Marsyas's howl: The myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's "Apollo and Marsyas"

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Nizynska, Joanna

"THE POET WRITES TO PLEASE his predecessors," claims Joseph Brodsky, asserting a belief that the power of poetic tradition frees poets from subjection to their immediate history and thus liberates them from the dictates of politics and the pressure of readership. That no poet writes solely for his contemporary audience has been proved by many a poet, including the uncompromising Russian Nobel laureate. Yet the vector of poetry does not point exclusively toward the past; it also extends into the future: in their desire to build monuments more lasting than bronze, poets write to please their descendants as well. If poetic practice situates poets simultaneously in the past and in the future, then poets themselves invite a mode of critical reading that is not based upon temporal, or even cultural, proximity (that is, upon analyzing continuity through direct historical influences), but upon juxtapositions of disparate and temporally distant texts. Placing poetic predecessors and descendants side by side enables us to trace over-arching structures and individual idiosyncrasies, as well as decipher political and social meanderings that are often overlooked when texts are approached in their singularity. In what follows I attempt just such a reading by exploring the treatment of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo by the Augustan Age Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-18 CE) and the contemporary Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998).

The juxtaposition of these two versions not only becomes a magnifying glass for examining the aesthetic choices of both poets, but also reveals how they sought to avoid political repercussions by manipulating their material. In fact, their aesthetic choices were partially determined by political conditions: both Ovid and Herbert wrote under repressive regimes, and both incorporated into their craft a complex dialogue concerning freedom of expression, the power of the state, and the artist's relation to the state. The subtle presence in Herbert of a revisionary awareness of the Roman poet forces us both to reread Ovid from the perspective of Herbert's poem and to rethink the myth's political and aesthetic implications. Reading and interpreting Herbert's poem rereads and reinterprets Ovid's text; "filling in" Ovid's silences implies "filling in" those of Herbert as well.

Herodotus (7.26; cf. 5.118) and Xenophon (Anab. 1.2.8) attest that the river Marsyas in Phrygia received its name from the foolish satyr who, after finding a flute, an instrument invented and discarded by Athena, challenges Apollo to a musical contest.1 Predictably, Marsyas loses, and Apollo punishes his hubris by having him flayed alive. Apollodorus (1.4.2) and Hyginus (Fab. 165), two mythographers of the second century CE, give a much more elaborate account of the story. Athena, intending to entertain the Olympians by playing the flute is mocked by the gods and retreats to Mount Ida to play alone. Looking at her reflection in a stream, however, she sees her cheeks ridiculously inflated and discards the instrument, cursing it.2 Marsyas finds the flute and becomes so proficient at playing it that he challenges the god of music himself, Apollo, to a contest, only to lose and meet his miserable fate at Apollo's command. In Hyginus's account of the story, the Muses judge the competition, giving Marsyas victory in the first round. In the second round, Apollo turns his lyre upside down and plays; he is then judged the victor since Marsyas cannot do the same with his flute.

As usually occurs with myth, this story has been variously interpreted to accommodate changing historical circumstances. The most common interpretation of the Marsyas myth in Greek antiquity focused on the punishment of the hubristic satyr. Such an interpretation also suited a Pythagorean paradigm in which the lyre, standing for universal harmony, is disturbed by a discordant particularity -the shrill sound of the aulos (flute). The cosmological assumptions of the Pythagorean school could also easily be translated into political terms as a call for social harmony, state order, and political hierarchy.3 From a Platonic perspective, Apollo's victory could represent the superiority of the state over the individual-a popular view in Augustan Rome (see Wyss 29). It was not accidental that at least by Pliny's time, and probably much earlier, Zeuxis's (430-390 BCE) painting Marsyas religatus was hung in the temple of Concordia in Rome as a warning to those who might disturb the concord of the state (Pliny, NH 35.66).4 Only in Hellenistic sculpture, especially in the famous Torso Belvedere, is Marsyas represented as a tragic sufferer heroically awaiting his execution.5

Ovid twice recounts the myth of Marsyas and Apollo. The earlier and better known version appears in the Metamorphoses (6.383-400), published shortly before the poet's exile in 8 CE for his carmen et error ("song and error"). The second version occurs in the Fasti (6. 649-710). This work culminates in a discussion of freedom of speech (including the Marsyas story) and abruptly ends with the month of June-just before the gens Iulia appropriated the Roman calendar by naming the seventh month after the dictator Julius Caesar, Augustus's adoptive father. In both Ovidian versions of the story, there are significant gaps in the narrative that only readers familiar with the myth could fill in. Thus, in the Fasti Ovid focuses primarily on the story of the aulos, Marsyas's instrument, and flute players. He relates how a satyr found pipes discarded by their inventor, Minerva (the goddess Athena in Greek mythology), how the satyr challenged Apollo, and how he was punished as a result. Ovid makes no mention of the rules of the competition nor of how Apollo defeated the satyr, and restricts the challenge and punishment to two lines (6.707-708). The satyr's name is not even mentioned. Significantly, Ovid places this version of the Marsyas myth at the end of an account of the surreptitious return of exiled flute players to the city of Rome (cf. Livy IX. 30. 5-10).