Why Read the Classics?

  This technique of metamorphosis has been studied by Sceglov in an extremely lucid and persuasive essay. ‘All these transformations’, says Sceglov, ‘concern the distinctive physical and spatial characteristics which Ovid usually highlights even in elements not subject to metamorphosis (“hard rock”, “long body”, “curved back”) … Thanks to his knowledge of the properties of things, the poet provides the shortest route for the metamorphosis, because he knows in advance what man has in common with dolphins, as well as what he lacks compared to them, and what they lack compared to him. The essential point is that since he portrays the whole world as a system made up of elementary components, the process of transformation — this most unlikely and fantastic phenomenon — is reduced to a sequence of quite simple processes. The event is no longer represented as a fairytale but rather as a collection of everyday, realistic facts (growing, diminishing, hardening, softening, curving, straightening, joining, separating etc.).’

  Ovid’s writing, as described by Sceglov, appears to contain within itself the model, or at least the programme, for Robbe-Grillet at his most cold and rigorous. Of course such a description does not exhaust everything we can find in Ovid. But the important point is that this way of portraying (animate and inanimate) objects objectively, ‘as different combinations of a relatively small number of basic, very simple elements’ sums up exactly the only incontrovertible philosophy in the poem, namely ‘that of the unity and inter-connectedness of everything that exists in the world, both things and living creatures’.

  Setting out his cosmogony in the first book and his profession of faith in Pythagoras in the last, Ovid clearly wanted to provide this natural philosophy with a theoretical basis, perhaps to rival the by now remote Lucretius. There has been considerable discussion as to the weight one should attach to these professions of faith, but probably the only thing that matters is the poetic consistency of the manner in which Ovid portrays and narrates his world: namely this swarming and intertwining of events that are often similar but are always different, in which the continuity and mobility of everything is celebrated.

  Before he has even finished the chapter on the origins of the world and its early catastrophes, Ovid is already embarking on the series of love affairs that the gods have with nymphs or mortal girls. There are several constants in the love stories (which mostly occupy the liveliest part of the poem, the first eleven books): as Bernardini has shown they involve love at first sight, overwhelming desire, no psychological complications, and demand an immediate resolution. And since the desired creature usually refuses and flees, the motif of the chase through the woods constantly recurs; metamorphosis can occur at different times, either before (the seducer’s disguise), during (the pursued maiden’s escape), or afterwards (punishment inflicted by another jealous deity on the seduced girl).

  Compared with the constant pressure of male desire, the instances of female initiative in love are rather rare; but to compensate, these are usually more complex desires, not sudden whims but real passions, which involve greater psychological richness (Venus in love with Adonis), often contain a more morbid erotic element (the nymph Salmacis who when she sexually embraces Hermaphroditus blends into a bisexual creature), and in some cases are totally illicit, incestuous passions (such as the tragic characters Myrrha and Byblis: the way in which the latter realises her desire for her brother, through a revelatory but upsetting dream, is one of the finest psychological passages in Ovid), or tales of homosexual love (Iphys), or of wicked jealousy (Medea). The stories of Jason and Medea open up right at the centre of the poem (Book 7) a space for a genuine romance tale, involving a mixture of adventure, brooding passion, and the ‘black’ grotesque scene of the magic philtres, which will resurface almost identically in Macbeth.

  The move from one story to the next without any interval is underlined by the fact that — as Wilkinson points out — ‘the end of a story rarely coincides with the end of a book. He will even begin a new one within the last few lines. This is partly the time-honoured device of the serial writer to whet the reader’s appetite for the next instalment; but it is also an indication of the continuity of the work, which should not have been divided into books at all, were it not that its length necessitated a number of rolls. This then gives us the impression of a real and consistent world in which events which are usually considered in isolation interact with each other.’

  The stories are often similar, never the same. It is not by chance that the most heart-rending tale is that of the unlucky love of Echo (Book 3), doomed to repeat sounds, for the young Narcissus, who in turn is condemned to contemplate his own repeated image in the reflecting waters. Ovid runs across this forest of love stories which are all the same and all different, pursued by the voice of Echo resounding from the rocks ‘Coëamus!’ ‘Coëamus!’ ‘Coëamus!’

  [1979]

  The Sky, Man, the Elephant

  For sheer pleasure of reading, I would advise anyone taking up Pliny the Elder’s Natural History to focus mainly on three books: the two containing the fundamentals of his philosophy, that is to say Book 2 (on cosmography) and Book 7 (on man), and — for an example of his unique blend of erudition and fantasy — Book 8 (on land animals). Of course you can discover astonishing pages everywhere: in the books on geography (3-6), on aquatic animals, entomology and comparative anatomy (9-11), on botany, agronomy and pharmacology (12-32), or those on metals, precious stones and the fine arts (33-37).

