Ovid’s Metamorphoses has many stories, too many to remember them all and in fact I didn’t remember this one. I stumbled upon it one day working in the Ceramic Galleries of the Museum where I work. This maiolica plate was painted by Francesco Urbini in Gubbio in 1533, and shows Erysichton, the king of Thessaly, felling an oak in the sacred grove of Ceres.
made in 1533 in Gubbio, tin-glazed earthenware. Ceramics, Room 137.
Erysichton was the king of Thessaly, in Greece. According to the myth, he ordered all trees in the wood sacred to Ceres be cut down. One huge oak was covered with votive wreaths, a symbol of every prayer Ceres had granted, and so the men refused to cut it down. Erysichthon grabbed an axe and cut it down himself, killing a dryad nymph inhabiting the tree. The nymph cursed him before dying and Ceres granted her revenge and punished Erysichthon by sending the king the spirit of unrelenting and insatiable hunger to his stomach. The more he ate, the hungrier he got. Erysichthon sold all his possessions to buy food, but to no avail. He was still hungry and even sold his own daughter Mestra into slavery to get money for food. Neptune helps Mestra by giving her the gift to change shape to escape her master, but Erysichthon instead uses Mestra shape-shifting ability, to sell her numerous times to make money to feed himself. But it’s all for nothing: his appetite is insatiable, and he eats himself.
The source for this tale comes from the roman Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid was one of the most influential poets of the day, and The Metamorphoses is considered his masterpiece. It’s a collection of 250 myths, in chronological order collected in 15 books (that of Erysichthon is in book VIII) that have as common theme that of transformation – metamorphosis. The stories are unrelated and are told in chronological order like an unbroken song, from the creation of the world (the first metamorphosis of chaos into order) to the death and deification of Julius Caesar (the culminating metamorphosis).
Yet it was nearly lost to us. In the 8th century AD (just after he finished to write the poem, Ovid was banned (for reason still unknown to us) by the emperor Augustus to a small town in modern days Romania, at the edge of the empire. His grief was so profound that, before leaving Rome, he took his own manuscript of the Metamorphoses and burned it. Thankfully, Ovid friends recognizing the artist value of the poem, had already made copies of it. Even Ovid was relieved after all…
For those of you who are not familiar with this work, Ovid’s book was one of the main sources of inspiration of classical iconography for many Renaissance artists, perhaps the most widely used source of classical iconography for the visual arts – even though in the West, most classical manuscripts of poetic texts were not illustrated, and no illustrated ancient copies of Ovid’s works exist.
However, despite their popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Metamorphoses were not a discovery of the Renaissance. On the contrary, pagan writers continued to be studied through the Middle Ages, thanks to the dutiful work of reproduction pursued by mediaeval copyists that, despite the hostility of early Christians, who found Ovid woks more difficult to reconcile with theology and philosophy than Virgil, kept making copies of the poem.
From the 12th century onwards, the number of copies or Ovid-inspired works and surrogates produced by scholars and translators alike, were rivalling the Bible. From the vast Ovide moralisé, a Christian translation who added tales and morals to the translation, making it some 12 times longer than the original, or the small pocket-sized editions made by the Venetian editor Aldus Manutius. Between 1494 and 1515, Manutius revolutionized personal reading by inventing a pocket-sized edition (the ancestor of modern paperback) and thus making the work of Greek, Latin and Italian writers available to a wider audience, and the works of printers and engravers, the Metamorphoses could indeed rival the Bible for its widespread availability in print.
Why was this book so famous? Partly because of the beauty of the poetry, but also because each story was also an allegory. Allegory come for the Greek allos and means ‘example to follow’.
From the Renaissance allegory has been widely used in art to express a deeper moral or spiritual meaning such as life, death, love, virtue, justice etc. By surrounding themselves with images, the cultured elite of the Renaissance wanted to show their peers their moral valour, their VIRTUE. If in Ovid’s time in ancient Rome, the word Virtus carried connotations of valour, excellence, courage, character, and worth, in the Renaissance meant the liberation from bestiality that is part of human nature.
When, in book VIII, the impious Erysichthon of Thessaly balances his axe with the intent of cutting down the oak tree sacred to Ceres, the tree, aware of the impending doom, trembles all over, and gives a sigh, while its acorns, leaves and branches turn pale. And when, finally, Erysichthon strikes it, blood flows from the wounded bark (vulnus8); Ovid describes the fall of the oak with pathos and, rehearsing a Virgilian simile, he compares it to a sacrificial animal:
- “quam solet, ante aras ingens ubi victima taurus concidit, abrupta cruor e cervice profundi. ” (Metamorphoses 8.763−64)
- “But when he struck with his defiling hand, blood issued from its severed bark, as when a bull is sacrificed before the altar and the warm blood pours from its severed throat.”
Soon part of the mystery is solved, and we learn that underlying the tree there is a nymph who is dying because of the blows inflicted on it, her body and the tree’s mysteriously identical.10 A book particularly dense with trees, as Emily Gowers has remarked, book 8 also features the myth of In Ovid’s poem there are many cases of metamorphosis into plants—twenty episodes or so, almost one-tenth of the 250 myths that constitute the entire poem. With his usual inventiveness Ovid composes many variations on the theme. He presents us either myths where the tree is showing emotional states and physical suffering, or myths where the human character undergoes feelings and emotions that will be crystallized in the form, characteristics and even behaviour of the plant into which he or she has metamorphosed.
Ovid attributes to the tree’s shape and botanic features a meaning that goes beyond the physical appearance of a tree, its branches and trunk, and the silence enveloping them.
Myths that evoked the life of trees, including their association with other living beings, existed long before Ovid. For the episode of the fading, blooded oak tree cut down by Erysichthon, Ovid found a precedent in Virgil’s Aeneid and Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter. Virgil had portrayed the bush, sprung from the lances imbued with the blood of the dead hero Polydorus, as shedding blood at the very moment some of its branches were being uprooted. Callimachus had presented the goddess Demeter aware of her sacred tree’s suffering, algein, and acting against the callous Erysichthon to save it.
Probably Ovid was influenced by the physical theory of the four elements associated with the Greek philosopher Empedocles, but especially in the role of the earth in generating the other living beings, cetera animalia, after the deluge destroyed them.
Ovid seems to appropriate elements of philosophical thought—the living status of plants along with the analogy between bodies of different kinds of living beings and the analogy of functions—to dramatize the episodes of metamorphosis into plants and to explore the possibility of the existence of sentient, self-aware trees. And the mode of such an appropriation is a measure of his poetic imagination. Indeed, Ovid often shortcuts the lucid observations of the philosophers to construct hybrid living beings, partly tree, partly “human,” dramatically capturing them in a moment of stillness during the metamorphic process. And he presents fully metamorphosed trees whose story makes us question their identity—as to what type of beings they are and what capacities they have—and whose blood, when shed, is a tangible sign of their living condition. In it we should see a cosmogonic event presenting the origin of yet another form of life and likely echoing Empedocles’ zoogony, in which trees were the first animals to appear on the earth under the rule of Strife— but all this dealt with Ovid’s usual inventiveness and wit.
This of Erysichthon was very appropriate. It seems an allegory of our time. His gratuitous gesture of felling the tree, seems to sum up our disrespect for nature. Despite hurricanes, floods, and tsunami we, like Erysichthon, abuse Nature and underestimate Her power of revenge. And like him, soon or later we’ll be punished. Let’s do something before it’s too late.
Paola Cacciari 2024
Vita da Museo 