- 1 Ewald 1942: 78, of a passage in contra Symmachum 1.
- 2 Mahoney 1934: 200.
- 3 Hardie 2020: 188-90.
- 4 Filosini 2022: 31.
1 I start with a general question about late antique allusion, and a general observation about Christian uses of metamorphosis. Firstly, what kind of allusive practice should we expect in a late fourth-/early fifth-century Latin poet such as Prudentius? In an older, and one of the most obsessively detailed, accounts of Prudentius’ use of Ovid, Sister Marie Ewald says: ‘The artistic device employed is that of contamination whereby Prudentius culls details of imagery from many passages of Ovid and Vergil and artistically blends them into a new pattern.’1 (my underlining) ‘Contamination’ is a term that Georg Knauer would later use in a more analytical way of an aspect of Virgil’s imitation of Homer. ‘Culls’ may suggest the image of an anthology, or perhaps of bees collecting honey from many different plants. The emphasis on ‘many’ chimes with one of the most common images in discussion of late antique poetics, and late antique aesthetics more generally, the mosaic, viewed as a work of art compiled from numerous small pieces. Here it is, for example, in another older work, on a passage in the Hamartigenia describing Lucifer’s transformation into a serpent, assembled, Albertus Mahoney says, from ‘a mosaic of typical Vergilian phraseology on serpents’.2 Incidentally, this is one of Prudentius’ tours de force of metamorphic narrative, which also draws heavily on Ovid, as I have discussed elsewhere.3 We find the same image in a very recent essay on Prudentius’ Ovidian allusion by Stefania Filosini: ‘To conclude, then, the Ovidian presences in the Psychomachia are many and diverse: in the microcosm of individual verses, these allusions are rarely obvious, having been disguised through a process of careful textual intarsia. However, they speak to the great literariness of Prudentius’ writing, and the pleasure he seems to take in selecting, from the great and varied storehouse of poetic tradition, the most appropriate tesserae to enhance the mosaic of his text.’4
2But, beyond the accumulation of fragments of earlier texts, Prudentian intertextuality is often compliant with a reader response alert to the wider contexts of the imitative tesserae, and a response open to larger patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, correction and inversion. There appears, in the experience of reading late Latin poetry, more continuity than discontinuity with the intertextuality that Latinists for some decades now have looked for in earlier Latin poetry, from Catullus and Lucretius to the Flavian epic poets. In this respect, Prudentius is no outlier in the map of late antique Latin poetry. In my Classicism and Christianity in late antique Latin poetry (2019) I made the case, revisionist of what has become a dominant trend at least in Anglophone criticism, that the allusive practice of Claudian, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, Rutilius Namatianus is not best seen as something ‘late antique’, fragmented and mosaic-like, qualitatively different from that of earlier Latin poetry, in one of the successive iterations of a version of Michael Roberts’ highly influential 1989 book on The jeweled style. This paper is further exemplification of my argument.
3 I said ‘Anglophone criticism’: continental, and in particular German, criticism has tended to go on different paths. Two of the best (in my view) studies of Prudentian intertextuality, Lühken 2002 and Heinz 2007, do not see a watershed between the intertextuality of earlier and late antique Latin poets.
- 5 See the concise and insightful overview in Gildenhard and Zissos 2013.
- 6 The following is based on a discussion in Hardie 2019: 24-5.
4 Secondly, metamorphosis plays a major role in the central narratives of Christ and of the Christian individual.5 I take an example from a contemporary of Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, in the famous verse correspondence with his former teacher Ausonius, in which Paulinus justifies his withdrawal from their former shared literary and cultural pursuits that followed his conversion to a stricter and more austere form of Christianity, Poem 10.138-43:6
non, arbitror, istic
confessus dicar mutatae in praua notandum
errorem mentis, quoniam sim sponte professus
me non mente mea uitam mutasse priorem:
mens noua mi, fateor, mens non mea, non mea quondam,
sed mea nunc auctore Deo …
I do not think that by saying this I shall be considered to have admitted the reprehensible sin of a mind changed for the worse, though willingly proclaiming that I have amended my former life through a purpose not my own. I admit that I have a new mind. My mind is not my own – or rather, it was not mine before, but now it is mine through God’s agency. (transl. P. G. Walsh, adapted)
- 7 Fränkel 1945: 163 for a summative statement of the thesis.
