1. Introduction: A Short, Puzzling, and Understudied Episode

Book 5 of Ovid's Metamorphoses is dominated by the two massive panels of Perseus’ fight with Phineus and the competition of the Muses and Pierides, the latter itself dominated by Calliope's narrative of the rape of Proserpina.Footnote ¹ Between these large-scale sequences and forming something of a prelude to the second of them, stands the short, puzzling, and understudied episode of the Muses’ encounter with the Thracian tyrant Pyreneus. Indeed, it is so short that it can be conveniently quoted in full as an anonymous ‘one of the sisters’ (una sororum, Ov. Met. 5.268)Footnote ² narrates it to Minerva:

Part of what makes this brief episode so intriguing and so puzzling is the way in which it combines in under twenty lines so many of the diverse themes and motifs that are scattered throughout this most diverse of poems. Critics are increasingly aware of the complex intratextual, motivic, and thematic connections which pervade Ovid's superficially discontinuous carmen perpetuum, but the density of their concentration in the Pyreneus narrative remains exceptional. As Spahlinger puts it, ‘the rather short narrative is of particular importance within the overall structure of the Metamorphoses, because it forms, as it were, the node of a plethora of motif-strands, which are brought together here, only to run further separated immediately afterwards.’Footnote ⁴ However, it is not just that so many motifs are present but that they are present in a distorted, unfulfilled, or in some other manner ‘off-key’ way. It is the diversity of these motifs that has led to disagreement concerning what the episode is actually about, but it is that same diversity, combined with their off-key nature, that provides the solution.

2. A Plethora of Motif-Strands: The Intratextuality of the Pyreneus Episode

Before turning to the interpretation of the episode, it will be useful to examine just what motif-strands make up this plethora and in what ways they are off-key. Perhaps the most obvious over-arching motif in a narrative where a mortal offers hospitality to gods is that of theoxeny. The motif of theoxeny is present already in the Odyssey and particularly significant later examples include The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Eratosthenes’ Erigone, the Falernus episode in Silius’ Punica 7, and, with a hero instead of a god being offered humble hospitality, Callimachus’ Hecale, the Molorchus episode of his Aetia 3, and Aeneas’ sojourn with Evander in Aeneid 8.Footnote ⁵ In the Metamorphoses, the motif will not appear fully-formed, with appropriate piety from the mortals and blessings from the gods, until Lelex's story of Baucis and Philemon towards the end of Book 8, but it has already featured near the beginning of the whole poem, in Jupiter's story of the dubious hospitality shown him by Lycaon. It is notable that both of these stories are explicitly didactic and polemical, as Jupiter justifies the ways of god to lesser gods and uses Lycaon as an exemplum that warrants the destruction of mankind by flood, while Lelex tries to refute Pirithous’ impious scepticism about divine power by showing Jupiter and Mercury sparing their pious hosts from a more localized genocidal deluge. Although there is no comparable explicit didactic frame to the Pyreneus episode, the reader is encouraged by these parallels to form some kind of moral judgment on the behaviour of the host. As a deceptive, attempted rapist of guests whom he has sought to imprison, it is clear that Pyreneus is, to say the very least, an off-key host and his theoxeny an off-key instance of that plot motif.

Since Pyreneus’ interaction with the divine Muses is only speciously centred around hospitality and is aimed more at conflict and violence, the episode is not only a (false) theoxeny, but also takes its place among the numerous others in the Metamorphoses where mortals challenge, attack, disparage, or express disbelief about gods, that is, as a theomachy. Pyreneus’ status as a theomach thus connects him with Lycaon, Pentheus, Niobe, and Erysichthon.Footnote ⁶ Although there is no explicit reference to any competition with the Muses, the poetic associations of those goddesses inevitably invite the reader to link Pyreneus even more closely with the subset of theomachs who challenge the gods in artistic contests, not least because his story serves as a prelude to those of the Pierides v. the Muses, Arachne v. Minerva, and Marsyas v. Apollo.Footnote ⁷ Outside the Metamorphoses, Thamyris, who competed with the Muses, is also an important figure and one to whom we shall return. As with his theoxeny, it can again be noted that Pyreneus’ is a curious sort of theomachy. It does not arise from skepticism like Lycaon's or Pentheus’, but on the contrary is based on his recognition of (cognorat, 5.280) and belief in the Muses’ divinity. It is not aimed at defeating or surpassing them, like Arachne or Niobe, but rather – though the threat of violence (uim, 288) is not absent – on detaining (claudit, 287) or, failing that, following (secuturo, 289) them.

