Terry E. Hill
Unpacking Ovid
The story turns on an ageing, ordinary couple who alone among the Phrygians gave welcome to strangers and who, upon seeing the bowls of their modest meal self-replenish, then took fright at their divine guests and flurried about to sacrifice their only goose as well. Gently the unveiled gods soothed the ruffled bird, and gently they granted the couple’s request. Companions we are and would like to remain until our hour is come, said the faithful mates. And so it was. The hour arrived on an ordinary day, when in the midst of their usual routines they turned, said farewell, and drew their last breath together. Ovid sang of the spreading branches of the trees they became, so one can readily imagine a gracious post-mortal mingling of limbs and leaves. ‘Two neighb’ring trees with garlands on their boughs’, said Dryden.
This has long been my favourite of the fabled transformations, not as dazzling as some but tapping nonetheless into some archaic yearning. Now part of a fortunate couple in our eighth decade, it occurs to me to look more closely and unpack, as they say, its congruities.
Starting with the flood. To their credit, Baucis and Philemon lamented their community’s devastation even as they themselves were spared. Ovid didn’t dwell on the drowned blacksmith, nor the midwife, barefoot boys, girls with scraggly hair, village simpleton, the thief, the blind crone, or the goat stranded on rooftop until the rooftop was no more. The gods in their sport, of course, never give much mind to fine distinctions of justice. Here all but the pious two are wicked and doomed by clear-cut categorical logic. But in ordinary reality, few of us inhabit moral extremes. A moment’s reflection on duty to neighbour or duty to stranger at the door will assign most of us to a vast and amorphous middling category, including the aforenamed couple in our eighth decade, of unexceptional virtue, fortunate only because of fickle streams in human history, subject to little more than the dancing dust particles of Lucretius, Brownian motion, mere jitters of fate.
Should we begrudge any such couple their happiness? How does one make sense of a good marriage amidst catastrophe, be it ancient or contemporary?
Context matters, for virtue is not a constant across millennia, and this flood of the past is not necessarily prologue. In Ovid’s telling, the world is put right, the waters calmed, the cottage and two trees landscaped and comely, the rolling Anatolian countryside again home to peasants and their goats. The merit of capricious gods over the likes of planetary forces is their willingness to relinquish their whims, to restore and regenerate. The contemporary story of ocean rise, catastrophic weather and fire will have no such tidy resolution, and our lamentations will insist on more than brief mention. And yet within that grand ineluctable narrative are numberless micro-stories that are open-ended, their outcomes contingent, and we are actors in those tangled contingencies. Even those of us with blemished piety are graced with opportunities to tend the temples of our planet and mitigate the pain of its creatures.
Finally, back to what Ovid didn’t know about those trees with spreading limbs and garlands. Possessed of a more modern botanical bent, I’m inclined toward the marvel that lies below those branches, in roots that lace together through aquiferous earth, passing nutrients in a deep knowledge network. Even the gods, rambling about a garden more immense and older than they, were unaware of this subterranean exuberance. Another lacuna in Ovid’s understanding was how Baucis and Philemon managed to achieve their equanimity. His own first two marriages ended in divorce, so he could not have been describing them when he wrote, ‘Command was none, where equal Love was paid…both commanded, both obey’d.’ His story still delights me with bowls of homely dishes transforming into feasts and wine jars filling with vintage on their own, but the less-magical wonder preceded the meal, realized day in day out by Baucis and Philemon across those faithful decades together. That couples can finesse that at all is marvel aplenty. We can give Ovid credit for affirming a marriage ideal beyond his reach, but we could also add that such couples’ achievement relies upon a shared ecosystem that manages to mature amid uncertainties and darkness, a shared psychic ecosystem whose roots gravitate downward, become relational, and draw resources from this underworld into the aboveground world of routines, mutual tasks and affections. Such sustained transformation doesn’t need a miraculous meal or big arboreal finale to be wondrous.
Justice is illusory, of course, when subject to the whims of gods or jitters of fate, but we can choose not to begrudge Ovid for the rounded satisfaction of his story and the delight of those intertwined limbs. And yes, I’m glad that Jupiter spared the goose. AQ