It’s still the same old story (version 6)

The greater part of book 5 of the Metamorphoses is made up by an episode where Minerva visits the Muses on mount Helicon. Some time ago this passage caught my attention, and I have been working on it on and off since. This paper is another attempt at it and, above all, at its role in the Metamorphoses as a whole. It certainly deserves more attention than it usually gets.

There is virtually no connection to what precedes Minerva’s visit. She has just left Perseus to his own affairs, and wants to see the Hippocrene because she witnessed the birth of Pegasus who struck the fountain open with his hoof. The Muses greet her as she arrives and tell her of their recent difficulties with a man, Pyreneus, bent on keeping them locked up and violating them, and with a group of nine mortal women, daughters of Pieros and therefore Pierides, who had challenged the Muses to a singing contest. The Pierides had sung a song ridiculing the gods’ performance in the fight against the giants – how they all fled from Typhoeus and disguised themselves in Egypt as various kinds of animal. But the Pierides had been defeated by Calliope and punished by being transformed into magpies. Calliope had won by singing a hymn to Ceres about the rape of Proserpina. She started with explaining how Typhoeus lies captive below Sicily, struggling to get up, and how Hades therefore had to inspect the surface of the island for cracks that might let light slip into the underworld. As he drives his chariot around Sicily, literally minding his own business, Venus instructs Amor to hit him with an arrow; too many gods are living in celibate and she fears for her power and her reputation. Proserpina threatens to become a virgin by choice; by joining her to Hades she too will cease to be a problem, and Venus’ dominions will include the underworld. Amor strikes Hades who promptly abducts Proserpina. A nymph named Cyane tries to stop him by appealing to proper courting procedure, but Hades simply, brutally, runs her down. Ceres goes in search of her daughter and gets a sign from Cyane (by now no longer able to speak; she has become a lake), but fails to find Proserpina. In her rage she strikes Sicily with a famine, and the suffering of the islanders only ceases when Arethusa informs Ceres that Proserpina is with Hades. She has seen this herself and promises to explain how that is the case later, when time allows. Ceres confronts Jupiter who spinelessly tries to argue that the liaison with Hades is not such a bad thing, but eventually Proserpina is adjudicated to Ceres’ care for half of the year – inadvertently Prosperpina has eaten a few seeds of pomegranate in the underworld and is therefore obliged to return for the other half of the year. Ceres now has time to hear Arethusa’s story. She once had to flee the advances of the river Alpheus; he chased her all over the Peloponnesus until she turned into a lake and by the miraculous aid of Diana found refuge across the sea, in Syracuse, as a fountain. In a kind of coda we are told how agriculture was spread from Athens all over the earth by Triptolemus.

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The narrative structure of this is highly complex; in fact the story of Arethusa is told to us by Arethusa telling it to Ceres in a hymn composed by Calliope in the contest with the Pierides and reenacted for Minerva by another Muse. There are no less than four levels of narrators. Interspersed with all this is a series of metamorphoses only very marginally related to the myth. In fact, Ovid also told this story in another work, the Fasti, which he wrote simultaneously with the Metamorphoses. This is a much simpler narrative. Hades abducts Proserpina and Ceres goes in search for her; wandering through all parts of the universe she rests only in Eleusis where decent, but poor people invite her to their house. The family has a son who is not well, and at night Ceres takes to curing him by placing him in the fire; but the boy’s mother sees it and cries out, and the procedure is interrupted. Ceres leaves and proceeds with the search; from the Sun she learns where Proserpina is, confronts Jupiter (still spineless), and eventually gets her daughter back on the same terms as in the Metamorphoses.

Most people know the myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In the hymn the rape is the will of Zeus, an act clearly designed to gratify Hades and thus secure the Olympian order. When Demeter learns thát she goes on a global strike – the entire earth is starving and has nothing to offer the gods who therefore receive no sacrifices. In the end this brings the gods to their heels and an arrangement is reached by which Persephone is only underground for four months each year. In the course of events Demeter stays for a time with the royal family in Eleusis, taking care of their sickly son as in Ovid’s Fasti; the mother cries out and Demeter leaves, less peacefully, since she demands a temple and a cult – which later became the famous Eleusinian mysteries.