The violence, ambition, and will to power that tend to characterize the theomach in the religious sphere are, in the political, also typical of another recurrent Ovidian type, the tyrant. Although Pyreneus is not explicitly referred to by the word tyrannus, his forcible usurpation of the Daulian and Phocian territory, his description as ferox, and the characterization of his kingship as unjust (iniustaque regna, 277) unambiguously identify him as one. If further evidence were needed, Ovid's pen-portrait of Rome's archetypal tyrant, Tarquinius Superbus, bears a very close resemblance: ultima Tarquinius Romanae gentis habebat | regna, uir iniustus, fortis ad arma tamen. (‘Tarquinius held the final kingship of the Roman people, an unjust man, but strong in warfare.’ Fast. 2.687–8). Other tyrants in the Metamorphoses include familiar faces from the list of theomachs, Lycaon (Arcadis tyranni, 1.218) and Pentheus, but also others such as Laomedon, Polymestor, and above all Tereus.Footnote ⁸ The idea of the tyrant pervades much of Greek and Roman thought and literature, so that parallels abound for Pyreneus’ political status and for the complex of ethical, psychological, and sexual characteristics associated with it.

Prominent among the characteristics of the stereotypical tyrant is that of sexual incontinence and a proclivity to commit rape, and it is no coincidence that this is also one of Pyreneus’ traits. Once more, there is a significant overlap with another list to which Pyreneus belongs, since his status as (would-be) rapist is one that he holds in common with his fellow-tyrant, Tereus. However, rape and attempted rape are motifs which recur – notoriously and confrontingly – throughout the poem, from Apollo's pursuit of Daphne in Book 1 to Vertumnus’ averted rape of Pomona in Book 14, and most significantly for Pyreneus it will be the subject both of Calliope's immediately following story of Proserpina and of its inset narrative of Arethusa.Footnote ⁹ The fact that Pyreneus’ attempt to rape the Muses (uimque parat, 5.288) is not fulfilled does not in itself mark it as unusual, since this is also the case with a considerable number of examples throughout the poem, including the programmatic and closural instances of Daphne and Pomona. However, in the overwhelming majority of those cases, the rape is prevented by the victim's death or by her metamorphosis, which itself symbolizes either death or the sublimated fulfilment of the rapist's desires. The connection – almost equivalence – between death and deliverance from rape is drawn perhaps most explicitly when Hesperie is bitten by a snake while pursued by Aesacus, and the narrator, with a characteristically expressive syllepsis, observes that ‘her flight was checked along with her life’ (cum uita suppressa fuga est, 11.777).Footnote ¹⁰ Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel tree marks the end of her meaningful life as an autonomous agent, but is still insufficient to prevent Apollo's repulsive fondling of her bark and appropriation of her foliage as his emblem so that he still takes advantage of her body against her will or at most with her enforced consent.Footnote ¹¹ With the Muses and Pyreneus, it is the unequivocal escape of the victims – and even the fact that a metamorphosis occurs, but in such an unusual form, underscores its difference from other instances – and the death instead of the attempted rapist that mark this out as a distinctly off-key example of the motif.

Although there is no explicit reference within the narrative to Pyreneus as a poet or other type of artist, there are many motifs in the episode that strongly encourage a metapoetic reading, even for those resistant to such interpretations elsewhere in the poem. His encounter with the Muses stands in the long tradition of more explicit initiation scenes from Hesiod through Callimachus and Ennius to Virgil and Propertius, not to mention Ovid himself.Footnote ¹² Indeed, one of these scenes includes the only earlier occurrence in extant Latin of the collocation una sororum (5.268), which identifies the narrator of the episode.Footnote ¹³ At Virgil Eclogue 6.65, Silenus (paraphrased by the narrator) describes ‘one of the sisters’, in the same sedes, initiating Gallus as a poet, so that Ovid is not merely evoking a type-scene formally, but verbally alluding to a specific instance of it. Unlike the figures in these scenes, Pyreneus is not initiated as a poet, but this is because he attempts to assault the Muses and is therefore rejected by them, which makes him a failed, would-be poet rather than someone with no connection to poetry. The subsequent series of artistic contests featuring the Pierides, Arachne, and Marsyas further encourages the diachronic reader to intepret Pyreneus retrospectively as part of that sequence, while the synchronic reader can already see his place within it. Even for the diachronic reader, the episode's pairing with the aetiology of the Hippocrene (5.250–68) as two short narratives between the Perseus and Pierides blocks encourages her to take the far from difficult step of interpreting it as, at least in part, an allegory about poetry and poetics. As poetry about poetry, the Pyreneus episode parallels many others in the Metamorphoses, most securely those featuring actual singers and artists, both the aforementioned theomachs who challenge the gods and more pious or neutral figures like Orpheus and Pygmalion. Metapoetry has been an immense part of Ovidian studies for the last half-century and many other characters, such as Medea and Niobe, have also been seen as poet-figures, with far fewer and less overt connections to poetics than Pyreneus.Footnote ¹⁴ Since Pyreneus’ failure as a would-be poet is the central focus of this article and in particular its final section, I shall defer till later discussion of the ways in which his is an off-key metapoetic episode.