5mens noua alludes to a moment of personal metamorphosis in Horace’s Dionysiac Odes 3.25, 2-3 quos agor in specus | uelox mente noua? (‘into what caves am I being driven at such speed, in a new state of mind?’). The repetitions of the personal adjective (non) mea, non mea, sed mea, point rather to Ovidian formulations. In Metamorphoses 10 Myrrha, in love with her own father, says (339) nunc, quia iam meus est, non est meus (‘now, because he is already mine, he is not mine’). This is a different kind of divided identity from that experienced by Paulinus: Myrrha complains that because Cinyras is ‘my’ father, he cannot be ‘my’ sexual partner. Split identity is a recurrent phenomenon in the world of Ovidian metamorphoses, here transferred by Paulinus to a spiritual metamorphosis. The experience recorded by Paulinus in this poem is of a transition between two worlds. Even if we reject Hermann Fränkel’s account of Ovid himself as a poet between the two worlds of paganism and Christianity,7 the kinds of in-betweenness repeatedly explored in the Metamorphoses lend themselves readily to the kind of spiritual autobiography of which we have here an example. Christian – as well as traditional – Latin poetry of late antiquity makes good use of Ovidian metamorphosis.
6 Turning now to Prudentius, Margit Kamptner offers an exemplary case study in reading Ovidian intertextuality as a pointed and controlled dialogue between alluding poet and source text, in a passage of Peristephanon 13 describing another conversion, that of Cyprian, from the use of artes sinistrae in the service of sexual licence, to the love of Christ (Per. 13.25-31, 57-60):8
- 9 Reading seuerum, rather than seueram, with Kamptner who supports it by the allusion to Am. 3.4.43 ( (...)
luxuriae rabiem tantae cohibet repente Christus, 25
discutit et tenebras de pectore, pellit et furorem,
inplet amore sui, dat credere, dat pudere facti.
iamque figura alia est, quam quae fuit oris et nitoris:
exuitur tenui uultus cute, transit in seuerum9,
deflua caesaries compescitur ad breues capillos. 30
ipse modesta loqui, spem quaerere, regulam tenere,
uiuere iustitia Christi, penetrare dogma nostrum.
ille ego, uipereis quem tu bonus oblitum uenenis, 57
criminibus uariis tinctum miseratus abluisti
iamque tuum fieri mandas, fio Cyprianus alter
et nouus ex ueteri nec iam reus aut nocens, ut ante. 60
- 10 Translations of Prudentius are from H. J. Thomson’s Loeb, adapted where necessary.
But all at once Christ checked this great rage of self-indulgence, scattered the darkness from his heart, drove out its frenzy, and filled it with love of Him, giving him the gift of faith and of shame for his past behaviour. And now his face and his elegant style changed from their former fashion; his countenance lost the softness of its skin and went over to an austere look, the flowing locks were clipped short, his speech was sober, he looked for the hope of Christ, holding to his rule, living according to his righteousness, and seeking to fathom our doctrine.10
I am he on whom Thou in thy goodness didst take compassion when I was all defiled with the venom of serpents and stained with many a sin, and didst wash me clean and from henceforth bid me be thine, and I became another Cyprian, a new man in place of the old, no longer the guilty sinner I was before.
7I shall pick out some of the main points that emerge from Kamptner’s analysis of the Ovidian intertextuality in these passages. Firstly, Prudentius alludes not to one, but to a combination of Ovidian passages, from both the poem of changes, the Metamorphoses, and the amatory poetry. I give the passages below, emboldening words and phrases re-used by Prudentius:
Met. 15.252-7
Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque nouatrix
ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras;
nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo,
sed uariat faciemque nouat, nascique uocatur 255
incipere esse aliud quam quod fuit ante, morique,
desinere illud idem.
Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the great renewer, ever makes up forms from other forms. Be sure there’s nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form. What we call birth is but a beginning to be other than what one was before; and death is but cessation of a former state. (transl. F. J. Miller, Loeb)
Ars 3.73-9
quam cito (me miserum!) laxantur corpora rugis
et perit, in nitido qui fuit ore color,
quasque fuisse tibi canas a uirgine iuras, 75
sparguntur subito per caput omne comae!
anguibus exuitur tenui cum pelle uetustas,
nec faciunt ceruos cornua iacta senes;
nostra sine auxilio fugiunt bona: carpite florem,
qui, nisi carptus erit, turpiter ipse cadit.
How soon, alas, in wrinkles sags the flesh,
Flees from the cheek its old complexion fresh,
And hairs you swear have been from girlhood white
O’er all your head will spring up overnight.
Snakes shed their dotage with their filmy sloughs,
The roebuck’s youth survives the horns he doffs:
Man’s glories fade and help avails him not:
Pluck then the flower, which left will merely rot.
(transl. A. D. Melville)
Am. 3.4.43-4
si sapis, indulge dominae uultusque severos
exue nec rigidi iura tuere uiri.
If you have any sense, indulge your mistress, wipe the stern look off your face, and do not uphold the rights of a strict husband.
Am. 3.14.15-16
quae facis, haec facito; tantum fecisse negato,
nec pudeat coram uerba modesta loqui.
Do what you do, but just say that you didn’t do it; do not be ashamed to speak modestly in my presence.
8Prudentius repeatedly mines the central passage from Pythagoras’ doctrine of universal change at Met. 15.252-7 in his, and Cyprian’s own, accounts of the saint’s personal transformation. Pythagoras claims that being born, nasci, is simply the name given to the passage from one shape to another. Prudentius does not use the language of birth, but his reader might connect the Ovidian nascique uocatur with the Christian doctrine of a spiritual rebirth, associated particularly with baptism.
9 Rather than constituting a random ‘mosaic’ of Ovidian passages, Prudentius’ allusions draw the reader’s attention to features shared by the disparate Ovidian intertexts. The passage from Ars 3 shares with the passage from Metamorphoses 15 the theme of metamorphosis, here the change from youth to old age, one of the changes listed by Pythagoras himself, Met. 15.228-33. One of his examples is Helen, imagined in the position of an ageing elegiac puella looking in a mirror.
10 The context of an Ovidian passage radiates more widely in Prudentius’ poem. Amores 3.4.43-4 is part of Ovid’s advice to a husband to allow his wife to commit adultery. Earlier in Peristephanon 13 we have been told that Cyprian was formerly a magician, who used his magic to rouse ‘adulterous passions in a wife and undo the rights of the marriage bed’, 24 quo geniale tori ius solueret aestuante nupta.
11 There are pointed examples of Kontrastimitation. For Pythagoras and the teacher of Ars amatoria 3, the coming of old age is something to be lamented. Cyprian’s sudden ageing is valued positively in Christian thought.11 Amores 3.14.15-16 advises the puella to speak modestly, in dissimulation of her scandalous lifestyle, while for Cyprian modesta loqui is fully concordant with his new life as a Christian.
12 The biblical allusion in these passages of Peristephanon 13 does not form part of Kamptner’s concerns in her article. 59-60 fio … nouus ex ueteri combines a Pythagorean with a Pauline novelty, alluding, obviously, to Ephesians 4:22-4 deponere uos secundum pristinam conuersationem ueterem hominem, qui corrumpitur secundum desideria erroris. renouamini autem spiritu mentis uestrae, et induite nouum hominem ‘That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the new man’ (King James Version).
13Line 29 exuitur tenui uultus cute closely tracks Ars 3.77 anguibus exuitur tenui cum pelle uetustas, but in a Christian context the reader will easily remember the Pauline ‘put off the old man’ and ‘put on the new man’. The cutting of Cyprian’s flowing hair may also have a specific reference to Paul’s admonition that ‘if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him. But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her’ (1Cor. 11:14-15). There is a further relevance to these Pauline allusions, in that Prudentius constructs his Cyprian as a latter-day Paul, following Cyprian’s own use of Pauline imagery to describe his own spiritual life.12 For my own immediate purposes, the point to hold on to is Prudentius’ skilful splicing of Ovidian with biblical allusion.
- 13 A first version of this paper was written before I came across Laurence Gosserez’s excellent 2019 a (...)
