SENECA, MEDEA 652–3

In the third choral ode of Seneca's Medea (579–669) the deaths of several of the Argonauts are described. Toward the end of the list, two seers are named: Idmon and Mopsus (652–5):

There are a number of perceived problems with these verses that have troubled commentators. Chief among them is that Seneca contradicts the far more common account of Idmon's death by apparently confounding it with the events surrounding Mopsus’ death. According to Apollonius, Idmon died on the way to Colchis in the country of the Mariadynians, where Lycus ruled (Λύκον … πρόμον ἠπείροιο, 2.752) and where a river shared the ruler's name (Λύκοιο ῥέεθρα, 2.724). On the morning after their feasting with the locals, the Argonauts make for their ship accompanied by Lycus. As they proceed, Idmon is fatally wounded by a boar and dies in the arms of his companions (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 2.812–26):

The events presented in Apollonius’ account match those of the Argonautica Orphica,Footnote ⁸ and of Ovid's Ibis,Footnote ⁹ as well as the summaries in ApollodorusFootnote ¹⁰ and Hyginus.Footnote ¹¹ In Seneca's version of the story, however, Idmon is killed by a snake (serpens) in the Libyan desert (Libycis harenis), presumably while the Argonauts are trying to get home from Colchis. This appears to confound the cause of Idmon's death (as presented by Apollonius) with that of Mopsus’ (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 4.1502–6 and 4.1518–21):

There are other versions of Idmon's death attested elsewhere. Valerius Flaccus—in a passage discussed below—says that Idmon died as a result of illness (morbis, 5.2), and, in the Naupactica, as is clear from three fragments from the scholia on Apollonius, Idmon was still alive in Colchis.Footnote ¹² It is also possible that this was the case in Eumelus’ Corinthiaca.Footnote ¹³

Let us return to the passage of the Medea in question. If one assumes, as most have done,Footnote ¹⁴ that these lines are Senecan, a number of possible courses of (in)action present themselves. The first is to assume, as the majority of modern editors have, that Seneca has confused the deaths of the two seers, whether intentionally or not, and that the paradosis is correct. The second is to seek to emend away Idmon, such that the whole passage under consideration refers to Mopsus. A third possibility is, by conjecture, to bring the cause of Idmon's death into line with that of the tradition represented by Apollonius’ epic.

On the first course of inaction, Costa notes that there is ‘confusion’ at Med. 652–5, and asserts that, whilst one may emend, ‘it is simpler to suppose that here as elsewhere Sen[eca] is careless about mythological detail’.Footnote ¹⁵ Another possibility is to suggest that a number of the fluid ancient traditions surrounding Idmon's death may be at play, and that the question of confusion, and the possible alteration of the text, should thus be cautiously approached.Footnote ¹⁶ Biondi takes the view that various aspects of the tradition were intentionally confused. He argues that the justification for the ‘libera reconstruzione’ of the more usual version of the myth by Seneca results from the proximity of the Calydonian boar that killed Ancaeus in the catalogue of Argonauts (643–4), and that the recasting of the myth and the juxtaposition of Ancaeus’ and Idmon's deaths provides ‘una sorta di dissimilazione referenziale’.Footnote ¹⁷ Henderson, on the other hand, argues that the confounding of the ways in which the two seers died is ‘somehow preferable in Seneca's view to the orthodox attributions of death by goring in Bithynia to Idmon and by snake-bite in Libya to Mopsus’. He notes that there are a number of contrasting details between the two seers, and asks whether we should add to these that ‘Idmon met his end at the wild ends of the earth (653) but Mopsus of Thebes was stuck down without premonition in the bosom of his native city (655)’.Footnote ¹⁸ There is nothing in the Latin (nor in the tradition), however, to suggest that Mopsus died in his own city. If he were to have done so and one were to seek a geographical contrast between the locations of the deaths of the two seers, it would be worth noting that Bithynia is not, in a sense, any further from the ‘wild ends of the earth’ than Libya, and so the change of place for Idmon's death would seem unnecessary.