Alongside the major motifs and plot-types of theoxeny, theomachy, tyranny, rape, and poetry stand a number of more minor and ostensibly incidental motifs that the episode shares with others across the poem, but even these can be seen to be significant. The fact that Pyreneus is a Thracian may seem an incidental point, though the oddity of a Thracian's being in Daulis is in itself sufficient to make it stand out and demand interpretation. Stereotypes of (Northern, under- not over-civilized) barbarism – avarice, lustfulness, and tyranny – are unquestionably relevant to his character, but so are the intratextual connections that his ethnicity establishes with other Thracians in the Metamorphoses. His affinity with the tyrannical rapist Tereus has already been noted as has that with the avaricious tyrant Polymestor.Footnote ¹⁵ However, Pyreneus’ associations with poetry also evoke his other fellow-Thracian, Orpheus, who will dominate, as actor and narrator, Book 10 and the opening of Book 11.Footnote ¹⁶ Outside the poem, the other Thracian poet, Thamyris will, as has already been adumbrated, be of significance.

The other small-scale motifs which Pyreneus shares with several other characters in the Metamorphoses are the interconnected ones of leaps, falls, and flights. Like a Disney villain whom the hero cannot be seen to kill deliberately, Pyreneus conveniently falls to his death through his own misguided action. The fall (pre-)echoes those of Scylla, Perdix, Daedalion, Alcyone, and Aesacus, sometimes suicidal, sometimes accidental, and in the case of Perdix, he did not fall, he was pushed.Footnote ¹⁷ However, in all these cases, the faller does not hit the ground (or sea), but is metamorphosed into a bird first. There is a metamorphosis into a winged creature in our episode, but it is the Muses who transform and they do so before Pyreneus’ leap/fall, which is in fact a failed attempt to emulate them.Footnote ¹⁸ Pyreneus’ situation ends up closer to that of Icarus, artificially imitating a metamorphosis and falling to his death when that imitation fails. The similarities with and differences from these other leaps, falls, and flights – and the very fact that these similarities and differences exist – are integral to understanding the story of Pyreneus.

3. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Pyreneus? Triangulating the Trope

This extraordinary number of diverse motifs and plot-structures crammed into a narrative of less than twenty lines has unsurprisingly produced a commensurate number of interpretations of that narrative. Indeed, there is generally a direct correlation between the motif that the critic privileges and the thematic significance that they detect in the episode as a whole, though they are also generally guided by their own wider interpretation of the entire poem. Spahlinger's radical if ultimately unconvincing conception of the Metamorphoses comes, as he himself confesses, close to that of the mediaeval Ovide moralisé and depicts the working of the traditional Roman values of pietas and moderatio in the cosmos.Footnote ¹⁹ It is therefore natural that, of the various motifs, he privileges the related pair of theoxeny and theomachy, and as a result produces an interpretation of the episode which concludes that ‘thus the metamorphosis of Pyreneus too is a story about the correct way of dealing with the sphere of the divine’.Footnote ²⁰ Critics who favour a political interpretation focus on the tyranny motif, though the distinction between the religious and the political is always blurred in Ancient Rome. Bartenbach emphasizes the opening pen-portrait of Pyreneus and argues that ‘his transgressions lie in the political sphere. Lust for power makes him a tyrant and violator of human rights.’Footnote ²¹ Schmitzer acknowledges the motif of poetry in the episode but situates it almost exclusively within a narrowly political framework as, in keeping with his quest for allusions to contemporary events within the Metamorphoses, a sort of allegory of Ovid's relationship with Augustus. In this reading, Ovid obliquely but aggressively ‘warns his patron against trying to monopolize him entirely. A fate like that of Pyreneus will befall anyone who tries to take their freedom and independence from the Muses or their protégés, the poets.’Footnote ²² A focus on the rape motif makes the narrative one primarily concerned with sexual violence.Footnote ²³ Likewise, a focus on the Muses as the embodiment of poetry sets the episode among many others self-reflexively concerned with the poem's own poetics.Footnote ²⁴

