter fragment.) 8 Several tragedies also told the story of Actaeon, but none survives in enough detail to reveal the offence that he committed. The Suda records plays under the title “Actaeon” by Phrynichus (TGF 3 F 1b), Iophon (TGF 22 T 1a) and Cleophon (TGF 77 T ) 1, of which nothing survives. Two fragments of Aeschylus’ Toxitides (242, 243) suggest that in that tragedy Actaeon was preoccupied with female virginity, but nothing more than that can be said for sure. His Semele included the body of Actaeon on stage, and perhaps discussion of the cause of his death (fr. 221). 9 The variant reappears in late antiquity: e.g. Nonnus, Dion. 5.432-437. 81 Greta Hawes of Nick Lowe regarding how we experience temporal and atemporal models of narrative. Even when we encounter a story in its linear form: … this illusory experience of living the story in time is not the only thing that is going on dynamically as we read. All the while, we are simultaneously building up a mental model of the story as a whole. And unlike the first model, this image of the story is timeless: it includes everything that ‘has happened’ and a good deal that ‘is going to happen’. At the point we have reached in our journey through the text, there are still large areas of the map that are blurred or blank. We know some, but not all, of the events already “past” – who found the body, perhaps, but not yet who committed the murder. We have some idea of some of the things that must still happen: the murderer unmasked, the lovers united, the survivors assigned their just desserts. But we do not yet know how these things are going to happen, or for certain that they can be guaranteed to happen at all. This narrative model does not develop in the timelike way that the text does – as if a curtain were rolling back and exposing everything to view an inch at a time. Rather, its linear development is holographic: from an initial blur to increasing focus and clarity. From the start of our reading, it is a total picture of the story, with successive details filled in as we go along10. A satisfying narrative arc does not, then, merely depend on the formal actions of the narrative, but emerges from an innate sense of the appropriateness of the linear story: What we, as readers, want is for our temporal and atemporal models of the story to coincide; and all the while we read, we are actively on the lookout for ways in which they will ultimately converge11. Lowe’s observations require that the “story” – in its generalised form – exists as an ontologically discrete entity independent of any particular instantiation. It assumes – quite rightly – that every enunciation of a narrative has a communal dimension: it sparks within the reader or listener or viewer some recognition, not necessarily of that exact story, nor precisely of a closely analogous narrative, but of an identifiable story template which necessarily constrains the expected forms of that enunciation. “whole” 10 11 Lowe (2000) 23. Italics in original. Lowe (2000) 24. 82 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Lowe compares the “universes” within which stories operate to games. While we play games, we accept an agreed set of rules; we dwell within a “closed system” in which actions and responses are limited to a predictable subset of the many more possible ones. The game like story-universe is “a self-standing symbolic system”, dynamic yet limited, and dependent upon, yet obviously not coextensive with, the norms of the real world12. The story-universe rules are artificial, yet perceived instinctually. Among these rules is a circumscribed sense of the operation of causality. Narrative actions must be both possible and significant: they must advance the story appropriately: … problems that need solving turn out to be soluble; lead players as a rule are not removed arbitrarily from the board by random accident; power does not leak suddenly out of the system13. Thus Penelope is not … struck down in the third year of the war; Odysseus does not suffer a fatal mishap with a javelin at the Phaeacian games; the suiters do not come down in a mass with food poisoning on the day of the showdown14. “Moves” within the game of the story universe have a logical relationship to one another; in the quite non-naturalistic universe of the story, they function obviously in chains of cause and effect. These moves and counter-moves imply a “teleology of value”, that is they communicate some underlying ideological or metaphysical impulse15. The end of a story is recognisably an “endgame”, a conventional cessation of these moves which 12 13 See esp. Lowe (2000) 