Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Summary

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins by promising to describe the way in which bodies change into new forms, but immediately follows into a primal myth of the creation of the world. Indeed, the poem as a whole is seemingly obsessed with myths of creation, human and divine. I would like to examine three particular episodes in Ovid’s epic — the myths of Arachne and Daedalus in Books VI and VIII, and the speech of Pythagoras in the final book (XV) — in order to examine Ovid’s handling of myths of creation. I hope to demonstrate by way of conclusion that although Ovid interestingly explores the correspondences between craftsmanship (a way of creating things) and parentage (a way of creating human beings), his ultimate concern is with his own medium, which is poetry. In some sense, the proliferation of creation myths within Ovid’s poem are all directed toward a covert self-analysis by the poet of his own art.

Ovid’s handling of Arachne would seem to have a relatively obvious moral: creation here is figured as a form of hubris. Arachne’s downfall in this story is caused by her own pride, although the poet is careful to give the reader as much mitigating circumstance to make Arachne’s pride seem justifiable. We are told, for example, that she comes from humble parentage, from an out-of-the-way place, and that her parents were of humble birth as well and her mother is dead. Despite all this, Arachne has become famous in such a way that even attracts divine attention: Ovid tells us that river and mountain nymphs would come to take a look at what Arachne creates. We must recall, of course, what precisely Arachne’s creativity is directed towards: she is a weaver, she creates elegant cloth with woven designs. This makes Ovid’s detail about Arachne’s deceased mother a more interesting character note: weaving is historically a woman’s art, of course, but one taught by mother to daughter. Arachne’s amazing talent at producing woven cloth — which has made her famous in her region of Greece (Lydia) and also managed to attract the attention of nymphs, and ultimately of a more powerful goddess — seems to be a natural gift.

Certainly that is how Arachne herself would like it to be seen, because what sets the story into motion is the issue of who taught Arachne how to weave. This is why Ovid’s detail about Arachne’s parents — “Her mother now was dead” (Mandelbaum 177) — seems so be frontloaded in the story. We might imagine most girls who learn to weave are taught by an older woman, if they are not indeed taught by their own mothers. But Arachne’s preternatural skill, according to Ovid, gave the viewer a different sense of where her talent had come from: “one knew that she was surely Pallas’ pupil.” This is slightly odd, because Pallas (Athena or Minerva) is a goddess and we are not told Arachne received divine lessons — instead this seems to be a reference to the goddess’s patronage over such things as craftsmanship and wisdom. What Arachne’s story devolves into is a contest between girl and goddess over who is the better weaver. Minerva comes in disguise to warn Arachne to exhibit more gratitude toward the goddess, and Arachne speaks slightingly of the goddess, without realizing that she is doing it to the goddess’ own face. Yet there is a more interesting dramatic irony to Arachne’s taunts here beyond the obvious dramatic irony that she is insulting a disguised goddess:

Old age has addled you; your wits are gone; too long a life has left you anile, stale, undone.

Your drivel might appeal to your dear daughter-

in-law, if you have one, or else your daughter, if you have one. As for advice, I can advise myself. And lest you think your warning changed anything, be sure of this: I am still sure of what I said before. Your goddess why doesn’t she come here? Why not accept my challenge?” Pallas answered: “She has come!” (Mandelbaum 178)

The actual phrasing of Arachne’s taunt to Minerva, with its repetiation for rhetorical emphasis — “your dear daughter-in-law, if you have one, or else your daughter, if you have one” — surely bears extra weight when we consider that Minerva was, indeed, the virgin goddess. Obviously virginity is subject to a variety of different cultural constructions that can give it all sorts of meanings. But one thing that it does not have outside of Christian mythography is the notion that a virgin might have children: the virgin is, by necessity, not a being that creates other beings. This is interesting again because — in this story about female creativity and creation — we are again seeing hints of the most obvious thing that women create (which is children). The seeming substitution of Minerva for the girl’s absent mother is the first sidelong reference, but Arachne’s rhetorically-highlighted reference to this old women’s putative children — not knowing she is talking to a childless divine virgin (and patroness of wars) — seems again to raise the same issue obliquely. And indeed sexuality and parentage resurface throughout the rest of Ovid’s handling of the myth. When Arachne and Minerva compete, Ovid gives descriptions of each of their tapestries — I will return to this fact in my conclusion, but it is enough to note that there are two enormous shocks for the reader regarding Arachne’s work. The first is that it is directly embarrassing to the gods themselves, and apparently depicts in detail a number of the more lurid sexual seductions that the gods accomplished with women, usually after the god has taken an animal form first:

The kind mother of harvests, golden-haired, knew you as stallion;

Whereas the mother of the winged horse — she

Whose hair was wreathed with snakes — knew you as bird;

And when you took Melantho, you were dolphin.

And each of these — the actors and the settings

Is rendered to perfection by Arachne. (Mandelbaum 182)

This seems like the most deliberate form of hubris possible (depicting the gods in the medium of cloth-based bestiality-porn) however the bigger shock arguably comes when we learn that even Minerva acknowledges Arachne has won this contest at weaving. This does not mean that Arachne will go unpunished, however, and once again the issue of childbirth and parentage is included by Ovid in the very language of Minerva’s curse upon the girl:

Live then, but, for your perfidy, still hang, and let this punishment pursue all who descend from you: thus, you must fear the future — down to far posterity. (Mandelbaum 182)

This serves an obvious function on the most basic level of relating the myth. Arachne is turned into the first spider, and so the story becomes a story about where spiders (and their marvelous skill at weaving) come from. But it is again worth noting that Minerva’s parting shot deliberately brings up the issue of childbirth: it is as though Ovid cannot describe female creators (neither of whom actually have children) without incorporating the idea of parenthood.

Many of the same motifs are repeated, in different ways, in another story of a preternaturally skilled creator in Book VIII. This is Daedalus, the famed inventor, who is introduced into Ovid’s story as the builder of the labyrinth that will contain the monstrous child, the Minotaur, of King Minos. Having used his phenomenal creativity to build a prison for the king’s child, Daedalus finds himself the king’s prisoner too, effectively speaking. The only escape from Minos’s island kingdom of Crete would be through the air, and so Daedalus uses his skill at inventing things in order to escape through the only route possible, which is the sky. Ovid describes how Daedalus builds wings using wax and feathers, layering them in different length so they resemble pipes that country people used to fashion where from unequal reed to reed the rise is gradual. And these he held together with twine around the center, at the base he fastened them with wax, and thus arranged he’d bent them slightly — they could imitate the wings of true birds.

As he worked at this, his young son, Icarus, inquisitive, stood by and — unaware that what he did involved a thing that would imperil him delighted, grabbed the feathers that the wind tossed, fluttering, about; or he would ply the blond wax with his thumb; and as he played, the boy disturbed his father’s wonder-work. (Mandelbaum 255)

The imagery here, comparing the wings Daedalus builds for himself and his son to pan-pipes played by shepherds, is an accurate way of describing the layering of feathers on actual bird’s wings, but it also seems to serve the function of likening this form of creativity — the invention of a technological device whose results seem almost magical — to artistic creativity. The pan-pipes are an image of song and, by extension, even of poetry itself. However, Daedalus’s creativity works with physical substance here — the innocent child’s play in his father’s workshop emphasizes the malleability of the wax, and the wind that scatters the feathers, emphasizing their physicality. It is also an example of dramatic irony, because of what will happen to Icarus shortly. Here, the father-son relationship is compared to the parental relationships in nature, as Daedalus teaching his son to fly is compared in a simile to (…the bird who, from her nest on high,

leads out her tender fledglings to the sky).

