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Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's"Apollo and Marsyas"Author(s): Joanna NiżyńskaSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 151-169Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593506 .Accessed: 20/07/2011 11:41

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JOANNA NIZYNSKA

Marsyas's Howl: The

Myth of Marsyas in

Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's

'Apollo and Marsyas"

"THE POET WRITES TO PLEASE his predecessors," claimsJoseph Brodsky, asserting a belief that the power of poetic tradition frees poets from sub-

jection to their immediate history and thus liberates them from the dictates of

politics and the pressure of readership. That no poet writes solely for his contem-

porary audience has been proved by many a poet, including the uncompromis- ing Russian Nobel laureate. Yet the vector of poetry does not point exclusively toward the past; it also extends into the future: in their desire to build monu- ments more lasting than bronze, poets write to please their descendants as well. If poetic practice situates poets simultaneously in the past and in the future, then

poets themselves invite a mode of critical reading that is not based upon tempo- ral, or even cultural, proximity (that is, upon analyzing continuity through direct historical influences), but upon juxtapositions of disparate and temporally dis- tant texts. Placing poetic predecessors and descendants side by side enables us to trace over-arching structures and individual idiosyncrasies, as well as decipher political and social meanderings that are often overlooked when texts are ap- proached in their singularity. In what follows I attempt just such a reading by exploring the treatment of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo by the Augustan Age Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-18 CE) and the contemporary Polish

poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998). The juxtaposition of these two versions not only becomes a magnifying glass

for examining the aesthetic choices of both poets, but also reveals how they sought to avoid political repercussions by manipulating their material. In fact, their aesthetic choices were partially determined by political conditions: both Ovid and Herbert wrote under repressive regimes, and both incorporated into their craft a complex dialogue concerning freedom of expression, the power of the state, and the artist's relation to the state. The subtle presence in Herbert of a revisionary awareness of the Roman poet forces us both to reread Ovid from the perspective of Herbert's poem and to rethink the myth's political and

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /152

aesthetic implications. Reading and interpreting Herbert's poem rereads and

reinterprets Ovid's text; "filling in" Ovid's silences implies "filling in" those of Herbert as well.

Herodotus (7.26; cf. 5.118) and Xenophon (Anab. 1.2.8) attest that the river

Marsyas in Phrygia received its name from the foolish satyr who, after finding a flute, an instrument invented and discarded by Athena, challenges Apollo to a musical contest.' Predictably, Marsyas loses, and Apollo punishes his hubris by having him flayed alive. Apollodorus (1.4.2) and Hyginus (Fab. 165), two mythog- raphers of the second century CE, give a much more elaborate account of the

story. Athena, intending to entertain the Olympians by playing the flute is mocked

by the gods and retreats to Mount Ida to play alone. Looking at her reflection in a stream, however, she sees her cheeks ridiculously inflated and discards the in- strument, cursing it.2 Marsyas finds the flute and becomes so proficient at play- ing it that he challenges the god of music himself, Apollo, to a contest, only to lose and meet his miserable fate at Apollo's command. In Hyginus's account of the story, the Muses judge the competition, giving Marsyas victory in the first round. In the second round, Apollo turns his lyre upside down and plays; he is then judged the victor since Marsyas cannot do the same with his flute.

As usually occurs with myth, this story has been variously interpreted to accom- modate changing historical circumstances. The most common interpretation of the Marsyas myth in Greek antiquity focused on the punishment of the hubristic

satyr. Such an interpretation also suited a Pythagorean paradigm in which the

lyre, standing for universal harmony, is disturbed by a discordant particularity -the shrill sound of the aulos (flute). The cosmological assumptions of the

Pythagorean school could also easily be translated into political terms as a call for social harmony, state order, and political hierarchy.3 From a Platonic perspec- tive, Apollo's victory could represent the superiority of the state over the indi- vidual-a popular view in Augustan Rome (see Wyss 29). It was not accidental that at least by Pliny's time, and probably much earlier, Zeuxis's (430-390 BCE) painting Marsyas religatus was hung in the temple of Concordia in Rome as a

warning to those who might disturb the concord of the state (Pliny, NH 35.66).4 Only in Hellenistic sculpture, especially in the famous Torso Belvedere, is Marsyas represented as a tragic sufferer heroically awaiting his execution.5

Ovid twice recounts the myth of Marsyas and Apollo. The earlier and better known version appears in the Metamorphoses (6.383-400), published shortly be-

In general, see Real-Encyclopidie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft vol. 28(ns), s.v. "Marsyas," cols. 1985-1999 (Laqueur); for the iconography of Marsyas, see Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, s.v. "Marsyas I,' vol. 6, 366-78 (Weiss).

2 In Pindar's account (early fifth century BCE), Athena invented the flute (aulos) in order to imitate the cries of gorgons after the death of Medusa (Py. 12.6-8).

3 For an overview of the pre-Roman literary references to Marsyas in antiquity, see Rawson 3-16. 4 The semi-mythological Camillus established this temple in 367 BCE in gratitude for the estab-

lishment of peace between the orders of Roman society; it was rebuilt in 121 BCE by Lucius Opimus, an aristocrat implicated in the murder of the Plebeian tribune, Caius Gracchus.

5 In the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque, the myth was read allegorically in order to allev- iate the ethically ambivalent actions of the gods and make it fit into the paradigm of philosophia moralis; see Wyss 43-142.

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/153

fore the poet's exile in 8 CE for his carmen et error ("song and error"). The second version occurs in the Fasti (6. 649-710). This work culminates in a discussion of freedom of speech (including the Marsyas story) and abruptly ends with the month of June-just before the gens Iulia appropriated the Roman calendar by naming the seventh month after the dictator Julius Caesar, Augustus's adoptive father. In both Ovidian versions of the story, there are significant gaps in the narrative that only readers familiar with the myth could fill in. Thus, in the Fasti Ovid focuses primarily on the story of the aulos, Marsyas's instrument, and flute

players. He relates how a satyr found pipes discarded by their inventor, Minerva

(the goddess Athena in Greek mythology), how the satyr challenged Apollo, and how he was punished as a result. Ovid makes no mention of the rules of the

competition nor of how Apollo defeated the satyr, and restricts the challenge and punishment to two lines (6.707-708). The satyr's name is not even men- tioned. Significantly, Ovid places this version of the Marsyas myth at the end of an account of the surreptitious return of exiled flute players to the city of Rome

(cf. LivyIX. 30. 5-10). In the Metamorphoses, Ovid compresses the story of Marsyas into eighteen lines

(6.383-400). Rather than focusing on Marsyas and his artistic skills, his agon with

