Apollo the Hunter

The interaction between Cupid and Apollo that motivates Apollo's chase of Daphne ostensibly represents the correction of Apollo's attempted incursion into ‘grand’ epic, signified by his slaying of the Python. Summarily, in generic terms, it emblematizes the victory of elegy over epic.Footnote ⁴ However, just how ‘epic’ is this deed in its actuality? If we look at the composite picture, it appears that the deed only becomes ‘epic’ in its recounting by Apollo to Cupid – an instance of the god of poetic inspiration exercising some measure of poetic licence. The narrator's account of the deed is as follows:Footnote ⁵

From this brief description, the reader learns that Apollo had never before used his arrows (letalibus armis) except against the quarry of red deer and roe deer (dammis capreisque). The learned reader recognizes this as an allusion to the first martial exploit of the young Ascanius (tum primum bello celerem intendisse sagittam / dicitur ante feras solitus terrere fugacis / Ascanius, ‘Then for the first time it is said that Ascanius aimed his swift arrow in warlike pursuits, before then accustomed to frightening skittish beasts’, Verg. Aen. 9.590–2).Footnote ⁶ After Ascanius kills Numanus Remulus, Apollo restrains him and imposes a set of cautionary boundaries upon the youth (Aen. 9.653–6) in an admonitory fashion reminiscent of a recusatio.Footnote ⁷ In fact, Ziogas argues persuasively that Ovid read the Virgilian Apollo's warning on precisely this literary plane of meaning and so uses this episode as direct inspirational material in the staging of his own metapoetic argument between Apollo and Cupid. The cautious Virgilian Apollo, in restricting the actions of Ascanius – who is throughout the epic a Cupid-like character – bolsters an epic programme, while Ovid's Cupid forces Apollo from an epic to an elegiac realm, consequently reversing the pattern of poetic priority established in the Aeneid.Footnote ⁸

Hunting Nicander in the Metamorphoses

The generic balance of epic and elegy is easily identifiable when framed by the poetic mechanism of a recusatio. However, this balance is destabilized here if one accepts the possibility of a unrecognized source for the narrator's account of the Python's death. A passage of Nicander's Theriaca supplies a further point of reference for the god's experience – a supplement that can imbue the encounter between the archer god and the mischievous Cupid with a very different tone.Footnote ⁹ After describing the threat that the viper poses to men, both after the sloughing of its skin and escaping the trampling hoofs of deer, Nicander elaborates upon the relationship between deer and serpents:

If we consider Ovid's specific designation of dammis capreisque a textual reprisal of Nicander's νεβροτόκοι καὶ ζόρκες, the heroic feat of slaying the Python experiences an irreverent reduction to the level of accidental exploit: Apollo, pursuing his customary prey, stumbles unsuspectingly upon the Python because of the natural enmity between deer and snakes. As the young god tracks the deer, the deer themselves are in fact tracking snakes, culminating in a surprise encounter and a panicked near-emptying of the god's quiver. If the pattern of ‘long reptile’ and deer seems less than secure to link these two passages and to thereby import the foundation of Nicandrian knowledge that Ovid uses to indulge his brand of very literary humour, there are a few contextual points of support that can reinforce this connection.