None of these interpretations is incorrect. Or rather they are only incorrect in their tendency to exclude the other interpretations of the episode which coexist with them. The essence of the Pyreneus episode is that it is about religion, politics, sexual violence, and poetry all at the same time. Johnson and Malamud come very close to catching the essence of the narrative's complexity when they write that ‘[w]ith this doubling of the Muses’ and the Emathides’ experience of persecution and the similar bird-like transformations they undergo, Ovid collapses the strict persecutor/persecuted opposition, and further, establishes a tight association between sexual, artistic, and political persecution.’Footnote ²⁵ It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the relationship with the Pierides/Emathides episode in any detail, but even in its own span, the Pyreneus episode goes beyond a ‘tight association’ of these themes. Sexual, artistic, and political persecution are not merely juxtaposed and associated, but made to serve as tropes for each other. This is part of the explanation for why the short narrative is so self-consciously over-stuffed with motifs, and specifically with motifs that carry significant thematic baggage. The text makes it impossible for the reader to choose between the themes that are paraded before her eyes through their related motifs and so forces her to read the episode in a way that acknowledges the indivisibility of the religious, the political, the sexual, and the artistic, the way in which each can stand as a metaphor for the others without any being privileged as the primary or ‘literal’ sense.Footnote ²⁶ She is coerced into reading a tyrant as a political rapist and a rapist as a sexual tyrant, a bad poet as barbarous, impious, tyrannical, and perverted on the artistic plane, just as the nature of his would-be poetry symbolizes the ethical, religious, political, and sexual transgressions of his equivalents in those spheres.

Such a reading has much in common with Hinds’ concept of ‘reversing the trope’, whereby metaphors for allusion like Ariadne's memory or Virgil's Trojans felling an ancient forest are just as much about using allusion as a way to think about memory or imperialism as vice versa.Footnote ²⁷ With Pyreneus, the trope is not so much reversed as triangulated or expanded into a still more complex polygon. Bad poetry is a way of thinking about tyranny, which is a way of thinking about rape, which is a way of thinking about impiety, and so on.Footnote ²⁸ Also important is Ovid's well-established blurring of the distinction between the literal and metaphorical, be it on the stylistic level of syllepsis, or on the narrative level, most commonly of personification and metamorphosis. Probably his favourite technique to achieve this blurring is the reification of metaphorical language.Footnote ²⁹ Pyreneus’ multiple statuses, some on the ‘literal’ level, as tyrant and attempted rapist, some on the ‘metaphorical’, as would-be poet, are inextricably bound up with the Muses’ own, even more diverse multiple statuses, as travellers, virgins, goddesses, sources of poetic inspiration, and as poets in their own right.Footnote ³⁰

4. Sex, Politics, and Poetry

The association between tyranny and sexual violence is well-established and one that, in keeping with Ovid's exploitation of the complex interplay of the literal and figurative, operates on a spectrum between synecdoche and metaphor. The sexual abuse of women (or young men), often conceptualized as an injury to the husband or father rather than to the woman herself, is a commonplace in rhetorical, historiographical, poetic and other depictions both of the archetypal tyrant and of specific instantiations.Footnote ³¹ Like the related topos of the tyrant as glutton, it constitutes not only a concrete example of the wider tendency for the tyrant to abuse his absolute power, but a manifestation of his ethical, psychological, social, and political inability – or unwillingness – to control his consuming passions.Footnote ³² Taking a further step towards the metaphorical end of the spectrum, and again like the tyrant's gluttony, the rapist's correlation to his victim stands parallel to the tyrant's towards his subject. Tyranny reduces the (politically and bodily) impenetrable, autonomous subject to the passive object of penetration and domination. The usurpation of another's territory (an emphatic motif in the Pyreneus narrative) can also be equated with the usurpation of another's body, exploiting the pervasive equivalence in Graeco-Roman (and much subsequent) thought between land and the female body.Footnote ³³ Moving beyond the physical altogether, on the most abstract level, the tyrant perpetrates a violation of the body politic.Footnote ³⁴

