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

hederae, venistis…’ (You too came, tendril-trailing ivy), and no wonder, especially when these are plants which move like people and come running to the sound of Orpheus, now widowed, playing the lyre, clustering round him in a teeming array of Mediterranean flora (Book 10). There are also times and the episode just mentioned is one of them — when the pace of narrative has to slow down, switch to a calmer rhythm, give the feeling of time being suspended, almost veiled in the distance. What does Ovid do at such times? To make it clear that the narrative is in no hurry, he stops to dwell on the smallest details. For instance: Baucis and Philemon welcome into their humble cottage the unknown visitors, the two gods. ‘… Mensae sed erat pes tertius impar: / testa parem fecit; quae postquam subdita clivum / sustulit, aequatam mentae tersere virentes…’ (But one of the three legs of the table was too short. She put a piece of pottery under it to make it level. As soon as this had fixed the sloping surface, they cleaned the table surface with green mintleaves. On top they then put olives of both colours, sacred to the virgin Minerva, and autumnal cherries preserved in wine lees, and endives and radishes and a round of cheese, and eggs that had been cookedand turned gently in ashes that were not too hot; everything was served in terracotta dishes…) (Book 8).
    It is by continuing to add to the detail of the picture that Ovid obtains an effect of rarefaction and pause. His instinct is always to add, never to take away; to go for greater and greater detail, never to shade off into vagueness—a procedure which produces differing effects depending on the tone, which is here restrained and in harmony with the humble ambience, but elsewhere is excited, impatient to saturate the marvellous elements of the tale with realistic observation of natural phenomena. For instance, that moment when Perseus is about to fight with the sea monster with its back encrusted with shells, and he rests Medusa’s head, bristling with serpents, face-down on a rock, but only after spreading a layer of seaweed and underwater reeds so that the head should not suffer contact with the rough surface of the sand. Seeing the reeds turn to stone on contact with the Medusa, the Nymphs play at making other reeds suffer the same fate: this is how coral is born, which though soft underneath the water becomes petrified on contact with the air. So Ovid concludes the fabulous adventure on a note of etiological legend, dictated by his taste for nature’s more bizarre forms.
    A law of maximum internal economy dominates this poem which apparently seems devoted to unrestrained expansion. It is an economy particular to metamorphosis, which demands that the new forms recuperate as much as possible of the material of the old forms. After the flood, in the transformation of the stones into human beings (Book 1), ‘if there was in the stones a part that was damp with moisture, or earthy, this became part of the body; whatever was solid and inflexible changed into bones; what had been veins in the rock stayed the same, including the name.’ Here the economy extends even to the name (vein): ‘quae modo vena fuit, sub eodem nomine mansit.’ Daphne’s most striking attribute (Book 1) is her hair dishevelled in the wind (so much so that Apollo’s first thought on seeing her is ‘What would that hair be like when properly combed’ —‘Spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos / et “Quid si comantur?” ait…’ (He gazes at her unadorned lock hanging down around her neck, and says to himself: ‘What would that hair be like when properly combed?’)), and she is already predisposed by the sinuous lines of her flight to a vegetable metamorphosis: ‘in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt; / pes modo tarn velox pigris radicibus haeret’ (her hair turns into foliage, her arms into branches; her foot once so swift now sticks to the ground withimmovable roots).