Rival Praises: Ovid and the Metamorphosis of the Hymnic Tradition

Celia M. Campbell, Rival Praises: Ovid and the Metamorphosis of the Hymnic Tradition (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2024). 9780299348748.

Reviewed by Daniel Libatique, Fairfield University, dlibatique@fairfield.edu.

Ovid’s experiments with genre have provided fruitful material not only for scholars but also for Ovid himself. From the recusatio of Amores 1.1.1–4 where Cupid steals a metrical foot from Ovid’s martial epic and turns it into amatory elegy to Metamorphoses 1.2’s fake-out caesura mimicking the dactylic pentameter’s line-central break characteristic of the elegiac couplet. In the book currently under consideration, Celia Campbell investigates hymnic elements in the Metamorphoses, a fruitful approach that capitalizes on Ovid’s generic adventurousness. Rival Praises is a fresh and invigorating study that explores undertheorized connections between Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Callimachus’s Hymns, and the Greco-Roman hymnic tradition at large, not only in terms of Ovid’s adaptations of mythological subject matter but also in terms of his manipulations of genre, his programmatic narrative structures, and his characterization of the gods within the first pentad (Books 1 through 5). Her (admittedly “polemical and dramatic”) thesis that “Ovid’s Metamorphoses is programmatically designed as a Callimachean Hymn to Venus and Amor” (p. 3) is demonstrated convincingly through a plethora of moving, interconnected parts. The novel close readings of episodes within the first pentad and intertextual connections to literary precedents range in time from Homer through Plato and Callimachus to Vergil and Ovid to a mélange of methodological lenses, including narratology and geopolitics, brought to bear on that wide variety of texts. In all, this book provides valuable new approaches to Ovidian intertextuality and sheds new light on productive ways of thinking about Ovid’s position in the mytho-hymnic tradition.

Rivalry is an inherent tenet of hymn, not only in terms of a singer attempting to outdo all others in praise but also in terms of the gods to be hymned vying for that praise in an almost zero-sum game. In general, each chapter of Campbell’s book is structured as a literary exploration of a divine rivalry that finds expression in Ovidian narrative structures and characterizations often through the intermediary of Callimachean precedents: Cupid and Jupiter in Chapter 1, Apollo and Jupiter in Chapter 2, Apollo and Diana in Chapter 3, Diana and Minerva in Chapter 4, Minerva and Ceres (or, better, the Muses and the Pierides as anti-Muses) in Chapter 5, and Venus and Ceres in Chapter 6. However, this summary grossly oversimplifies the detailed, well-evidenced means by which Campbell explores those rivalries and the branching conclusions that she reaches with those rivalries as her starting point, as she marshals an impressive command of a wide variety of literary genres and methodological approaches in service of illuminating the previously unexplored debts that Ovid owes to Callimachus and the hymnic tradition.

In Chapter 1, “Amorphous Control? Resolving the Question of Cosmic Authority within the World of the Metamorphoses” (14–44), Campbell explores the rivalry for control between the generative forces of love, exemplified by the figures of Cupid and Venus, and empire, exemplified by Jupiter. Ovid’s refusal to name the demiurgic creator of the universe (and thus the ultimate wielder of laudable power) at the beginning of Book 1 provides an opportunity for him to play intertextually with the rivalries between Cupid and Jupiter (or Eros and Zeus) as progenitors in previous literature, from Hesiod, Plato’s Timaeus and Symposium, the Orphic cosmogonies, and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite to Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus. Loci in the Metamorphoses in which Campbell cogently argues for a hymnic prioritization of Cupid and Venus at the expense of Jupiter include Calliope’s hymn at 5.341-661, in which Venus essentially sings a hymn to Cupid and usurps Jupiter’s territorial prerogatives, from his physical domain in the heavens to his seat atop the structure of imperium, for Cupid and herself. Such reworkings of the generative Jupiter/Zeus–Cupid/Eros dynamic in previous hymnic works evince Jupiter’s ultimate displacement from the top of the cosmogonic hierarchy in favor of Cupid and Venus.

Chapter 2, “Divining Praise: Jupiter, Apollo, and Poetic Primacy” (45–87), shifts our attention to a different divine rivalry within the first pentad, now between Jupiter and Apollo, a pairing which activates new geographic and political (qua Augustan) considerations in the gods’ rivalry for praise and power. Expected dominions over geographic spaces in Met. 1 and 2 are subverted, as Jupiter Tonans appears at the top of heaven’s Palatine (1.171–72), where one would expect Augustus’s Apollo Palatinus; similarly, the palace of Sol/Apollo (2.1–18) draws upon the description of Menelaus’s palace at Homer, Odyssey 4.71–75, the resplendence of which Telemachus describes as necessarily belonging to Zeus. While Peter Knox omits Menelaus’s palace in the Odyssey from a list of Greek and Roman models for the ekphrasis of Sol’s palace in the Metamorphoses,1 Campbell makes an ironclad philological connection through the metals used to describe both and argues successfully that the emotional resonance that Knox found missing in Phaethon’s (lack of) consideration of Sol’s palace in the Metamorphoses is activated intertextually via Telemachus’ awe-struck wonder at Menelaus’s palace in the Odyssey. Campbell’s analyses of understudied comparanda like Menelaus’s palace and her lucid engagements with appropriate secondary literature like Knox’s article evince thoughtful positionings of her own scholarly contributions within the areas of hymnic and Ovidian studies. 

