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 usurpation of the prophetic power of independent augurs by those associated with Apollo (and controlled by Augustus) left no room for the Marsyas of the Republic.14 For this reason, Augustus encouraged transformation of the satyr from an augur to a civic figure by stressing Greek accounts of Marsyas, the majority of which did not mention prophetic abilities. Emphasizing Greek sources also allowed for the presentation of Apollo as a just champion over the barbaric Marsyas, who became a hubristic foil to highlight Apollo's civilized nature and demonstrate his power (cf. Rawson 11). In the visual arts Apollo's superiority was expressed by attaching small figurines of Marsyas to large-scale figures of Apollo (for instance, to the colossal cult statue from the Temple of Apollo at Bulla Regia) in order metaphorically to indicate the "size" of the prophetic abilities of the two divinities (Rawson 11). By emphasizing the arrogant flutist's challenge to Apollo and its consequences, Augustus diverted attention from the augural abilities of Marsyas. Ironically, the satyr's association with the augural libera area ("purified lands") could then be used to facilitate his transformation into a figure of the civic libertas which the Roman Princeps could grant. As a figure of civic freedom, not a divinity, Marsyas now affirmed the justness of Rome's (and, by extension, the emperor's) rule. The Etrusco-Roman Marsyas, the bringer of exauguration, was doomed to oblivion.

Which Marsyas is Ovid invoking? The old Etrusco-Roman deity or the new civic symbol of liberty? In either case Marsyas signifies limits put on the individual by the authority of the state. As the guarantor of civic freedom and free speech, he is still a muted augural divinity whose new "speech" is a result of political manipulation. As the augural deity, he is about to disappear because of a new religious system in which his rival, Apollo, controls prophecy. Whether the competition between Apollo and Marsyas is a competition between absolute authority and artistic autonomy or between the new prophetic deity and the old augural deity over the right to practice divination, it demonstrates how power influences, controls, determines, "metamorphosizes" the fate of those subjected to it.

Perhaps because the figure of Marsyas was too explicitly connected with the question of civic freedom, Ovid seems to have been reluctant to dwell upon the myth. The poet's sensitivity to the politics of the story and its relation to power likely resulted in his silence concerning the rules of the competition and Apollo's deception of Marsyas, a silence that, ultimately, reduced the myth to a scene of bloody punishment. Yet even this aesthetic choice, this particular way of dealing with the myth's "inflammatory material," can be read as an implicit reminder of the limitations on civic freedom in Augustan Rome; it encodes a message about power imposing its own "augural authority," a message which Ovid's more sensitive readers could readily decode.