ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF DEATH VIOLENCE, DEATH, AND SUPERNATURAL TRANSFORMATION IN OVID’S FASTI A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY ANNA EVERETT BEEK IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY CHRISTOPHER NAPPA, ADVISER FEBRUARY, 2015 copyright 2015 Anna Everett Beek ABSTRACT Ovid’s Fasti, in its elaboration of mythic stories and the aetia of Roman religious practices, exhibits a marked correlation between violence and supernatural transformation: people who experience acts of intense violence such as rape, assault, and bodily mutilation are transformed by the experience into gods or other supernatural beings. In fact, within the Fasti, nearly all apotheoses have an episode of violence as a catalyst, and moreover nearly all violence results in transformation. Although rape (and some other forms of violence) in the Fasti has been examined extensively by other scholars, previous studies have focused on the perpetration of violence, while this dissertation examines the consequences of the event, how the victims fail to re-integrate to society and are removed by being ostracized, exiled, killed, transformed, or even apotheosed because a return to their former lives is impossible. Some of the prominent examples treated are Romulus, Anna Perenna, Ino, Callisto, and Lara. Special attention is paid to how this overarching pattern differentiates the Fasti from Ovid’s best known collection of mythic transformation stories, the Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses does provide several episodes of apotheosis (such as those of Hercules, Aeneas, Romulus, and Julius Caesar), and those episodes share certain structural elements that recur in similar episodes in the Fasti: in many cases, the character in question is put in life-threatening danger, which is averted at the last minute by divine intervention and transformation into divinity. Nevertheless, the Fasti, unlike the Metamorphoses, has almost no episodes of humans being transformed into plants, birds, stones, or geographic features as salvation from a threat or punishment for transgression. On the contrary, transformation is almost exclusively a vehicle to divinity or catasterism. The Fasti’s strong association of violence with apotheosis and vice versa enshrines violence within the Roman calendar and even celebrates it as a path to a greater destiny. i TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables………………………………………………………………………. iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: The Hercules Model and Variations…………………………………… 13 Chapter 2: Remus and Romulus: a Divided Hercules………………....................... 77 Chapter 3: Transformation via Rape……………………………………………….. 119 Chapter 4: Catasterism……………………………………………………………... 177 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………. 209 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….. 215 Appendix: Further Transformations: Lucretia and Livia…………………………... 225 ii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Apotheoses in Ovid’s Metamorphoses………………………………….... 15 iii Introduction Ovid and Supernatural Transformation This dissertation is a study of narratives of supernatural transformation1 in Ovid’s Fasti and the common elements within them. Supernatural transformation of course plays a great part in Ovid’s work, most of all in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, as Darcos states: “Ovide chante un monde, en effet, où s’opère sans cesse cette incorporation du divin sur terre.”2 My primary avenue of investigation will be the relationship between violence and apotheosis in Ovid’s Fasti. There is a generally observable pattern in the Fasti of direct correlation between violence and supernatural transformation, to wit: supernatural transformation is necessarily precipitated by violence against the person transformed--and, for the most part, violence against a person is necessarily followed by that person’s supernatural transformation. There are important deviations from this model, as I will address over the course of the dissertation, but the overwhelming trend is that Ovid’s narratives of apotheosis, catasterism, and other miraculous transformations are shot through with violence, perpetrated against the person transformed. Within this correlation, the reader witnesses a martyrizing effect such that, to gain divine power, a 1 Note that my investigation centers on narratives rather than predictions of apotheosis--narratives of completed events bear standard elements that predictions of the future (such as the predicted apotheoses of Augustus and Ovid at Met. 15.868-70 and 15.871-9, or that of Livia at Fasti 1.536) lack. 2 Darcos (2009) 349. Tissol (2002) 310 likewise claims “the loss of human identity in metamorphosis” as one of the big themes of the Met. 1 