Ovidian rewritings of mythogeography, like the relocation of the Peneus and other rivers (which serve as a metaphor for poetic praise) from Jupiter’s Arcadia in Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus to Apollo’s Thessaly at Met. 1.568–82, or Ovidian nods towards prior competitions for praise between Jupiter and Apollo, as in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and potentially in Pindar’s fragmentary first Hymn, conspicuously read as a denial of praise to Jupiter, a (seeming) transference of that praise to gods like Apollo, and a disruption of geographical continuity, causing the audience to pause and consider such relocations (and their concomitant implications) for themselves. Apollo’s obsession with praise is evident in his first major episode in the Metamorphoses, his conquest of Daphne, which begins with his accusation of usurpation against Cupid, moves towards his own self-hymning in his boasting to Daphne, and ends with an explicit appellation of him as “Paean” (i.e., the hymnic genre of praise) and his assumption of the laurus (~laus) as a symbol. The reemergence of and emphasis upon Arcadia in Callisto’s narrative in Book 2 seems to affirm the deliberateness of the mythogeographic transgressions that Ovid had committed earlier and his reluctance to assign praise to Jupiter in places where one would expect.

Chapter 3, “Rivaled Affection and Affectation: Diana, Apollo, and Delian Disguise” (88–133), maps a triangulation between the twins Diana and Apollo and Daphne as the Ovidian embodiment of the rivalry of the Delians featured prominently in prior hymnic treatments, far from the harmonious pair of Horace’s Carmen Saeculare and Augustus’s ideological campaigns. Daphne is herself styled in various ways that invite comparison to previous conceptions of Apollo and Diana in Callimachus’s Hymns and other Ovidian works like the Ars Amatoria. At the same time, Daphne is modeled after Cyrene of Callimachus’s Hymns to Apollo and Artemis and Pindar’s Pythian 9, in which Cyrene is the daughter or granddaughter of Peneus (the Ovidian Daphne’s father), whose request for grandchildren to Daphne recalls Cyrene’s motherhood of Aristaeus by Apollo. The association thus activates a sense of rivalry between the Delians, since Cyrene’s emulation of Artemis as one of her favorite hunting companions in the Hymn to Artemis is put into purposeful dialogue with her pursuit by Apollo in the Hymn to Apollo. In addition, Daphne evokes aspects of Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos: Leto begs for asylum from Peneus and his daughters (among whom we may anachronistically count Daphne thanks to Ovid), and Daphne’s flashing eyes and hidden (i.e., difficult to see) features (Met. 1.498–99, 502) recall the starry Asteria (ἀστήρ, “star”) who becomes the island Delos (δῆλος, “clear to see”).

Chapter 4, “Ovid’s Lavacrum Dianae: The Huntress Muse of the Metamorphoses” (134–72), considers Diana’s punishment of Actaeon as a sequel to Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis, a choice that effects dramatic associations parallel to the traditional focus on the episode’s debt to Callimachus’s Bath of Pallas and defers consideration of Minerva to later in the Metamorphoses, a declaration of competition between Diana and Minerva. This sequel is mediated by allusions to Grattius’s Cynegetica, itself a hymn to Diana, which conceives of Diana as a Muse-like arbiter of hunting and informs Ovid’s Actaeon as a Hagnon-figure who loses his way. Campbell’s detailed analysis of the “Catalogue of Dogs” (3.206–25) (and the less-noticed “Catalogue of Nymphs” at 3.165–72) convincingly demonstrates Callimachean and Grattian debts through close philological connections and proves that the catalogue is not only a “witty take on the epic catalog” or “a product of Ovidian irreverence” (160) but also a clever coalition of all characters (from Diana’s nymphs to Actaeon’s own dogs) in Diana’s hymnic favor against Actaeon.

Chapter 5, “The Hymnic Battle for Helicon: Reflections over Contested Grounds” (173–200), begins a two-chapter focus on the singing contest between the Muses and the Pierides of Book 5, here focusing on the contest’s setting, players, and the Pierides’ song. Ovid activates intertextual connections with Callimachus’s Bath of Pallas to set the scene for the contest on Mount Helicon; as explained in Chapter 4, the connection would form a natural part of Ovid’s Actaeon narrative at 3.138-252 but instead is delayed until here. In addition, Ovid draws upon Callimachus’s Hymn to Demeter in, unexpectedly, the Pierides’ song. The Pierides and the Muses thus stake their claims and goals not only in terms of physical space and domain (with Mount Helicon as a prize for winning the contest) but also in terms of ownership of Callimachus’s hymnic territory. The Pierides, etymologized via a byform of Pierus > πιερός (πιαρός, “fat” or “rich”), antithesize Callimachus’s injunction towards a “slender Muse” and assume in their song large, grandiose topics: theogonic successions and the Gigantomachy. Moreover, the inset tale of Erysichthon, styled as a voracious giant and thus reminiscent of Gigantomachic poetry, in Callimachus’s Hymn to Demeter provides a link to the anti-Callimachaean Pierides and appears programmatically in Ovid’s Metamorphoses much earlier than Ovid’s Erysichthon in Met. 8, on whom previous scholars have focused. 