14One of the great set-pieces of Prudentian metamorphosis is the narrative of the transformation into a pillar of salt of the wife of Lot, in the didactic poem on the origin of sin, Hamartigenia, whose express purpose is to combat the dualist thesis of Marcion 723-76:13
accipe gestarum monumenta insignia rerum,
praelusit quibus historia spectabile signum.
Loth fugiens Sodomis ardentibus omnia secum 725
pignera cara domus properabat sede relicta
nubibus urbicremis subducere, sulpure cum iam
nimboso ignitus coelum subtexeret
aër flagrantemque diem crepitans incenderet imber.
angelus hanc hospes legem praescripserat ollis 730
emissus uirtute Dei sub imagine dupla,
omnis ut e portis iret domus atque in apertum
dirigeret constans oculos, nec pone reflexo
lumine regnantes per moenia cerneret ignes:
‘nemo, memor Sodomae, quae mundi forma cremandi est, 735
ut semel e muris gressum promouerit, ore
post tergum uerso respectet funera rerum.’
Loth monitis sapiens obtemperat, at leuis uxor
mobilitate animi torsit muliebre retrorsus
ingenium Sodomisque suis reuocabilis haesit. 740
traxerat Eua uirum dirae ad consortia culpae:
haec peccans sibi sola perit; solidata metallo
diriguit fragili saxumque liquabile facta
stat mulier, sicut steterat prius, omnia seruans
caute sigillati longum salis effigiata, 745
et decus et cultum frontemque oculosque comamque
et flexam in tergum faciem paulumque relata
menta retro, antiquae monumenta rigentia noxae.
liquitur illa quidem salsis sudoribus uda,
sed nulla ex fluido plenae dispendia formae 750
sentit deliquio, quantumque armenta saporum
attenuant saxum, tantum lambentibus umor
sufficit attritamque cutem per damna reformat.
hoc meruit titulo peccatrix femina sisti,
infirmum fluidumque animum per lubrica soluens 755
consilia et fragilis iussa ad caelestia. Uoti
propositum contra non conmutabile seruat
Loth ingressus iter, nec moenia respicit alto
in cinerem conlapsa rogo, populumque perustum
et mores populi, tabularia, iura forumque, 760
balnea, propolas, meritoria, templa, theatra,
et circum cum plebe sua, madidasque popinas.
quidquid agunt homines Sodomorum incendia iustis
ignibus inuoluunt et Christo iudice damnant.
haec fugisse semel satis est; non respicit ultra 765
Loth noster, fragilis sed coniunx respicit, et quae
fugerat inuerso mutabilis ore reuisit,
atque inter patrias perstat durata fauillas.
en tibi signatum libertatis documentum,
quo uoluit nos scire Deus, quodcumque sequendum est, 770
sub nostra dicione situm, passimque remissum
alterutram calcare uiam. duo cedere iussi
de Sodomis; alter se proripit, altera mussat,
ille gradum celerat fugiens, contra illa renutat.
liber utrique animus, sed dispar utrique uoluntas. 775
diuidit huc illuc rapiens sua quemque libido.
