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 cuz 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, 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. 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.