31–32. Lowe (2000) 53 elsewhere describes power relations as integral to the functions of plot within the story-universe: “Like games, narrative universes are constructed as a closed system. Within that system, narrative power is effectively conserved: it cannot be created, destroyed, or even transferred between players in the course of the game, but only converted into differently harnessable forms. When characters seem to acquire power, we understand them to be in fact actualising a narrative potential they have been carrying in a different form: informational, positional, instrumental, social, intellectual, moral, even supernatural. When characters seem to surrender power, they are simply translating it back from a kinetic to a potential form”. Italics in original. 14 15 Lowe (2000) 55. Lowe (2000) 56. 83 Greta Hawes place[s] the story universe in a steady state of unlimited duration, in which the chief tensions and imbalances in the story are repaired and the reader’s sense of the proper place of things prevails16. In this chapter, I examine the dynamics implicit in ancient retellings of the story of Actaeon as the narrative moves towards its known, expected, and invariable resolution. I argue that it is the stability of the form of Actaeon’s death which allows the story to function so lithely as an exemplum in disparate contexts. This recognition of the story as having an ontologically-independent identity separate from –but not unaffected by– specific enunciations of it allows for the analysis of interplay between the inevitable story arc of offence and punishment, and the various teleological values that the story encodes in our narrative archive. Lowe’s observations are important most notably because they emphasise the cognitive –rather than formal– aspects of a satisfying narrative, and highlight the significance of the endgame’ in producing a sense of narrative completeness native to its storyworld. I structure my treatment of the story of Actaeon through Ovid’s enunciation of it in the Metamorphoses. Ovid is the sharpest ancient reader of the Greek mythic tradition, and he gives us the most complete rendering of the story of Actaeon from antiquity, one that picks up on earlier dynamics of its use while providing a foundation for his own recasting of Actaeon as an exemplum with personal resonances in his exilic poetry. An inevitable end The story of Actaeon fills over 100 lines of the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is midday, and Actaeon commands his companions to break off their hunting and rest (143–154). Meanwhile, in the vale of Gargaphie, Diana, attended by her nymphs, undresses to bathe in a spring (155–172). Actaeon’s entrance into the grove causes a commotion; the goddess curses him: “now go tell that you saw me without my clothing, if indeed you are able to tell!’ (nunctibi me positovisamvelaminenarres,/ sit poterisnarrare, licet!”, 192–193), and he transforms into a stag. His hounds approach, their names listed elaborately in a catalogue (206–225)17. Despite 16 17 Lowe (2000) 59. 84 Such catalogues also appear elsewhere: for discussion see Daris (1970); Grilli The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Actaeon’s attempts to stave them off, they attack; his companions appear, looking for him, in time to witness the “stag” torn to pieces (229–252). Ovid captures the nightmarish reversal suffered by Actaeon by highlighting ironically the pleasure that he would normally take in such a sight: at comites rapidum solitis hortatibus agmen ignari instigant oculisque Actaeona quaerunt et velut absentem certatim Actaeona clamant (ad nomen caput ille refert) et abesse queruntur nec capere oblatae segnem spectacula praedae. Vellet abesse quidem, sed adest; velletque videre, non etiam sentire canum fera facta suorum. (3.242–248) His companions, oblivious, urged on the frenzied pack with their usual exhortations, and sought out Actaeon with their eyes, calling out ‘“Actaeon” eagerly, as if he were absent. (And he lifted his head at the sound of his name). They admonished him for being absent and missing the sight of the fray by lagging behind. He wished he were indeed absent, but he was there; he wished he was watching, not feeling, the savage deeds of his own hounds. Actaeon’s inability to even signal that he recognises his own name here contrasts markedly with the articulate authority he had displayed earlier, giving commands to his companions (146–154)18. Yet John Heath somewhat surprisingly reads the episode as an account of the reversals suffered by Diana: she becomes, he argues, “the uncompromising agent, more than the compromised victim”19. Heath’s analysis works within the narrative patterns of the early books of the Metamorphoses. As is now recognised, Ovid’s perpetuum carmen unravels in a variegated mass of stories which extend and subvert recurring narrative templates. Crucial to the story of Actaeon (1971). 