Elsewhere in the Metamorphoses, Tereus is the clearest example of the tyrant-rapist.Footnote ³⁵ However, the parallelism also features in the narrative of the rape of Proserpina, where that rape is both a synecdochic part and a symbolic representation of Venus’ imperial project to make love conquer all.Footnote ³⁶ There, the figure of the tyrant and rapist are separate, though it is significant that Pluto is twice designated tyrannus (5.359, 508). Pyreneus’ uncontrollable desire for territorial domination, as indicated by his conquest of Daulis and Phocis, and for political domination, as indicated by his tyrannical imposition of unjust rule upon his subjects, spring from the same tyrannical impulse as his uncontrollable desire to sequester and rape the Muses. But the three actions also stand in a metaphorical relationship to each other: the rape of the land, of the body politic, and of the female body. The equivalence is even more pointed by the emphasis on Pyreneus’ greater interest in controlling and possessing than in having sex with the Muses, a clear forerunner of the modern notion that rape is about power rather than desire.

The association of tyranny and rape (together or separately) with poetry (or literature more broadly) is less straightforward and perhaps less pervasive but still strong. The role of the tyrant as nurturing but controlling patron is of course a well-established one, from Polycrates to Augustus, but pace Schmitzer, I wish to explore the parallelism between the tyrant and the poet embodied in one person, rather than dividing those roles between Pyreneus and the Muses.Footnote ³⁷ Steiner's work on writing in Classical Greek thought reveals how closely the act of writing was associated with tyranny, and in particular Oriental tyranny, not only as a practice but as a metaphor for the regimentation of subjects and the memorialization of the tyrant's power, often sublimated as a mutilating or branding ‘inscription’ upon the subjects’ bodies.Footnote ³⁸ However, unlike Steiner's Herodotean despots, whose domination of their subjects and of the written word is equally successful, Pyreneus, though evidently adept at conquering foreign territory and imposing authoritarian rule on the conquered, fails dismally as a poet. The parallelism with the tyrant lies then in the bad poet's incontinent transgression into territories that are not legitimately his, but with the limiting factor that poetic inspiration, unlike human flesh or the body politic, cannot be appropriated purely by the exercise of power. Perhaps the tyrant-rapist's appropriation of his polity and his victims’ bodies is itself illusory, and as usurper-adulterer never takes true possession of them.Footnote ³⁹ In any case, the illegitimate (attempted) appropriation of inspiration results only in bad poetry.

Poetry's metaphorical relationship with rape is based, like that of tyranny, conquest, and colonization, on the symbolic associations of the female body, in this case with the text or poetic corpus. Also as with tyranny, the poet-rapist is transgressing into a sphere to which he has no legitimate title and acting there in a damaging and destructive manner. The metaphor of theft is an extremely common one in Roman discourse about plagiarism.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although furtum itself, when transferred as a metaphor into the sexual realm, tends to suggest illicit but consensual sex rather than rape, the analogy of illegitimately appropriating the ‘property’ of others, be that property chattel, poem, or wife, remains a potent one. Martial, who is particularly interested in the idea and language of plagiarism, not only introduces into that language the source of our own word, plagiarius, a kidnapper, thus associating more clearly the appropriation of text and person, but in a number of epigrams figures plagiarism of his poems as the seduction of his puer delicatus.Footnote ⁴¹

The other Roman poet particularly associated with allegations of plagiarism, Terence, also shows how it can be conceptualized as literary rape. Gowers has demonstrated how the prologues of Terence's comedies, ostensibly concerned only with matters outside the world of the play, in fact include ‘hidden outlines’ of motifs and themes within the plot.Footnote ⁴² To reverse the trope yet again, these plot motifs can in turn serve to explore the ‘real world’ issues addressed in the prologues. Dessen writes of the figure of the eunuch in Eunuchus that ‘[t]he literary imagery [sc. of ‘spoiling and touching’ in the prologue] strongly suggests the analogy of sexual violation; for what is the rape of a virgin (like Pamphila) if not a theft from her male relatives and a stain or contamination of her intact virginity?’Footnote ⁴³ None of this is to suggest that Pyreneus is depicted as a plagiarist per se, and certainly not in the Martialian sense of someone who passes off another poet's work wholesale as his own. Rather, the metaphor of sexually interfering with the body of the text primarily implies an illegitimate transgression into alien literary territory.