Listen now to a famous record of events whereby history has given beforehand a notable sign. Lot was seeking in hurried flight from blazing Sodom, where he had abandoned his home, to save himself and all the dear ones of his house from the storm that was consuming the city with fire. Already the air was glowing red and veiling the sky with sulphurous clouds, and a rattling rain was kindling the day into flames. An angel visitor sent forth by the power of God in twofold shape had laid down for them this rule, that all the household go forth from the gates and keep their eyes unswervingly on the open country, nor turn their gaze back to see the fires that were lording it over the city: ‘Let no one think of Sodom, which is the prefiguration of the burning of the world, and, when once he has stepped from the walls, turn his face back to look upon the death of all things.’ Lot, being wise, obeyed the warning, but his light-minded wife with unsteady purpose, like a woman, turned her thoughts backwards, and hearing the call of her dear Sodom, cleaved to it. Eve had drawn her husband into partnership in an accursed fault, but this woman by her sin brought death on herself alone. She stiffened in a solid mass of wasting stone; turned into soluble rock she stands there a woman still, as she had stood before, preserving every detail modelled in a pillar of salt that has long borne her image, her graceful form, her dress, brow and eyes and hair, her face turned to look behind, the chin carried slightly backwards, a stiff memorial of an ancient sin. Her wet figure dissolves, indeed, in salt sweats, but she suffers no loss to her full form from the waste that drips away; and however much the cattle wear away the savoury rock, there is always as much moisture for them to lick, and she grows again the skin that is rubbed off and lost. Such is the memorial statue earned by a woman who sinned, for she let her weak, unstable resolution melt away in slippery courses and had no firm constancy to keep heaven’s commands. Lot on the other hand kept his purpose unchanged once he started on his way, and cast no thought back to the city which had fallen in a heap of ashes like a lofty funeral-pyre, or to its consumed people and its people’s life, its archives, courts and market-place, its baths, its hucksters’ stalls, its brothels and temples and theatres, its circus and the masses that thronged it, and its drunken cookshops. The flames of Sodom enwrap all the concerns of men in righteous fire and condemn them under the judgment of Christ. To have escaped all this once is enough; our good Lot casts no glance back again; but his frail wife does glance back; in her inconstancy she turns her face and looks again on what she had fled from, and now she stands petrified amid the embers of her homeland. In that figure you have a proof of freedom, whereby God willed that we should know that the course we are to take lies in our own discretion and we are everywhere free to tread either path. Two were bidden to leave Sodom; one hastens away, the other falters; one quickens his step in flight, the other refuses. Each has freedom of will, but each wills differently. Men are carried separate ways each by his own free choice.
Gen. 19:26 respiciensque uxor eius post se, uersa est in statuam salis (Vulgate). ‘But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’
15The story is told as a vivid illustration of the doctrine that sin arises from free will, the choice between good and evil, first in the garden of Eden, when Eve freely assented to the persuasion of the serpent, so choosing to go against god’s prohibition, and Adam, in turn, chose to assent to Eve’s persuasion. A brief account of the Edenic Fall is followed by four longer examples of the freedom to choose between good and evil: Lot’s choice to obey the angel’s instruction not to look back at Sodom, and his wife’s choice to succumb to the temptation to look back; Ruth’s decision to accompany her mother-in-law Naomi back to Judah, where she will marry Boaz and become an ancestor of Christ, and the other daughter-in-law, Orpah’s, decision to leave Naomi, becoming the mother of Goliath; the choice of two brothers at a crossroad (the Pythagorean biuium), between a thorny and rocky upwards path, leading to the stars, and a pleasantly shaded green path through a sloping plain to a miry bog; and the choice of some birds in a flock of doves to take the bait set by a bird-catcher, and be trapped on the ground, and the choice of others not to, and so be able to fly back up to the starry sky.
- 14 Adam’s choice is set up as an internal debate, of a typically Ovidian kind, at Hamart. 720-2 nunc i (...)
16 Classical models inform this sequence from the start. Of Adam’s choice we are told, 717-18 namque et Deus ante | suaserat ut meliora uolens sequeretur ‘for God had before urged him to follow the better, of his own free will’, so anticipating the choice of Ovid’s Medea at Metamorphoses 7.19-21 sed trahit inuitam noua uis, aliudque cupido, | mens aliud suadet; uideo meliora proboque, | deteriora sequor ‘but a new force drags me against my will; desire urges one thing, my mind another. I see and approve the better course, I follow the worse.’ Prudentius’ uolens corrects the Ovidian Medea’s claim that love pulls her against her will, inuitam.14
17As god laid down a prohibition in Eden, so the angel at the destruction of Sodom laid down a prescription that those leaving the burning city should not look back, 730 angelus hanc hospes legem praescripserat ollis; 735-7 ‘nemo … ore | post tergum uerso respectet funera rerum.’ Prudentius alludes to the Virgilian injunction of Proserpina to Orpheus and Eurydice, Geo. 4.486-7 Eurydice … pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem, imitated by Ovid at Met. 10.50-1 hanc simul et legem Rhodopeius accipit heros, | ne flectat retro sua lumina, donec Auernas | exierit ualles; aut inrita dona futura ‘For the Thracian hero received this condition at the same time, that he should not turn his eyes backwards until he had left the Avernan vale; otherwise the gift would be void.’