Apollo, or the victor and his choice of punishment, Ovid concentrates on the tortured body of Marsyas, shifting at the end to the metamorphosis of the tears shed over Marsyas's death into the river Marsyas:

... satyri reminiscitur alter, Quem Tritoniaca Latous harundine victum Adfecit poena. "quid me mihi detrahis?" inquit; "A! piget, a! non est" clamabat "tibia tanti!" Clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus, Nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat, Detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla Pelle micant venae; salientia viscera possis Et perlucentes numerare in pectore fibras. Ilium ruricolae, silvarum numina, Fauni Et satyri fratres et tunc quoque carus Olympus Et nymphae flerunt, et quisquis montibus illis

Lanigerosque greges armentaque bucera pavit. Fertilis immaduit madefactaque terra caducas

Concepit lacrimas ac venis perbibit imis; Quas ubi fecit aquam, vacuas emisit in auras. Inde petens rapidum ripis declivibus aequor Marsya nomen habet, Phrygiae liquidissimus amnis.

... someone recalled the satyr who, defeated at playing the Tritonian flute, was punished by the son of Leto:

"Why are you peeling me from myself?" he cries. "Ah! Mercy! Ah!" he screams "the flute is not worth such pain!" As he screams, his skin is torn away from the surface of his limbs, and he was nothing unless a wound; blood flows everywhere; the sinews, uncovered, lie exposed, trembling veins

quiver without any skin. You could count the pulsing intestines and gleaming entrails in his breast. The country dwellers and forest spirits, the fawns and his brother satyrs wept for him. Then, too, did his beloved Olympus and the nymphs and anyone who pastured fleecy flocks

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 154

or horned cattle in those mountains. The fertile earth grew moist with tears and when it was saturated

accepted the falling drops and drank them into its deepest veins. Then she turned them into water and sent them forth to transparent air. From this place a stream rushes down the sloping banks. It carries the name of Marsyas, the clearest of all Phrygian rivers. (my translation)

Despite the epic length of the Metamorphoses, Ovid had to treat some myths spar- ingly, if only out of considerations of space. Nonetheless, the brevity of the Marsyas narrative is surprising since in this epic Ovid usually treats mythic artists rather

extensively, carefully introducing each artist's psychological make-up, skill, and

transgression (most famously, in the elaborate stories of Orpheus and Arachne). Yet, in this case there is no introduction to Marsyas's character and the nature of his hubris. And since the story lacks any progression, we are immediately con- fronted with the horror of Marsyas's punishment. This brevity has led many crit- ics to agree with William S. Anderson's claim that the myth functions simply as a transitional story; it is so "casually added and so perfunctorily told that Ovid fully prepares us to abandon the subject [of human blasphemy]" (201). Yet, it may be that this treatment of the myth is neither transitional nor accidental. As in the

Fasti, where the Marsyas myth is the climax of a long discussion of freedom of

speech (in the last "pre-Julian" month of the calendar), the flaying of Marsyas in the Metamorphoses constitutes the finale to the stories of human blasphemy (Arachne, Niobe, and the Lycian Farmers) for which Book VI is famous. Although this placement makes interpretations such as Anderson's plausible, it does not exclude the possibility that political concerns underlie Ovid's brief treatment of the myth.

Several critics give the short episode of Marsyas a political interpretation, al-

though only as a small component of larger studies of Ovid's poetry and poetics in the Metamorphoses. Such studies address neither the full implications of Ovid's versions of the myth, nor the iconography of Marsyas. The discussion of Marsyas's challenge to Apollo in these studies serves to illuminate, for instance, Ovid's

complex negotiation of his own artistic autonomy in Augustan Rome (Carole Newlands), his supposed indulgence in human pain and agony (Karl Galinsky), his elusive voice, tone, and perspective (Eleanor Leach), and his tendency to contrast violence with idyllic landscape (Charles Segal). Similarly, many schol- ars of Italo-Roman iconography (for example, M. Torelli, F. Coarelli,J.P. Small, P.B. Rawson) have discussed the transformation of the Roman conception of

Marsyas from an "Italic" figure of augury who warranted a statue in the Forum Romanum (see below) to a Phrygian figure punished by Apollo (a painting of

which, Zeuxis's Marsyas religatus, hung in the Temple of Concordia). My explora- tion of the political dimension of the myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses more fully projects the history of this mythical figure (and its semiotic transfor-

mations) into the text of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this analysis, what is silenced and omitted in Ovid's short account of the myth becomes even more significant than what is expressed. Such an analysis of the blank spaces in Ovid is greatly aided by the juxtaposition of the myth's treatment in the Metamorphoses with

Zbigniew Herbert's contemporary rewriting of the myth (the focus of the second half of this paper).

THE MYrH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/155

Because in the Metamorphoses, Ovid reports briefly on the duel between the

satyr and god, graphically describes the punishment, and concentrates on the

metamorphosis, some critics have claimed that Ovid does not demonstrate any sympathy for his character (see, for example, Galinsky 110-57). Indeed, Marsyas's comment quid me mihi detrahis, "why are you peeling me from myself" (6.385) employs a verbal witticism that distances the reader from the events. This dis-

tancing has encouraged Karl Galinsky to link Ovid's gory imagination to the Roman indulgence in the amphitheater spectacles and to read Ovid's lines as a reflection of a typically Roman delight in cruelty. To be sure, the most graphic part of the narrative-the description of Marsyas's intestines: Detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla/Pelle micant venae; salientia viscera possis/Et perlucentes numerare in pectorefibras (6.389-392); "The sinews, uncovered, lie exposed, trem-

bling veins quiver without any skin. You could count the pulsing intestines and

gleaming entrails in the breast"-might strike one as an anatomical catalogue in which the organs in their "autonomy" depersonalize their "owner" (cf. Anderson 202). But Ovid is rarely explicitly compassionate; as Eleanor Leach has noted, he

conveys his personal voice only indirectly through style, tone, and perspective (107), and, indeed, a closer reading of the passage raises questions concerning Galinsky's claims. The description progresses from the past tense (inquit, clamabat, erat) to the immediacy of the present (manat, patent, micant) and from the im-

personal third person to the second-"you could count" (possis numerare). By breaking the third person narration and shifting to a second person subjunctive, Ovid creates a sense of immediacy and direct address, as if he wanted to involve his audience in the process of counting Marsyas's intestines.6 This forces readers to "watch" the punishment, as if confronting once again in this narrative what

Segal regards as the deep pattern of the Metamorphoses: the uneasy coexistence of an anxious desire to maintain the inviolability of the body's surface with recur- rent displays of the inner features of the grotesque Bakhtinian body ("Ovid's Metamorphic Bodies" 12, 25). Such stylistic devices mark Ovid's sympathy for the satyr by involving the reader in the horror of Marsyas's suffering. It is true that the satyr lacks any psychological dimension, but his reduction to blood- soaked flesh (nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat, "he was nothing unless a wound," 6.388) transcends psychology. The extremity of his punishment-beyond human

comprehension-does not exclude the possibility of sympathy. Moreover, Ovid

projects his sympathy onto a bucolic setting (see below), describing the beings of the region lamenting the satyr's death7 and forming a river named Marsyas from their tears.