The nexus between rape and poetics is particularly well illustrated by three examples. The first is a speech by the personification of Mousikē in a fragment of the fifth-century comic playwright Pherecrates’ Cheiron, where she is depicted as a hetaira who has been sexually-cum-artistically mistreated by a series of clients/dithyrambic poets, culminating in Timotheus, who, ‘if he runs into me somewhere when I'm walking alone, stripped me and undid me with twelve strings’ (κἂν ἐντύχῃ πού μοι βαδιζούσῃ μόνῃ, | ἀπέδυσɛ κἀνέλυσɛ χορδαῖς δώδɛκα).Footnote ⁴⁴ A clear parallelism is established, not only between woman and text, but between sexual violence and artistic violence. That artistic violence is part of a discourse of literary criticism which depicts the poet-musicians of the New Music as producing, not plagiarized, but bad poetry.

The second example is less a specific intertext than the wider mythical tradition surrounding the Thracian poet Thamyris.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thamyris first appears in extant poetry in the Catalogue of Ships at Iliad 2.594–600, where he is a straightforwardly boastful (ɛὐχόμɛνος, 597) challenger of the Muses. When he loses, they disable him in non-specific manner (πηρὸν θέσαν, 599) that may have been the blindness for which he was later famous, and take away his ability to sing and play the kithara. Here is a story combining theomachy with artistic contest very much in the manner of Ovid's own Pierides and Arachne episodes. It is in a rival tradition that a sexual element enters the story and forges a close motivic connection with Pyreneus. The tradition, which may also have been dramatized in Sophocles’ Thamyras, is most clearly preserved in Apollodorus 1.3.3. Thamyris challenges the Muses to a musical contest. If he wins, his prize is to have sex with all nine of them. If he loses, as of course he does, they may deprive him of whatever they wish, which turns out to be his sight and his musical abilities. It has already been noted that Pyreneus shares with Thamyris a Thracian ethnicity, and that this in turn associates them with sexual rapacity, like Tereus, and poetry, like Orpheus. McPhee has recently and attractively suggested in passing that ‘[t]aken together, [Pyreneus and the Pierides] embody different aspects of the myth of Thamyris.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet there is no need to invoke the Pierides to correspond to the poetic aspect of Thamyris. For the metapoetic dimension of Pyreneus’ attempted rape means that he single-handedly embodies both aspects of the Thamyris myth. Indeed Thamyris himself already represents the nexus of sex and poetry, so that Pyreneus’ imitation of him is also an act of creative intepretation that draws attention to that nexus.Footnote ⁴⁷ For while, for Thamyris, sex and poetry are, in Wilson's word, ‘entwined’, they are still formally distinct: sexual performance would follow successful poetic performance as its reward. For Pyreneus, the implicit parallelism of the two activities is articulated by being collapsed into one act, the literal attempted rape that is the metaphorical appropriation of poetic ability.

The final example is more elusive, but it is hard not to imagine Ovid's learned reader thinking of it when she reads about a violent encounter with the Muses leading to a fall:

Here we have two and perhaps all three of our elements troping or triangulated with each other, though each stands in a further metaphorical relationship to the literal images of mountain-climbing and violent, agricultural ejection.Footnote ⁴⁸ The poetic dimension is the most prominent, as Mentula tries to ascend Olympus (unexpectedly standing in for Helicon),Footnote ⁴⁹ attaining the generic heights of epic inspiration, but is rejected by the Muses, source and embodiment of that inspiration. The sexual is established by the nickname of the protagonist, the primary obscenity for penis, by the double entendre which makes scandere the ‘rising’ of the mentula's erection, and possibly by other details in the distich.Footnote ⁵⁰ These, combined with the virgin goddesses’ expulsion of the would-be intruder mean that ‘Mentula's effort is a form of rape’.Footnote ⁵¹ Several critics have seen the sexual dimension as more than purely metaphorical, reflecting also the perverted or polluted nature of Mentula's poetry.Footnote ⁵² This is possible and it is common for the vehicle of a metaphor to colour the interpretation of its tenor with its specific content rather than simply to map onto it structurally. However, Mentula the rapist-poet attacking the Muses need only be illegitimately composing poetry, without that poetry itself being sexual. Like so much about this and others of Catullus’ poems, our ignorance about the original context makes it impossible to be certain about the precise implications of his invective. This is particularly true of any political dimension. Most critics believe that Mentula is an abusive pseudonym for Caesar's ally, Mamurra, whom Catullus attacks under his own name in several other poems, often combining the political and the sexual.Footnote ⁵³ Skinner takes it for granted that there is a political dimension to the epigram, elusively remarking that ‘[t]he monodistiches 105 and 106 then return us to the political arena’ and it seems very probable that she is right.Footnote ⁵⁴ If so, then Catullus 105 offers an excellent example of a poem where politics, rape, and poetics all trope each other, and are in turn troped on the narrative level by a literal ascent and fall. Even if Ovid's readers did not think of Mentula, his assault on the Muses demonstrates that the Roman mind could associate these four categories.