18 Such reversals highlight the contrasts which lie at the heart of the story; Spencer (1997) 22 offers a comprehensive enumeration: “male/female; mortal/immortal; the known (world of hunting)/the unknown (world of Diana’s secret bath); human hunter/the hunter’s protective deity; hunter/hunted; human/animal; innocence/ guilt; justice/cruelty; divine behaviour/human behaviour; obvious/overlooked; appearance/reality; speech/speechlessness”. 19 Heath (1992) 55. 85 Greta Hawes is the paradigm of the virgin nymph –Daphne, Io, Syrinx– pursued or attacked by a god, which is developed diachronically through the first two books. In an important episode, Diana herself misses the signs that Callisto, a favourite, has been raped; Callisto’s punishment when Diana realises her mistake is swift (2.458–264)20. With that episode in mind, Diana understands herself, a virgin huntress, to be in danger when Actaeon wanders near her noontime haunt, and she acts this time with proactive swiftness. Her silencing of Actaeon is moreover part of another narrative template: she punishes him before he can reveal what he had seen, as other garrulous mortals privy to divine secrets had been similarly punished throughout book 221. Diana’s actions derive, then, from a “correct but only partial understanding of the text”22. She “reads” Actaeon in this context as a rapist and informant, before he has shown any sign that he intends either to rape her or to reveal to others that he had seen her naked. The story’s alignment with these two narrative paradigms is complex, because it does not fit easily into either: Diana is both a vulnerable nymph (victim in the first paradigm), and a god with the power to punish (victor in the second). Against the “paranoia” of Diana, Heath diagnoses the “obliviousness” of Actaeon23: the hunter is quite unaware that he is playing a role within such a paradigm. Diana, by contrast, uses her bookish knowledge to seize narrative agency. To return to Lowe’s conception, she recognises the genre in which she finds herself, foresees several potential developments, and acts to control the endgame in this storyworld. Diana’s –or, Heath’s– is merely one reading of this episode24. The Metamorphoses encompass as many readings as there are readers. To take another tack, we might point to the tension between the sense that Diana chooses to stave off a different potential outcome, 20 For these paradigmatic episodes, see Heath (1992) 55–60, who draws on the seminal study of Davis (1983). 21 For this “indicium” paradigm, see Heath (1992) 76–83, who draws on the unpublished dissertation of Gregson Davis. 22 23 24 Heath (1992) 64. Heath (1992) 87. Here I disagree with Heath, who suggests that the reader’s expectations are broadly aligned with Diana’s (e.g. 55, 76) despite the fact that the reader knows more about Actaeon’s intentions (64). 86 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth and our knowledge that, whatever else he does, Actaeon must die in a particular way. Each myth has its own paradigmatic form, quite separate from the prevailing storytelling templates operant more generally in a culture; “Actaeon” is not just another variation on the “nymph pursued by god” story, but an acte identifiant of its own. Ovid begins Actaeon’s story not at the beginning, but at the end, with his death. I say “Actaeon’s story”, but in fact Ovid does not name the hero at this point, he only gives his genealogical connections: Prima nepos inter tot res tibi, Cadme, secundas causa fuit luctus, aliena que cornua fronti addita, vosque canes satiatae sanguine erili. (3.138–140) A grandson was the first cause of sorrow for you amongst so many, Cadmus: horns sprouted, out-of-place on his temples, and you, dogs, grew sated with the blood of your master. As Ovid tells it, this story cannot simply unfold in temporal sequence; because the reader instinctively imports into the text the name that accords with this mythic datum, the reader is by nature invested in the story in an atemporal manner: she reads to see how Ovid will clarify the details of this holographic image, not to see how it will all end. When Actaeon’s name does finally come, its placement in the episode is crucial. Some 90 lines later, Actaeon finds himself trapped in a transformed body and chased by hounds; he tries desperately