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CITING EMPEDOCLES: A BILINGUAL PUN AT OVID, MET. 15.58

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2018

Paul Roche
Paul Roche*
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
*
paul.roche@sydney.edu.au
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Extract

Ovid completes his narrative of the origin of Croton with the following lines (Met. 15.58–9):

      talia constabat certa primordia fama
      esse loci positaeque Italis in finibus urbis.
      It was agreed by sure fame that such were the beginnings
      of the place and of the city established within Italian borders.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 552 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2018 

Ovid completes his narrative of the origin of Croton with the following lines (Met. 15.58–9):

talia constabat certa primordia fama
esse loci positaeque Italis in finibus urbis.
It was agreed by sure fame that such were the beginnings
of the place and of the city established within Italian borders.

Within the immediate context of Book 15, the phrase certa … fama refers to the tradition informing the speech made at lines 12–57 by an old Crotonian man in response to Numa's inquiries about the city's foundation.Footnote 1 This phrase is unique in the poem, as is the impersonal use of constare with an ablative; the verb is used absolutely in its other appearances at 7.533 and 12.264. This note will argue that the additional phrase certa … fama—superfluous for meaning and appearing only here in the Metamorphoses—embeds an etymological pun on the name Empedocles, wherein certa fama (‘sure fame’) calques his name as deriving from the phrase ἔμπεδον κλέος (‘fixed fame’). The wordplay is neither accidental nor without significance; and it is positioned within the text in such a way as to contribute to a plausible interpretation of its context.Footnote 2

This type of etymological allusion, in which a name or word is invoked without being explicitly mentioned, has been called ‘suppression’.Footnote 3 This is a common strategy of wordplay within the Metamorphoses, and it requires the active participation of the reader to uncover the unstated object of the reference.Footnote 4 I argue that, for the reasons set out below, Ovid's readers would be well placed (i) to recognize the potential for wordplay in the phrase certa … fama; (ii) to participate fully in the process of ‘solving’ the object of the allusion at line 58; and (iii) to appreciate that an allusion to Empedocles would be apt at this moment in the poem. First, fama is a standard Latin equivalent of κλέος: for example, cf. Cic. Div. 2.64.22 fama ac laude perenni (‘[of] perennial fame and glory’) translating Hom. Il. 2.325 ὅου κλέος οὔ ποτ’ ὀλεῖται (‘whose glory will never perish’). Second, both fama and κλέος encompass the notion of ‘glory’ as well as ‘what is heard’ or ‘report’ and can thus operate on both levels of meaning required for the pun to work in its immediate context.Footnote 5 Third, wordplay turning on the nominal suffix -cles / -κλης, or its equivalent prefix Cleo- / Κλεο-, is both venerable and frequent in Greek and Latin literature.Footnote 6 Fourth, certus, in the context of signs or information, meaning ‘certain, sure, indisputable’ (OLD s.v. 5), represents the same sense in which ἔμπεδος is used at Hom. Od. 19.250 (= 23.206) σήματ’ … ἔμπεδα (‘sure tokens’).Footnote 7 Fifth, of the forty occurrences of the noun fama in the Metamorphoses, this is the only occasion when it is modified by an adjective expressing any of the basic meanings conveyed by the Greek adjective ἔμπεδος. Sixth and finally, as we shall see below, punning on the name of Empedocles was not uncommon in Greek and Latin literature prior to Ovid. The practice may in fact have originated with Empedocles himself (to judge from his own use of ἔμπεδος in compound adjectives such as ἐμπεδόφυλλος ‘evergreen’, fr. 105 = DK 31 B 77, and ἐμπεδόκαρπος ‘ever-fruiting’, fr. 106 = DK 31 B 78).Footnote 8