He urges on his son, saying he must keep up, not fall behind; so he instructs the boy in flight, an art most dangerous; and while his father beats his wings, he turns to watch his son, to see what he has done. (Mandelbaum 256)

This myth remains perennially popular and is well-known today, where Icarus fails to head his father’s instructions and flies too close to the sun, allowing the wax to melt. However, what is a shock to Ovid’s reader is that — in much the same way that Athena and Arachne seem to engage with each other as a substitute mother and substitute daughter — the story of Daedalus and the tragic death of a young boy is doubled, with Daedalus playing a much less sympathetic role in the second version of the story, which regards his nephew Talus. Talus, it seems, was also an inventor like his famous uncle:

He also was the first to twin a pair of metal arms joined by the hinge they shared;

and while the first stood firm — erect and central the second, moving arm described a circle.

And Daedalus, in envy, threw him headlong down from Minerva’s sacred citadel and — lying — said he’d fallen. But Minerva,

who favors those with ingenuity, caught up the boy before he struck the earth;

while he was in midair, the goddess clothed his form with feathers; he became a bird

And yet that bird will never fly too high up from the ground

That bird recalls its ancient fall, and so it shuns the high and always seeks the low. (Mandelbaum 257-8)

For readers who were already familiar with the more famous myth of Daedalus and Icarus, we basically get a horrifying parody of the story, in which the same motifs are rearranged — but not to Daedalus’s credit. Instead, Daedalus sees a younger child and family-member who is also capable of inventing miraculous technological substitutes for physical things — Talus has built a mechanical arm — and kills him for sheer envy, then lies about the deed. But if Icarus in the first story does plummet to impact and dies, Talus is saved by the gods and turned into an actual bird — moreover, a bird that “recalls its ancient fall” and “shuns the high.” In other words, Ovid tells the two Daedalus myths out of chronological sequence, but the second one told seems to answer the first one point for point: the son Icarus flies too high and falls to his death because he does not have actual bird-wings, the nephew Talus is thrown to his death as a rival but is granted real bird-wings and thus learns never to fly too high. But the interrelation between the two stories is fascinating mostly because they suggest a parallelism between Daedalus as inventor and Daedalus as parent. His inventions have earned him immortality — especially the one he built for a parent to cage a monstrous child — but his own parentage seems defined by his own inventions, whether by their failure (as with Icarus) or by the younger competition (as with Talus).

The episodes of Daedalus and Arachne both show Ovid putting creativity and artistic or technological creation in a complicated relationship to actual parenthood. But the poem goes on, in its concluding book, to offer a larger philosophical theory of natural creation, delivered as a speech by the sage Pythagoras. This is one of the more surprising elements of Ovid’s overall construction in the poem, because ultimately Pythagoras’s speech takes on an explicitly religious character, that includes things we might expect (like a prophetic description of the rise of Rome as the pre-eminent world empire of its time) but also thinks that we would not (like lengthy exhortations on the virtues of vegetarianism). Yet Pythagoras is presented as one who knows about the secrets of the origins and the creations of the natural world — “what nature had denied to human sight / he saw with intellect, his mental eye” (Mandelbaum 515) — and he ultimately offers a kind of theory of existence about what underlies the mythology of changing bodies that Ovid has repeatedly sketched out throughout the fifteen books of the poem:

For all things change, but no thing dies.

The spirit wanders: here and there, at will,

The soul can journey from an animal

Into a human body, and from us

To beasts; it occupies a body, but It never perishes. As pliant wax

Is still the selfsame wax, so do I say

That soul, however much it may mitigate,

Is still the same. And thus, lest piety

Suffer defeat when faced with belly’s greed,

Do not expel — so I, a prophet, teach

The soul of others by your butchery:

Those souls are kin to your own souls; don’t feed

Your blood upon another’s blood. (Mandelbaum 519)

Thus the earlier myths — Arachne turned by Minerva into a spider, Talus killed by Daedalus but turned into a partridge before hitting the ground — are shown to be a universal principle, whereby human souls can end up in animals. As a result, bodies in Pythagoras’s speech are like temporary vessels that are occupied by a universal and immortal soul. When Pythagoras comes down to an actual account of childbirth — how humans create other humans — he interestingly uses natural metaphors. The child in his mother’s womb is like a plant and the child’s passage from birth to recognizable human has a stage in which it resembles a four-footed animal:

…our bodies undergo the never-resting changes: what we were and what we are today is not to be tomorrow. Once we were but simple seeds, the germ from which — one hoped — a man might spring;

we dwelled within our mother’s womb until, with hands expert and wily, nature willed that we not lie so cramped in narrow walls, within our mother’s bowels; she drew us out into the open air from our first house.