to call them off: clamare libebat Actaeon ego sum, dominum cognoscite vestrum! verba animo desunt: resonat latratibus aether. prima Melanchaetes in tergo vulnera fecit, proxima Therodamas… (Met. 3.229–235) He wished to cry out “I am Actaeon! Recognise your master!” But the words did not come; the air echoed with their barking. First, Melanchaetes tore into his hide, then Therodamas… Ironically, Actaeon’s attempt to control his hounds spurs their final fatal attack, and their barking fills the sonic void where his voice should have been. Only to the reader does Actaeon make his name heard, and in finally naming himself, he (re-)secures his fate. The act of naming, from the reader’s point of view, brings about the acte so intimately identified with it, his death. 87 Greta Hawes The name “Actaeon” functions elsewhere in the Metamorphoses as a metonym for his death. Later in book 3, Pentheus, desperate to rouse Autonoe out of her madness, reminds her of their family connection and of her own son: Saucius ille tamen “fer opem, matertera” dixit “Autonoe! moveant animos Actaeonis umbrae.” (3.719–720) Pentheus, wounded, cried out “help, aunt! Autonoe! May Actaeon’s shade make you merciful!” Here, too, the name does not work as intended by the speaker; the communicative flaw this time resides not in the failure of the speaker, but in the inability of the listener to understand his words. But the name does work in the sense that it again moves the inevitable narrative onwards; here, too, the invocation of Actaeon brings on the final fatal assault: Autonoe responds by ripping off Pentheus’ arm25. By naming Actaeon at this point, Ovid is indulging in a moment of intertextual allusion. In Euripides’ Bacchae Cadmus warns Pentheus of the danger of denying a god’s supreme prerogative using the exemplum of his (and Dionysus’) cousin: [Κάδμος:] ὁρᾷς τὸν Ἀκτέωνος ἄθλιον μόρον, ὃν ὠμόσιτοι σκύλακες ἃς ἐθρέψατο διεσπάσαντο, κρείσσον’ ἐν κυναγίαις Ἀρτέμιδος εἶναι κομπάσαντ’, ἐν ὀργάσιν. ὃμὴ πάθῃς σύ· (337–341) You see the miserable fate of Actaeon, whom raw-eating pups he had raised tore to pieces in the meadows because he vaunted of being more skilled in hunting than Artemis: may you not suffer so! As so often in Euripidean drama, talk achieves nothing: Cadmus’ words do not change Pentheus’ course, but provoke from him a violent, blasphemous outburst against Dionysus (343-57), thus guaranteeing that Pentheus will indeed replay Actaeon’s fate. Actaeon’s offence here 25 This detail is significant: in Bacchae Pentheus is first attacked at the shoulder (1126–1128), and Cirio (1977) 49, 58 has shown that this is a consistent feature of the pictorial renderings of Actaeon’s death in particular. 88 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth is modified to fit Pentheus”26. His death takes on a Dionysiac cast: the ὠμόσιτοι hounds recall the rite of omophagia; ἐν ὀργάσιν suggests the Maenads’ orgia. These elements of flexibility do not of course undercut the drama’s inexorable movement towards Pentheus’ inevitable death. Cadmus’ raising of the spectre of Actaeon signals the precise significance of the Maenads transforming –metaphorically– into κύνες (731, 977; note that Actaeon’s hounds are specifically feminine: ἃς, 338) and of Dionysus adding a fawn’s pelt to Pentheus’ costume (835). As in the Metamorphoses, these transformations bring with them new instincts which overcome the natural ones of familial affinity: Pentheus boasts that he will hunt down the Maenads (e.g. 434-436, 451-452, 719-721, 731-732); in the end it is Agaue, who should nurture her son (recall ἐθρέψατο, above), who puts an end to his life in rending apart a “lion cub”27. The close accordance of Actaeon’s and Pentheus’ offences make their peripeteiai parallel arcs; thus the end of the tragedy occurs at that appropriate moment in which the full details of how –in Lowe’s terms– Pentheus’ fate has converged with the one accorded to him by analogy with the fate of Actaeon are made clear28. 26 In assuming that Euripides is innovating here, I follow Forbes Irving (1990) 18-19; Gantz (1993) 480; Konstantinou (2015) 481-482. Schlam (1984) 86-87 argues that Euripides makes use of an existing (but otherwise unattested) variant. It is tempting to speculate on the possible resonances of Actaeon’s crime being the sight of Artemis naked (a variant not attested before Callimachus) given the prominence of visual imagery in the tragedy, and in particular Pentheus’ strong desire to see the Maenad s’ rites (e.g. 810-816, 912-917, 981). Heath (1992) 17; Segal (1997) 166 n. 16 raise the possibility that the influence went the other way, with Callimachus crafting the bathing motif through analogy with Pentheus’ voyeurism. 