If this shows nothing else it makes us aware of the fact that myths can be told, by omissions and additions to the narrative, in infinitely many ways. There simply is no authoritative version, everything changes according to the needs of the specific context of narration – the needs of the narrator, to be precise. Clearly, Ovid has found two quite distinct tales in the hymn. One is about a goddess visiting humans and showing them a favour for their kindness, even if she is prevented from completing her actions. This is a wellknown Hellenistic manoeuvre, exemplified for instance by Callimachus’ Hecale, written in hexameters, or, in an elegiac work, the story of Molorchus in the Aitia. The other is about power. Demeter does not yield to the bidding of Zeus but manifests her own power, proving that she is as indispensable as any other god and therefore to be respected on equal terms. But to this story Ovid, oddly, adds Venus.

In the age of Quellenforschung it was current dogma that the Homeric hymns were not known in Rome in Ovid’s day. An intermediary between the hymn

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and Ovid was invented, to explain among other things why Ovid places the story in Sicily. This is an utterly uneconomical assumption well taken to pieces by Stephen Hinds in his extremely influential book The Metamorphosis of Persephone from 1987. Whatever an intermediary could have done, Ovid would have been up to doing precisely the same – so there is no reason to doubt that Ovid knew and used the hymn himself. But Hinds’ primary subject is the question of genre. Reinstating Richard Heinze in his deserved position as a master of Augustan literature and genre as an important concern for of ancient literature, Hinds works his way through sometimes very minute details of expression in Ovid, showing – or trying to show – how Ovid relates to contemporary poets and to the long literary tradition before that. I shall not myself follow that path, not because I find it irrelevant or sterile, but because there are other issues to be dealt with as well. One of these issues could be 'Ovid and Augustus'. Noone can be anything but fascinated, even shocked, by the relegation of Ovid by the emperor himself to the outskirts of the Roman empire. Another book in which the hymn to Ceres plays a central role is Patricia Johnson’s Ovid Before Exile from 2008. Being a poet, she argues, in the later part of Augustus’ reign was difficult, even dangerous. While I find Hinds’ approach perhaps a little too complex, redolent of the postmodern and deconstructivist atmosphere of the late 1980’ies, I may be a little disappointed by the lack of subtlety in some of Johnson’s arguments, redolent in turn of the new historicist environment of the past 20-30 years. In any case these approaches both work with a significant external apparatus to the understanding of the work, and they focus on what it is to be a poet rather than what it is to be a reader, or consumer, of the Metamorphoses. Whoever wishes – or ever wished – to understand Ovid in those two ways is obliged to know a great deal more than the text of the Metamorphoses itself informs us. And the average consumer of Ovid probably did not know all that much. To be honest, we know very little of this average consumer, but it seems certain that there were, instantly, a great many of them. They probably often read only fragments of the text, as indeed the Metamorphoses almost invite you to do, and they were no doubt more impressed by the immediate elegance and visual clarity of Ovid’s exposition than by the literary pedigree or political relevance of the work. I have a vivid memory of my own first encounter with Ovid. It was the mid 70’ies, I was at school, second year of Latin, I would imagine, when we started reading Ovid – and the text chosen was the episode of Apollo and Daphne. The scene of Amor targeting Apollo and the following chase of the girl, described in such loving simplicity, plainly took me by storm. As I remember, I was actually in love with Daphne. The feeling I had was very well conveyed by a picture of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne now in the Villa Borghese – or it was created by it. I could not tell, then or now. I never had any idea of the complexity of the work or the literary antecedents of the passage – and I did not care, till I started studying classics in university and was told by

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the histories of literature to admire Ovid for his dexterity of expression – and then for nothing more. Learned literature was not – yet – valued very highly. In fact, Alexandrian and to no small extent Augustan literature was seen as excessively literary, artificial, if you like, and too demanding in comparison with early Greek literature. As I have already indicated, I do not myself think this is a helpful or even fair view of the developed literature of Alexandria and Rome. Nevertheless, I shall start from a naive, even simpleminded or simplifying point, asking only simple questions. The kind of observations and questions that might occur to an attentive but not too educated reader of the Metamorphoses, one of those thousands that had their walls decorated with scenes from Ovid.

