Ovid's allegory on the "goddess" "Envy" metrical comments and questions

Latin Learning Latin
1

I really enjoyed reading Ovid’s description of Envy and her domicile in Book II of the Metamorphoses, esp. the four lines translated and scanned below which are full of elisions which hopefully I understand now after so much help from mwh. I’ve used his method of marking the elided word endings by surrounding them with parentheses. First, 3 lines for context:

	concussae patuere fores. videt intus edentem
	 -  -   -  · ·- ·  · -    · ·  -  ·  · -  -
	vipereas carnes, vitior(um) alimenta suorum,
	 - · ·-   - |-    · ·-      · ·|-  ·  ·- -
	Invidiam, visāqu(e) oculos avertit; at illa                 770
	-  · ·-    -|-      · ·|-  -|-  ·   · |-  ·

My translation: “Having been shaken, the doors opened. She sees Envy inside eating the flesh of vipers, food of her own vices, and she averts her eyes from her (Envy) having been seen; she (Envy) on the other hand…”
These next four lines are great, all four of them scanning the same, HEAVY with spondees describing the sluggish creature Envy has made of herself, and with several elisions. I’m unsure what kind of effect they are supposed to have on the listener, since it seems each has the effect of speeding the content along by skipping syllables, which seems opposite to the effect of the spondees slowing things down:

	surgit humo pigrā semesarumque relinquit  
	 -  ·   ·|-  - |-  -|- -|-   ·  ·|-   -       -··-------··-x
	corpora serpentum passuqu(e) incedit inerti.  
	 -  · ·| -  - |-   - |-      -| - ·  ·|-  -   -··-------··-x
	utque deam vidit formaqu(e) armisque decoram, 
	-   ·  ·-   -|-   - |-      - |-   ·  ·|- ·   -··-------··-x
	ingemuit vultumqu(e) un(ā) ac suspiria duxit.   
	-  · ·-   -| -       - |   -   -| - ··| - -   -··-------··-x
	
	quamvis tamen oderat illam,
	talibus adfat(a) est breviter Tritonia dictis:
	 - · · |-  - |   -     · ·|-    -|- ··| -  -
	'infice tabe tua natarum Cecropis unam:
	 -  · ·  - ·  ·-  - - -   -  · ·  - -
	sic opus est. Aglauros e(a) est.' haud plura locuta...       785
	 -  · · |-    - | - ·  ·   |-       -   |- ·  ·|- ·

“…stands up from the stagnant ground and leaves behind the bodies of the half-eaten serpents and advances with a sluggish step. And when she saw the goddess beautiful in respect to her looks and weapons, she groaned and heaved sighs and grimaced at the same time…” I did my best to render the apparent zeugma in the line starting “ingemuit”. (This line is troubled in the manuscripts and Tarrant has adopted the emendation of Housman [“una ac”]). I found “vultum ducere” in Freund to mean “to draw awry, to make wry faces”, so Envy drawing her vultum into a “wry face” sounds like a grimace to me.

“…Although Minerva hated her (Envy), nevertheless she addressed her briefly with words such as these: 'infect one of the daughters of Cecrops with your corruption: that is what’s needed. Aglauros is the one. Having said nothing else at all…”

My other question for the experts is how line 785 (near the bottom of the 2nd code window) is to be pronounced around the elision, assuming I have correctly identified it as being one. Should it be read with a glottal stop where the elided “a” would have been? Is that a case of “hiatus”?

Thanks for any help provided!
Dave S

2

In line 785, the “e” of the “est” is elided rather than the “a” of “ea”: Aglauros ea’st

This is called prodelision: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodelision

3

Would that mean that the line I had as:

“talibus adfat(a) est breviter Tritonia dictis”

would also really be: “talibus adfata (e)st breviter Tritonia dictis”?

I knew that this happened with “-que” as the first word, which I guess I thought was some kind of special case, but I guess not.

4

Hi Dave,
It’s not actually an allegory, rather a personification.
I’ll withhold criticism of your translation, but you should avoid things like “having been shaken” when you could simply say “shaken.”
-Note that the zeugma of uultum unaque suspiria duxit (if correct) has a slightly milder counterpart in formaque armisque decoram in the previous line.
-It’s successions of short syllables that may give the impression of speed or lightness, not elisions, which hardly affect the pace (in fact something like uultum una may slow it down).
-I haven’t checked all your scansions but I expect they’re right. But once again, do pay heed to the caesura!
-As for ea est at 785, Laurentius Mons prescribes prodelision, i.e. erasure of the e- of est. That’s the conventional dogma, and it receives support from some manuscripts of early Latin comedy. (It’s not how I told you elision works, but this is a special case. lingua est in 777 is parallel.) More probably, however, the -a and the e- were collapsed into a long a (a form of “crasis,” blending, sometimes known as synizesis). Regardless of the exact phonology, it doesn’t affect the scansion. That’s the important thing.

Edit. Posted before seeing your latest (above), but this effectively addresses that. It’s the meter that matters.

5

Thanks for the responses!

