(This is from the Cambridge green and yellow edition of Book 14 by K. Sara Myers, page 67 of her commentary):
“and her mutilated groin and protruding belly are enclosed by the bodies of the beasts” (the translation given in the annotations)
“an example of the idiom by which a transitive verb (coercet) refers not to what the subject ‘does’ but to what the subject ‘has happen to him or her’”
Is that really a thing? I don’t understand that. The subject would still be terga, right? And it’s plural, but still somehow governing “coercet” singular? I would have thought the text should be something like this instead, in order to have the stated sense: “inguina trunca et uterum exstans (in) subiectis tergis ferarum coercentur”?? What happens is the “getting enclosed”, and what gets enclosed are the groin and belly, and yet those are in the ablative, while the “bodies” are in the nominative. I don’t see how this works. Can someone please help me understand this?
The annotator has cast the sentence as passive. In the Latin it’s active — the subject is Scylla. The metamorphosis is described by Ovid as if Scylla is actively imposing the metamorphosis on herself, rather than as something happening to her. The passive translation is intended to explain this point — though it evidently is too cryptic.
“She encloses the bodies of the beasts …“ is what Ovid says literally. This makes the description of the metamorphosis more vivid and striking by casting it in a strange and unexpected way.
The Latin reads literally: “She encloses the bodies of the beasts by her mutilated groin and protruding belly.” The annotator translates this freely with a passive sentence: “The bodies of the beasts are enclosed by her mutilated groin and protruding belly” to show how Ovid has cast his description of the metamorphosis as Scylla effecting it herself actively, rather than as something happening to her involuntarily.
You are correct about the active, but incorrect to explain away the annotator, who is simply off-base here. She doesn’t seem to know what she is talking about and is just trying to explain the Loeb version (which translates as passive).
Ovid’s actual image sure looks to me like a belly enclosing monsters in mockery of a birthing woman.
Yes, that helps a lot, thanks! So the “inguinibus truncis uteroque exstante” are just ablative of place-where, I guess. That’s where she encloses them. The way she expressed that in her commentary was confusing for me. It would have been clearer if she’d simply said what you said, or if she’d just said “the subject is Scylla”.
The annotator had me thinking here was some exotic and possibly rare new construction I’d never seen before, and had left me in the lurch by incompletely explaining how it worked.
Also “hiding” the beasts inside her belly and having them come out and do beastly duty from time to time makes sense.
Hiding her belly inside the wild beasts, which is effectively what she said, makes no sense.
I see what Joel is saying. Myers has the groin and belly enclosed by the bodies of the beasts. This is backwards. The bellies of the beasts, as I read Ovid’s Latin, are enclosed/contained by the groin and belly. (The ablatives could be loose ablatives of location without in, or ablatives of means or instrument; I think the latter, but it doesn’t really matter.).
The Loeb seems to make the same mistake. Is this the revised Loeb or the old one? Maybe I’m missing something, but I just can’t reach the way Myers and the Loeb have translated this. Could inguinibus and utero be ablative of means/instrument taken with subiecta? (They can’t be dative because exstante is ablative and extanti wouldn’t scan.) But that would leave coercet without a modifier – by or in something – puzzling.
But Myers’ poorly explained point is valid: Ovid has framed the metamorphosis as an act on Scylla’s part, using an active verb with Scylla as implied subject, instead of as something that happens to her. The translators smooth out the strangeness, which seems more jarring in English, by using the passive. Ovid is infinitely imaginative and inventive in describing the metamorphoses, and that’s one of the pleasures of this work.
I’m not sure “enclose” gives quite the right idea. Scylla doesn’t actually enclose the backs of the monstrous barking beasts that she sees below her (subiecta terga ferarum); still less is she enclosed by them. She confines them in the sense that they are not separate from herself; she’s forced to recognize that they’re actually an inescapable part of her.