The first simple question is why Venus is even mentioned in the hymn to Ceres at all. Of course it helps having read the Homeric hymn to see how very disturbing her presence is, but in the context it is in itself a perfectly legitimate question for a reader to ask – her presence does nothing to exalt Ceres, rather the opposite, and it is actually possible to remove her completely without really losing anything but her. In fact, in the specific situation, even the most limited knowledge of Greek mythology will make it clear that the immediate audience of the hymn, Minerva, cannot have taken much pleasure in Venus’ importance here. The situation gets awkward when she is even mentioned as part of Venus’ problem (375). We are not told anything about her reactions to the hymn; she simply leaves. She would have been in her rights to be offended, sulky. So there is every reason why this element in the hymn should not be there. But it is, so including Venus must be important to the tale. As I mentioned before, the narrative potential of this myth as exploited by Ovid in the Metamorphoses focuses on power struggle among the gods. In fact, the primary combatants have changed – in the Homeric hymn it was Demeter who stood up to Zeus (and won); here Venus takes on the entire pantheon, and indeed in a moment where the gods have only recently overcome the most serious challenge they ever met, the Giants. She even declares this war in terms that make it clear that we are dealing with a desire for world domination. Heaven and sea she has conquered, even though she still feels the need for recognition of the fact; now it is time to add the underworld. So Amor places an arrow in Hades, this decent countryside gentleman out to inspect his fences, and within seconds he is a brutal rapist disregarding all conventions of society, paying no heed to warnings and reproaches. Perhaps it is not entirely fortuitous that Bernini also made a sculpture of the abduction by Hades of Proserpina. The description of Amor selecting an arrow and fixing it in Hades is certainly reminiscent of Amor doing much the same in the Apollo and Daphne episode in book 1. This episode is also set immediately after the last fighting in the war on the Giants, and Apollo makes it perfectly clear what he thinks of the kind of activity Amor stands for. Weapons are for grown-ups, for serious warfare. This said, it takes but a few

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lines for Apollo to lose all his pompous dignity and be chasing Daphne across the landscape, pleading with her to stop and let herself be loved. When she finally gets help from her father to retain her virginity and is changed into a laurel, Apollo prophesies her role as a central element in Augustan ceremony. The scene is quite amusing; Amor must have been laughing all the way back to tell his mother. But Daphne’s flight is also strongly reminiscent of an element of the fifth book – Arethusa, another virgin by choice, fleeing the approaches of Alpheus. So now we have two episodes of the ascent of Venus or Amor to world domination, largely contemporaneous and similar in general structure, but also carefully different – variation is the keyword of this poem. Actually, Ovid himself claims to have had a similar experience once. The very first poem of the Amores shows Ovid setting out to write serious poetry in hexameters (which means, we know from the first poem of the second book, among other things a Gigantomachy) when Amor teasingly takes away one foot in every second line, and when Ovid protests that Amor has no power over poets, he is simply hit by an arrow. The entire scene is strikingly similar, even in its details. Ovid was conquered much as was Apollo and Hades, and he, too, changes, from serious author to devotee of Venus. Now, it may be that our imaginary average consumer of the Metamorphoses has not read the Amores – though I think he has. But if our reader goes on reading the Metamorphoses he will eventually get to book 10. If for any reason he should have forgotten book 5, he is immediately reminded of it – Orpheus is in the underworld trying to get Eurydice back, and wonders if Love is known down there – yet, rumour has it that Proserpina was once joined to Hades by Amor (10, 28-9). Shortly afterwards Orpheus, frustrated, gives up serious subjects such as the Gigantomachy and sings of illicit love by women and the love of gods for boys. In a long narrative structurally reminiscent of that of his mother Calliope in the hymn to Ceres Orpheus finally gets to telling how Venus fell in love with Adonis. Once again Amor is to blame, but this time it is an accident; as Venus is giving him a kiss she gets a scratch from one of the arrows, and that is quite enough. Before too long she is following the huntsman Adonis dressed as and acting as Diana herself – quite out of character, that is. Even Venus cannot resist the power of Venus. Now, if this is not enough, there is more. Adonis is a daring hunter, and Venus wants him to stay away from dangerous animals. In order to make him obey her, she tells the story of her help to Hippomenes to win Atalanta, another tale of a lover’s chase of the beloved. But Hippomenes is not grateful and Venus is angry enough to have Cybele transform him and Atalanta into lions – the very kind of animal that Adonis must escape. Venus scarcely conceals the threat to Adonis if he does not obey her. These three scenes, then, have shown us gods under the influence of Venus; in each case the effect is loss of self-control and extensive character change, to the verge of subverting the norms of society. Of course it is difficult to take the single scenes completely seriously, it is perfectly in place to be amused. But the

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matter is serious enough. Not only does the event have important consequences for the victims, but in each case the dignity of another god is infringed. Of course no human could ever actually influence a god as Venus does, but even the attempt would have been fatal.