The word primordia (‘beginnings’, OLD s.v. 1a) is often found in the context of city foundations (TLL 10.2.1270.70–1271.8). However, it is used in this ktistic context only here in the Metamorphoses; elsewhere it denotes the aetiology of Nileus’ gens (5.190) or of human birth (15.391). I suggest that here primordia is used by Ovid to function as an etymological marker of the pun certa fama ~ ἔμπεδον κλέος.Footnote 9 It falls comfortably within the same semantic range as a cluster of words which regularly indicate the presence of etymological wordplay, such as origo and primus.Footnote 10 Here it points to the notion of ‘fixed fame’ as the semantic primordia or ‘origins’ of Empedocles’ name.Footnote 11 The word further inevitably calls to mind the doctrine of four elements, in Latin primordia, for which Empedocles was famous.Footnote 12 The concepts of ktisis and cosmogony shared strong associations, and the word primordia operates in both contexts:Footnote 13 its use at 15.58 thus also immediately foreshadows its use at line 67 magni primordia mundi … docebat (‘he used to teach the origins of the great world’), where the tone and the language evoke Lucretius,Footnote 14 but the subject-matter at hand is the discourses of Pythagoras, for which Empedocles was an important source for Ovid.Footnote 15

Ovid furthermore positions this pun immediately prior to introducing Pythagoras of Samos himself at 15.60–4: verses which clearly cite—via a ‘window allusion’ to Lucretius’ Graius homo (1.62–79)—Empedocles’ own praise of a man who in antiquity was widely taken to be Pythagoras.Footnote 16 The pun certa fama ~ ἔμπεδον κλέος thus ‘names’ for the learned reader the Empedoclean source of the description of Pythagoras, and it hints at the Empedoclean influence upon the speech that Pythagoras will deliver over the following four-hundred lines.Footnote 17 It has a privileged place within lines 15.58–9, which facilitate the transition from the narrative of Numa at Croton into the longest and most densely ‘Empedoclean’ section of the entire poem.Footnote 18 In this role and position it neatly illustrates the tendency of epic, as formulated by Alessandro Barchiesi, to make strong references to its own tradition but to abstain from explicit citation:Footnote 19 certa fama can thus be read as the marker that precipitates and renders visible Ovid's allusion to Empedocles in the following lines. A similar strategy, identified by Richard Hunter, may be observed at Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.499, where the narrator—describing Orpheus singing an Empedoclean cosmogony—suggestively juxtaposes the words ἔμπεδον αἰὲν (‘always … fixed’).Footnote 20

Reading the phrase certa fama as a suppressed reference to Empedocles has the further effect of placing the philosopher-poet himself as an absent presence at Croton.Footnote 21 It facetiously places Empedocles as a hidden audience-member to the words of his master Pythagoras in a textual game which mimics the process of transmission of Pythagorean doctrine via Empedocles.Footnote 22 Note the tradition, recorded by Diogenes Laertius from the Histories of Timaeus, that Empedocles heard Pythagoras lecture (ἀκοῦσαι δ’ αὐτὸν Πυθαγόρου) and had been convicted of stealing the discourses of Pythagoras (καταγνωσθεὶς ἐπὶ λογοκλοπίᾳ, Diog. Laert. 8.2.54; cf. 55).Footnote 23

Etymological wordplay, whether explicitly marked or not, is perhaps more familiar as a closural device within the poem,Footnote 24 but it also regularly foreshadows imminent or relevant content. Puns on semen and sero mark the imminent presence of Saturn at 1.76–89;Footnote 25 and the transformation of Lycaon into a wolf is anticipated by a number of words punning on (or suggestive of) λύκος (‘wolf’).Footnote 26 In such examples wordplay is relevant to the name of an imminent character or event within the poem. A parallel for wordplay marking the name of a source of imminent material can be adduced both in Latin literature before Ovid and elsewhere in the Metamorphoses. Joshua T. Katz has argued that Verg. G. 1.1–2 terram | uertere (‘to turn the earth’), a periphrasis for arare, evokes the name ‘Aratus’ in the same line and metrical position in which Aratus himself embeds a ‘signature’ at the incipit of the Phaenomena: 1.1–2 ἐῶμεν | ἄρρητον (‘we leave unnamed’). One function of this wordplay is to signal the importance of Aratus in the poem, particularly in Book 1.Footnote 27 The same strategy occurs, albeit on a more local scale, in the sphragis of the Metamorphoses: at 15.875 Ovid uses the adjective perennis three lines before adapting a famous epigram of Ennius (Met. 15.878 ore legar populi ‘I shall be read on the lips of the people’; cf. uolito uiuus per ora uirum ‘I fly living on the lips of men’, Epigr. 10 Warmington).Footnote 28

In sum, the calque certa fama ~ ἔμπεδον κλέος at Met. 15.58 is recognizable, marked and decipherable; it operates in a tradition of such wordplay in Greek and Latin literature, and it participates in an even more specific tradition of citing Empedocles via etymological wordplay. Finally, the pun is in no way inert within its context, but both contributes in a comprehensible manner to Ovid's poetic project and conforms to the idioscyncratic norms of the epic genre in designating and citing its own tradition.

References

1 Cf. Ov. Met. 15.11 ueteris non inscius aeui (‘not ignorant of a past age’), 15.14 fertur (‘it is said’).

2 These are the criteria of Tissol, G., The Face of Nature. Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Princeton, 1997), 12Google Scholar and n. 6, applied to Ahl, F., Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca, 1985)Google Scholar.

3 See O'Hara, J.J., True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay (Ann Arbor, 1996), 79–82Google Scholar, who adopts (81 and n. 336) the terminology of Serv. Verg. G. 2.126 supprimens nomen (‘suppressing the name’).

4 Tissol (n. 2), 173–7 discusses examples of Ovidian bilingual wordplay, wherein such suppression occurs.

5 That is, both words can denote ‘tradition’, required for the immediate context of Met. 15, and ‘glory’, required for activating a pun on the last element in Empedocles’ name. On the semantic range of κλέος, see Goldhill, S., The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge, 1991), 69–108Google Scholar; on that of fama, see Hardie, P., Rumour and Renown: Representations of ‘Fama’ in Western Literature (Cambridge, 2012), 3–11Google Scholar and Guastella, G., Word of Mouth: Fama and its Personifications in Art and Literature from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2017), 57–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Gale, M., ‘Etymological wordplay and poetic succession in Lucretius’, CPh 96 (2001), 168–72Google Scholar, at 168 n. 2; cf. e.g. Nagy, G., The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore, 1979), 104–8Google Scholar on wordplay with the names Cleopatra and Patroclus in the Iliad, or ‘tell-tale’ names in Plautine comedy (see Duckworth, G.E., The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment [Princeton, 1952], 347–50Google Scholar), such as Cleomachus (‘renowned in battle’), the soldier of Bacchides, or Pleusicles (‘sail-glory’), who disguises himself ornatu nauclerico (‘in a ship-owner's costume’) at Mil. 1177.

7 Cf. LSJ s.v. ἔμπεδος I 2; see also R.B. Rutherford, Homer Odyssey Books XIX and XX (Cambridge, 1992), 171 on Hom. Il. 19.240–50.

8 All quotations from Empedocles are from the edition of Marciano, M.L. Gemelli (ed.), Die Vorsokratiker. Band 2. Parmenides, Zenon, Empedokles (Berlin, 2013)Google Scholar. Both Wright, M.R., Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar, ad loc. and Sedley, D.N., Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 25 n. 91 suggest that the use of the element ἐμπεδό- is self-conscious. In the lines χαίρετ’· ἐγὼ δ’ ὑμῖν θεὸς ἄμβροτος, οὐκέτι θνητός | πωλεῦμαι μετὰ πᾶσι τετιμένος … (‘Greetings! Before you an immortal god, mortal no more, I go about, honoured by all …’, 157.9–10 = DK 31 B 112), I read ἄμβροτος … τετιμένος (‘immortal … honoured’) as hinting at the etymology of his own name in ἔμπεδον κλέος (‘everlasting fame’).

9 On etymological markers more generally, see Maltby, R., ‘The limits of etymologizing’, Aevum(ant) 6 (1993), 257–75Google Scholar, at 268–70; O'Hara (n. 3), 75–9.