  It has always been the case, I believe, that people do not read Pliny, they go to Pliny to consult him, both to find out what the ancients knew or thought they knew about a certain topic, and to winkle out bizarre facts and curiosities. On this latter point one cannot ignore Book 1, an index of the whole work, whose charm derives from unpredictable juxtapositions: ‘Fish which have a small stone in their head; Fish which hide in winter; Fish which are influenced by the stars; Fish which have fetched extraordinary prices’; or ‘Roses: 12 varieties, 32 drugs; Lilies: 3 varieties, 21 drugs; Plants which grow from an exudation; Narcissus: 3 varieties; 16 drugs; The plant whose seed can be dyed to produce coloured flowers; Saffron: 20 drugs; Where the best flowers grow; What flowers were known at the time of the Trojan war; Floral patterns in clothes.’ Or again, ‘The nature of metals; Of gold; Of the amount of gold possessed by the ancients; Of the equestrian order and the right to wear gold rings; How many times the equestrian order has changed name’. But Pliny is also an author who deserves an extended read, for the measured movement of his prose, which is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena.

  We could distinguish Pliny the poet and philosopher, with his awareness for the universe, his sympathy for knowledge and mystery, from Pliny the neurotic collector of data, the compulsive compiler of facts, whose sole concern appears to be not to waste any note from his gigantic collection of index cards. (In his use of written sources he was both omnivorous and eclectic, but not uncritical: there were facts he recorded as true, others to which he gave the benefit of the doubt, others he rejected as obvious nonsense. The only problem is that his method of evaluation appears to be extremely inconsistent and unpredictable.) However, once one admits the existence of these two sides to him, one has to recognise that Pliny is just one writer, just as the world he wants to describe is just one world though it contains a great variety of forms. To achieve his objective, he is not afraid of trying to embrace the infinite number of existing forms in the world, which in turn is multiplied by the countless number of reports which exist about all these forms, since forms and reports both have the same right to be part of natural history and to be examined by someone who seeks in them that sign of a higher reason which he is convinced they must contain.

  For Pliny the world is the eternal sky which was not created by anyone, and whose spherical, rotating vault covers all earthly things (2.2). But the world is difficult to distinguish from God, who for Pliny and the Stoic culture which he embraced is
a single deity that cannot be identified with any single portion or aspect, nor with the crowd of Olympian gods (apart perhaps from the Sun, which is the soul, mind or spirit of the heavens (2.13)). But at the same time the sky is composed of stars as eternal as God (the stars weave the sky and at the same time they are interwoven into the heavenly fabric: ‘aeterna caelestibus est natura intexentibus mundum intextuque concretis’, 2.30), and is also the air (both above and below the moon) which seems empty and diffuses down here the vital spirit, generating clouds, hail, thunder, lightning and storms (2.102).

  When we talk of Pliny we never know to what extent the ideas he advances can be attributed directly to him. He is scrupulous about putting down as little as possible of his own, and sticking closely to what his sources say: this conforms to his impersonal view of knowledge which excludes individual originality. To try to understand his real view of nature, what role is played in it by the arcane majesty of principles and what by the material existence of the elements, we have to restrict ourselves to what is definitely his own, to what the substance of his prose conveys. His discussion of the moon, for instance, blends together two elements: first a note of deep-felt gratitude for this ‘ultimate star, the star most familiar to those who live on earth, their remedy against the dark’ (‘novissimum sidus, terris familiarissimum et in tenebrarum remedium’) and for everything her changing phases and eclipses teach us; and second the nimble practicality of his phrasing, both of which combine to convey the moon’s function with crystalline clarity. It is in this astronomical section of Book 2 that Pliny proves that he can be more than just the mere compiler of data with a taste for the bizarre that we usually think of. Here he shows that he possesses the main strength of great scientific writers of the future: the ability to communicate the most complex argument with limpid clarity, drawing from it a sense of harmony and beauty.

  All this is done without ever veering towards abstract speculation. Pliny always sticks to the facts (to what he or his source considers facts): he does not accept an infinity of worlds because this world alone is already difficult enough to understand and an infinity would not simplify the problem (2.4). He does not believe the heavenly spheres produce sound, whether that sound be a roar too great to be heard or an ineffable harmony, because ‘for us who are inside it, the world slips round day and night in silence’ (2.6).

  Having stripped God of the anthropomorphic trappings which myths attributed to the Olympian gods, Pliny is forced by this logic of his to bring God closer again to humans since this logical necessity has limited his powers (in fact in one respect God is less free than man since he could not kill himself even if he wanted to). God cannot resurrect the dead, nor make someone who has been alive never have lived; he has no power over the past, over the irreversibility of time (2.27). Like Kant’s God, he cannot enter into conflict with the autonomy of reason (he cannot prevent ten plus ten making twenty), but to delimit him in this way would distance us from Pliny’s pantheistic identification of him as immanent in nature (‘per quae declaratur haut dubie naturae potentia idque esse quod deum vocamus’ (these facts unquestionably prove the power of nature, which is what we call God), 2.27).