I am not going to claim that this series of similar scenes is a clue to the structure of the Metamorphoses. This vexed problem is not at all my issue here. But these three episodes are certainly a clue to a structure in the Metamorphoses, which even follows a pattern of a division of the poem into pentads which has had its advocates.

As our average reader leaves book 10 and enters the third pentad he quickly finds himself in an ever more human environment. The Trojan war and its sequel is as human as anything can be, even though the gods play their part in the events. In book 9 Hercules was deified by the will of Jupiter, unopposed, as it were, by even Juno, and in book 14 we find both Aeneas and Romulus accepted into the ranks of the (minor) gods, on the humble pleas of, respectively, Venus and Mars. Apotheosis is very much the prerogative of Jupiter, and it is granted rarely and gruntingly. In book 15, Pythagoras rambles along on the subjects of constant change and vegetarianism, and we can see the end of the poem in the distance. It is time for closure. Our average reader knows nothing about the interest bestowed in the past decades on closure in literature, but, now that he has noticed the pattern of scenes with Amor hitting someone etc., he will certainly expect in book 15 something to match them. Venus is very much active in the final episode, the apotheosis of Caesar (the Elder), pleading with the gods for his life. It is a passage fraught with ironies and provocations, and we may ask why it is even there. It has, obviously, never really been a reader’s favourite like the Apollo and Daphne or the Pyramus and Thisbe passages, and one would have thought that Ovid had reason enough to avoid the subject of Augustus. Appealing, as has been done, to Alexandrian practice is hardly relevant –Ovid, for all his playful multiplicity, is not Callimachus, and in any case, what is said about Augustus in this epilogue is not unequivocally panegyric. In the very least, the very ambiguity of it is just not helpful to a politician. Closing the Metamorphoses with precisely this material requires some kind of explanation. But in a way, in this passage, Venus finally achieves what she desired in book 5. She is now, demonstrably, in power, a fact symbolized by her role in the apotheosis of Caesar. This is carried out not by Jupiter but by Venus and Augustus who is expected to be deified himself eventually. Two more gods on her side in Olympus (Aeneas was only accorded access to the minor deities, remember). However: Venus’ specific powers are disregarded. Throughout the work her interventions – and not only the ones I’ve been talking about, but all of them –

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have resulted in disruption, breaking up the personality of her victims and forcing them to transgress all kinds of norms of society. Nothing like that occurs in the end of the Metamorphoses. Rather, the world is being restored to ’order’ – the civil wars as well as the war with the ’Egyptian wife of a Roman general’ and other external wars and conquests being brought to an end, laws being introduced and morality restored by the good example of Augustus himself. What Augustus is doing is much more like what Jupiter stands for, when he is not being spineless or madly in love. He defeats the Giants, exterminates immoral humanity, deifies humans and presides over the divine senate. The parallelism is insisted upon – both are pater atque rector, Jupiter in Heaven, Augustus on earth, but as we saw, equipped with the power to enfranchise new citizens on Olympus, if he so wishes. It is as if Augustus is not even related to Venus at all – which, incidentally, Ovid goes out of his way to point out by an extraordinarily clumsy attempt to say the opposite, only adding injury to insult when he points out that the future emperors will, physically, be the offspring not of Augustus, but of Livia. This is not Venus come into power but relegated to some marginal position (and not a word about Ovid in exile!) But we do not know Venus to take this kind of insult. The situation is obviously unstable; it is only a question of time before she will come again (as indeed she did) and generate disruption – and, in fact, Ovid does not promise us anything else. There is no expectation of a golden age of peace and harmony here. This is all the more noteworthy because a golden age was exactly what Vergil thought the reign of Augustus to be. Ovid invites, even provokes comparison with the Aeneid, when he lets Venus recall Aeneas’ war with Turnus, ’or, to tell the truth, rather with Juno’, as she pleads for the life of Caesar. Now, so far I have not really allowed my reader to possess any knowledge of other literature at all. But this is an impossible assumption; it is extremely unlikely that a reader of the Metamorphoses entire should not also have read the Aeneid entire. So it is most likely (or let us assume that it is) that my reader has noticed the internal inconsistency in the Metamorphoses itself – there is no solution to the conflict of Venus and Jupiter/the rest of the gods; a fight of love and glory will still go on, and, indeed, he will have noticed that this is somehow a comment on the Aeneid – it is still the same old story. This much my model reader could, I think, make out with a minimal knowledge of other literature. Obviously, this reader must have a capacity for remembering other texts, as he has remembered, when reading the hymn to Ceres in book 5, the Apollo and Daphne episode in book 1, and later combines the Venus and Adonis episode in book 10 with the hymn. If so, he may also have remembered, when reading the end of the Metamorphoses, how Jupiter promises Venus the world in book 1 of the Aeneid, and with any luck he will have seen that Venus in the hymn virtually quotes the Venus of the Aeneid, when she sends Amor off to replace Ascanius (Aen. 1,664: ’nate, meae vires, mea magna potentia’ etc. = Met. 5,365 ’arma manusque meae, mea, nate, potentia’) If he does recall these things, he will be confirmed, and only confirmed, in the belief that

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Ovid is setting up an alternative scenario – to say the least – to the Virgilian Augustanism.

So the Augustan ideological programme is questioned, and with it the great narrative that carried it, the Aeneid. We simply cannot believe that Venus has been forced to keep her peace – the end of the Metamorphoses is just not really an end. Of course, there are good reasons to think that Apollonios' Argonautica and the Aeneid itself have no real closure either. Did our average reader perceive that, and did it matter for him? Did he have any opinion on whether "proper" epics should have endings; did he even care about the genre as such? I'm sure he had some expectations of a long text in hexameters, but did he not rather follow the story, enjoy the poetry, the kaleidoscopic wealth of ideas? When provoked to see the difference of Aeneid and Metamorphoses, how did he react? Tacitus lets us follow a vox populi discussing the merits of Augustus at his funeral in the first book of the Annals, so the very thought of such a reaction is not unreasonable, but, to be honest, we have no way of knowing. He certainly did not suddenly turn into an Antiaugustan activist. But perhaps he doubted the whole Augustan setup a little more. It would not be strange, if he already had his doubts. In the late republic it was centuries since politics could be influenced by the common people; and ordinary people certainly did have reason to doubt their leaders. Whatever madness got hold of the clan leaders it was the people who took the beating.

This calls for another aside, if I may: I myself doubt that Ovid thought that the Augustan order could or even should be opposed politically. He is merely playing with the tools used by Augustus to establish that order. Perhaps Augustus decided that this game was not so innocuous after all; indeed, I think it wasn’t. Once one takes apart society’s fundamental narratives one is obliged to offer alternative ones that will serve their purpose. To be frank, I’m not entirely sure that Ovid did. The one massive mistake in the thinking of the 80’ies was the belief that great narratives were dead. They were not, and left unattended they rose with terrifying power and have yet to be tamed again, confined below Etna, if you like.

If I make my model reader still a little more sensitive to details of the text, he will have noticed that in all the episodes we have been examining Diana has a role to play. Daphne begs her father to be allowed to retain her virginity ’just like Diana’s father permitted’ (1, 487; a Callimachean reference, if ever there was one); Diana is, with Minerva, part of Venus’ problem in book 5, and she saves Arethusa from Alpheus; and finally Venus changes to be Diana in book 10. Now, there was in Greek myth an incident where Artemis and Aphrodite confronted each other on the question whether any human could be allowed to refrain from sex, the story of Hippolytus. This incident, though thematically at home in book 10 when Orpheus sings of illicit love by women, is in the