First, to establish a basis of secure knowledge of Nicander's Theriaca, we know that Macer was an important poetic influence upon Ovid from the autobiographical Tristia 4.10: saepe suas uolucres legit mihi grandior aeuo, / quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer (‘Often Macer, more advanced in years, read to me of his own birds, and the snakes who wrought harm, and the plant remedies which helped’, 43–4).Footnote ¹¹ This couplet alludes to Macer's Ornithogonia and at least one, if not two, works of Nicandrian adaptation. Scholars unproblematically identify the quaeque necet serpens as an encapsulation of Macer's own Theriaca, and Hollis further argues that iuuet herba alludes to a separate Alexipharmaca, presumably also influenced by Nicander.Footnote ¹² Macer's position as the first in a list of poets that Ovid mentions adds further emphasis to his importance and influence. Although Hollis calls Nicander's work ‘the most dreary verse from the Hellenistic age’, the passage in question (Ther. 141–4) nevertheless shows Nicander's desire to engage with the lexical innovations that verse can allow, particularly with the coinage νεβροτόκοι. Found only here, it represents one of three words for deer that Nicander uses (along with ζόρκες and ἐλάφων previously in 139).Footnote ¹³ Nicander also experiments with a reversal of perspective and expectations by attaching the adjective σμερδαλέος to the breath of the deer (σμερδαλέῃ…ἀϋτμῇ, 144), rather than to the snake. The adjective is a ‘standard epithet of monsters’, and is found at Hom. Il. 22.95 to depict the frightening gaze of a snake; Nicander attaches it to a different sense (sound, rather than sight), and transforms the relationship between hunter and hunted as found in Homer, casting the deer as hunter.Footnote ¹⁴ The poetic dynamic created by this play with expectations would certainly have appealed to the tastes of Ovid, who continually toys with his reader in games of complex narrative misdirection. The verbally unexpected exchange between hunter and hunted in the Nicandrian passage provides an appropriate contextual overlap to consider as a backdrop to the exchange between Apollo and Cupid, in which Apollo accuses Cupid of trying to usurp his realm of power and control, only to fall prey to the mastery of the lesser god. This exchange of power is also spatially depicted: after their verbal exchange, Cupid flies to the top of Mount Parnassus to shoot his arrows:Footnote ¹⁵

According to most mythological coverage of the encounter, Parnassus is the mountain that the Python so recently occupied (the unnamed monte of 440), and so Cupid's chosen position of attack speaks to literally and metaphorically ‘topping’ Apollo by taking over the space so recently cleared by the god.Footnote ¹⁶ Painting Apollo as an accidental hero is also tonally consistent with the way in which the god is represented throughout the Metamorphoses: that is, as a generally hapless figure lacking in self-knowledge and self-control.Footnote ¹⁷ The origin point of this less-than-dignified literary portrait of the god is generally traced to the moment of his besottedness with Daphne, culminating in the humorous self-hymn of Met. 1.504–25. However, we also see Apollo as a figure who cannot learn from his mistakes, especially in the tales of Coronis from Book 2 and of HyacinthusFootnote ¹⁸ and Cyparissus in Book 10.Footnote ¹⁹ Viewing his narrative repackaging of the Python's death as evidence of his own abuse of poetic licence presents a coherent picture of Apollo as a likely figure of narrative ambiguity and metapoetic commentary from the moment of his entrance into the poem.

There are a few more considerations that can be made in attempting to connect this passage of the Metamorphoses to Nicander. Nicander's poem is far from straightforwardly ‘scientific’ and, as we can see from the second part of the proem (8–20) and other digressions (such as 343–8, 483–7, 902–6), he is concerned with the integration of mythological and aetiological poetry into the fabric of his didactic poem. Likewise, the Metamorphoses passage that segues into the narrative of the Python's birth describes the regeneration of life after the flood (Met. 1.416–37) and details, as Myers notes, a ‘process Ovid explains to us with didactic precision and technical scientific language’.Footnote ²⁰ Although the tone and language is scientific and didactic in a way that is most reminiscent of Lucretius,Footnote ²¹ the narrative progression from this creation scene into the Apollo–Daphne myth presents a combination of scientific and mythological material also observed in the proem of the Theriaca. Lucretius is certainly not the only poet from whom to borrow a scientific, didactic voice and vocabulary, and Nicander's unapologetic blend of mythical and scientific material in the Theriaca’s approach to the natural world would certainly have held appeal for Ovid. In fact, despite the Lucretian language, we might be tempted to see the direct address to the Python that introduces the snake into the space of the poem as a joke on Nicander that points to the Theriaca as a source, and further informs the scientific information to be supplied from reference to this text within the narrator's account of the Python's death:

The Python is the last creature listed of the beings born after the flood; in other words, the final entry in a small catalogue. Catalogue poetry is a feature of didactic, especially Hesiodic didactic,Footnote ²² and the Theriaca is no exception, comprising a catalogue of poisonous creatures. The direct address to the Python is emphatic, and takes over the entirety of the narrator's description of the being: the Python is a terror because of his vast size (maxime, tantum spatii de monte tenebas), and was hitherto unknown (incognita serpens). We can also consider this direct address and assumption of ‘live’ speech in the context of didactic, a form which demands an addressee, often in a combination of forms implicit, internal, or external, and one that employs a fictive façade of actual speech.Footnote ²³

Looking cumulatively at this compressed set of allusions to didactic form and content, we might read this as Ovid playing with the didactic conventions of Nicander's Theriaca. Addressing the Python as the incognita serpens pokes fun at the Theriaca, inverting the parameters of that poem's teaching: not only is the venomous serpent itself the ‘addressee’, the recipient of this ‘live’ speech, but it is called incognita, which, as a negation, calls attention to the very purpose of didactic – to gain knowledge. Ovid's playful inversion of didactic boundaries therefore further sets in motion the tone we should use to approach the narrator's account of the Python's slaying, one of deflation and humour. We may yet proceed one step further and apply a note that Ogden makes in discussing the Python's name:

Despite Ogden's admission that this connection is only recorded officially in the late tradition, it is yet tempting to think that Ovid was sensitive to this didactic possibility lying latent in the Python's name.

The verb is also one used to guide the attentions of readers within the didactic tradition: Nicander uses the older, poetic variation of this verb to signal a new portion of his teachings (πευθέο, 700; see also πεπύθοιο, the aorist optative form, at 935).Footnote ²⁵ Ovid may also here purposefully signal Nicander's potentially surprising lack of reference to the mythological Python: Ovid's miniature, joke Theriaca redresses this wrong by including him as the addressee, alerting him to ‘learn’ with wordplay upon his very name.Footnote ²⁶ Taking all of these stylistic and verbal cues together, it seems that the description of the Python that precedes the narrative of his death prepares the reader to supply reference to Nicander's Theriaca by allusion to didactic form and content, in a way both learned and humorous.

Target practice and Ovidian irreverence

If we examine other passages featuring the progression of targets that capture the attention of archer deities, Ovid's humorous allusion to an accidental discovery of the Python gains further support as a satisfactory angle of interpretive approach. Slaying the Python out of strict necessity makes Apollo's heroism less straightforward; at best, he is accidentally heroic. If we compare the Apollo of Iliad 1, we can see a noticeable progression in his targets: imprecated by Chryses to punish the Danaans with his arrows, he directs his aim first at mules and swift dogs, before finally turning his eyes to the men themselves:

Likewise, in Callimachus’ third Hymn, the poet asks Artemis ποσσάκι δ᾽ἀργυρέοιο, θεή, πειρήσαο τόξου; (‘How often, goddess, did you test out your silver bow?’ Hymn 3.119) and then proceeds to list her targets:

Common to both passages is the stratified progression in targets: Apollo aims at animals before beginning to decimate the ranks of the Greeks, while the sequence of Artemis’ targets is even more progressively developed, beginning with the arboreal world before advancing to the animal. Only after this intermediary level is broached does the human sphere appear. The lack of progression given to the Ovidian Apollo prior to his encounter with the Python is therefore notable – he has only honed his archery skills on red and roe deer. The lack of advancement in these targets further emphasizes his unpreparedness to defeat the Python. This is the only instance in the poem in which the god is depicted as hunting with his bow – unlike his twin, Apollo is not traditionally a hunter god, and his bow is emphatically not a hunting weapon, which makes close scrutiny of this passage merited.Footnote ²⁸ The choice of two types of deer is a pointed, poetic choice that becomes validated with the added information of the enmity between deer and snakes – knowledge that a reader well versed in Hellenistic didactic would be able to supply after reading Nicander.

