Philology Fix

#philologydust #ovid #metamorphoses #etiology

inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati.

From this we are a hard race, tried in work and we bear the brand of being birthed from this source.

On Ovid

This ends the account of the flood and the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The last two humans alive have repopulated the earth by throwing the bones of the mother (i.e. stones of mother earth) behind them. Ovid maps the wet and the dry to the composition of the human body, with the earthy part turned flesh and the solid part turned bones. The veins of rock turn to veins of blood.

On Poetic Explanation

Anderson on Ovid's Metamorphoses 1.414-15 comments on the word documenta: “a prosaic word captures the didactic manner of the aetiologist.”

Such a loaded statement. There's a sneer in there, about “the didactic manner” and “aetiologist” as if that is something different from poet.

Wrong on both counts.

Here's Anderson on the line as a whole: “The narrator affects to reduce the significance of the whole story to simple aetiology: why human beings are hardy and used to toil. The audience should not feel so restricted”

Why all the hate towards didactic and etiologizing? Anderson, like so many critics, seems to think that any sort of explanation is “prosaic” or inherently unpoetic; he assumes that explaining origins brings the whole thing down and “reduce”[s] the story. This is rather backwards as a value judgment for a poet (Ovid) who is all the time explaining things. There is the prejudice of modern tastes about poetry and what makes something poetry at work here. For ancient audiences, explanation is not some foreign bit of dirt infecting the glistening leaves of poetry. It is a core feature of the poetry itself. (To mention the most obvious point, the very first line of the poem, in nova, echoes the Greek tag for telling an origin story, en arche. So if Ovid thought explanation any sort of “reduction” of significance, then it is there in the very first line of his 15 book poem.

Let's focus on the word “documenta”. First, there is clearly a connection between experiens and documenta (from doceo, to teach), almost a gloss on the notion of experiens but given a different form. One hears “teaching in mind” or something similar perhaps, even though Ovid uses it for something very different.

On etymology

It seems obvious to say that words matter to a poet like Ovid. This explanation is one that hinges not just on an idea (namely that stones become people) but also on an etymology which is clear in Greek versions of the story (namely that laas and laos, stones and people, are similar words). Etymology is not epiphenomenon or play or surface cleverness. It reveals deep truths about the world. The choice of Laborem (415) seems like a non-trivial echo of the Greek etymological connection. It is Hesiodic certainly, in connecting work and the nature of humanity, but these are not the same terms as Hesiod. Rather, Ovid makes the Greek etymology work in Latin, a non-trivial task, certainly clever, but also, if we take seriously that etymology reveals deep truth, then a powerful statement about how the world is ordered.

Contra Anderson, the endpoint of this story is an affirmation of Ovid's opening salvo in the Metamorphoses, a demonstration in words and word origins of the order of the world and how its traces can be found even still today (kai eti nun).