27 Actaeon’s significance to the drama is highlighted again in the final episode: his story is alluded to in a fragmentary line (1371) and his name is mentioned twice, once as the son of Autonoe (1227) and –more significantly– as a person also killed on Cithairon (1291). A fifth reference to Actaeon occurs at Bacch. 229-230, but these lines are possibly interpolated (see Seaford (2001) 172; cf. Segal (1997) 118 n.54), and contribute little in any case. For discussion of Actaeon as an analogy for Pentheus, see Segal (1983) 179; Forbes Irving (1990) 87-89; Konstantinou (2015) 481-82. 28 Such convergence might have previously been capitalised on by Aeschylus in his Semele. Actaeon’s body seemingly appeared on stage and Hadjicosti (2006) suggests that “His death would create an interesting correspondence in the play: Hera is to kill her antagonist, Semele, in the same way that Zeus had earlier killed his antagonist, Actaeon. … The death of Actaeon, and his personal tragedy, would apparently have to give way in the course of the play to the tragedy of Semele, the main heroine of the play” (124). 89 Greta Hawes Crime and punishment The mutability of Actaeon’s fate not being at issue, the key question of the Ovidian episode becomes one of moral responsibility. Ovid begins the episode by insisting that Actaeon was victim of a “fault of fortune” (fortunae crimen), not guilty of a “crime” (scelus), a distinction that seemingly places us in the world of delicate judicial arguments: “for what crime can there be in a mistake?” (quod enim scelus error habebat? 141–142). In the episode itself, Ovid takes care to characterise Actaeon’s entry into Diana’s grove as unintentional: he is merely wandering and displays no untoward desire (175–176)29. The episode ends on the theme of (in)justice, with Diana’s actions under scrutiny: Rumor in ambiguo est: aliis violentior aequo visa dea est, alii laudant dignam que severa virginitate vocant; pars invenit utra que causas. Sola Iovis coniunx non tam culpet ne probetne eloquitur, (3.251–257) Gossip was divided. To some, the goddess seemed more violent than was fair, but others praised her as worthy of her strict virginity. Each side found support for its argument. The wife of Jupiter alone neither praised nor censured … Ovid’s framing of this debate cannot, however, move beyond the merely rhetorical. Whatever Actaeon’s intentions, the fact remains that he gazed upon the goddess naked; this very act has the force of violation, as Varro notes when he illustrates his (erroneous) etymology of video from vis with an excerpt from Accius about the incident30. Likewise Diana’s actions seem at first to invite general moral enquiry, yet the context soon makes clear that this debate actually takes place on Olympus: the alternatives presented frame it as a dilemma of divine action, not one of human justice; Actaeon’s perspective is ignored. We are 29 Cf. Hyginus’ summary: “Actaeon Aristaei et Autonoes filius pastor Dianam lauantem speculates est et eam uiolare uoluit” (Fab. 80) 30 De Lingua Latina 6.80: “cum illud o<c>uli<s>violavit<is>, qui [sc. Acteon] invidit invidendum”. Salzman-Mitchell (2005) 47–49 reads Ovid’s account of Actaeon with this in mind, and argues that his intrusion into Diana’s space is intrinsically an act of physical violence; her reading of the passage is a useful corollary to Heath’s attempt to entirely deny the hunter’s culpability. 90 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth told of only one concrete outcome of this discussion: Diana’s actions inspire Juno to persecute Semele. However human Ovid’s gods might seem, they brandish an arbitrary prerogative which has no place for the delicacies of human conceptions of guilt and innocence. In emphasising the disconnect between Actaeon’s “error” and Diana’s nightmarish retribution, Ovid is picking up on Callimachus’ use of the story as an exemplum in his Bath of Pallas. Unlike earlier extant versions, which characterise Actaeon as a hubristic individual, guilty either of desiring to wed Semele, or boasting of his prowess as a hunter, Callimachus has him merely unwittingly (οὐκ ἐθέλων, 113) encounter the bathing goddess. Athena introduces this parallel to console her companion Chariclo, whose son Teiresias she has just blinded after he happened upon her naked. Athena denies her responsibility and insists that it was simply Teiresias’ fate to suffer so (98–105); besides, Autonoe and Aristaeus will count Chariclo blessed because her son was only blinded, when their son