Austen Aquino Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite For

"IN NOVA FERT ANIMUS MUTATAS DICERE FORMAS CORPORA": A COMPARISON OF THREE THEMES IN OVID AND ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN MYTHOLOGY Austen Aquino Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Comparative Literature under the advisement of Edward Silver April 2017 © 2017 Austen Aquino 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people that I need to thank without whom this beast of a thesis would merely be a pipe dream. First and foremost, I have to thank my parents for everything they've done to help me during my time at Wellesley, and for letting me run away to go to a school on the East Coast that they'd never heard of before. Mom and Dad, thank you for trusting me, believing in me, raising me so that I felt I had the ability to take on a project like this one, and not letting me come home after my first week here when I called you crying because I accidentally shrank all my clothes in the school dryers. Also, thanks Mom for sending me pictures of the dog almost everyday this year for emotional support. I also need to thank the myriad of wonderful friends in my life for their undying support. Vickey, Willow, Emily, Maya, Zaynah, Bridget, Clara, Kaylie, Jeanette, Clarissa, Ryan, Lisa, Vianna, and Ethan — thank you all so much for making sure that I was eating, drinking water, and sleeping, for sending me encouraging Snapchats and animal videos at 3 AM, for leaving me notes on my thesis carrel, for staying late to have Domino's delivered to the library with me, and for listening to me complain over the course of my year-long self-indulgent pity-party. I appreciate each and every one of you for your support, and for relentlessly cheering me on! I need to thank my uncle Michael and my aunt Linda for taking the time out of their busy lives to proof read my outrageously long thesis. I also want to thank my Latin 315 class for their incredible discussions about Ovid's Metamorphoses that sparked ideas about the material I'd been studying. I especially want to thank them for drawing my attention to Ovid's connection to Lucretius, and to the linguistic intricacies of Ovid's anthropogony section. I also need to thank all of the trees that gave their lives throughout this process in the name of printing. I'm also very grateful to all of the professors and mentors who have taken the time and effort to give me such sound advice, both academic and general, throughout my time here at Wellesley. Thank you to Professor Starr for seeing potential in my Latin abilities from my first year, and for advising my Classical Civilizations major. And thank you so much to Ruth and Mariana over in Special Collections. You have both given me endless support, mentorship, confidence, encouragement, and friendship from the very beginning of my Wellesley career. I am forever grateful to you both for always seeing the best in me and always believing in my abilities. Thank you so much to Professor Nolden, Professor Rosenwald, and Professor Young for agreeing to be on my committee, and for reading my work. I'm so appreciative for the time, effort, and thought that you're undertaking on my behalf. I would like to extend an extra thank you to Professor Young for her secondary advisement on my thesis work, and for advising my Comparative Literature major. You are an incredible teacher, an incredible scholar, and an incredible person, and I am so grateful to have had the chance to know you and work with you throughout my time at Wellesley. Finally, of course I have to thank Professor Silver for the extraordinary effort he's put into working with me on this project. Thank you so much for all of your guidance, for reading every draft I've given you (no matter how rough or how extravagantly long), for pushing my abilities as a scholar, and for believing that I was capable of accomplishing this thesis even when I didn't. Also, thank you for the pep talks, for answering my frantic emails even on weekends or on late nights, and for bringing Hector to so many of our meetings. And, thank you for listening to my vague, casual thesis topic last spring with such enthusiasm and boundless support: without you, I truly and honestly wouldn't have been able to write this thesis. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................................4 CHAPTER 1: Hospitality..................................................................................................................21 CHAPTER 2: Flood..........................................................................................................................47 CHAPTER 3: Creation....................................................................................................................103 CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................................166 WORKS CITED...............................................................................................................................170 WORKS REFERENCED....................................................................................................................174 4 INTRODUCTION: SING, O MUSE! The striking motivic parallels between Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman literatures, particularly between their mythological literatures, have often been noted by scholars. In early scholarship the connections between the Hebrew Bible and Greek classics were recognized and accepted. The link between these two geographical and cultural areas was considered to be the Phoenicians, a theory that has had a resurgence in modern scholarship. Walter Burkert noted toward the end of the 18th century, however, that there was a general shift toward "an image of a pure, classical Greece in splendid isolation",1 which is influenced by several external factors. Initially the gap between Near Eastern and Grecian cultures began with the evolution of attitudes towards Greece.2 Largely within the German scholarly community there was a rise of romantic nationalist ideology3 in the late 18th century. This period was also a time "when Jews were being granted full legal equality in Europe",4 a time when anti-Semitic sentiments were on the rise, and ultimately a time when scholars began to emphasize the chasm between Ancient Near Eastern (i.e. Semitic) literatures and that of Greece (i.e. the roots of Western civilization). With the discovery of the common linguistic root of so-called Indo-European languages,5 the divide between Greece as a part of Europe and the Ancient Near East as a Semitic "other" culture 1 Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1. 2 As the concept of classical Greece becomes more polytheistic and Hellenistic in the works of scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the culture and literature of Greece becomes more distant from that of the Ancient Near East, and from the Hebrew Bible in particular. 3 Romantic nationalism was an ideology that emphasized the inherent separateness of each cultural-ethnic community. Under this ideology, ethnic communities had a strong tie to their own literature and culture, and each community and their respective culture organically developed internally. See: Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 2. 4 Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 2. 5 Ibid., 2. 5 was reinforced. These various factors worked in concert throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as Burkert observes, "in order to establish the concept of classical-national Greek identity as a self- contained and self-sufficient model of civilization".6 It was not until the decipherment of Near Eastern cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, the discovery of pre-Classical Greek Mycenaean culture, the decipherment of Linear B, and the discovery of the Gilgamesh epic, that Near Eastern culture reemerged into the scholarly conversation. This resurgence spawned anti-oriental reactions.7 In fact, during the German inter-war period of the 20th century, many scholars and archaeologists, such as Helmut Berve and Otto Neugebauer, continued to favor Hellenism rather than universalism in their studies. Rarely, at this time, did German scholars consider Near Eastern culture in conjunction with Greek culture.8 With the discovery of Hittite literature9 and its connection to Indo-European languages, the mid- 20th century saw these texts set against similar literatures from Semitic Ugarit, and Greek literatures, as well as those fragments from Philon of Byblos that addressed Phoenician myths. After over a hundred years of rejecting the connection between Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman cultures, the perceived gap was closing in scholarly circles, while literary comparisons accompanied by numerous historical claims became more common. For example, Joseph Fontenrose, an early 20th century scholar with a diffusionist mindset, 10 took up the discussion of the textual transmission of flood stories around the time that Greek and Near 6 Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 2. 7 Some scholars, such as Julius Beloch, completely rejected the role of Phoenicians in Greece, and continued to elevate the uniqueness of Asia Minor. 8 Franz Dornseiff was a rare exception who examined the interaction of these two cultures, an endeavor that was supported by the discovery of Hittite mythological literatures. 9 Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 4. 10 Diffusionism is the idea that "cultural traits naturally move from

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