I knew about the very frequent elision of “-que” and also that “est” is sometimes (prod)elided to “-st” but I guess the latter is happening more often than I thought, probably in every case where it CAN happen, just like with “-que”. I wondered about the line with “adfata est” in it where I failed to scan it properly by prodeliding the “e” in “est” and was momentarily concerned about the meter since now we’d be keeping the short vowel “a” on “adfata” and kicking out the long “e” in “est”, but now the “a” itself becomes long by position before “st” just like the “e” in “est” was. So, no change in the scansion.

I keep waiting for a case of accidental hiatus where there’s an elision of a final vowel in the first word which happens to be preceded by another vowel (like the “ea” in the present passage) and the following word begins with a vowel (“vv v”) where eliding the vowel at the end of the first word produces a hiatus (“v v”) and every time I think I’ve found one it turns out to not be the case, as in the case of “sic opus est. Aglauros ea (e)st haud plura locuta”. Once retained, the short ‘a’ on “ea” also gets promoted to long ‘a’ by position before “st”, so again, no change to the scansion, as mwh mentioned as being a necessity.

6

I was suggesting that in the case of -a est the resultant vowel is not “long by position” (a deplorable formula that confuses vowels with syllables) but is actually long, the result of the merger of the two short vowels. Compare τα εμα > τἀμα in Greek, the first α long.
Sidney Allen’s Vox Latina has a section on vowel junctions if I remember.

And -que is different. The -e simply elides (as with Greek τε).

7

I think I understand the idea of combining two short vowels to form one long vowel, but I’m sorry to say that I simply don’t understand the deplorability of the “long by position” formula or in what way it confuses vowels with syllables. Nor when crasis would apply instead of elision (the -que case). Should I seek out the section on vowel junctions?

8

You referred (to take one example) to the "long e in est.” The e in est is not long, it’s short. It’s the syllable that’s long (or “heavy,” in the now preferred terminology). The distinction between vowels and syllables is fundamental. You have some unlearning to do, my friend.

There’s crasis, and there’s elision. They’re different phenomena, and they operate under different conditions. My Greek examples might help you understand, if you have any Greek. -que can only elide (if a vowel follows, of course), but est can coalesce with a preceding vowel to make a single long vowel or diphthong, regardless of the -st. But you’re venturing into deep waters.

9

If I gave the impression that I don’t know the difference between a long vowel like the “a” in “optare” (infinitive of opto) and a short vowel like the “a” in “ad” (the preposition), then I gave the wrong impression. I do understand the difference between long and short vowels. Did I really say “long e in est”? I know the ‘e’ is short but the syllable is “heavy”…I want to review what I said… You’re right, I did say that. But I didn’t mean it the way I said it. I meant to say “the e in est”. I see that I DO have a bad habit of talking about vowels when I mean syllables. I pledge to stop doing that.

10

This personification, I think is Virgilian parody. Vergil personifies Fama at Aen. 4.174 ff.: Fama malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum etc. But Ovid pushes the personification of Inuidia over the top. This also parodies the Allecto passage at Aen. 7.341, to my mind. As I recall, there are several other personifications in the Metamorphoses that parody Fama malum. There are two big parodies of Homeric battle scenes in the Metamorphoses, too – fights that break out at weddings! Ovid is wickedly funny.

11

I love Ovid’s personifications. The one of Envy was very entertaining. I think the only other one I’ve encountered so far, which was also very enjoyable, was the personification of Sleep in Book 11. Unfortunately I’m insufficiently well-versed in Vergil or Homer to fully enjoy allusions to those authors in Ovid.

12

Yes the personification of Sleep in Met.11 is even more over the top (to use Hylander’s phrase) than that of Invidia, and it’s stuffed with allusions to earlier literature, starting with Ovid’s inclusion of Sleep in Juno’s seduction of her husband (Iliad 4) and the famous scene in Iliad 16 where Sleep and Death together carry off the body of Sarpedon (depicted on the magnificent Euphronios krater), Zeus being an item common to both episodes. What’s typically Ovidian (among much else, and the sheer artistry) is his having Sleep himself scarcely able to keep his eyes open; and Iris has to fly off promptly for fear of falling asleep herself! There’s nothing like that in Homer. It’s delectable stuff, if you approach it in a suitably frivolous frame of mind (which not all commentators do).

It’s quite possible to enjoy the Metamorphoses without knowing the antecedent Greek and Latin literature that Ovid riotously and ingeniously deploys, but it’s so much richer, and so much more fun, if you do,

13

The last words on Envy as she moves to carry out Minerva’s commands:

…tandem Tritonida conspicit arcem
ingeniis opibusque et festa pace virentem, 795
vixque tenet lacrimas, quia nil lacrimabile cernit.

At length she spots the citadel of Tritonia vigorous in its talent and abundance and festive peace, and she holds back tears with difficulty, because she spots nothing worth crying about.

(I’m unsure how to translate present participles like “virentem”. It’s vigor is on-going…but how best to render this word in English?)

I love Ovid!