In this lament, which is indispensable to the Ovidian version since it consti- tutes the source of the metamorphosis, Ovid follows the Theocritean and Vergilian

6 Although "possis" in "possis numerare" can be read as an equivalent to the English "one" ("one

could count"), it seems to retain a personal force. Professor Thomas Habinek (private communica- tion) suggests that such cues as the second person could be analyzed in relation to the performance of Latin poetry, that is, as direct address by the poet-reciter to the audience.

7I disagree thus with Galinsky, who finds this scene formulaic and treats it as further proof of Ovid's lack of humanitas in his representation of suffering (Galinsky 135).

8 Anderson rightly remarks on the distinctiveness of this metamorphosis from other metamor-

phoses in the epic since it is thematically divorced from the satyr's words or actions (Anderson 201).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /156

tradition in which minor forest deities and shepherds lament another's suffer-

ing. This lament is indeed disturbing since the weeping shepherds, fauns, forest deities-all stock figures of the pastoral landscape-do not belong to the realm of raw violence perpetrated against Marsyas's body. According to Charles Segal, Ovid's contrast of violent action with an idyllic loci amoeni intensifies the victim's

helplessness and the arbitrariness of the oppressing force (Landscape 83ff). Far from indicating Ovid's indifference to violence, as Galinsky claims, the conven-

tionality of this lament intensifies the horror lying in wait beneath the serene

appearances of the Ovidian landscape. Here, it is important to recall that Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses (as well as the

Fasti) in the later years of Augustus's principate, years marked by the increasing intolerance of the Emperor, an intolerance which resulted in the exile of several

prominent citizens (including the Princeps's daughter, Julia) whose behavior and beliefs conflicted with his program of cultural and social renewal. Poets from

Augustus's circle (most prominently Vergil, Propertius, and Horace) contributed to Augustus's program with works proclaiming the Golden Age of Rome. Ovid's works, on the other hand, leave few doubts about his reluctance to support the pater patriae's attempt to effect moral renewal through his poetry. In his Ars Amatoria, for example, Ovid's playful disregard for the "velvet glove" mocks

Augustus by ironically contrasting Augustus's teaching with his own: if Augustus is a teacher of new moral values, Ovid is obsceni doctor adulteri (the "teacher of obscene love," as he later characterizes himself in Tristia 2.212); if Augustus praises the morale of the army, the Ovidian soldier is miles amoris-"the soldier of love"; if Augustus's impressive buildings and temples in Rome demand poetic glorifica- tion, Ovid sees them only as potential venues for lovers (Lateiner 4). Ovid also ridicules Augustus's attempts to reorganize religion; in his works Jupiter and

Apollo are lustful, ruthless, selfish gods whose authority comes entirely from their

power, not from any essential moral superiority (Lateiner 5). Likewise, in the Metamorphoses Ovid subverts the epic, the literary genre best

suited to Augustus's program of cultural classicism. As Lateiner and Leach have shown, the explicit mockery of Augustus's principate in the Ars Amatoria is in the Metamorphoses transported into mythological settings-primarily as a response to an increasingly repressive political environment. Indeed, the political prob- lem of artistic autonomy in Augustus's Rome is one of the key concerns of the

Metamorphoses. For Leach, Ovid's artists, including Marsyas, manifest the impossi- bility of reconciling personal vision with an authoritarian world (107). Similarly for Lateiner, the Metamorphoses focuses on the unpredictable nature of power and its manipulation of artists. In stories like Arachne's, artists are presented as vulnerable and abused by ruthless figures of authority, but their ars, like Arachne's

spider web, cannot be entirely destroyed. Lateiner thus presents Ovid's Marsyas as "the image of the artist's pain and vulnerability-all wound, stripped of any covering, his insides and guts all visible" (21).

The themes of artistic autonomy, patronage, and freedom of speech are clearly traceable even in the Fasti, a work written simultaneously with the Metamorphoses and likely designed to please Augustus's demands for artworks supporting his

principate. Indeed, by celebrating Augustus's regulation of the Roman calendar

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/157

and by incorporating the Imperial family into this calendar, Ovid's work seems to present itself as a fine example of imperial flattery. Yet, as Carole Newlands has shown, even the Fasti expresses Ovid's fears for his artistic autonomy and his

recognition that poetic independence has been lost under imperial censorship. Through his prefatory remarks on the title of the poem, which define dies fasti and dies nefasti according to the restriction of public speech, Ovid points to the freedom of expression so vital to his own life and career before and during his exile (Newlands 175). As in the Metamorphoses, the mythical artists in Fasti allow Ovid to explore the issue of poetic freedom as well as the issue of personal patronage, which ideally should mediate between the artist and a state commit- ted to aggressive dynastic politics. Ovid's views are, as usual, contradictory: the

myth of the legendary singer Arion presents a successful example of such patron- age; the myths of Aesculapius and Marsyas show its impossibility. In the myth of Arion Apollo represents a model patron poet; in the myth of Marsyas he elimi- nates the rival artist.

Throughout the Metamorphoses and the Fasti artists cannot trust their patrons, who are often the source of the poets' destruction. The power structures in these works are indifferent if not malevolent to the human values of the poet and his creations (Newlands 19). Thus, in the Fasti Minerva distances herself from the scene of Marsyas's punishment, even though that punishment is the result of her invention and abandonment of the flute (Newlands 198). As Newlands claims, the contradictory images of Apollo (the exemplary poet in the Arion myth) and Minerva (a patroness of arts, see Fasti 3.809-848) indicate that the divine super- structure is as capricious as it is powerful (201).