character must first suffer some trauma as a lesser form of being; those who have not suffered on earth will not gain divine power among the gods.3 To this end, violence has a particular status and function within Augustan poetry, particularly the works of Ovid. Rea has called attention to the fact that, in the wake of the civil wars, violence was much on the mind of the Romans, and that many Augustan poets cultivated a palpable presence of violence in their poetry: “The poets’ memories of the past encouraged the Romans to explore the ways in which they could negotiate their differences of opinion about the recent violence in the city and the loss of many of their compatriots at Actium.”4 Ovid has a unique place in this schema, since he was the youngest of the famous Augustan poets; unlike Horace, he did not personally participate in the battles for control of the empire; unlike Vergil, his youth was not mired in civil conflict. One may see this reflected in Ovid’s work, in which violence is represented by very few large scale wars or battles with calculated political consequences at stake, and more individual attacks that are not part of an organized campaign. The violence generally occurs at the personal level, but its consequences (in the form of supernatural transformation) are greater than the audience may have expected. 3 My use of the word “martyr” is anachronistic since Ovid’s work obviously predates the Christian martyrs and their appearances in classical and post-classical literature. I use it here metaphorically to discuss characters who endure suffering in the course of mortal life, but are rewarded with exalted status in the afterlife, and are honored on earth. Although in a Chrisitan context ideas of martyrdom are bound up with implications that the martyr is a good and righteous person suffering for his or her faith, in this context the person is only suffering, without the implications of moral goodness. For a full discussion of Christian martyrdom in the context of classical culture and literature, see Edwards (2007), especially chapter eight (“Laughing at Death?”). Edwards discusses martyrdom as an outgrowth of the idea of noble suicide. Although in some cases the Christian martyrs claim that the tortures to which they are subjected do not hurt them, in other cases the martyrs claim that “it is precisely the physical suffering of the martyr which gives value to his or her act” (Edwards 219), just as Ovid’s characters seem to experience great distress in the process of apotheosis. Calhoon (1997) persuasively discusses the parallels between Livy’s Lucretia and a Christian martyr (which will be discussed in the appendix), many of which apply to Ovid’s Lucretia as well as Lara, Remus, and Rhea Silvia. 4 Rea (2007) 5. 2 Scholarship on the Fasti has greatly expanded in the past twenty to thirty years. During the twentieth century, a few monumental commentaries (Frazer’s work of 1929 and Bömer’s work of 1958 being the most noteworthy) and a smattering of other influential works were published, but otherwise attention to the Fasti was minimal. Even now, the Fasti has not been published as an Oxford Classical Text. Starting in the eighties and nineties, renewed interest in the Fasti was heralded by an influx of new works such as Hinds’ The Metamorphosis of Persephone, Barchiesi’s Il Poeta e il Principe, Herbert-Brown’s Ovid and the Fasti, Newlands’ Playing with Time, and the article collection edited by Herbert-Brown, Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium.5 Several important commentaries on individual books of the Fasti have been published in recent years, with the most recent ones (Robinson’s 2011 commentary on book 2 and Ursini’s 2008 commentary on book 3) being the most thorough and expansive. This new flood of scholarship has addressed topics such as the dialogue between the Fasti and the Metamorphoses and the Fasti’s importance as a distinct work, the political background to the Fasti and Ovid’s thoughts on contemporary politics (primarily as expressed by using Romulus or Aeneas as a symbolic Augustus), the use of the calendar as a frame for legendary stories, and the role of silence in the punishments that the gods send to mortals. The study of silence, violence, and divine punishment-- notably Murgatroyd’s book Mythical and Legendary Narrative in Ovid’s Fasti and Feeney’s article “Si licet et fas est”--has been highly influential on this dissertation. Although previous work (such as Murgatroyd’s book) tends to focus on the perpetration of violence, my dissertation examines the consequences of the event, how the victims fail to re-integrate to society and are removed by being ostracized, exiled, killed, transformed, 5 Also worthy of note is the 1992 volume of Arethusa dedicated exclusively to research on the Fasti. 3 or even apotheosed