The description seems especially apt in light of the lines leading up to them, with their vivid depiction of her novel and unwelcome situation:
Scylla venit mediaque tenus descenderat alvo, 60
cum sua foedari latrantibus inguina monstris
adspicit ac primo credens non corporis illas
esse sui partes refugitque abigitque timetque
ora proterva canum, sed quos fugit, attrahit una
et corpus quaerens femorum crurumque pedumque, 65
Cerbereos rictus pro partibus invenit illis.
The metamorphosis is from her pubes on down—and of her pubes in particular: inguinibus truncis uteroque exstante (from which the dogs are born). Hyginus’ description of Scylla is a good match, without the subjectivity of Ovid’s:
superiorem corporis partem muliebrem, inferiorem ab inguine piscis, et sex canes ex se natos habebat.
How about “incorporates” (in place of “encloses”)? It’s seems an interesting possibility because of its etymology in English. It’s a little removed from the sense of coercere, but I think it may better capture the sense you’re talking about.
Thanks for contributing to the discussion, Michael! It seems you are right in your analysis, given the underlined text in the preceding few lines.
Yes, inguinibus, but also utero. If utero weren’t there along with coercet, maybe a tepid “restrain” could do it. But wherever the backs of the monsters are they are obviously not fully conceived by the poet here, and the visual image seems clearly a woman in the midst of birthing a monstrous brood, with the distended uterus and inguen splayed around the forms at the point of attachment rather than a smooth plastic transformation.
[Does anyone here recall the chapter in James Herriot about the cow with the prolapsed uterus? To the extent that Ovid seriously means uteroque, something like that.]
Yes, mwh’s explanation makes much more sense. It’s a picture of how she looks after the metamorphosis, with the dogs protruding from her body, not a description of the metamorphosis itself. And "incorporates’ captures the image well. Ablatives “in” or maybe “from”.
BTW: one manuscript has “coh(a)erent” in place of “coercet”. I’m using Tarrant’s edition. Seeing that the verb there is in the plural, I guess the “backs” become the subject and not Scylla in that case. After the manuscript symbol it says “(Heinsius)” in parentheses. I guess in parentheses this means that Heinsius approved of that reading, and used it in his edition of the text? And without that manuscript reading, i.e. if “Heinsius” were not in parentheses, I assume that reading would be merely conjectured by Heinsius but not found in any manuscript? I’m afraid I know very little about the Sigla pages in there. At least I can observe variant readings, even if I can’t grok the manuscript tree.
Tarrant’s notation “(Heinsius)” is explained at the foot of page xlvi: “lectio ab Heinsio in notis suis probata quam non recepi” – as you thought, “a reading approved of by Heinsius in his notes which [Tarrant] did not accept [in his text].” And just “Heinsius” would be a conjecture of Heinsius.
I think that in the text of the Metamorphoses and other Ovidian texts, a reader who is not working on an academic publication does’t really need to know the manuscript tree or remember which manuscript is which. The tradition is totally “contaminated,” i.e., cross-borrowing among manuscripts was so pervasive that the editor can’t rule out readings merely on the basis of manuscript affiliations alone. Even in later manuscripts that have been copied from other still extant manuscripts, it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether a unique reading might have been taken from a third manuscript – which could be representative of an otherwise unknown tradition independent of all the other manuscripts and thus potentially preserving a true reading – or is a conjecture of the copyist, and sometimes such conjectures might be convincing.
I don’t think Tarrant records every single variant in the totality of the manuscripts, anyway. That would make for a virtually unreadable and useless apparatus, with little more than a line of text on a page and an inscrutable tangle of abbreviations and many worthless variants occupying the rest of the page. Tarrant has winnowed out readings that he thinks are of interest for one reason or another, and you just have to rely on his diligence and trust his judgment – but that’s what editors are for. Sometimes he marks a reading that he doesn’t put in the printed text fort. recte, “perhaps right.” So the casual, non-academic reader doesn’t really need to “grok” the tree – s/he can just consider the individual variants and conjectures reported by Tarrant without worrying about where each reading comes from.
You might want to read the easy Latin preface to Tarrant’s Metamorphoses, and also, for a good, really indispensable, general introduction to Latin textual criticism, his book Texts, Editors, and Readers:
