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. It’s still the same old story 6 - 1 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 It’s still the same old story 6 - 2 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.