was killed for the same offence (107–118). Fate, then, is both all-powerful, and full of quirks. The gulf between Athena and Chariclo cannot be bridged: “is this the kind of friends you gods are?” Chariclo cries (τοιαῦται δαίμονες ἐστἐ φίλαι; l.86), yet “friendship” has no divine dimension. Athena’s compensations are generous within the norms of traditional theology; but to a mourning mother, held fast by a very real, very human sense of injustice, her actions cannot but be brutal.31 Callimachus’ and Ovid’s coupling of Actaeon’s invariable “punishment” with a distinctly unintentional “crime” makes the myth anew as a paradigm for disproportional violence. In the Tristia Ovid shifts the terms of this debate from divine patronage, to political. Actaeon’s fate becomes a model for his own: cur ali quid vidi? cur noxia lumina feci? cur im prudenti cognita culpa mihi? inscius Acteon vidit sine veste Dianam: praeda fuit canibus non minus ille suis. scilicet in superiset iam fortuna luenda est, nec veniam laeso numine casus habet. (2.103–108). 31 Why did I see anything? Why did I make my eyes culpable? Why did I inadvertently stumble upon this mischief? This is Bulloch’s argument (1985) 229. 91 Greta Hawes Actaeon was equally oblivious when he caught sight of Diana naked, yet he nonetheless became prey to his own hounds. It seems amongst those on high that even misfortune requires punishment, and an accident will receive no pardon from an affronted deity. Here the comparison of Ovid’s exile to Actaeon’s death activates thematic connections concerning the exercise of justice, not the precise ones of dismemberment that Euripides activated. Ovid’s error was to see something, again unintentionally; once more he frames the question of personal guilt from a human point of view; once more, human protests over the morality of retribution have no weight; in the world of the principate, fortuna is the preserve of Augustus and no alternative outcome is possible32. In borrowing the pattern of Actaeon’s crime and punishment, Ovid is giving shape to his own judicial experience. The story of Actaeongives Ovid a culturally-visible template through which to pursue his claim of inequity. He presents his interactions with Augustus as part of a specific chain of causality, in which his actions have significance only in that they resemble Actaeon’s, and Augustus’ are only relevant in that they resemble Diana’s. He is thus shifting his life into the realm of a storyworld, and making from it a coherent story. This “mental schema” shapes otherwise haphazard events into a meaningful plot: one event leads to another until a tidy formulaic structure is evident in which events of the past logically and presciently create a particular model of the present33. In Ovid’s exile poetry, Actaeon is intelligible as a victim of supreme injustice in large part because Ovid rebuilds the ‘closed world’ of his 32 33 I discuss this passage from the Tristia more fully in Hawes (2009) 24–27. For “mental schemata”, see Zerubavel (2003) 4–5. These shape the past into “plots”: “in order for historical events to form story like narratives, we need to be able to envision some connection between them. Establishing such unmistakably contrived connectedness is the very essence of the inevitably retrospective mental process of emplotment. Indeed, it is through such emplotment … that we usually manage to provide both past and present events with historical meaning. … And although actual reality may never “unfold” in such a neat formulaic manner, those script like plotlines are nevertheless the form in which we often remember it, as we habitually reduce highly complex event sequences to inevitably simplistic, one-dimensional visions of the past” (Zerubavel (2003) 13). I thank Nikolas Papadimitriou for bringing this work to my attention. 92 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth exile narrative to accord with the teleology of value already encoded into the myth. Here, of course, we must note that Ovid himself, in the Metamorphoses, had been instrumental in producing this coding of the story as a confrontation between innocent victimhood and the violent ramifications of paranoia. The story circulates in the cultural vocabulary not as simply a narrative composed of a specific sequence of actions and responses, but as a narrative illustrative of specific attendant properties. One such property is, as I have emphasised, the acte identifiant of the violent reversals of Actaeon’s death. But the other central component is the causal relationship between this death and Actaeon’s offence. In the archaic and