Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

Arachne’s, in which the insidious seductions of Jupiter, Neptune and Apollo, which Ovid had already recounted in some detail, reappear like sarcastic emblems amidst garlands of flowers and wreaths of ivy (each with the addition of some precious details: Europa, for instance, while being transported across the sea on the back of the bull, carefully lifts her feet so as not to get them wet: ‘ … tactumque vereri / adsilientis aquae timidasque reducere plantas’ (afraid of her feet being splashed by the surging waves and drawing up her fearful heels))?
    The answer is with neither of them. In the great array of myths which constitute the whole poem, the myth of Pallas and Arachne seems to contain in turn two scaled-down selections in the tapestries, pointing in ideologically opposed directions: one to instil a sacred fear, the other inciting towards irreverence and moral relativity. But it would be a mistake for anyone to infer from this that the whole poem has to be read either in the first way — because Arachne’s challenge is cruelly punished — or in the second — on the grounds that the poetry sides with the guilty victim. The
Metamorphoses
aim to portray the entirety of narratable tales that have beenhanded down by literature with all the force of imagery and meaning that tradition can convey, without privileging — as is only correct, according to the ambiguity typical of myth — any particular reading. Only by accepting into his poem all the tales and the intentions behind them which flow in every direction, pushing and shoving to squeeze them into the ordered ranks of the epic’s hexameters, only in this way will the poet be sure of not serving a partial design but the living multiplicity that does not exclude any known or unknown god.
    There is a case of a new, foreign god, not easily recognisable as such, a scandalous god at odds with all models of beauty and virtue, who is fully recorded in the
Metamorphoses:
Bacchus-Dionysus. It is his orgiastic cult which the devotees of Minerva (the daughters of Minyas) refuse to attend as they continue to weave and card wool on the days of the Bacchic festival, alleviating their long labours with story-telling. Here then is another use of stories, which is justified in secular terms as pure enjoyment (‘quod tempora longa videri / non sinat’ (to prevent time from seeming to drag)) and as an aid to productivity (‘utile opus manuum vario sermone levemus’ (we will lighten the useful labour of our hands with a variety of stories)), but which is still appropriately associated with Minerva, the ‘melior dea’ (superior goddess) for those hard-working girls who are revolted by the orgies and excesses of the cult of Dionysus which had swept into Greece after conquering the Orient.
    It is clear that the art of narrating, so beloved by weavers, has a link with the cult of Pallas Athene. We saw it with Arachne, who was turned into a spider for having spurned the goddess; but we also see it in the opposite case, of an excessive cult of Pallas, which leads to a neglect of the other gods. So even the daughters of Minyas (Book 4), guilty inasmuch as they are overweening in their sense of virtue, and too exclusive in their devotion to ‘intempestiva Minerva’ (untimely Minerva), will also undergo a horrendous punishment, being turned into bats by the god who only recognises inebriation, not work, and who listens not to tales but to the obscure chant which overwhelms the mind. So as not to be turned into a bat as well, Ovid is careful to leave every door of his poem open to the gods of the past, present and future, indigenous and foreign gods, and gods of the Orient which in a world beyond Greece rubs shoulders with the world of fables, as well as to Augustus’ restoration of Roman religion which is intimately bound up with the political and intellectual life of his own times. But the poet will not manage to convince the god of executivepower closest to him, Augustus, who