5. The Barbarism of Bad Poetry

Having carefully established that tyranny, rape, and poetics are three equally important themes in the Pyreneus episode which all act as tropes for each other, this final section will – perhaps a little perversely – focus primarily on poetry. The case could be made for poetics as the first among equals in the trio of themes, but the important point is that it is the one most in need of exegesis, since it operates entirely on the metaphorical plane, while Pyreneus’ actions as tyrant and attempted rapist are explicitly and literally narrated. Two interrelated questions, which have been adumbrated throughout this discussion, arise. What is ‘bad’ about Pyreneus the bad (would-be) poet and how is he depicted as such? The second question of ‘how’ bifurcates in turn, raising the issues not only of Ovid's technique but also of the attitude towards Pyreneus which the narrative encourages in the reader.

Within the relatively small body of scholarship on Pyreneus, the most oft-quoted analysis is that of Leach from almost half a century ago:

Leach's response to Pyreneus is surely coloured by drawing implicit and explicit parallels with the more overtly harsh treatment by artist-gods of figures such as the Pierides, Arachne, and Marsyas. The instinct to ‘punch up’ and side with the impotent mortal losers in these asymmetrical power struggles is an admirable one with which I have much sympathy, though it sometimes ignores troubling facets of those mortals’ characters. Even allowing for this, the description of the tyrant-rapist as ‘rough and uncultivated’ is distinctly uncomfortable, even before the era of #MeToo, so that considerable emphasis must be put on Leach's parenthetic remark that ‘we have only the Muses’ word for his character’.

The power of the tendentious narrator to shape and distort the narrative is a common motif within the Metamorphoses, perhaps particularly in the case of gods narrating theomachies. Chaudhuri has demonstrated the importance of Jupiter's and the Muses’ spin in narrating respectively the hospitality of Lycaon and the song of Pierides, but in both instances the reader is able crucially to discern elements of Lycaon's own empiricism and the Pierides’ Epicureanism even through the filter of the narration.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nothing in the anonymous Muse's depiction of Pyreneus as tyrant-rapist hints at anything behind the surface, so that the reader would be required to imagine the narrative's most important details as invented from whole cloth and she would thus be left in almost total aporia about what ‘actually’ happened.Footnote ⁵⁷ The framing and content of the episode encourage the reader to accept as reliable its depiction of Pyreneus as tyrant, attempted rapist, and bad would-be poet, and to condemn him in all three respects.

The effect of the narrative voice is of fundamental importance for the Pyreneus narrative, but the partisanship of the Muse is not the dominant influence on that voice. Unlike Orpheus and other poet-figures, Pyreneus is not a narrator and it is not his voice that Minerva and the reader hear. It is significant that the Muse is narrating but it is even more significant that her act of narration is affected by Pyreneus. The Muse's preamble explains to Minerva her current nervousness:

These lines are readily comprehensible, and even psychologically acute, on the level of the rape-narrative. The traumatic experience of Pyreneus’ attempted assault produces both terrifying flashbacks of that specific attack and a more general anxiety that sexual violence might threaten at any time from any quarter.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, since the narrative operates on multiple levels, the impact of Pyreneus upon the Muses is not only an attempted rapist's psychological traumatizing of his victims but also a bad (would-be) poet's aesthetic confounding of a good poet. Though dead, Pyreneus lives on in the narrative and, though he failed to imprison or assault the Muses, he has temporarily affected them so that they have not recovered themselves, are quite literally ‘not themselves’. Their poetry becomes bad poetry under the lingering malign influence of Pyreneus.

The depiction of the Pyreneus episode as the result of Pyreneus’ own aesthetically inept disfiguring of the Muses’ narrative operates on two, or perhaps three, levels. His actions within the episode reify literary metaphors, particularly those related to artistic failure, a subset of the reification of metaphorical language that Ovid uses elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁹ On another level, he acts as composer (though not narrator) and protagonist, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes with one or other element coming to the fore. His attempt to compose an Ovidian episode is characterized by the over-anxious and unartistic inclusion of too many Ovidian plot-motifs. This is the other reason for the excessive ‘plethora of motif-strands’. However, it is not only their number but even more importantly their failure that marks Pyreneus as the tyrant-rapist-poet illegitimately transgressing into another's territory but failing.