10 On origo, see Michalopoulos, A., Ancient Etymologies in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Commented Lexicon (Leeds, 2001), 4–5Google Scholar; Hinds, S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1987), 5Google Scholar (‘the standard term in Latin for the etymological derivation of a word’). On primus, see Cairns, F., ‘Ancient “etymology” and Tibullus’, PCPhS 42 (1996), 24–59Google Scholar, at 33–40.

11 For primordium used of word-origins, cf. Ter. Maur. 817 syllabae …, nominis uerbiue … primordia (‘origins of syllables, nouns, or verbs’).

12 For its use in this sense, with examples from Lucretius to Augustine, see TLL 10.2.1271.61–74. For a convenient overview, see e.g. Graham, D.W., ‘Empedocles and Anaxagoras’, in Long, A.A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), 159–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 159–62.

13 Hardie, P., Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford, 1986), 343–6Google Scholar, 350; C.T. Hamm, ‘Empedoclean elegy: love, strife and the four elements in Ovid's Amores, Ars Amatoria and Fasti’ (Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013), 309–10.

14 See Hardie, P., Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Volume VI: Libri XIII–XV (Milan, 2015), 486Google Scholar on 15.58–9: ‘Dopo primordia eziologici, seguiranno primordia cosmici di tipo lucreziano al. v. 67’; cf. ibid. 492 on 15.67.

15 See Hardie, P., ‘The speech of Pythagoras in Ovid, Metamorphoses 15: Empedoclean epos’, CQ 45 (1995), 204–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 204–5.

16 Ov. Met. 15.60–4; cf. Empedocles, fr. 186 = DK 31 B 129. Diog. Laert. 54 preserves the quote, presumably from Timaeus, and identifies the man as Pythagoras. Porphyry (VP 30) and Iamblichus (VP 67) agree with this identification; Theophrastus thought that the lines referred to Parmenides; see Baron, C.A., Timaeus of Tauromenium and Hellenistic Historiography (Cambridge, 2013), 165Google Scholar; Burkert, W., Weisheit und Wissenschaft. Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Nuremberg, 1962), 113–14Google Scholar. On ‘window allusions’, see Thomas, R.F., ‘Virgil's Georgics and the art of reference’, HSPh 90 (1986), 171–98Google Scholar, at 188–9; Wills, J., Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford, 1996), 284Google Scholar. For comment, see Bömer, F., P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen. Buch XIV–XV (Heidelberg, 1986), 273–4Google Scholar ad loc.; Hardie (n. 14), 486–92: ‘la descrizione e l'elogio della capacità mentali di Pitagora sono modellati da un lato sull'elogio di Lucrezio dell'innominato Graius homo (Epicuro) a 1.62–79, e dall'altro sul modello di Lucrezio, Empedocle, D.-K. B.129, in una lode probabilmente di Pitagora’ (at 491).

17 Hardie (n. 15), 205: ‘the broad outline, as well as much of the detail, is paralleled in the philosophical hexameter poetry of Empedocles’. Hardie (n. 15) surveys earlier lists of parallels between the speech and the extant writings of Empedocles at 205 n. 6.

18 On transitional devices in the poem, see Hollis, A.S., Ovid Metamorphoses Book VIII (Oxford, 1970), xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar; Galinsky, G.K., Ovid's Metamorphoses. An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley, 1975), 91–103Google Scholar; Solodow, J.B., The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill, 1988), 41–3Google Scholar. For a convenient snapshot of Empedocles’ presence within the Metamorphoses, see Hardie (n. 14), 675, s.v. ‘Empedocle, -eo’.

19 Barchiesi, A. (edd. and trans. Fox, M. and Marchesi, S.), Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets (London, 2001), 129Google Scholar.

20 See Hunter, R., The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies (Cambridge, 1993), 163 n. 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who further records David Sider's suggestion that Apollonius may be echoing Empedocles’ punning on his own name at frr. 105–6 = DK 31 B 77–8 (quoted above, in text, before n. 8). For the highly Empedoclean beginning of Orpheus’ cosmogony, see Kyriakou, P., ‘Empedoclean echoes in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica’, Hermes 122 (1994), 309–19Google Scholar, at 309 n. 2; Hunter (this note), 163.