Although the Iliadic passage does not contain the same emphasis on youthfulness and the development of the skill of the deity that we find in the Callimachean hymn, the fact that this is Apollo's first address and appearance within the Homeric epic may bear relevance to the Ovidian literary sequence. If we examine how Ovid describes the god, the specific epithet of arquitenens also adds to this picture of a lack of secure qualification: commentators note its tone of studied archaism, citing Naevius’ arquitenens…Pythius (‘bow-brandishing Pythian god’, Bellum Punicum fr. 30 Morel), but tend to neglect the potential tonal discord that results when applying the considerable gravitas of such an archaism to the young god about to accomplish his first godlike act. It seems preferable to take it as farcical or tongue-in-cheek, particularly with the proleptic appellation of Pythius that comes from awareness of the Naevian line (for he has not yet slain the Python); such an interpretation would be tonally continuous with the humour of this act of killing the Python being understood as accidental.

Apollo, epic narrator

It is critical to remember that it is the poet's account of the Python's slaying that dilutes its epic-heroic tone, and that Apollo makes identifiable changes to his own retrospective four-line boasting recount of the event to Cupid. The passage is as follows:

On a less prominent level, there is an exchange between the quantifiable elements of space and arrows: the indefinite tantum spatii de monte (1.440) becomes tot iugera (1.459), while the mille…telis (1.443) become innumeris sagittis (1.460).

The god also lays claim to a sequence of targets that the careful reader can easily recognize he has not measured himself against: qui dare certa ferae, dare uulnera possumus hosti (1.458). It is generous to call red and roe deer ‘wild beasts’ (ferae), which is the first indication of Apollo's tendency to hyperbole; on the basis of most textual evidence, the dammis capreisque targeted by the god are categorically placed outside of the epic realm.Footnote ²⁹ However, he moves into the territory of outright fiction with the mention of hosti; who is the enemy he refers to? For the Iliadic ruler of Tenedos it would be the Danaans, and for the Callimachean Artemis, unjust men, but this is the first that the reader of the Metamorphoses hears of an enemy of the god. Ironically, the enmity between deer and snakes detailed by Nicander is cast as a ‘historical enmity’,Footnote ³⁰ but the mention of any enemy of Apollo should leave the reader questioning the veracity of his account. Apollo seemingly endeavours to establish for himself a more securely stratified pedigree of targets for his arrows to aid the elevation of his deed to a more guaranteed epic status than that granted by the poet in the original account: he does not leave the potential slippage for interpreting it as an accident, as is the case with the Ovidian narrator.

Beyond these details, it is the crucial adjective tumidum (‘swollen’, 1.460) that is applied to the Python that truly changes the narrative tone. Apollo professes his entry into epic territory with the pointed use of this adjective to describe the vanquished Python.Footnote ³¹ This word has a notable place in the lexicon of literary critical vocabulary. Often, it has the connotation of misguided bombast and falling short of one's literary goals.Footnote ³² Catullus’ tumidus epic poet, Antimachus (tumido…Antimacho, 95.10), provides a classic example. In the stylistic realm, Gellius notes in his description of the three approved writing styles (uberis, gracilis, and mediocris, ‘grand’, ‘graceful’, and ‘middle’) that sic plerumque sufflati atque tumidi fallunt pro uberibus (‘thus oftentimes inflated and bombastic stylists deceived themselves that they belong to the grand manner’, NA 6.14.3–4), while Pliny finds himself justifying his own literary methodology with the admittance of quia uisus es mihi in scriptis meis adnotasse quaedam ut tumida quae ego sublimia, ut improba quae audentia, ut nimia quae ego plena arbitrabar (‘because it seemed to me that you had designated certain passages in my writings overblown that I deemed sublime, immoderate which I deemed bold, and excessive which I deemed fully treated’, Ep. 9.26.5).Footnote ³³ Tumidus is most commonly used to describe a storm-swollen sea, an image that is frequently drawn upon for metapoetic purposes.Footnote ³⁴ The inclusion of tumidus in such a critical vocabulary allowed its transformation into an epic tag (much like arma) in certain frameworks.Footnote ³⁵ Although tumidus is not being used directly within this contextual framework here, it can still be considered as a statement of epic intent.Footnote ³⁶

