When we get to Ovid's treatment of the Trojan War, we're moving into a different
kind of genre. we're moving in from an epic treatment of
the Trojan War that we've seen in seen in Homer and we've seen in Virgil, into
something that we might call a mock epic. There's something different happening in
Ovid's treatment of this. And he's having fun with us all the way
through this story. If as you're reading, you find yourself
on this long digression that seems to indenture and you're not sure what,
how in the world that's related to the main action in the Trojan War. You're on
to it, you've got it right. Ovid is bringing us all off into parts of
the, the story that don't really seem quite to fit.
we'll talk about what his message is in closing, but let's take, try to get a
grip on what's happening in Ovid's version of the Trojan War.
first of all, let's just do a thought experiment.
Imagine a documentary covering World War II from the middle last century.
And if in, imagine in that documentary that there's no mention at all of D-Day,
there's also hardly any battle scenes at all. In fact,
it's there's one though long bloody kind of battle-ish scene when you've got
general George Patton, who fights someone you never heard of.
He's got a really, he has a really hard time of it, and then he eventually pushes
a guy over and then just strangles him and smashes him with his club.
there's an older colonel who goes off on a long digression and starts prattling on
and on and on, about a time when he was a young guy, and there was a pack of bears
that came along, and they had to have long fight to fight off the pack of
bears. And the story takes up nearly a third of
the documentary that treats World War II, some old guy talking about when he was
young and they fought off a pack of bears.
That's like a third of the coverage of World War II.
then on the Allied side, two top officers argue over who gets to keep General
George Patton's pearl-handled pistols. Let's just say for sake of argument,
Patton gets killed in the middle of the action and he's got these pearl-handled
pistols, and the two great officers from the Allied side fight over who gets to
keep them. the documentary, documentary mentions
that the Axis countries fall, and then, we take a long look at the
plight of the Japanese Emperor's family and all the suffering that happens, and
we talk about how the Allies savagely firebombed Tokyo.
And that will be the end of the treatment of World War II.
You might say to yourself, well, that's weird, and it's focusing on certain
pieces and making them seem really important.
What's with that whole digression about the pack of bears?
And why is that in there? that's the same kind of reaction you
probably should have to Ovid's treatment of the Trojan War.
Let's see a look at an outline of the main action as it happens, and then, we
will try to figure out what he is up to. We've got a departure for Troy and in
that departure we hear about Iphigenia, but, in Ovid's version, she is saved at
the last minute. Diana substitutes a deer instead of her,
there's a, change that happens. and then, we jump off and we hear about
Achilles. The great Greek warrior, Achilles, he's a
killing machine in Homer. He's extraordinarily good at it.
He carries a tough eh, carries it in a way that makes it clear it's a tough
burden for him to shoulder, but he's he knows what he's doing.
He's kind of an elegant killer. in, in the scene that Ovid chooses to
pull out is Achilles against Cygnus. And if you haven't heard of Cygnus as a
famous warrior, well, it's because Cygnus is not a famous warrior.
It's a small end battle. and we've got Achilles compared to a
bull. There's that rich simile that talks about
him as a bull. how does that make him look?
And then we've got in the end, he just takes Cygnus and beats his face in with a
shield, then finally he chokes him to death.
Well, this is not elegant killing. It's not the kind of thing that Homer
talks about. Achilles is able to use you know, sharp,
[COUGH] bronze weapons to take the life of other people in dramatically efficient
ways. I mean, here is an inefficient, cloddish,
cumbersome, bull-like overwhelming brute force, using brute force of one guy
against the not very famous guy. That doesn't seem very glorious, glorious or
heroic. Then we get the battle of the Lapiths and
the Centaurs. This is that thing that takes like, about a third of Ovid's
recounting of the war at Troy focuses in on this.
How do we get on to this topic? And if you don't remember that's probably
just about fine. you are catching that Ovid has only a
very tangential relation between this whole thing and and the Trojan War.
In fact, it comes out of Nestor's mouth. And Nestor is traditionally a guy who
likes to talk. He's an old man and he likes to hear his
own voice as old people do. As I get older, I'm finding that that's
true. My voice sounds more and more mellifluous
as the years go by. How does Nestor get on the topic of
telling everyone who, oh, you know, gory detail about the battle of the Lapiths
and the Centaurs? Well, he just decides he's, wants to talk
about Phineas. and this Phineas was once a woman and he
wished he could be turned into a man to avoid being raped again and dah, dah,
dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then all of a sudden, we start
hearing about him as a Lapith and how they fought off the Centaurs.
Otherwise, there's really no connection. Nestor's just kind of prattling.
and all of a sudden we jump on into this long battle-like scene where Lapiths, who
we don't necessarily care that much about, are killing Centaurs who we care
nothing about. what we've got in the way he frames
things, the way Ovid frames things is a kind of
triumph of gruesomeness and gore for gore's sake over heroism.
he focuses in on these nasty beasts getting ripped apart and there's gory
detail after gory detail. Homer himself spends a lot of time with
gory detail, but, and by contrast, in most of the cases
that Homer does that, we care about the person that's getting ripped up.
Here, the Centaurs, they play a role that's kind of like the role that zombies
play in contemporary horror movies. Zombies are there in order to just get
ripped up and you watch their green gooey gore blood splatter everywhere. the
Centaurs are a little bit like that, you're just going to watch them get sort
of sliced to bits and you say, oh, well, look at that, that's sort of exciting.
so a famous case of old they're debauched creatures, these Centaurs, the men,
they're man and beast together. We don't really admire them. What we've
got instead of a grand, heroic scene with people on one side and people on another
fighting over a great cause, we've got gore for gore's sake.
It's just gruesomeness. and then, we jump back and all of a
sudden get back to our digressive moment of [INAUDIBLE] and oh, yeah, he was there
too. We hear about that.
Oh, okay. All of a sudden Ovid has brought us
through this long gory detail that doesn't really have much at all to do
with the Trojan War, then we hear about the death of Achilles.
Yes indeed, we just hear about it, he dies. And the, the way he dies is, is by
a cheap shot from a peanut gallery. [COUGH] you've got Paris who is not very,
of all of the Trojan princes, Paris is not the greatest of warriors and he
fights with bow and arrow, that's never coded as being a very brave thing.
Bow and arrow fighters fight from far away and they kind of ping and then they
run off. well, so this arrow flies and it hits
Achilles and poor Achilles who's depicted here on this vase dead Achilles being
dragged along, he gets pushed aside. But it's just a small, tiny mention.
It's not as though there's anything, grand and grandiose that has happened.
in our next lecture, we'll look at another piece of how this Trojan war is
framed. After Achilles is dead, there's going to
be an argument over who gets to keep his arms.