The possibility of emending Idmonem was suggested to me by Stephen Heyworth. He had tentatively conjectured augurem. Were one to accept this, one would have to have all four verses refer to Mopsus. One could then plausibly suppose that Idmonem was added as an erroneous gloss to augurem, and that it was later copied into the text. Whilst this readily resolves the issues that surround the confounding of the ‘standard’ accounts of Idmon's and Mopsus’ respective deaths, it results in some awkwardness in the passage. First, the syntactical change of the augur from object (652–3) to subject (654–5) is strained; second, there is some tension between the assertion that Mopsus spoke the truth to all but was false to himself alone (654), and that he knew the (or his own?) fata well (652). It is also the case that the paradosis of 652 provides a bilingual play on the meaning of ἴδμων—‘having knowledge of a thing’—as it juxtaposes the name of the seer (Idmonem) with the assertion that he knew the fata well (bene fata nosset); this elegant etymological play would be lost with the replacement of Idmonem with augurem. Alongside this, the close calquing, with the words quamuis bene fata nosset, of Apollonius’ characterization of Idmon in the catalogue of Argonauts would also lose some of its force: Ἴδμων δ’ ὑστάτιος μετεκίαθεν ὅσσοι ἔναιον | Ἄργος, ἐπεὶ δεδαὼς τὸν ἑὸν μόρον οἰωνοῖσιν | ἤιε, μή οἱ δῆμος ἐυκλείης ἀγάσαιτο, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.139–41). In rhetorical terms, it ought also to be noted that in this second part of the choral ode (607–69), in which the deaths of the Argonauts are described, a careful stanzaic structure is maintained,Footnote ¹⁹ and that, as the ode progresses, the number of casualties mentioned in each stanza increases so as to create an accelerating cumulative effect. Tiphys, Orpheus and Heracles—some of the better-known Argonauts—receive a stanza each (616–24, 625–33, 634–42), but from the stanza beginning in 643 the catalogue of deaths becomes rather denser. Were Mopsus the subject of the whole stanza, 651–660b, it would enfeeble the rhetorical thrust of the latter part of the ode to a considerable degree.

Let us consider the third course of action. The difficulties with the description of Idmon's death as represented in the vulgate have been outlined above. A relatively straightforward solution to the problem would be to read monstrum Lyciis.

The adjective Lyciis, already conjectured by Koetschau,Footnote ²⁰ provides an appropriate descriptor for the harenae of the country of the Mariadynians, where Lycus ruled and a river shared his name. It is cited by ZwierleinFootnote ²¹ and appears in the apparatus criticus of Hine's edition, but is dismissed by both. This is perhaps because it only resolves half of the problem: it was a boar that killed Idmon in the ‘standard’ account, not a snake. The banalization of the rarer Lyciis to the common Libycis is straightforward enough to imagine, and the reading of E may represent an intermediary stage in the process of corruption (lybicis E: libicis A); it is also possible that such a banalization was prompted by the prior corruption into serpens of the preceding spondee—‘a well-known seer was killed by a snake, but not in Lycia’, a scribe might have thought. It is not inconceivable that the juxtaposition of harena with Libyae thirty or so lines later may have influenced a copyist too (pestes uocat quascumque feruentis creat | harena Libyae, 681–2).

The Sapphic hendecasyllable requires a spondaic word to follow condidit, and a number of suggestions have been made with which to replace serpens. In their edition, Peiper and Richter print the former's conjecture pestis,Footnote ²² which may refer to animals,Footnote ²³ but is never thus used by Seneca. In the tragedies, it is used to refer to disease, poison, infection or plague,Footnote ²⁴ to people who are deemed to be scourges,Footnote ²⁵ and to mythical harbingers of ruin;Footnote ²⁶ it also occurs figuratively to denote a possible cause of destruction.Footnote ²⁷ In his last edition, Giardina proposes uerres.Footnote ²⁸ This gives us the desired sense, but it is not a term used elsewhere by Seneca.Footnote ²⁹

