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faithless husband: aut per vulnera mille / sontem animam expellam, 617f.; cf. A. Ag. 86668).27 |
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To this demarcation of the story by temporal divisions corresponds an equally sharp set of spatial contrasts. The chief mechanism of Tereus' plot is to lure Philomela from the civilized city of Athens and from the safety of her father's house to the desolate forest in the wild land (520f.). This movement from a civilized house to the wild and from a great city to lonely Thracian forest also gains force from the comparison of Philomela, at her first appearance, to the naiads and dryads of the forest (45154, quales audire solemus / naidas et dryadas mediis incedere silvis . . .). We may be reminded of the lament of these forest-dwellers over their kinsman Marsyas at his bloody end shortly before (39095). That lament created a contrast between painful physical violation and a tranquil sylvan or pastoral landscape: nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat, / detectique patent nervi (388ff.); et nymphae flerunt, et quisquis montibus illis / lanigerosque greges armentaque bucera pavit (394f.). For Philomela, likened to a naiad, the remoteness of nature is threatening. There are no compassionate Nymphs or Fauns in this deserted forest, and the mutilated woman is thrown entirely on her own resources. |
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The violence implicit in the shift from Athens to Thrace is also symmetrical with an abrupt spatial shift within Thrace. The two Athenian sisters move from enclosure to dangerous wildness, and then back to a domestic interior. But the return to the house via the forest leaves that domestic space changed forever. It is now a place of crimes, passions, and bloody acts as grim as those of Tereus' forest. With the female vengeance, this becomes a world of total violence, a world from which reason and restraint are gone. Procne's maenadic freedom on the mountainside puts an end to her previous identity as Tereus' complaisant wife (cf. 428ff., especially 440, blandita viro Progne). The "Bacchic" drink served in cups of gold when Philomela lived in the regal shelter of her own house (488) returns as Procne's vengeful Bacchic riot in the forests of Thrace (587, 596).28 |
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Philomela's delicate weaving enabled her to find a way through her heavily walled prison: fugam custodia claudit, / structa rigent solido stabulorum moenia saxo, 572f.). She had initially threatened Tereus with just |
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27 The episode also has a number of other intertextual allusions. Often noted is the echo of Apollo's pursuit of Daphne in Tereus' lust for Philomela: 6.45557 and 1.49295, on which see Jacobsen (1984/85) 4552. The ill-omened wedding at the beginning (6.429ff.) is perhaps recalled in the story of Orpheus, 10.38. In both cases the resemblances set off the bestiality of Tereus and the violence of this tale. Cf. also the motif of the final farewell, 509, which also recurs in Orpheus' story (10.62), as well as elsewhere: see Bömer (1976) ad loc. (p. 141). Compare the seduction motif of 463f. with the story of Procris in the next book, 7.739f., and see Bömer (1976) p. 133. |
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28 This passage is perhaps a possible reminiscence of the disastrous banquet of Dido at the end of Aen. 1, esp. 1.685f.; cf. Bömer (1976) ad Met. 6.488f. |
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