Alternative versions of the Marsyas story may also help explain Ovid's empha- sis on the satyr's punishment rather than the rules of the contest and Apollo's involvement. AsJocelyn Penny Small rightly points out, the mythological figures of antiquity tend to be judged from whatever view dominates the surviving sources.9 As a result, Marsyas is best known as the foolish challenger of Apollo. However, even in the versions of the Apollo-Marsyas agon most sympathetic to

Apollo, Small identifies a Marsyas who is not only an artist great enough to chal-

lenge Apollo, but also one who can ultimately be defeated only by a ruse (68). In addition, an equally strong Etrusco-Roman tradition revered the "other"

Marsyas-the wise satyr-for his dissemination and teaching of augury. An im-

portant first century Hellenistic source for this Marsyas is Diodorus Siculus, who informs us that Marsyas was admired for his intelligence (sunesis) and self- control (sophrosune) (Diod. Sic. 3.58.3), and classical Greek testimony can be found in Plato's Symposium, when Alcibiades likens Socrates to Marsyas (Symp. 215B-C, 216D). A statue of Marsyas as a wise old silenus embodied this positive version of

Marsyas in the Forum Romanum. Erected in the third to second centuries BCE

(Small 84) and placed, according to Pliny, close to the rostra (Pliny, HN 34.11, 24), this statue was throughout the Imperial period a landmark sufficiently well known to be a common meeting-place. (It is mentioned, for instance, by Horace

9 I base the following review of Marsyas's different "personae" and their functions on Small's

fascinating discussion of the historical transformation of the figure of Marsyas in Roman culture. See Cacus and Marsyas in Etrusco-Roman Legend 74-93.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 158

in the Satires [1.6.119-121]). The statue represented a nude male figure wearing traveling boots and carry-

ing a wineskin on his left shoulder, his right shoulder and hand raised above his head. This gesture is the key to understanding the figure's shifting signifi- cance in the Republican and Imperial periods. Initially, Marsyas's raised hand was interpreted as an augural gesture-the satyr was calling attention to what he observed in the sky.10 During the Republic, this traditional augural gesture was used before performing the rite of exauguration, whose main function was to

purify a portion of the land. The land was thus made "free" (libera) from other

religious claims, thereby ensuring that the introduction of a new divinity or the construction of a temple on the site would not offend a divinity who was already present (Small 77-78; see Livy 1.55.2-4). Eventually, the augural gesture was com-

pletely divorced from its religious connotations and was translated into the civic realm as, according to Servius, "a sign of liberty (indicium libertatis)" whereby Marsyas's "raised hand (erecta manu) calls to witness that nothing is lacking in a

city" (Serv. Aen. 4.58).11 This new understanding of Marsyas's gesture as an indicium libertatis transferred

the adjective libera from the religious dimension of libera area to the civically connotative noun libertas, a recontextualization of both gesture and location. This recontextualization may have been due to the statue's proximity in the

Augustan period to the tribunal for the foreign praetor, which signified the libertas Rome provided colonial cities of the empire (on libertas see Syme, Roman 152). In this imperial, civic reading of Marsyas, his raised hand became identi- fied with adlocutio, the oratorial gesture of the Emperor who bestowed the im-

perial privileges of Rome upon grateful subject cities,12 which often erected their own copies of the statue (Small 74, 69), an ironic testimony to their accep- tance of their conqueror's law. What is especially important for the Ovidian treat- ment of the myth is the fact that the gradual shift from Marsyas the augural divinity to Marsyas the marker of Roman civic privileges was abruptly completed during Augustus's reign and with substantial "help" from the Princeps. Why, we

might ask, would the Princeps desire to eliminate any traces of the traditional

augural function of this minor deity? Cicero tells us that in republican Rome Maximum tamen et praestantissimum in re

publica ius est augurum cum auctoritate coniunctum, "The greatest and most pres- tigious authority in the state is that of the augurs, to whom is accorded great power" (Cicero, Leg. 2.12.31). Although the old augural forms had gone through a crisis of decentralization in the second century BCE, they remained essentially unchanged until the time of the principate, when Augustus initiated a new augural

10 A primary means of augury was to scan the sky. It is also important to remember that Phrygians (Marsyas's origins) were first to perform auspices. The statue clearly indicates that Marsyas, the teacher of augural practice of auspices, arrived in Italy from Asia Minor (hence, the boots and the winesack; see Small 77).

11 Quoted in Small 73. Mario Torelli interprets Marsyas as a symbol of plebeian libertas under- stood specifically as a freedom from want.

12 For the difference between Marsyas's raised arm and the more frequent adlocutio gesture, see Small 83; cf. the late second century BCE bronze in Florence known as the "Orator" and a similar figure on late first century coinage (Brilliant, fig. 1.43 ["Orator"] and 1.65, 1.66 [coinage]).

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/159

system under the guise of the restoration of religion (Small 97). Aware that, in Small's phrase, "the ruler or ruling party had to control prophecy lest he or they be predicted out of power" (110), Augustus tried to eliminate (or at least super- vise) any prophetic material that raised doubts about the divine sanction of his

policies or that offered an alternative to the view of Roman history he attempted to propagate. He transferred the power of divination from numerous indepen- dent augurs into the control of the temple of Apollo, a change which not only allowed prophecy to be controlled more easily, but also reinforced the associa- tion Augustus consistently made between himself and Apollo. After being elected Pontifex Maximus in 13 BCE, Augustus also sought to suppress the diversity of divinational practices by destroying all Greek and Latin prophetic books, other than the Sibylline books (some of which he eliminated as invalid). Significantly, Augustus moved the Sibylline books from the Temple ofJupiter Capitolinus to the temple of Apollo Palatinus (near his own residence) (Small 100; see also Potter 151).

Augustus remained devoted to Apollo throughout his life, a devotion particu- larly evident in his relation to the Temple of Apollo Palatinus. The young Octavian had initiated the construction of this sanctuary adjacent to his residence, and after his victory at Actium (28 BCE) he dedicated the temple to Apollo;13 in his later years, Augustus even conducted official business in this temple (Wyss 30). Augustus also reinforced the association of his person with Apollo by, for in- stance, dedicating a statue of himself with the deity's attributes in Apollo's temple. Furthermore, as Paul Zanker observes, the most lavish new temples in Augustus's rebuilding of Rome were dedicated not to the gods of the old Republic, but to those most closely associated with Augustus; consequently, the new Temple of

Apollo Palatinus (17 or 12 BCE) rivaled the Temple ofJupiter Capitolinus, and

Apollo became the chief focal point of the state religion (Zanker 108). As a re- sult of Augustus's identification with Apollo and attempts to establish Apollo as Rome's primary deity, to speak compassionately about Marsyas (or to attack