classical versions of the myth, the death resolves an act of deliberate transgression; in Callimachus and Ovid, it resolves an unintentionally transgressive act. This shift matters in that these later versions pair a lesser action with the same reaction; the resolution of the endgame thus resonates more keenly as a moral questioning of the logic of cause and effect, which rules this storyworld. Conclusion: Teleological habits That Actaeon is characterised by his death, and the uses that could be made of this “fact”, is demonstrated by less conventional renderings of the myth. Palaephatus’ interpretation explains exactly this element: how he could be said to have been “destroyed by his dogs” (Peri Apiston 6); Lucian offers another “explanation”, having a vindictive Hera comment that Artemis sicked Actaeon’s dogs on him because he had seen how ugly she really was; this secret makes sense of the seemingly too harsh punishment (Dialogues of the gods, 18). The invariability of Actaeon’s death allows counter-factual scenarios to function with rhetorical efficacy. Thus, Varro, describing the food suitable for dogs suggests that Actaeon might have avoided his fate by paying closer attention to canine nutrition: Diligenter ut habeat cibaria providendum. Fames enim hos ad quaerendum cibum ducet, si non praebebitur, et a pecore abducet; nisi si, ut quidam putant, etiam illuc pervenerint, proverbium ut tollant anticum veletiam ut μῦθον aperiant de Actaeone atque in dominum adferant dentes. (On agriculture, 2.9.8–10) Great diligence must be given to the feeding of dogs. If they go unfed, hunger will drive them to hunt for their own food, and this will take 93 Greta Hawes them away from the flocks – even if they will not in fact (as some think) go so far that they disprove that old proverb, or replay the story of Actaeon and sink their teeth into their master. A line of Menappean satire applies this motif more broadly: Crede mihi, plures dominos servi comederunt quam canes. quod si Actaeon occupasset et ipse prius suos canes comedisset, non nugas saltatoribus in theatre fieret. (Varro, Menippean Satires, 513 Astbury) Believe me, more masters have been devoured by their slaves, than by their dogs; if Actaeon had been more proactive and destroyed his dogs, he would not have become merely a trifle for dancers in the theatre. In both instances, these eye-catching gambits succeed because the name Actaeon invokes a decisive paradigm of error and (dire) consequence, and any alternative ending is understood as possessing a false sense of potentiality and an impossible endgame: Actaeon could not have acted otherwise. My argument, then, is that Actaeon’s presence presupposes his ending in that his name brings with it his distinctive death. We have seen, indeed, that the mere mention of his name can hasten that ending. That is not to say that the myth is frozen in its form; no myth is. Variations in the form of Actaeon’s offence bring with them important shifts in the morality of Actaeon’s culpability and the justice of divine retribution; teleological value in this case is not dependent upon the ending itself, but upon how that ending exists as a response to the action which precipitated it. Cadmus’ argument that Pentheus must avoid blaspheming the gods as Actaeon had in order to avoid a fate like his works only in the context of a readily transgressive perpetrator; Ovid, by contrast, rails against the injustice of his punishment given that he, like Actaeon, had not willingly overstepped the Emperor’s prerogative. All enunciations converge on this same endgame, then, but they do not all produce the same resonance. I have previously argued that we should be sensitive to the “habits of thinking” that grew up about particular myths and shaped their use. This was an attempt to dispel the idea that storytelling, and mythic interpretation, are shaped by dogmatic assumptions of “belief”, or 94 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth the pure mechanics of inter-textual influence and allusion. “Habits of thinking”, by contrast, embrace those quite subtle, practical traditions which shape and control the contexts in which a story was felt appropriate, the associations it tended to provoke, points of emphasis which reappear, and thus the range of values that attend it. To understand a myth, or a set of myths, as encased in habitual practices of cultural hermeneutics is to understand storytelling and narrative interpretation to be intertwined in how a myth finds use within the cultural vocabulary of antiquity. This is not to deny the plurality and malleability of myth. Rather, the