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This sacred time might suggest a larger world-order framing the events. Yet the very remoteness of these celestial phenomena (especially in items 1 through 3 above) also sets off the moral isolation of the human world and the absence of gods. This story takes us about as far from a clear divine justice as any tale in the poem.25 We are immersed in the dark night of human passions, as Ovid carefully points out at the beginning and end: |
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pro superi, quantum mortalia pectora caecae
noctis habent ("O gods, how much dark night do mortal hearts contain," 472f.); |
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tantaque nox animi est ("So great is the night of his mind," 652) |
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There is, to be sure, a kind of poetic justice in the fact that Procne's night of Bacchic rites on the mountain harks back to the nocturnal banquet of Tereus' deception (48794 and 58890, where nox is repeated three times). Yet the only god explicitly mentioned is Bacchus, in a brief apostrophe (596).26 Even the metamorphosis at the end comes without benefit of divinity. It follows as the external manifestation, almost ratification, of the bestiality which the main actors have already been enacting among one another. Compared to an eagle seeking its prey with its talons (516f.), Tereus has already undergone an inner metamorphosis before he becomes, literally, the hoopoe with its "armed face" (armata facies, 673f.). The bestiality in his character has already been marked by adjectives like ferus and saevus (549, 557; 464, 581). |
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Procne undergoes an analogous change as she emerges from the Bacchic ritual with a new identity: not the "Procne sweetly coaxing her husband," but the "fearful Procne," goaded by the furies of her grief (blandita viro Progne, 440; Progne terribilis, 595). Tereus, for a moment, could imagine himself as a potential Paris, carrying off a Greek woman to a barbarian land for a second Trojan war: aut rapere et saevo raptam defendere bello (464). But Procne has a more sinister register of mythical echoes to play upon. She becomes an Agave who rends her child, a Medea who kills her offspring, and a Clytaemnestra who would inflict multitudinous wounds on her |
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(footnote continued from previous page) |
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10. |
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25 Schmidt (1991) 123f. attributes the absence of the gods here to the organizational scheme of the poem, which here turns from gods punishing mortals to relationships between man and man. This view, however, fails to take account of Ovid's insistence on the divine indifference in Philomela's three appeals to divine help (526, 542f., 548). |
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26 Cf. also the insignia Bacchi just afterwards (598) and the metonymic use of Bacchus for wine in 488f. (Bacchus in auro / ponitur), to be discussed later. The absence of gods to help the innocent or bring justice is also in keeping with the implicit criticism of divine cruelty in the stories of Arachne, Niobe, and Marsyas earlier in the book. |
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