Apollo) could have been understood as a direct attack on Augustus. The usurpation of the prophetic power of independent augurs by those

associated with Apollo (and controlled by Augustus) left no room for the Marsyas of the Republic.14 For this reason, Augustus encouraged transformation of the

satyr from an augur to a civic figure by stressing Greek accounts of Marsyas, the

majority of which did not mention prophetic abilities. Emphasizing Greek sources also allowed for the presentation of Apollo as ajust champion over the barbaric

Marsyas, who became a hubristic foil to highlight Apollo's civilized nature and demonstrate his power (cf. Rawson 11). In the visual arts Apollo's superiority was

expressed by attaching small figurines of Marsyas to large-scale figures of Apollo

13 This temple, as Small tells us, served several functions: 1) it showed Augustus as a selfless man who founds a temple at no public cost; 2) it displayed and thus popularized the divinity since the

temple's strategic position made it conspicuously visible in the city; and 3) it privatized the rela-

tionship of Augustus with Apollo. 14 It is important to note that prior to the Principate, Romans, especially from promiment fami-

lies, were able to employ their own augurs and, consequently, to influence events for their own

advantages. Augustus's concentration of augural power allowed him to control historical memory by controlling the interpretation of political events.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /160

(for instance, to the colossal cult statue from the Temple of Apollo at Bulla

Regia) in order metaphorically to indicate the "size" of the prophetic abilities of the two divinities (Rawson 11). By emphasizing the arrogant flutist's challenge to Apollo and its consequences, Augustus diverted attention from the augural abilities of Marsyas. Ironically, the satyr's association with the augural libera area ("purified lands") could then be used to facilitate his transformation into a fig- ure of the civic libertas which the Roman Princeps could grant. As a figure of civic freedom, not a divinity, Marsyas now affirmed the justness of Rome's (and, by extension, the emperor's) rule. The Etrusco-Roman Marsyas, the bringer of

exauguration, was doomed to oblivion. Which Marsyas is Ovid invoking? The old Etrusco-Roman deity or the new

civic symbol of liberty? In either case Marsyas signifies limits put on the indi- vidual by the authority of the state. As the guarantor of civic freedom and free

speech, he is still a muted augural divinity whose new "speech" is a result of polit- ical manipulation. As the augural deity, he is about to disappear because of a new

religious system in which his rival, Apollo, controls prophecy. Whether the com-

petition between Apollo and Marsyas is a competition between absolute author-

ity and artistic autonomy or between the new prophetic deity and the old augural deity over the right to practice divination, it demonstrates how power influences, controls, determines, "metamorphosizes" the fate of those subjected to it.

Perhaps because the figure of Marsyas was too explicitly connected with the

question of civic freedom, Ovid seems to have been reluctant to dwell upon the

myth. The poet's sensitivity to the politics of the story and its relation to power likely resulted in his silence concerning the rules of the competition and Apollo's deception of Marsyas, a silence that, ultimately, reduced the myth to a scene of

bloody punishment. Yet even this aesthetic choice, this particular way of dealing with the myth's "inflammatory material," can be read as an implicit reminder of the limitations on civic freedom in Augustan Rome; it encodes a message about

power imposing its own "augural authority," a message which Ovid's more sensi- tive readers could readily decode.

What the Roman poet left unspoken, broken off in mid-sentence, a modern

poet continued and rewrote. Zbigniew Herbert, who refused to compromise his art by adapting to the precepts of social realism and publishing during the era of Stalinism seems to have learned from his Roman predecessor how to encode

political messages through the language of myth. Herbert's works repeatedly refer to the classical tradition, and in so doing he demonstrates how this tradi- tion can be revived, transformed, and continued. Indeed, the poem "Apollo and

Marsyas" from the collection The Study of the Object (Studium Przedmiotu, 1961) almost programatically exemplifies all the critical poetic, aesthetic, and ethical

complexities associated with Herbert's modern rewriting of the classical tradition.

"Apollo i Marsjasz" "Apollo and Marsyas"

Wlasciwy pojedynek Apollona The actual duel between Apollo z Marsjaszem and Marsyas (stuch absolutny (absolute hearing contra ogromna skala) versus grand range) odbywa sie pod wiecz6r takes place in the evening gdyjakjuz wiemy after as we all know

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/161

sedziowie

przyznali zwycivstwo bogu mocno przywiazany do drzewa dokladnie odarty ze sk6ry Marsjasz krzyczy zanim krzyk dojdzie dojego wysokich uszu

wypoczywa w cieniu tego krzyku

wstrzasany dreszczem obrzydzenia Apollo czysci sw6j instrument

tylko z pozoru glos Marsjasza jest monotonny i sklada sie zjednej samogloski A

W istocie

opowiada Marsjasz nieprzebrane bogactwo swego ciala

lyse g6re w4troby pokarm6w biale wawozy szumi4ce lasy pluc slodkie pag6rki miesni stawy zi6 krew i dreszcze

zimowy wiatr kosci nad sola pamieci

wstrzasany dreszczem obrzydzenia Apollo czysci sw6j instrument

teraz do ch6ru

przylacza sie stos pacierzowy Marsjasza w zasadzie to samo A

tylko glvbsze z dodatkiem rdzy

tojuijest ponad wytrzymalosc boga o nerwach z tworzyw sztucznych iwirowa alej; wysadzana bukszpanem odchodzi zwyciezca zastanawiajac sie

czy z wycia Marsjasza nie powstanie z czasem nowa galaz sztuki-powiedzmy-konkretnej

nagle pod nogi upada mu skamienialy slowik

odwraca glowe i widzi ze drzewo do kt6rego przywiazany byl Marsjasz jest siwe

zupelnie (19-21)

the judges granted victory to the god

tightly fastened to the tree

thoroughly stripped of his skin

Marsyas screams before the scream reaches his tall ears he reposes in its shadow

with a shudder of disgust Apollo cleans his instrument

only seemingly Marsyas's voice is monotonous and consists of a single vowel Ah

in fact

Marsyas tells the inexhaustible wealth of his body bold mountains of liver white valleys of intestines

rustling forests of lungs sweet hills of muscles

joints bile blood and shivers the wintry wind of bones over the salt of memory with a shudder of disgust Apollo cleans his instrument

now Marsyas's spine joins the chorus

basically the same Ah but deeper with a touch of rust

this is already beyond the endurance of the god with nerves of artificial fibers

the victor leaves

along the gravel path planted with boxwoods

wondering whether out of Marsyas's howling there will not some day arise a new type of art-let us say-concrete

suddenly at his feet falls a petrified nightingale he looks back and sees that the tree to which Marsyas was fastened has turned white

completely (my translation)

