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

Several critics give the short episode of Marsyas a political interpretation, although only as a small component of larger studies of Ovid's poetry and poetics in the Metamorphoses. Such studies address neither the full implications of Ovid's versions of the myth, nor the iconography of Marsyas. The discussion of Marsyas's challenge to Apollo in these studies serves to illuminate, for instance, Ovid's complex negotiation of his own artistic autonomy in Augustan Rome (Carole Newlands), his supposed indulgence in human pain and agony (Karl Galinsky), his elusive voice, tone, and perspective (Eleanor Leach), and his tendency to contrast violence with idyllic landscape (Charles Segal).

Similarly, many scholars of Italo-Roman iconography (for example, M. Torelli, F. Coarelli, J.P. Small, P.B. Rawson) have discussed the transformation of the Roman conception of Marsyas from an "Italic" figure of augury who warranted a statue in the Forum Romanum (see below) to a Phrygian figure punished by Apollo (a painting of which, Zeuxis's Marsyas religatus, hung in the Temple of Concordia). My exploration of the political dimension of the myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses more fully projects the history of this mythical figure (and its semiotic transformations) into the text of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this analysis, what is silenced and omitted in Ovid's short account of the myth becomes even more significant than what is expressed. Such an analysis of the blank spaces in Ovid is greatly aided by the juxtaposition of the myth's treatment in the Metamorphoses with Zbigniew Herbert's contemporary rewriting of the myth (the focus of the second half of this paper).