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Metamorphoses found in book 15 (493-546). I first tried to make this episode a sequel to the other three, transgressing the literary competence, I think, of my model reader, by assuming that the reference here is to Euripides’ Hippolytos. That tragedy, still preserved, begins with Aphrodite setting up a plot to get at the virtuous and utterly asexual Hippolytos, one of Artemis’ favourites, by forcing Phaidra, his step-mother, to love him, even though she is very well aware that Phaidra will kill herself rather that act on that impulse. As it turns out, Hippolytos dies, torn to pieces by his own horses, as they are chased by a sea monster, and Artemis swears to take her revenge on Aphrodite, probably by killing Adonis, whom we met in book 10. This would have the theme of gods in conflict repeat itself at an appropriate moment, albeit not explicitly, just as there is a chase to support the parallel. But, to be honest, this is not the version of the myth Ovid builds on, and there is too little left of the Phaidra – Euripides' other treatment of the myth, where Phaidra, it appears, was much more forward and aggressive – to build any intertextual case on the fragments. This, then, was my first idea. But then, and to my disgrace only then, did it occur to me that the answer is much closer to home. In the Heroides Ovid makes Phaedra send Hippolytus a love letter, and this letter fills the lacuna in the Metamorphoses which is somewhat brief on Phaedra's actual approach to Hippolytus. The tricky thing is, of course, that such a document would make Phaedra's suicide note completely ineffectual - but perhaps this is one of the details that one should not notice. If we do not, we have, in the letter, Amor mentioned as more potent than the other gods; a wish for a shooting of Hippolytus (variation!), and Phaedra completely out of character, wanting to live a life like Diana - in nemus ire libet, she says. The chase follows, in the Metamorphoses themselves. The same general picture, though varied. The text total that there is for us to read to make the narrative complete is then, not only the Metamorphoses, but also the Fasti, the Amores, and the Heroides, basically Ovid's entire literary output at the time. That much an average reader could, perhaps, accomplish. This would make for an interesting, and open- ended, conclusion to this paper. Still, I would like to go a little further. There are many conflicting divine interests in the Hippolytus passage. Theoretically, Ovid may be suggesting that not only Venus and Jupiter are at odds, but that all gods are at odds with each other – that there is no way at all in which the world will find a coherent explanation, no matter how much we try. This would be a most postmodern conclusion, even deconstructivist, the end of metaphysics. But, I suppose, this would require a wider literary and philosophical outlook, greater education, than I have accorded my model reader. A person able to discuss the Metamorphoses on such a level is rapidly approaching the level of learning that Stephen Hinds and his like display. Now, of course, Stephen Hinds could just as well be our model reader. For Hinds the text total is infinitely larger; it even comprises the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Germanicus’ translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus. But just as it

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is uncertain how we should deal with Hippolytus in book 15, so any intertextual reference, or indeed intertextuality itself, is not a self-evident fact, but a component of the act of interpretation – only if the reference makes sense, as a generic marker or a specific analogy, can it be taken into consideration, and since our knowledge of ancient literature is bedeviled by lacuna, we shall never be certain to have got the whole picture. We would not even be sure, if we had still possessed all that Ovid ever read. The ultimate model reader is one who has complete control over the entire text, who knows everything. One is tempted to say that this can only be the author, but this has been doubted often enough, and certainly with good reason. But it is time for one last naive observation. In the last lines of the Metamorphoses Ovid expresses his conviction that he will always be read by the people – clearly, by a series of allusions, provoking comparison with Horace who was always preoccupied with addressing the nobles. In the lines immediately before this Ovid claims that his work is as indestructible as fate itself (an internal allusion to lines 809 sqq.) Whatever you make of this remarkable claim, Ovid is certainly an author in control of his work, or so he thinks. And, in fact, our average reader may have wondered why the Muse in book 5 sort of overloads her hymn with so many stories of transformations, and, indeed, the quite insulting and superfluous focus on Venus. But of course she has to; not she, but Ovid is in control, and his work is on metamorphosis, just as he needs Venus for later use. It has often been noticed that Ovid does not invoke the Muses until the end where he is actually describing historical events, where, in other words, one would have thought his need for help is least pressing. But Ovid is not the medium through which the Muse speaks – she is the medium through which he speaks. Ovid himself was Fate itself. Only God (or Fate) can understand the world in full; only Ovid can really read the Metamorphoses, see through the intricate web of internal and external connections that ultimately demands knowledge of the entire ancient literature, whether preserved or not. We try, and we should try, to disclose the secrets of Ovid as he builds his world, to understand the demiurge at work. But that is not what Ovid wants. His desire is to be read – forever – by the average reader, the people. And, I think, what this misty figure finds, with his or her comparatively restricted means of interpretation, is a story of a world in endless conflict, mainly a conflict of the desire for importance and security in society and the physical needs of the individual, a conflict of Venus and Jupiter – a fight of love and glory.

Simon Laursen

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