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 162

Like Ovid, Herbert begins with a Marsyas who has already been defeated. Herbert's "as we all know" is perhaps an ironic wink at the reader who also, ide- ally, knows Ovid, but probably does not know the version of the story Herbert is about to tell. This parallel opening is followed by an analogous focus on the scene of punishment and a description of Marsyas's flayed body as graphic as Ovid's. In both versions, the figure of the satyr is reduced to blood-soaked flesh. However, what Ovid represents as a body watched from the outside-"blood flows

everywhere; the sinews, uncovered, lie exposed, trembling veins quiver without

any skin. You could count the pulsing intestines and gleaming entrails in the breast" (Met. VI. 389-91)-Herbert displays as a landscape surrounding the reader: "bold mountains of liver/white valleys of intestines/rustling forests of

lungs/sweet hills of muscles/joints bile blood and shivers/the wintry wind of bones/over the salt of memory." The transformation of Marsyas's mutilated flesh into an aesthetic object de-corporealizes his body and, perhaps, makes Herbert's

description ultimately more disturbing than Ovid's more overtly violent account. Herbert's transformation of the Ovidian anatomy lesson into landscape also par- allels his transformation of Marsyas's howl into narrative, as the satyr "tells the inexhaustible wealth of his body."

In refusing to psychologize Marsyas, both Ovid and Herbert emphasize the

brutality of the scene; if in Ovid Marsyas is "nothing unless a wound," in Herbert he is one great howl. The core of Herbert's revision of the myth-and what ulti-

mately imbues it with a humanity and compassion only subtly and complexly evident in Ovid-is Herbert's divergence from the Ovidian paradigm in his treat- ment of the lament over Marsyas's fate. As noted above, throughout the Metamor-

phoses the traditional bucolic charm of the external landscape contrasts-often

disturbingly-with the violence performed on the "mythic bodies" in the stories Ovid narrates. Herbert translates this external landscape into the internal land-

scape of Marsyas's body that Apollo sees as the god aestheticizes Marsyas's suffer-

ing. At the same time, Herbert's setting for Marsyas's punishment-"the gravel path/planted with boxwoods"-seems almost desolate compared to the lush

"beauty" of Marsyas's body. This opposition is essential to Herbert's representa- tion of the lament, and, by extension, of the aestheticization of violence.

In contrast with Ovid's woodland denizens whose flowing tears form the river

Marsyas, only a tree and a nightingale-mute creatures of the world of nature and key elements of the traditional repertoire of "beautiful themes" in poetry- witness the satyr's suffering in Herbert's poem.Their reactions-the nightingale falls petrified to the earth and the tree turns white-deny aesthetic distance as both are ultimately destroyed by their compassion. Thus, whereas the suffering body might be, as Segal suggests, a metaphor of the human condition in the

Metamorphoses, in Herbert Apollo's speculations about the aesthetic value of pain might represent the amorality of an art that feeds on the aestheticization of suf-

fering. Unlike the howling Marsyas, or Ovid's weeping mourners, Herbert's wit- nesses react to Marsyas's suffering with a silence fully expressive of their horror.

Upon seeing Marsyas's mutilation, the tree and the nightingale undergo meta- morphoses that completely overwhelm their essential qualities: "at [Apollo's] feet falls/a petrified nightingale/he looks back/and sees/that the tree to which

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/163

Marsyas/was fastened/has turned white/completely." The trauma of witnessing robs the nightingale of its ability to sing and fly; it makes the tree a desolate

wintry skeleton.15

In light of Apollo's speculation "whether out of Marsyas's howling/there will not some day arise/a new kind/of art-let us say-concrete," the "concretiza- tion" of the nightingale, its petrification, might be understood as the very first and ironic product of such an art, which is, after all, a terminal-a dead-art. The tree, whose "treeness" is associated with the color green, becomes white. As a witness to the scene, the tree is anthropomorphized, drained of youth and

vitality, turning grey instantly, like the hair of someone faced with a horror be-

yond endurance.16 Furthermore, if in aetiological myths such as Ovid's trans- formations most often imply movement toward a new beginning,17 Herbert's transformations freeze movement into stasis and reverse vital processes. No

space is left for new creation after the scene of Marsyas's suffering. The meta-

morphoses of the tree and the nightingale mark the ultimate limit of their existence just as the transformations also close the poem. Herbert's ending thus

ironically subverts the Ovidian pattern in which metamorphosis both provides closure for every story and creates narrative movement as the endless violence

performed on the bodies of the epic's victims transforms them into new bodies. In Herbert, however, violence does not mark a new beginning-the transfor- mations of the tree and the nightingale do not give them new shapes and new lives. Nor does it mark the beginning of a new narrative.

This subversion indicates that Herbert did not employ a "generic" myth of

Apollo and Marsyas, but a very specific, Ovidian version. Moreover, taking into consideration Herbert's knowledge of mythology and his fascination with the ancient world, it is possible that he knew of Marsyas's political significance in Roman culture.18 If this is indeed so, the poem's political message becomes even clearer and, simultaneously, closer to Ovid's agenda. While Ovid's representa- tion of undeserved suffering foreshadows his own fate and reflects the arbitrary use of power in the Rome of his time, Herbert's representation of Marsyas meta-

phorically foreshadows the consequences of challenging the rhetoric of a com- munist regime.Just as Ovid would lose his autonomy and find his life irrevocably metamorphosized by Augustus's decree that he be exiled, so Herbert would en- dure several years of silence, unemployment, and degrading living conditions

15 The choice of the nightingale is in itself interesting. The bird also appears in the Metamorphoses in the story of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus almost immediately following the Marsyas myth (Met. 6.424-675). The Ovidian nightingale at least can sing of her traumatic experience; Herbert outdoes Ovid: his nightingale is mute.

16 The word "siwe" (grey) in the Polish original connotes the sudden change of hair color due to a traumatic experience.

17 Usually, but not always. In the Metamorphoses, the story of Marsyas is preceded by the story of the petrified (sic!) Niobe.

18 Herbert's fascination with antiquity manifests itself in numerous poems and short poetic prose pieces focusing on mythical or ancient themes, for example, "Nike Hesitating," "To Marcus Aurelius," "Why the Classics," "To Apollo," "The Parable of King Midas," "Arion," and "The Classicist," to name just a few of the most famous titles. See, also, the collection of essays, Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985) (Barbarzynca w ogrodzie [Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1962]).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /164

because of his refusal to reduce his art to the strictures of totalitarianism. At the same time, by reinforcing the aesthetic dimension of the duel between Apollo and Marsyas, Herbert stresses the intersection of the ethical/political with the aesthetic (the duel was, after all, a musical competition), and it is in this aesthetic dimension that Herbert, an extraordinarily self-reflexive writer, is able to explore key issues ignored by Ovid.

