Icarus: Entering the World of Myth
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Icarus: entering the world of myth About this free course This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman worlds www.open.ac.uk/courses/modules/a330. This version of the content may include video, images and interactive content that may not be optimised for your device. You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University: www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/icarus-entering-the-world-myth/content-section-0. http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/modules/a330. There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning. Copyright © 2017 The Open University Intellectual property Unless otherwise stated, this resource is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Licence v4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en_GB. 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Head of Intellectual Property, The Open University 2 of 25 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/icarus-entering-the-world-myth/content-section-0 Monday 11 March 2019 Contents Introduction 4 Learning Outcomes 5 1 Ovid as mythographer and myth-maker 6 2 Icarus as symbol and signifier 7 3 Daedalus and Icarus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10 4 Brueghel and Auden 13 4.1 Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 14 4.2 A further angle on the painting 16 4.3 Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts 16 4.4 Auden’s Stop All the Clocks 19 4.5 A further angle on the poems 20 Conclusion 22 Keep on learning 23 References 23 Further reading 24 Acknowledgements 24 3 of 25 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/icarus-entering-the-world-myth/content-section-0 Monday 11 March 2019 Introduction Introduction In this free course, Icarus: entering the world of myth, you will be working on one short mythical narrative, the death of Icarus. One aim of this course is to introduce you to the Roman poet Ovid, a crucially important figure in the history of classical mythology. Very few Graeco-Roman mythic narratives escaped Ovid’s attention, even if some crop up in unexpected places and only feature by brief allusion. Sampling Ovid in this OpenLearn course will involve the exciting activity of probing deeper into his influence on both the matter and the method of myth-telling in the literary and visual arts for centuries after his death. This ‘taster’ of a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses will also acclimatise you to reading and responding to a mythical story with an extremely varied afterlife. Here, you will focus on two famous later works which both draw on the Icarus myth: a sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and a poem written in 1938 by W.H. Auden. You will analyse the ways in which the ancient myth has been transformed in these more recent artworks, and consider what these changes can tell us about the societies in which they were created. This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman worlds. 4 of 25 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/icarus-entering-the-world-myth/content-section-0 Monday 11 March 2019 Learning Outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: ● display knowledge of one well-known classical myth, and understand its relation to a number of other myths and characters ● understand how this myth functions in a range of historical, cultural and artistic contexts ● engage in basic literary and visual analysis of ancient and later sources of myth. 1 Ovid as mythographer and myth-maker 1 Ovid as mythographer and myth-maker Publius Ovidius Naso, to give Ovid his three full names as a Roman citizen, was born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), Italy, in 43 BCE and died in exile at Tomis on the Black Sea coast (modern Constanţa, Romania) in 17 or 18 CE. Ovid was a poet who wrote in a variety of genres, but for present purposes you might start by regarding him as a mythographer or myth collector. The reason for this is his epic poem Metamorphoses, written in Latin in Rome around the end of the first century BCE, which has proved to be a treasure house of Greek and Roman myths throughout the centuries. Metamorphoses continues to function as a ‘myth-kitty’ – a notion coined and dismissed by the poet Philip Larkin (1982, p. 69) – but Ovid was not producing this magnum opus to be a mere catalogue for future cultures. There are some parallels between Ovid and the nineteenth-century scholar Sir James Frazer as both authors made connections between themes and characters across different myths. The kind of thematic superstructures Ovid and Frazer created – in their very different ways – have proved enormously influential on ideas about the meaning of myth and its function in society. As indicated above, Ovid was a receiver and also a refashioner (in his own day) of mythical material. He adapted and combined well-known narratives in ingenious ways but also brought to the fore less familiar, small-scale stories from Greek and Roman legend and put these on the mythic map for future generations. His use of an epic frame for such disparate and narratively fluid material was in itself challenging and innovative. In his prologue to Metamorphoses (1.1–4) Ovid claims to weave together stories of transformation in a ‘continuous’ song. 6 of 25 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/icarus-entering-the-world-myth/content-section-0 Monday 11 March 2019 2 Icarus as symbol and signifier 2 Icarus as symbol and signifier The myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son who escaped from the island of Crete on wings, is told in Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Icarus has become the more familiar of the two characters as the ancient high-flyer who fell from the sky when the wax that secured his wings was melted by the sun. Icarus’ story connects up with a number of narrative passageways centred on the island of Crete (where Daedalus, the legendary artificer and craftsman, constructed a maze, the Labyrinth, to conceal and control the Minotaur). Daedalus was himself effectively imprisoned on the island (the king barred his exit by sea) and so was unable to return with his son, Icarus, to Athens or find sanctuary away from the harsh regime at Crete. The Cretan labyrinth also featured in the exploits of the Athenian hero, Theseus, who slew the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull offspring of queen Pasiphaë, with the help of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos. Another connected myth is that of the Cretan princess Phaedra, who later married Theseus (even though he had abandoned her sister, Ariadne, his guide through the Labyrinth), and developed a destructive and tragic passion for her stepson Hippolytus. These strange sexual couplings (or attempts at them – Phaedra is scorned and takes her revenge) stem from a curse on the descendants of the sun god, Helios. Aphrodite punished Helios for his exposure of her affair with Ares by decreeing that the female descendants of the sun would select and pursue inappropriate and disastrous partners.