identification of “habits of thinking” recognises that an allusive discourse of rhetorical exempla can only function efficiently when there exists too a shared communal sensibility which ascribes not only actions, but also moral colourings, to mythic figures. The cultural vocabulary of antiquity is made up, then, not only of narrative templates and genres that provide predictive power for how any one story might end, but also of an attendant framework of values, which control the illustrative potential of that story. The inescapable death attached to Actaeon’s name makes him habitually a monitory figure: we have seen that he exists in Greco-Latin literature most commonly not for his own sake, but as the double for some other character, clarifying or prefiguring his ultimate fate. Ironically, of course, Actaeon’s status as a warning to others cuts across the inflexibility of divine reactions in the narrative storyworld of antiquity. Ovid’s exile has little in common with Pentheus’ death, except this: Ovid makes Actaeon’s unwarranted destruction an illustration of the inescapable powers-that-be – in his case a slighted Emperor. For Euripides, the story likewise sets Pentheus on a path to destruction once he, too, has refused to grant to Dionysus his rightful place. In both cases, the action, whether intentional or unintentional, unknown at the time, or deliberate, sets in motion the necessity for a penalty to be extracted, so that the story may finally achieve resolution. Bibliography Berman, D. W., Myth and culture in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, Rome, Edizioni dell Ateneo, 2007. Bulloch, A. W., Callimachus: the Fifth Hymn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985. 95 Greta Hawes Buxton, R., Forms of astonishment: Greek myths of metamorphosis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. Casanova, A., “Il Mito di Atteone nel Catalogo Esiodeo”, RFIC 97 (1969), pp. 31-46. Cirio, A. M., “Fonti letterarie ed iconografiche del mito di Atteone”, BPEC 25 (1977), pp. 44-60. Daris, S., “P. Med. inv. 123”, in Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Papyrology (1970), pp. 97-102. Davis, G., The death of Procris: “amor” and the hunt in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Rome, Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 1983. Forbes Irving, P. M. C., Metamorphosis in Greek myths, Oxford, OUP, 1990. Frontisi-Ducroux, F., “Actéon; ses chiens et leur maître”, in B. Cassin and J.-L. Labarrière (eds), L’animal dans l’antiquité, Paris, J. Vrin, 1997, pp. 435-449. Gantz, T., Early Greek myth: a guide to literary and artistic sources, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Grilli, A., “I canid’ Atteone: Igino e il P. Med. inv. 123 – la tradizione poetica”, PP 26 (1971), pp. 354-367. Hadjicosti, I., “Semele and the death of Actaeon: Aeschylus, Fr. 221 (Radt)”, 49 (2006), pp. 121-127. Hawes, G., “Metamorphosis and metamorphic identity: the myth of Actaeon in works of Ovid, Dante and John Gower”, Iris 21 (2009), pp. 21-41. Heath, J., Actaeon, the unmannerly intruder: the myth and its meaning in classical literature, New York, Peter Lang, 1992. Janko, R., “P. Oxy. 2509: Hesiod’s Catalogue on the death of Actaeon”, Phoenix 38 (1984), pp. 299-307. Konstantinou, A., “Tradition and innovation in Greek tragedy’s mythological exempla”, CQ 65 (2015), pp. 476-488. Lowe, N. J., The classical plot and the invention of Western narrative,Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Neschke-Hentschke, A. B., “Mythe et traitement littéraire du mythe en Grèce ancienne”, SCO 37 (1987), pp. 29-60. 96 The story of Actaeon and the inevitability of myth Renner, T., “A papyrus dictionary of Metamorphoses”, HSPh 82 (1978), pp. 277-293. Salzman-Mitchell, Patricia B., A web of fantasies: gaze, image and gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2005. Schlam, C. C., “Diana and Actaeon: metamorphoses of a myth”, ClAnt 3 (1984), pp. 82-110. Seaford, R., Euripides: Bacchae, Warminster, Aris & Phillips, 2001. Segal, C., “Greek myth as a semiotic and structural system and the problem of tragedy”, Arethusa 16 (1983), pp. 173-198. —, Dionysiac poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997. Spencer, R. A., Contrast as a narrative technique in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. West, M. L., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: its nature, structure and origins, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985. Zerubavel, E., Time maps: collective memory and the social shape of the past, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003. 97