On one level, the poem presents the inability to reconcile the lived experience of suffering with the abstract quality of art. Apollo, who "with a shudder of dis-

gust/cleans his instrument" while listening to Marsyas's howl, represents a pure, sterile art that does not get involved with "flesh and blood." That is why wit-

nessing the punishment he has just executed "is already beyond the endurance of the god with nerves of artificial fibers." In Ovid, the very absence of Apollo creates an imaginary gap between the mutilated body of the satyr and the per- fect beauty of the god of arts. Paradoxically, a god who within the narrative is unable to inhabit the space of Marsyas's suffering is simultaneously the origin of that space through his choice of Marsyas's punishment. Herbert fills in this

gap by imagining the moment before the Ovidian Apollo leaves the howling Marsyas and characterizing that moment as an opposition between aesthetics and reality, observation and compassion. He intimates that Apollo's aesthetics is

all-encompassing and totalizing; faced with Marsyas's howl, Apollo formalizes the pain into "concrete art," a system closed to the physicality of Marsyas's howl. That is, Apollo's art can share the space of Marsyas's suffering only by giving it a form that allows aesthetic contemplation precisely because it de-humanizes the

suffering. Herbert's Apollo is even able to speculate on the possible artistic uses of pain: he wonders "whether out of Marsyas's howling/there will not some/day arise/a new type/of art-let us say-concrete." For Apollo nothing is real, every- thing must be abstracted into aesthetics-even Marsyas's entrails become a land-

scape.19 The virtuosity of Apollo's purely formal art (playing the lyre upside down) can dazzle the audience, but it cannot contain or even endure real pain. Apollo's art achieves its effect by deserting the human domain.

The distancing of Apollo from Marsyas and the de-realizing of the punish- ment through an act of aestheticization seems to stem from Herbert's complex relation with modernism's de-humanization of the aesthetic sphere.20 This de- humanization rejects any art based on self-expression and clearly separates art ("the observed") from reality ("the lived") (see Ortega y Gasset). Apollo never

goes beyond "the observed," since doing so would require accepting the Marsyan element of the "lived," the limitations of which are represented by the satyr's inability to "play reverse pipes." Herbert's Apollo is like the "craftsman who probes

19 Through representing Marsyas's intestines as a landscape, Herbert may be making a further comment on Apollo. Until the mid-nineteenth century, landscapes (and still lifes) were considered the lowest genres in the traditional hierarchy of painting. Not only does Apollo abstract Marsyas's body into art, but the aesthetic of his eyes "sees" in a lowly genre.

20 Because no mimetic or self-expressive art is able to justify its ontological status as a domain entirely removed from that of direct human experience, from the perspective of modernist aesthet- ics only detachment from human experience-"lived reality"-and the abandonment of what is human can enable art to be evaluated on its own terms. Thus, the function of the modernist art- work is to de-realize "lived" reality, that is, to present it from an absolute distance.

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/165

to the very bottom of cruelty," to quote from Herbert's parable "On the Road to

Delphi": acknowledging the human would imply blurring the distinctions be- tween the "lived" and the "observed." Thus, "the divine" in art is itself limited and frozen-perfection excludes participation in direct experience. (We might recall that the instrument Marsyas employed to challenge Apollo was discarded as imperfect by the divinity who invented it.) That is why Apollo does not un-

dergo any kind of transformation, remaining eternally unchanged. Neverthe- less, even in his pain Marsyas continues his aesthetic agon with Apollo, challenging Apollo's self-contained efficiency by forcing him to listen to something as imper- fect and real as his scream. While Ovid leaves room for a verbal concetto in Marsyas's plea-"A! piget, a! non est' clamabat 'tibia tanti'"-Herbert leaves Marsyas's howl as a monotonous replication "consist[ing] of a single vowel/Ah." Marsyas's howl becomes an act of self-expression, an imperfect, immediate, and formless "art" of direct experience-in this sense a truly "concrete" art. The purity of Apollonian art, in contrast, implies quitting the locus of pain. Only the tree and the night- ingale remain, but by "living" Marsyas's suffering, they lose the power to express it; they remain silent and prove through their metamorphoses the irrelevance and cruelty of aesthetic values when applied to the "lived reality."

Like others belonging to the generation that "lived" the war, Herbert faced the dilemma of how to write poetry after the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth

century. Should human suffering be passed over in a respectful silence that ac-

knowledges the limitations and ethical dangers of expression? If so, how could the writer bear witness to history (so often the major function of post-war litera- ture in Poland)? Finally, is there a place to practice the ethos of modernism- to deform, de-realize, and overall, de-humanize human experience-if the means of "aestheticization" problematize poetry's confrontation with the tangi- bility, materiality, and incomprehensibility of what I have called "Marsyas's howl"? In "Apollo and Marsyas" Herbert presents Apollo as the champion of the

poetics of modernism in order to demonstrate that modernism's "will to style" is unable to bear witness to human pain. To Herbert, poetry is never y Gasset's "the

higher algebra of metaphors," or the "high noon of the intellect." Although, as Stanislaw Baraficzak has pointed out, Herbert valued antinomies throughout his career-the West vs. the East, the present vs. the past, myth vs. empiricism-he never situated ethics and aesthetics antithetically (see The Fugitive from Utopia). The spine of Herbert's poetics is the projection of ethical and political dilem- mas upon the aesthetic. Thus, in the splendid poem "The Power of Taste" (1984), nonparticipation in a totalitarian regime is identified as a refusal to partake of its "dis-tasteful" iconography. Taste, as Baraficzak succinctly puts it, is for Herbert "the aesthetic equivalent of conscience" (132).Just as a taste "nourished" on true art cannot digest the iconographic kitsch of communism, so the "cogito" of the individual rejects the immorality of the political ideology. Like ethics, aesthetics "teaches how to face existence with fortitude," to paraphrase Henryk Elzenberg (see Klopoty z istnieniem). Thus, Herbert does not recognize the modernist claim that a gap exists between the poet and the man-for him aesthetic choices are ethical choices and vice versa.