  The lyricism, or rather the mixture of philosophy and lyricism which dominates the early chapters of Book 2 reflects a vision of universal harmony which is soon shattered: a substantial part of the book is devoted to heavenly portents. Pliny’s scientific method hovers between a desire to find an order in nature and the recording of what is extraordinary and unique, and it is the latter tendency which always prevails in the end. Nature is eternal, sacred and harmonious, but it leaves a wide margin for the occurrence of miraculous, inexplicable phenomena. What general conclusion should we draw from all this? That in fact nature’s order is a monstrous order, composed entirely of exceptions to rules? Or that her rules are so complex as to He beyond our understanding? In either case, there must be an explanation for every occurrence, even though it may be unknown to us at present: ‘All these are things of uncertain explanation and hidden in the majesty of nature’ (2.101), or a little later on, ‘Adeo causa non deest’ (There must be some cause for this) (2.115): it is not that there is no cause, some explanation can always be found. Pliny’s rationalism upholds the logic of cause and effect, but at the same time it minimalises it: even when you find an explanation for the facts, the facts do not thereby cease to be miraculous.

  This last maxim acts as the conclusion to a chapter on the mysterious origin of the winds: perhaps folds in mountains, concave valleys in which gusts of wind rebound like echoes, a grotto in Dalmatia in which throwing even the lightest object is enough to unleash a storm at sea, a rock in Cyrenaica which you just have to touch with your hand to stir up a sandstorm. Pliny gives us plenty of these catalogues of strange, unconnected facts: catalogues of the effects of thunderbolts on man, causing cold wounds (the only plant not attacked by thunderbolts is the laurel, the only bird the eagle, 2.146), lists of strange things that rain from the sky (milk, blood, meat, iron or iron spunges, wool, bricks, 2.147).

  Yet Pliny dismisses a large number of fanciful ideas, such as comets presaging the future: for instance, he rejects the belief that the appearance of a comet between the pudenda of a constellation — what did the ancients NOT see in the sky! — foretells a period of loose morals (‘obscenis autem moribus in verendis partibus signorum’, 2.93). Yet every strange event is for him a problem of nature, in that it represents a variation from the norm. Pliny rejects superstitions, yet he is not always able to recognise them himself, and this is particularly so in Book 7, where he discusses human nature: he quotes the most abstruse beliefs even regarding facts which are extremely easy to check. The chapter on menstruation is typical (7.63-66), but it has to be noted that Pliny’s account is of a piece with the most ancient religious taboos regarding menstrual blood. There is a whole network of analogies and traditional values that does not clash with Pliny’s rationality, almost as if the latter was founded on the same bedrock. Consequently he is sometimes inclined to construct explanations based on poetic or psychological analogies: ‘Men’s corpses float on their back, women’s on their front, as if nature wanted to respect the modesty of women even after death’ (7.77).

  It is only very rarely that Pliny quotes facts that he himself has witnessed directly: ‘I have seen at night, while the sentries were on guard in front of the trenches, lights in the shape of a star shining on the soldiers’ lances’ (2.101); ‘When Claudius was Emperor, we saw a centaur which he ordered to be sent from Egypt, conserved in honey’ (7.35); ‘I myself saw when in Africa a citizen of Thysdritum change from woman into man on the day of her wedding’ (7.36).

  But for a researcher like Pliny, who was in a sense the first martyr of empirical science, since he would die asphyxiated by the fumes of Vesuvius when it erupted, direct observation occupies a minimal place in his work, and counts neither more nor less than what he reads in books, which for him were all the more authoritative the older they were. At best he admits his uncertainty, saying: ‘However, I would not give my word for the majority of these facts, preferring as I do to rely on the sources, to whom I refer you in all cases of doubt: I will never tire of citing the Greek sources, since they are not only the most ancient but also the most precise in observation’ (7.8).

  After this preamble Pliny feels he is now authorised to launch into the famous list of ‘miraculous and incredible’ characteristics of certain foreign races which was to be so popular in the Middle Ages and afterwards, and was to transform geography into a kind of living freak show. (Its echoes will continue even in the accounts of true journeys, such as those of Marco Polo.) That the unknown lands at the edge of the Earth harbour beings who border on the human, should not surprise us: the Arimaspians with one single eye in the middle of their forehead, who fight the griffins for possession of the gold mines; the inhabitants of the forests of Abarymon, who run at full speed with their feet turned backwards; the androgynous inhabitants of Nasamona who change sex when
they couple; the Thybians who have two pupils in one eye, and the figure of a horse in the other. But this huge circus reserves its most spectacular stunts for India, where one can encounter a mountain tribe of hunters who have the head of a dog; and another of leaping dancers who have just one leg, and who when they want to rest in the shade, lie down raising their single foot up as a parasol; and another race still, this time nomads, whose legs are in the shape of serpents; while the Astomi who have no mouth, live by sniffing odours. In the midst of all this there are also accounts which we now know to be true, like the description of the Indian fakirs (Pliny calls them gymnosophist philosophers), or which continue to feed the mysterious reports which we read in our newspapers (Pliny’s mention of enormous footprints could refer to the Himalayan Yeti), or legends which will be handed down for centuries to come, like that of the healing powers of kings (King Pyrrhus cured diseases of the spleen by the laying on of his big toe).