Brought forth into the light, the infant lay

Helpless; then on all fours, much like a beast,

He hauled his body up and, with his knees

Unsteady, wobbling still, gradually,

Although in need of props, stood on his feet. (Mandelbaum 521)

What is interesting, then, is that the Pythagorean vision implies a sort of hierarchy within creation itself — a newborn human moves from plantlike (as a seed) to beastlike (on all fours) to the thing that walks on two legs (which makes it recognizably human). But at the same time this hierarchy is undercut by a radical democratization, in which the soul is present in everything: whatever form wax is shaped into, it is still wax. And thus whatever physical form a soul is currently animating, it is always the same soul-substance.

What is most interesting here, though, is the nature of this animating force in Ovid’s imagination. We can actually learn something crucial by looking up the etymology of the word “animating” in an English dictionary: it derives from the Latin word (“anima”) for “soul” which is also the same word for “breath” or “wind” — these beliefs are indicated in various other vocabulary words that persist in English, such that the English word “spirit” is related to the English word “respiration,” and both actually indicate an overlap between the movement of air in breathing, and the presence of a soul. Thus if we look back at the description of little Icarus from the vantage of having listened to the long speech of Pythagoras at the poem’s end, we have a different sense of what it means when the boy delighted, grabbed the feathers that the wind tossed, fluttering, about; or he would ply the blond wax with his thumb

The wind that is animating the lifeless feathers here is a sort of universal soul that pervades all things, and the wax that Icarus enjoys squashing and re-forming is the same that forms Pythagoras’s metaphor of the soul. We might additionally note that, for Ovid as a poet, these were also the tools of his trade: poets in the ancient world would compose their first drafts on wax tablets (in the same way that colonial Americans used slates with chalk, because they were easy to erase) and the poetry would be recited out loud, it was not a silent experience but an experience with breath, or soul, behind it. That is why Ovid’s last lines in the Metamorphoses predict his own immortality but also define that immortality through his presence on people’s lips:

But, with the better part of me, I’ll gain

A place that’s higher than the stars: my name,

Indelible, eternal, will remain.

And everywhere that Roman power has sway

In all domains the Latins gain, my lines

Will be on people’s lips, and through all time

If poet’s prophecies are ever right

My name and fame are sure: I shall have life. (Mandelbaum 549)

The same idea from the poem’s closing lines in Book XV is also reflected, we might note, in the opening lines of Book I, where soul and breath are similarly combined (in the way that, etymologically, they still are in English, in “animal” or “anemometer,” “spirit” or “respiration”). It is the breath of the gods that brings Ovid’s own words to life:

My soul would sing of metamorphoses.

But since, o gods, you were the source of these

Bodies becoming other bodies, breathe

Your breath into my book of changes: may

The song I sing be seamless as its way

Weaves from the world’s beginning to our day (Mandelbaum 3)

Creation myths in Ovid therefore always seem to point back to Ovid’s own creation in the Metamorphoses. The tapestries of Minerva and Arachne in Book VI sound, of course, like the Metamorphoses themselves — with their descriptions of the physical transformations (and bad behavior) of the gods. The workshop of Daedalus and the philosophy of Pythagoras both toy with imagery of wax and wind, but the wax is also a poet’s notepad and the wind is a poet’s voice or soul. In some sense, Ovid’s myths of creation seem inevitably to point back to Ovid’s own work as a creator. But it is superior to the creativity of a parent, and respectful to the divine creativity of the gods, because ultimately it requires the reader to put his or her own soul or breath into reading the verses — thus it is the reader’s lips that provide the animating force to Ovid’s creation, making us as readers part of the overall structure of his world and its immortal soul as it is described by Pythagoras in the concluding book.

Works Cited

Allen Mandelbaum (translator). The Metamorphoses of Ovid. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Print.

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