The most obvious reification of literary metaphor in the episode is Pyreneus’ failed attempt to fly and his subsequent fall to earth (5.289–93). The wider association of poetic inspiration with the imagery of flight is given a particular twist with the image of the poet who aims at sublimity (stetit arduus arce, 289) ‘falling’ into bathos.Footnote ⁶⁰ The image is most fully-formed in Latin poetry in Horace's comparison of the poet who aspires to the sublimity of Pindar as one doomed to fall like Icarus.Footnote ⁶¹ Inevitably, the synchronic reader of the Metamorphoses (especially if she has also read Ars Amatoria 2) will connect Pyreneus’ plunge to Ovid's own depiction of Icarus’ fall in Book 8 and its metapoetic connotations.Footnote ⁶² Although Pyreneus successfully imitates (or anticipates) Icarus’ failure, his non-flight and non-metamorphosis also sit in the category of failed reproductions of Ovidian plot motifs, as noted above, in that he does not become a bird like Scylla, Aesacus, and others. Thus Pyreneus’ fall is simultaneously a reification of the metaphorical language of artistic failure and a concrete instance of his failure to replicate an Ovidian motif, either as composer or actor.

A similar blurring of the lines between literary terms and plot motifs comes in Pyreneus’ disingenuous offer of hospitality to the Muses. As has been noted, this constitutes part of his attempt to stage a theoxeny. The anxious over-compensation of the incompetent, slavishly imitative would-be poet is underlined by his self-conscious appeal to literary and mythological precedent: subiere minores | saepe casas superi (‘the gods above have often stooped to enter lesser huts’, 5.282–3). saepe often serves as an Alexandrian footnote emphasizing the frequency with which a motif has appeared in earlier texts or indeed the present one.Footnote ⁶³ It is tempting to see in the motif of the sudden rainstorm a slavish allusion to the occasion for the humble hospitality offered to Theseus by Callimachus’ eponymous Hecale.Footnote ⁶⁴ The line between imitation and plagiarism, creative allusion and slavish aping, is – and was in antiquity – a fine and contested one, and we must beware of designating as inept copying what we might characterize elsewhere in the Metamorphoses as sophisticated intertextuality. Rather it is Pyreneus’ failure to imitate other theoxenies completely and successfully that renders his frantic attempts to do so desperate. Because he recognizes his divine guests (“Mnemonides” (cognorat enim), 280) when the absence of recognition is central to the theoxeny and its blind testing of piety, because his mimesis of the humble host's piety is a transparent and unconvincing fraud (nostraque fallaci ueneratus numina uultu, 279), because he breaks the fundamental rules of hospitality by imprisoning and attempting to assault his guests, rather than sending them safely on their way, for all these reasons his attempt to compose and enact a theoxeny is a poetic failure and the details which contribute to the attempt partake of that failure. However, Pyreneus the poeta auctor does not only fail to enact a theoxeny on the narrative level. To entertain the Muses as guests is a poetological image for inspiration dating at least as far back as Pindar and one that recurs in Ovid's own exile poetry.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pyreneus’ failure to perform the role of host therefore operates also on the metaphorical level. Whereas his fall from a height successfully enacted a metaphor of artistic failure, his perverted hospitality towards the Muses fails to enact a metaphor of artistic success.

However, Pyreneus’ attempt, not simply to appropriate for himself the role of poet by controlling the Muses’ narration, but specifically to imitate – in a manner closely approaching plagiarism – the Metamorphoses itself is most clearly and fully manifested in the failed, incomplete, or otherwise ‘off-key’ versions of the plethora of motifs from elsewhere in the poem. These motifs and the ways in which they were off-key were discussed in section 2 above and I shall not repeat that discussion here. Pyreneus’ desperate attempt to out-Ovid Ovid by cramming at least nine motifs commonly found elsewhere in the Metamorphoses into eighteen lines of narrative is sufficient in itself to represent both the derivative, virtually plagiaristic nature of his attitude to poetry and his poor artistic judgment in selecting and arranging those motifs.Footnote ⁶⁶ The fact that he both stage-manages and enacts an inhospitable theoxeny, a theomachic confrontation in which there is no contest, an attempted rape that results in his own death and his victims’ escape, and a leap that fails to lead to flight or metamorphosis except in his would-be victims, means that, both as would-be poet and protagonist, as auctor and actor, he is a failure, a bad poet.