18It is Orpheus who looks back, Geo. 4.491 uictusque animi respexit ‘overcome in his mind he looked back’ (Met. 10.57 flexit amans oculos ‘the lover turned back his eyes’), but Eurydice who is lost. In the story of Lot and his wife, Lot obeys the angel’s instruction (Ham. 758 nec moenia respicit; 765-6 non respicit ultra | Loth noster), while it is the wife who looks back, the physical expression of a mental lack of constancy, Ham. 738-40 at leuis uxor | mobilitate animi torsit muliebre retrorsus | ingenium.
- 15 The wife of Lot and Niobe are paired as pagan and biblical examples of those who are turned into a (...)
19Orpheus cannot endure the loss of his wife. Eve drags Adam into a partnership in sin. Lot’s wife involves only herself in her downfall, Ham. 742 haec peccans sibi sola perit. This solipsist isolation she shares with the Ovidian model for her physical transformation, Niobe: Met. 6.301-12:15
dumque rogat, pro qua rogat, occidit: orba resedit
exanimes inter natos natasque uirumque
deriguitque malis. nullos mouet aura capillos,
in uultu color est sine sanguine, lumina maestis
stant inmota genis, nihil est in imagine uiuum. 305
ipsa quoque interius cum duro lingua palato
congelat, et uenae desistunt posse moueri;
nec flecti ceruix nec bracchia reddere motus
nec pes ire potest; intra quoque uiscera saxum est.
flet tamen et ualidi circumdata turbine uenti 310
in patriam rapta est; ibi fixa cacumine montis
liquitur, et lacrimas etiamnum marmora manant.
And even while she prayed, she for whom she prayed fell dead. Now does the childless mother sit down amid the lifeless bodies of her sons, her daughters, and her husband, in stony grief. Her hair stirs not in the breeze; her face is pale and bloodless, and her eyes are fixed and staring in her sad face. There is nothing alive in the picture. Her very tongue is silent, frozen to her mouth’s roof, and her veins can move no longer; her neck cannot bend nor her arms move nor her feet go. Within also her vitals are stone. But still she weeps; and, caught up in a strong, whirling wind, she is rapt away to her own native land. There, set on a mountain’s peak, she weeps; and even to this day tears trickle from the marble. (Loeb transl.)
- 16 On Prudentius’ use of the Ovidian Niobe see Salvatore 1955: 48-52; Hanley 1959; Palla 1981 on Ham. (...)
- 17 742 metallo is literally a substance obtained by mining or quarrying, so appropriate for rock salt.
20There is an intricate play of similarity and dissimilarity between the metamorphoses of Niobe and of the wife of Lot, an intertextual mirroring of the relationship between the before and after states of a metamorphosis.16 One might say that the Ovidian metamorphosis of Niobe has been metamorphosed into the Prudentian metamorphosis of the wife of Lot. Both women stiffen into mineral hardness, Ham. 742-4 solidata metallo | diriguit fragili saxumque liquabile facta | stat mulier, 768 atque inter patrias perstat durata fauillas ~ Met. 6.303 deriguitque malis, 304-5 lumina maestis | stant inmota genis. The use of saxum at Ham. 743 to refer to salt is perhaps a nod to the Ovidian saxum (Met. 6.309).17 Both women are rendered motionless, Met. 6.304-5 lumina maestis | stant inmota genis; Ham. 744 stat. Lot’s wife remains, metamorphosed, in her patria, Ham. 768 inter patrias perstat durata fauillas; the metamorphosed Niobe is whisked back to her patria, Met. 6.311. Hardened into immobility, both women shed a perpetual flow of liquid, the paradox pointed by Ovid in the assonant juxtaposition of marmora manant at the end of line 312, liquitur, et lacrimas etiamnum marmora manant; cf. Ham. 749 liquitur illa quidem salsis sudoribus uda, 750-1 fluido … deliquio, 752 umor.
- 18 In antiquity tears and sweat were considered to be the same liquid: Onians 1951: 202.
