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Flight Myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Phaethon and Daedalus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Valerie Merriam Wise
Valerie Merriam Wise*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Several myths of the Metamorphoses are stories about nights. These imaginary voyages are taken either by artists or by characters granted an experience analagous to artistic experience. The possibility of vision made available through the act of flying provides the immediate connection between flight and art. Characters within the fictive world of the poem achieve literally a perspective on the cosmos analogous to Ovid's metaphoric vision of his poetic universe. Insofar as vision is the initial act of artistic creation, characters who engage in flying, whether specifically artists or not, enact within the context of the narrative this part of the creative process. Because the attempt at vision is only a preliminary, Ovid must find a way for the metaphor of flight to express the rest of the creative process and its culmination in an artifact. The means of flight, whether Apollo's chariot or the wings designed by Daedalus, are therefore works of art that express both the mimetic and interpretive aspects of this process. Artifacts created by Ovid's fictive artificers repeatedly prove inadequate or ambiguous, however, and they fail as their makers' attempts at vision fail. These characters are unable to sustain vision or interpret what they see, and so the efficacy of their art is called into question. In telling their stories, Ovid conveys the powers and limitations of vision and art. At the same time, he implies his own success as poet through the ironic treatment of the artists within the poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , 1977 , pp. 44 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1997

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References

1. Altieri, Charles, ‘Ovid and the New Mycologists’, Novel (Fall 1973), p. 35Google Scholar.

2. All quotations from the Metamorphoses are from Ovid, Metamorphoses, The Loeb Classical Library 2 vols. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1921). The translations are taken from Humphries, Rolfe, trans., Ovid: Metamorphoses (Bloomington, 1955Google Scholar).

3. For an excellent study of ekphrasis in the Metamorphoses see Leach, Eleanor Winsor, ‘Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Ramus 3 (1974), 102–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to this article for pointing to the significance of artifacts within the poem, though Professor Leach does not discuss Vulcan’s carving on the palace of the sun. She focuses on stories that emphasize the personality of the human artist and his consistently disastrous fate.

4. Leach, op. cit., 104.

5. See Altieri’s remarks on the story as a basis for imaginative play, op. cit., 34–35.

6. Frankel, Hermann, Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley, 1945), 88Google Scholar. Fränkel sees the play on the double nature of the nymph as an example of the ‘dialectical wit’ of romantic writers.

7. Lines 79–81 from the second Book of the Ars Amatoria are as follows: iam Samos a laeva (fuerant Naxosque relictae et Paros et Clario Delos amata deo), dextra Lebinthos erat silvisque umbrosa Calymne.

8. Leach observes that ‘the human artists of the Metamorphoses show that art can have many effects other than that of creating order. It can provide a perilous, self-destructive isolation from reality; it can stir up jealous passions or provoke the anger of the gods. Indeed,-the artist is unable to predict or govern the consequences of his own work’ (op. cit., 133).

9. Segal, Charles, in his article ‘Myth and Philosophy in the Metamorphoses’, AJP, 90, No. 3 (1969), 257–92Google Scholar, suggests that poetry is the one constant amid perpetual change (290). See also Leach, 134–35.