21 Cf. Hardie, P., ‘Ovid as Laura: absent presences in the Metamorphoses and Petrarch's Rime Sparse’, in Hardie, P., Barchiesi, A., Hinds, S. (edd.), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphosesand its Reception (Cambridge, 1999), 254–70Google Scholar, esp. 255–6 on Petrarch, Canzoniere 176.9, where the phrase ‘l’òre’ (‘the breeze’) supplies through paronomasia the absent presence of Petrarch's Laura.

22 Burkert, W. (trans. Miner, E.L.), Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 219, 220 n. 12Google Scholar.

23 Discussion in Baron (n. 16), 164–8.

24 Myers, K.S., Ovid's Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor, 1994), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 37–9, 65–6. For example, cf. the conceit Ciris > κείρω at 8.151 a tonso est hoc nomen adepta capillo: the conclusion to the story of Scylla at 8.6–151 (with Kenney, E.J., Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Volume IV: Libri VII–IX [Milan, 2011]Google Scholar, 322 ad loc.); or of the wordplay λαός > λᾶας at 1.414–15 inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum | et documenta damus qua simus origine nati, lines which conclude the human race's regeneration from the stones cast by Pyrrha (with Barchiesi, A., Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Volume I: Libri I–II [Milan, 2005], 199Google Scholar ad loc.).

25 1.78 semine, 1.81 semina, 1.82 satus, 1.89 aurea prima sata est all point to the (as yet unnamed) god who will rule over the Golden Age of man; cf. Barchiesi (n. 24), 162 on Ov. Met. 1.78–82: ‘l'insistenza sul linguaggio della semina … non si lega immediatamente al contesto, ma in qualche modo anticipa il ruolo di Saturno, dio della semina, nel tempo della prima generazione di uomini’. On the etymology, see Varro, Ling. 5.64 ab satu est dictus Saturnus; Varro apud August. De civ. D. 7.3 sicut opinatur Varro, quod pertineat Saturnus ad semina (cf. Maltby, R., A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies [Leeds, 1991], 546–7Google Scholar).

26 1.198 (Jupiter) notus feritate Lycaon, looking to the etymology Lycaon > λύκος; Jupiter's itinerary at 216–17 through Maenala … latebris horrenda ferarum (suggesting μαίνομαι) and the forests of Lycaeum (again evoking λύκος); for discussion, see Barchiesi (n. 24), 189 on 1.216–19.

27 Katz, J.T., ‘Vergil translates Aratus: Phaenomena 1–2 and Georgics 1–2’, MD 60 (2008), 105–23Google Scholar, at 111–13: ‘Vergil signals his debt to Aratus in exactly the same place in the Georgics that Aratus signs his own name … in the Phaenomena’ (113); this represents the first of Katz's five conclusions; for further dimensions of significance attaching to the incipit of the Georgics, see Katz (this note), 113–17. Haslam, M., ‘Hidden signs: Aratus, Diosemiai 46ff., Vergil, Georgics 1.424ff.’, HSPh 94 (1992), 199–204Google Scholar, at 203–4 has further suggested that sol at Verg. G. 1.438 is a suppressed allusion to Aratus via his birthplace of Soli. On the pun in Aratus independent of its later influence, see Kidd, D., Aratus Phaenomena (Cambridge, 1997), 164Google Scholar ad loc.

28 Cf. Hardie (n. 14), 624 ad loc.: ‘un gioco verbale sul nome di Ennio’; Martelli, F.K.A., Ovid's Revisions: The Editor as Author (Cambridge, 2013), 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘… all but spelled out for us’. On the transparent nature of the pun perennis ~ Ennius, see e.g. Feeney, D.C., ‘Mea tempora: patterning of time in the Metamorphoses’, in Hardie, P., Barchiesi, A., Hinds, S. (edd.), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception (Cambridge, 1999), 13–30Google Scholar, at 17 n. 17, who observes that perennis is used in the same basic context at Lucr. 1.117–19, Catull. 1.10, Hor. Carm. 3.30.1 and Ov. Met. 15.875, and suggests that the pun may go back to Ennius himself.