None of these satisfies. As mentioned above, I propose to read monstrum. This is a word that occurs frequently in Senecan tragedy, and is not infrequently used of (potentially) deadly creatures: for example the snakes that Hercules throttles as a child (HF 215), the Lernaean hydra (HF 241), the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece (Med. 473), and the creatures summoned by Medea from the desert (Med. 684); the term monstra is also taken closely with fera at HF 434 (obici feris monstrisque uirtutem putas?).Footnote ³⁰ Valerius uses monstrum to refer to the Erymanthian boar in his Argonautica at 1.374. The use of monstrum to refer to the boar that killed Idmon would, furthermore, look back to Apollonius’ account of the death, in which the white-tusked boar is described as an ὀλοὸν τέρας, which the marsh-dwelling nymphs fear (2.820). It is straightforward enough to suppose, moreover, that a reader felt the need to provide monstrum with a gloss, and, in so doing, mistakenly wrote serpens, confounding the causes of the deaths of Idmon and Mopsus; one spondaic word could then easily have replaced the other in the course of copying.Footnote ³¹

VALERIUS FLACCUS 5.2–3

I should like to consider the death of Idmon in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica in the light of the proposed reading of monstrum Lyciis at Med. 653. The account provided by the Flavian poet opens the fifth book of his work, and follows on immediately from the festa conuiuia held in Lycus’ palace at the end of the preceding book (4.760–2). In it, Idmon, not unaware of the time of his death, is said to have been snatched away by the fates and by illnesses (morbis) (Val. Fl. 5.1–5):

The use of labor to mean ‘die’ here seems heavily indebted to its occurrence in Seneca's Oedipus, where it is likewise coupled with the idea of rapacious fate: stirpis inuictae genus interimus | labimur saeuo rapiente fato (124–5). With morbis, however, Valerius’ usage seems rather odd. First, the pairing of the plural morbi with fata is unparalleled, though some support may be gained for reading the singular morbo Footnote ³⁴ from Sen. Oed. 1059 (uiolenta Fata et horridus Morbi tremor). Second, the collocation of the verb labor with morbus is found nowhere else in extant Latin, and the comparandum offered by Wijsman in his commentary ad loc. is no such thing: in the passage of Lucan that he cites, labens means ‘stumbling’.Footnote ³⁵ The oddness of the vulgate of Valerius’ text is not, in and of itself, insurmountable, though, if one takes labitur closely with fatis rapacibus.

That being said, I have wondered if it would not be better to replace morbis with a word that could refer to Idmon's death without digressing from the ‘standard’ account. A neutral term referring to death is possible,Footnote ³⁶ but more apposite, in that it avoids tautology with fatis, would be to conjecture a noun that could refer to the boar. monstro could work well here—it is used by Valerius, as already noted above, to refer to the Erymanthian boar—and one might suppose a particular debt to Seneca's description of Idmon's death in the Medea. Aside from removing the oddity of having Idmon die from some sort of illness (found nowhere else in the varied extant traditions), it would give a particular point to labitur. One might suppose that Valerius is using the verb to mean ‘die’ but playing on its sense of ‘fall’: this is, after all, what Idmon may be imagined to have done on being struck by the boar. (This may provide some traction for Wijsman's supposed parallel too.) The corruption of monstro to morbis is not too difficult to imagine: the words are not dissimilar in shape, and the ablative singular could have been changed to the plural under the influence of fatis.Footnote ³⁷ The fact that Tiphys is struck down by some sort of disease whilst the Argonauts are mourning Idmon's death may have influenced a copyist too.

Valerius’ indebtedness to Senecan tragedy is well documented,Footnote ³⁸ and may already be seen in the lexical borrowing from the Oedipus in this passage.

In short, then, it is my proposal that, in Seneca's and Valerius’ accounts, Idmon was disposed of by a boar on the banks of the river Lycus, as in Apollonius’ version. The two passages should read thus: