The traditional site for violence in epic is the battlefield, and that site is characterized by face-to-face combat among men who are in general equally matched. In the Metamorphoses, however, violence for the most part is enacted outside the battlefield and is directed against those who lack adequate defence, whether because of their gender, their age, their profession, or their sheer mortality. On the few occasions when heroes do fight one another, the circumstances or their actions are often ridiculous or grotesque. The most violent fighting in the Metamorphoses takes place at weddings. Thus when the Metamorphoses comes in time to the Trojan War and the subject matter of the Iliad, long-winded Nestor, though encamped outside Troy, tells not of the present combat but instead of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding of Hippodamia (12.168535). Moreover, much of the fighting he describes is crudely comic and hardly heroic; mixing bowls serve as weapons along with swords. It is important to recognize, as Holz-berg cautions, that the grotesque nature of such scenes calls into question not Homeric poetry but rather hero worship (1997: 141). We are invited to see traditional heroes in a new, less flattering light.
The battle among heroes that takes place at the wedding of Perseus and Andromeda (5.3-249), is an episode that, as Alison Keith argues “constitutes a sustained meditation on the action of heroic epic,’’ for the brutality of Homer and the sentimentality of Virgil are intensified within the brief compass of 250 lines (2002: 241; cf. Otis 1970: 57). Perseus, with only a few companions but with the assistance ofMinerva, fights for his wife against a greater number of armed rivals, headed by Phineus, the spurned fiance; thus the parallels with Odyssey 22 are particularly striking, along with details fTom Virgil’s Italian war in the Aeneid.
Most critics have treated this episode as a parody of heroic battle (cf. Keith 2002: 245 and Due 1974: 78). Yet the episode implicitly attacks as false the premise that the hero must be defined and proved through martial prowess, for the entire fight is unnecessary. In the end, after a good deal of bloodshed, all Perseus has to do is to swing round Medusa’s head and turn his enemies into statues, and we have to wonder why he did not do this earlier. Indeed, this unnecessary fight provides the occasion for the deconstruction of heroic norms of miltary prowess, ancestral pride, and immortality. The heroes appear as inept, cruel, and pathetically pretentious. For instance, Perseus is presented as an opportunist, killing Athis with a log (55-7) and swinging a mixing bowl instead of a sword (79-84); Phineus kills Idas by mistake (89-96); so slippery with blood does the floor of the banquet hall become that several heroes slip and fall, meeting their deaths as they struggle to get up (74-8); the venerable seer Aethion, once ‘‘sagacious’’ (146), has been deceived by a lying portent (146); Astyages thinks a petrified soldier is alive and strikes the figure with his sword, making a metallic sound (200-6). Heroic genealogy too here is flawed. Not only are most of the ancestors mentioned quite obscure, but also the parentage of Astreus, we are told, is in doubt (144-5), Agyrtes is infamis, disgraced (148), because he killed his father, and Nileus, who bears a lavish representation in silver and gold of the River Nile on his shield, has lyingly claimed (ementitus, 188) that his father is the Nile (187-9). The episode ends with a bitter play upon the heroic goal of immortality on the battlefield. Perseus promises his enemy Phineus that in the future he will never be violated by the sword but rather will be an eternal monument, mansura... monimenta per aevum (227). Playing off the double meaning of monimentum as literary memorial and monument, Perseus literalizes his promise by turning Phineus into a statue to be placed in the palace of the fiancee who jilted him (224-35). The episode ends with a bad joke that makes fun of the hero’s traditional desire for immortal glory; Phineus will always, we are told, be looked at by his former fiancee (228-9); always he will keep his craven expression (234-5). The hero is memorialized as a perpetual emblem of unheroic fear and the object of a woman’s scorn.
Glenn Most noted the influence that the Metamorphoses had on the development of grotesque forms of death in Neronian literature (1992: 393-4; see also Due 1974: 77). Indeed, for Karl Galinsky Ovid panders to the tastes of his Roman public, debased by the contemporary, savage pleasures of the amphitheater rather than the battlefield (1975: 110-57). But the violence of the nuptial battles is, paradoxically, pointedly gratuitous. In these often ridiculous and exaggerated scenes of violence, the poem is ironic about epic conventions, undermining the heroic ethos and inviting critical scrutiny of traditional heroic values, in particular the prowess that rests on pride of birth and martial skill, and on the elevation of glory through killing. With characteristic humor, irony, and grotesquerie, the poem provides an alternative look at the battlefield, revealing the mistakes, the mess, the vain pretensions, the false motives and claims that often fuel combat. As a product of a state vested in military success, yet haunted by the specter of past civil wars, the poem challenges Rome’s most cherished values and ideals.
Writers from Aristophanes to the present day have, like Ovid, employed humor, along with the grotesque and the absurd, to critique prevailing social and political beliefs and norms. George Bernard Shaw in his 1894 play Arms and the Man, for instance, invites his audience to scrutinize their assumptions about the motives underpinning the state’s exaltation of martial valor and patriotism. When his heroine Raina, starstruck with romantic ideas of military glory culled from books and trips to the opera, asks her ‘‘chocolate cream soldier’’ to describe a cavalry charge, he puts a severe dent in her fantasy by describing it as a handful of peas thrown against a window pane. Indeed, what Leonard Barkan calls ‘‘the anti heroic thrust of metamorphosis’’ is well captured by Ted Hughes in Tales from Ovid when, in the fight between Achilles and Cygnus, he uses an absurdly domestic, comic image to describe how ‘‘the flaring helmet flew off in shards/Like the shell of a boiled egg’’ (Barkan 1986: 85; Hughes 1997: 171). Metamorphosis often involves the absurd and the grotesque; above all, change in human form reminds the reader of the fragility of the human body and the instability, rather than immortality, of human identity.
World History
