Constructions of Venus in Ovid's Metamorphoses V

Abstract

The fifth book, and with it the first third, of Ovid's Metamorphoses ends with a friendly visit of the goddess Minerva to Mt. Helicon, in the course of which one of the Muses recounts the events of a poetic contest which had recently taken place between her learned sisters and a group of nine mortal challengers called the Emathides. The Muse narrator briefly summarizes the song of these women, an idiosyncratic and highly irreverent version of the revolt of the monster Typhoeus against the Olympians, 1 then repeats verbatim the responding entry of Calliope (Meta. V 341-661), which documents the famous rape of Proserpina by Pluto and the wanderings of her mother Ceres in search of her. Most interpretations of this episode have quite understandably focused upon Calliope's song as art, asking what kind of poetry, or more particularly what genre of poetry, it might represent, and why. 2 Despite their close comparison of the episode with its two most famous predecessors, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Ovid's own account in Fasti IV, critics fail to consider the possible social and narrative purposes of a highly significant digression from not only the Hymn and Fasti versions, but all versions of the rape: Calliope's attribution of the rape to the sole agency of Venus and Cupid (V 359-84). Further, the representation of Venus and Cupid in Metamorphoses V, not so much as the inspirers [End Page 125] of love but as the Empress and Commander in Chief of an empire, diverges in significant ways from their more traditional depiction in Ovid's and other elegiac poetry. Why they should attain such prominence in Calliope's version of the rape of Proserpina, and why their characterizations depart so radically from Ovid's elegiac divinities, will be the focus of this discussion. I will argue that Ovid's elegiac and epic treatments of Venus and Cupid are two sides of the same Ovidian strategy, in the first case making a mockery of Augustan moral legislation, in the second launching a broader assault upon Roman imperial ideology. Two further digressions from the traditional accounts of the rape, Cyane's attempt to stop it and her consequent transformation early in the song (V 409-37), and the lengthy account of the rape of Arethusa toward the end of the episode (V 572-641), are linked thematically to this unusual appearance of Venus and Cupid in order to reinforce a correlation between imperial, divine, and sexual power that Ovid has developed in the first third of the Metamorphoses. Venus and Cupid, who do not appear to have been available motivators of the rape before this episode, 3 are here made entirely responsible for Proserpina's demise. Jupiter, the motivator in the Hymn, 4 is invisible until Ceres' traditional appeal on behalf of her daughter (V 512ff.). Pluto, blamed in the Fasti, 5 is merely an unfortunate victim of [End Page 126] Venus' ambition. Pluto has emerged from Tartarus to check for damages caused by the struggling of Typhoeus, with whose burial under Aetna (the traditional end of his battle with Jupiter, omitted by the Emathides), Calliope has opened her narrative. As Venus spots the unwitting Pluto she addresses Cupid (V 365-79): "arma manusque meae, mea, nate, potentia," dixit, "illa, quibus superas omnes, cape tela, Cupido, inque dei pectus celeres molire sagittas, cui triplicis cessit fortuna novissima regni. tu superos ipsumque Iovem, tu numina ponti victa domas ipsumque, regit qui numina ponti. Tartara quid cessant? cur non matrisque tuumque imperium profers? agitur pars tertia mundi . . . at tu pro socio, si qua est ea gratia, regno iunge deam patruo." "My arms, my hands, my power, my son!" she said, "Take up the missiles that overwhelm everyone, Cupid, and sink your swift arrows into the heart of the god to whom the last lot for the division of the three-fold universe fell. You domesticate the gods, and Jupiter himself, and the divinities of the sea and their ruler; why...