Herbert's ambivalent relationship to modernist aesthetics does not, however,

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 166

necessarily support the frequently made claim that "Apollo and Marsyas" is an almost programmatic example of Herbert's classicism.21 What does it mean for a

twentieth-century Pole to be "classical"? And, more generally, what does it mean for a modern poet to be "classical"? To reduce the highly complex subject of classicism to just one aspect, classicism relies on the assumption that both poets and readers belong to the same semiotic domain, that, in other words, they share the same recognizable and comprehensible repertory of cultural topoi. Incorpo- rating myths into poetry functions, then, as a language of common signs, enabl- ing the reader to decode the poet's agenda. Yet the "code" of mythological topoi does not suggest fixed meanings and interpretations allegorically assigned to the mythical stories. Classicism can no longer be identified (if it ever could) with trust in the self-explicatory language of shared myths. It is not through the repetition of the patterns of the past that a poet establishes a "classical" stance, but through a conscious attitude towards his poetic ancestors manifested implic- itly or explicitly in his works. In his book Czymjest klasycyzm? (What is Classicism?) Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, a contemporary Polish poet, defines classicism as "the poet's neverending struggle for his own place in culture, as a neverending awareness that time past is time present. This is the awareness that poetic idiom

belongs ... to a common sea of poetic language which lies outside of time and that poetry itself is an endless projection of oneself and of others into the future" (175). In this sense perhaps all "mature" poets (to use T.S. Eliot's qual- ifier of classicism) are classical poets since their awareness of their predeces- sors and their conversation with the past (be it accepting or rebellious) contributes to the uniqueness and empowerment of their voice, rather than obstructs their individuality.

Herbert's works carry on precisely this type of conversation with the classical tradition, as if he can express his historical reality only through membership in an atemporal and aspatial community of all living and dead poets. This reality, however, is not determined purely by historical causality: it is as national as it is international, as constituted by the political environment as by the transcultural experience of reading poetic predecessors and writing for poetic descendants. If Ovid disturbs his "mythologically-aware" audience with his account of the myth, Herbert forces his reader to reread mythology-still so often (mis)understood as a common realm of understanding-by basing his "Apollo and Marsyas" on one of the least attested stories of Greek mythology,22 an episode relatively un- known to the modern audience and even within the Metamorphoses "like a pin in a forest," to borrow,a term from Herbert's poem "Why the Classics." The seem-

ing insignificance of the original story leaves the reader with various interpre-

21 The traditional perception of Zbigniew Herbert as a "classical" poet or a "poet of the West" has been questioned by, for instance, Baraniczak, who claims that Herbert is as much "modern" as "clas- sical" and as much an "Eastern European barbarian" as a "poet of the West." In Baraficzak's view, the core of Herbert's poetry was constituted by the very confrontation of the values of Western culture of the past with those of the "barbarian" present of Eastern Europe in much of Herbert's life. Un- questionably, the paradoxes and ironies inherent in Herbert's writing are often overlooked by critics too eager to resolve taxonomic discussions.

22 As demonstrated by the scarcity of sources on Marsyas; see Gantz 95; see also Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 28(ns), s.v. "Marsyas," cols. 1985-1999 (Laqueur).

THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID & HERBERT/167

tative possibilities, none of which Herbert privileges. Like any modern poet, Herbert is "an exiled Arcadian" without faith in some universal harmony or trans-

parent language. Yet Herbert's treatment of mythological material clearly shows that he is interested less in subverting the material than in transforming it into a new poetic body. Herbert consciously chose to rework Ovid's treatment of the

myth because this myth allowed him to explore themes, contradictions, and ten- sions constitutive of his own and of Ovid's poetics. The use of Ovid's Marsyas also enabled him to contrast the aesthetics of "the observed" and "the lived" within a

politicized framework established by Ovid and, thereby, to assert his own belief in the intersection of the political/ethical with the aesthetic.

Reading Herbert and Ovid together forces us to examine the resemblance of their historical and poetic situations and to explore the political causality behind their aesthetic choices. Since freedom of speech was limited both in Ovid's Rome and in Herbert's Poland, the two poets encode messages that could not be ex-

pressed otherwise. On Ovid's part, this encoding took the form of a radically reduced treatment of the story of Marsyas and Apollo, while for Herbert it was the employment of a myth that Ovid had already politicized. Ovid's strategic silence is designed for an audience familiar with the contextualization of the

Marsyas figure in the Augustan world. Herbert's manipulation, conversely, de-

pends on his choosing a relatively obscure myth that at once lacks an over- determined interpretation and contains a character associated with civic freedom, a choice that enables him to publish a poem about the consequences of chal-

lenging authority (in other words about the "flaying" of the indicium libertatis) despite the censorship in Poland in 1961. The Apolline action that Ovid passed over in silence because of its anti-Augustan overtones, Herbert, in somewhat simi- lar political circumstances, could express quite openly since this openness itself

provided a cover-Ovid's poem-for the political allusions of the myth that only a limited audience could penetrate. Moreover, the absence of an allegorical or fixed meaning to the myth allowed Herbert to project ethical/political themes onto the aesthetic issues of modernism. Therefore, for Herbert the Marsyas myth plays a double role: first, its obscurity marks the necessity for obfuscation in ad-

dressing the question of freedom; and second, it thematically demonstrates the limitations of freedom precisely because it displaces and obscures the earlier and wiser Marsyas of Etrusco-Roman tradition.

No rewriting of the classics is possible without a simultaneous act of rereading. Herbert's rereading of Ovid shows how a "strong poet," to use Bloomian vocabu-

lary, re-visions the truths in received texts and re-opens these texts to his own

experience. Herbert acknowledges his revisionary position by, on one hand, recon-

structing Ovid's treatment of the myth and, on the other, by metamorphosizing it for the new historical and individual context. Perhaps, this very attempt to re- incarnate the old by the act of rereading and rewriting constitutes our modern form of a translatio studii that transcends cultural and chronological distinctions. Quite possibly it also demonstrates that each historical moment necessarily rein-

terprets myth a posteriori, or that only by reading different versions of the same

myth can we understand its deeper structures. Once Herbert rewrites the episode from Ovid, he creates for his audience a

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 168

new reading horizon-the process is irrevocable-no original experience of read-

ing Ovid without Herbert is possible just as there is no experience of Herbert without Ovid. The activities of reading and of writing seem to belong to an order of time that defies chronology and to a sphere that transcends immediate his- torical circumstances. Herbert himself affirms the synchronic nature of the liter-

ary enterprise when he remarks that "A poet's sphere of activity is not the time in which he lives but reality, which is a much broader notion" (qtd. in Baraficzak 9). Ultimately, Herbert's poem is just that: more than an affirmation of "the time in which he lived," it is an affirmation of the final word of the Metamorphoses- Ovid's prophecy for himself and his declaration of an artistic pride stronger than the fear of exile and more lasting than Augustus's monumental buildings- "I shall live"-vivam.

University of California, Los Angeles

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