Chapter 6, “Calliope’s Hymn: Musing on the Nature of Love” (201–28), continues the discussion of Book 5’s contest with a focus on Calliope’s song, which brings the discussion full circle from Chapter 1 to considerations of the power of love and its hymnic priority in characters like Cupid and now Venus over others like Jupiter and now Ceres. The rivalry between Venus and Ceres present in the Homeric Hymns and Fasti 4 finds expression in Venus’s prominence in Calliope’s hymn, which dramatizes Proserpina’s abduction, and in Calliope’s assimilation to Venus, a relationship that emphasizes Arethusa and the role of her narrative (and the role of love within it) as a metapoetic précis of the first four books of the Metamorphoses. Campbell cleverly suggests via a comparison to Fasti 5 that the unnamed Muse that re-sings Calliope’s hymn is Polyhymnia or Polymnia, whose name etymologically reflects “much-hymned” or “much-remembering,” appropriate for Campbell’s overall thesis, that Ovid’s construction of his characters and narratives in the first pentad exhibits careful manipulation of preceding (and now “remembered”) Callimachean or Greco-Roman hymnic or hymn-related precedents in ways previously unexplored in scholarship.

Campbell’s introduction (3–13) and conclusion (229–35) clearly delineate the parameters of her scholarly exploration and reaffirm her novel contributions to Ovidian and, for that matter, Callimachean and hymnic exegesis. The book’s front matter includes brief acknowledgments (ix) and a list of consistently used abbreviations (xi–xii). The back matter includes chapter endnotes (237–79), a comprehensive list of works cited with publications as recent as 2022 (281–302), a general index (303–12), and an index locorum (313–32). While there are more typos or errors than expected (e.g., “two chapters (4 and 5)” for “(5 and 6)” on p. 11; loca amoena for loci amoeni on p. 12; “competingissues” [sic] on p. 24; finierit for finierat on p. 74; μολυμνήστη twice for πολυμνήστη on p. 225), they do not detract in any way from the sophistication and originality of Campbell’s analyses and arguments. Her writing style is lucid and easy to follow, and I greatly appreciated her constant signposting of the stages of her arguments; each chapter begins and ends with a summary of the detailed evidence and analyses contained therein, with any appropriate connections to preceding or succeeding chapters, and each chapter subsection begins with a summary of points just made and a connection to those about to be made.

Campbell’s valuable study offers invigorating, provocative readings for consideration and leaves open many further avenues for scholarly exploration. For example, the book’s explicit focus on the first pentad, a reasonable boundary given Ovid’s focus on divine-mortal interactions in Books 1 through 5, opens the door to consideration of hymnic elements and their adaptations and repurposings in the second and third pentads. To adduce three quick examples from the Medea narrative in Book 7: after Cupid and the forces of love emerge triumphant over Jupiter in the first pentad, how does Ovid’s conspicuous erasure of Eros/Cupid’s agency in Medea’s love for and aid of Jason (a prominent plot point in Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, as Campbell mentions at p. 42) inform the human-centric narratives and episodes of the second pentad? What effect does Cupid’s defeat after Medea’s choice to honor Aeëtes over Jason (victa dabat iam terga Cupido, “Cupid turned his now-defeated back” [7.73]) have on the prior reading of Cupid as victorious over the forces of imperium as in Campbell’s Chapter 1? Also, at the end of the Medea narrative, how does the outright “Hymn to Theseus” (7.433–52) subvert the expectations engendered by the less manifestly hymnic elevations of the first pentad’s divine entities, channeled and diverted as they are through Callimachean allusions and intertexts?

In all, this book suits the advanced undergraduate level and up and is requisite reading for scholars of Ovid, intertextuality, Callimachus, hymns, and any combination thereof. Campbell’s achievement in this book that explores the reallocations and repurposings of praise for the gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the intermediary of Callimachus and the hymnic tradition at large is, indeed, highly praiseworthy in and of itself.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Nature of Praise (3–13)
1. Amorphous Control? Resolving the Question of Cosmic Authority within the World of the Metamorphoses (14–44)
2. Divining Praise: Jupiter, Apollo, and Poetic Primacy (45–87)
3. Rivaled Affection and Affectation: Diana, Apollo, and Delian Disguise (88–133)
4. Ovid’s Lavacrum Dianae: The Huntress Muse of the Metamorphoses (134–72)
5. The Hymnic Battle for Helicon: Reflections over Contested Grounds (173–200)
6. Calliope’s Hymn: Musing on the Nature of Love (201–28)
Conclusion: Amor’s Winged Words (229–35)
Notes (237–79)
Works Cited (281–302)
Index (303–12)
Index Locorum (313–32)

Notes

1.  P.E. Knox (1988). “Phaethon in Ovid and Nonnus.” Classical Quarterly 38.2: 536-51, at 542.