Apollo's fictions: Tityos and hyper-epic

Apollo's ‘epicizing’ of the Python's death transgresses the rules of writing poetry familiarly espoused in the tradition of the Callimachean recusatio – the rule of adhering to one's appropriate sphere of knowledge, and of not overreaching the poetic arena yielded by inspirational power. An accidental discovery of the Python and a strictly necessary use of his bow, rather than an act of heroic daring, would certainly not constitute an epic deed deserving of song. Apollo, by addressing Cupid and recasting his victory over the tumidus Python, tries to carve out a space for himself as an epic poet, in contrast to the Ovidian narrator's distanced, ironic account of the serpent's death. At this juncture, it is appropriate to interrogate further Apollo's desire to be considered not only a doer of epic deeds but a ‘writer’ of epic poetry, and to ask whether that can assist in explaining the fictive gaps in his tale. As mentioned previously, one incongruous detail that features in his account is the unexplained and unelaborated hostis. The following line could yield an interpretative clue: qui modo pestifero tot iugera uentre prementem / strauimus (‘who burdened so many stretches of land with its pestilential paunch’, 1.459–60). As Bömer notes, iugera (nine, to be precise) is typically used as a measure for the expanse of space that Tityos covers, stretched out in the Underworld.Footnote ³⁷ Is there any reason here for Apollo to invoke Tityos?Footnote ³⁸ According to some accounts, the slaying of Tityos was the first exploit of the young god, when, shortly after birth, he killed the giant who was attempting to assault his mother as she made her way to Pytho.Footnote ³⁹ Other accounts place Apollo's slaying of the Python first.Footnote ⁴⁰ Within the epic tradition, Statius links the two events closely (Theb. 1.709–11 and 7.349–54), and there is good reason to connect the two: like the Python, Tityos was a nursling of the Earth,Footnote ⁴¹ either a direct or a foster child, and, as a giant, had a snake-like form. If Apollo is indeed hinting at Tityos as the vanquished hostis, a number of possible interpretations arise.

On one level, if Apollo is trying to further heroicize his act by recalling the slaying of Tityos, he is deviating even further from the appropriate poetic boundaries: by hinting at a gigantomachy (if not the Gigantomachy), he is pushing the delineation between epic and hyper-epic, and treading further into bombastic territory.Footnote ⁴² Writing a gigantomachy is precisely what Ovid claims to have been attempting to do when he was halted once again at Amores 2.1.11–15: the parallel between the poet of the Amores and the Apollo of the Metamorphoses becomes even tighter if they are both forced to jettison the shared epic pretensions of a gigantomachy.Footnote ⁴³ Ovid's elegiac experience is filtered anew through the person of the young god, and the experience of Apollo becomes a compressed poetic echo of both Amores 1.1 and 2.1, drawing simultaneously on being cut down to size from both epic and hyper-epic ambitions, and reinforcing the potential to read the opening amatory tale of Apollo and Daphne in some ways as the true beginning of the Metamorphoses.

The narrator says explicitly that Apollo had never before used his arrows except on red deer and roe deer, and so, if we identify the hostis that Apollo cites as Tityos, this is a moment of irrevocable divergence between the two accounts. As readers, how are we meant to negotiate this gap? The god might be asking his audience (Cupid and the reader) to supply the appropriate mythological story of the vengeance exacted upon his mother's assailant, but, by doing so, he is aspiring to write himself out of the poem at hand and into his own epic. Prepared by the poet's account, the external audience has no choice but to supply the alternative mythological strain. In consequence, Apollo's poetic credibility is further, crushingly deflated: the alternative myth recounts Artemis as the slayer of Tityos. Callimachus hails her as Ἄρτεμι Παρθενίη Τιτυοκτόνε (‘Artemis, Maiden, Slayer of Tityos’, Hymn 3.110), and Pindar recounts that Tityos was hunted down by Artemis in order that a man should learn to touch only those loves which are within his reach:

Pindar's version is especially appropriate in light of the events that Apollo's unmerited boasting sets into motion: Apollo will burn with a love that will never be returned, a love that he follows and to whom he says non insequor hostis (‘I do not pursue you as an enemy’, 1.504). Apollo's undeserved foray into epic is marked not only by his label of the Python as tumidus, but also by his attempted appropriation of a deed that cannot belong to him.Footnote ⁴⁴ While scholars have correctly identified Apollo's slaying of the Python as mock-epic, or attempted epic, because the distinction between the accounts of the Python's death has not been fully explored, the recognition that it is only in Apollo's address to Cupid that the deed is made ‘epic’ has been glossed over. With the acknowledgement of Nicander's influence upon the passage, the Python's death becomes an accidental exploit of the young god that is subsequently elevated to inappropriate epic proportions by the god himself. Apollo's unmerited attempts at epic poetry then cause Cupid to intervene on behalf of the poem's elegiac programme; in some ways, Nicander provides Ovid with the antidote for Apollonian hyper-epic.

The mediation of epic tone provided by reference to Nicander also tempers the transition between the tale of the Python and the first love of Apollo that is spoken of as the divide between epic and elegy. This transition has been granted greater continuity by Ziogas, who reads it as a poetic echo of the transition from the Hesiodic Theogony to the Catalogue of Women: the Python, as the first exploit of Apollo, balances the defeat of Typhoeus as the last foe of Zeus, and Daphne opens the space of poetic and thematic recalibration that comes with the shift from the Theogony to the Catalogue.Footnote ⁴⁵ The name Python closely resembles Typhon, which brings it closer contact to Typhoeus.Footnote ⁴⁶ Apollo attempting to add Tityos to the mix through hostis here strengthens this Hesiodic link, because, as previously noted, some mythological sources place Apollo's slaying of Tityos first, which would provide the similar, necessary balance to the last effort of Zeus, his defeat of Typhoeus.

In this way, even Apollo's attempted diversion of the poetic course on an upwards track is nevertheless subsumed into Ovid's mastery of narrative transition. It is also possible to remark upon Ovid's reliance on Hesiod for a mechanism of poetic continuity in the transition from epic to elegy in light of the Hesiodic influence upon Nicander. Nicander names Hesiod directly at Ther. 12, amid the proemial shift, but the verb κατέλεξε (‘tell in order, enumerate’) marks him as a writer of catalogue poetry, specifically of the Catalogue of Women, rather than the perhaps expected, more overtly didactic Works and Days.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, the mythological material that Nicander is speaking of, the Titanomachy, is sourced from the Theogony. Therefore, Hesiod in Nicander's proem – as it shifts from an overtly didactic opening to aetio-mythological material – is evoked in a way that points to the different topics of these two works nevertheless by a shared author. In this way, we might also view Ovid's treatment of Nicander: the first extended interaction with the author, as I have argued, is not from his Metamorphoses but from the didactic Theriaca.Footnote ⁴⁸

In re-examining the poetic impulses and motivations that contribute to the Cupid–Apollo recusatio, it becomes clear that the tension between epic and elegy is even more fraught than previously perceived, and that ‘epic’ can be appropriated and raised from the slippage between word and deed. From this tension arise notable generic interactions between epic and elegy that characterize the Apollo–Daphne episode. If we are prepared to look at the differences between the tale that the detached Ovidian narrator tells about the Python's death and the version pompously broadcast to Cupid as Apollo basks in its afterglow, we can see that the god has made considerable changes. I would submit that Nicander's Theriaca has been an unrecognized literary influence behind this programmatic opening myth sequence, and that supplying knowledge of this passage can lend a satisfactory sense of poetic logic to parsing the differences between the accounts. It allows Ovid to make a joke at the god's expense in casting his feat as an accidental accomplishment rather than a heroic achievement, presenting a deflationary view of Apollo that is consonant with his other depictions in the poem. Ultimately, it represents the intersection of learnedness and irreverence that neatly encapsulates the wit and spirit of Ovidian verse.