21 The origin of this liquidity differs. In the case of Niobe, the liquid is the tears that she begins to shed (310 flet tamen), even as every other part of her body is in the process of being immobilised through petrifaction, the tears which continue to pour off the rock that she has become, to the present day. William Anderson (1972) comments on Met. 6. 310-2: ‘What interpretation we are to place on her weeping – remorse for her words, sorrow for her children, shock at disaster – Ovid does not prescribe. One thing is clear, though: her tears are a permanent denial of that once foolishly asserted felicity.’ In the case of Lot’s wife, the flow of salsus sudor, another bodily secretion,18 is the physical expression of a settled prior mental state, a spiritual fluidity and instability, not a reaction to a newly arisen situation, Ham. 754-6 hoc meruit titulo peccatrix femina sisti, | infirmum fluidumque animum per lubrica soluens | consilia et fragilis iussa ad caelestia. Unlike Niobe’s hard rock, the pillar of salt is brittle and soluble, fragili, 743, and that too is the material expression of the spiritual condition of Lot’s wife,756 fragilis iussa ad caelestia.
- 19 Salvatore 1955: 51 n. 42.
- 20 6.87-8 Threiciam Rhodopen habet angulus unus et Haemum, | nunc gelidos montes, mortalia corpora quo (...)
22Antonio Salvatore lays emphasis on the moralization in Prudentius’ account of the metamorphosis of Lot’s wife, seeing in it an anticipation of the moralizing exegesis of Ovidian metamorphoses in Fulgentius and Ovide moralisé, and, more particularly, the detailed moralising exegeses of Niobe in the Middle Ages.19 But full-blown moralizing metamorphoses are already to be found in Ovid, particularly when the moral is pointed by an internal narrator. A notable example of petrifaction as a punishment fitting the crime is the fate of the dura puella Anaxarete, narrated by Vertumnus as a warning to the reluctant Pomona in Metamorphoses 14. In the episode immediately preceding the story of Niobe in Metamorphoses 6, the weaving contest between Minerva and Arachne, the minor panels at the corners of Minerva’s tapestry contain scenes of metamorphoses intended as warnings to Arachne of the folly of challenging a god, including two petrifactions.20
- 21 Palla 1981 on 742 ff. ‘Nell’interpetare il testo biblico Prudenzio applica ad esso la regola del co (...)
23A hard but breakable mineral leads to the slightly paradoxical juxtaposition in Ham. 743 diriguit fragili, followed by the more strongly paradoxical saxum liquabile, a rephrasing of the Ovidian paradox in marmora manant. Is it also paradoxical that the physical fixity of the metamorphosed wife of Lot is punishment for her moral mobility (739 mobilitate animi) and laxity, a punishment for her mutability indeed (767 mutabilis, in contrast to Lot’s propositum … non commutabile, 757)? At one level, her moral mutability is condignly expressed through the process of physical metamorphosis. At another level, her moral mutability is deservedly memorialized in the fixed form of the pillar of salt, 754 hoc meruit titulo peccatrix femina sisti. But this salty statue is itself a perpetuation of the action – or inaction - to which her moral mutability led, that of looking back and standing still.21 Just as the flowing tears perpetuate the condition of Niobe at the moment of her metamorphosis, the pillar of salt is the exact image of the Lot’s wife at the moment of her metamorphosis, Ham. 744-8 stat mulier, sicut steterat prius, omnia seruans | caute sigillati longum salis effigiata, | et decus et cultum frontemque oculosque comamque | et flexam in tergum faciem paulumque relata | menta retro, antiquae monumenta rigentia noxae (and cf. also 768 perstat; 740 haesit). Prudentius uses Ovidian language to register the continuity between the before and after of a metamorphosis: compare Met. 1.236-9 (the first ‘regular’ metamorphosis of a human being in the poem) ueteris seruat uestigia formae ‘retains the traces of his former shape’, followed by eadem x3; 11.401-5 sed enim reuocatus ab acri | caede lupus perstat dulcedine sanguinis asper, | donec inhaerentem lacerae cervice iuuencae | marmore mutauit; | corpus praeterque colorem omnia seruauit ‘But the wolf, though called from his fierce slaughter, still kept on, wild with the sweetness of the blood, until, as he tore a heifer’s neck and held it fast, she changed him to marble. Everything save colour was preserved.’ This moment of standing still is accompanied by a movement, the turning backwards of her head (et flexam in tergum faciem paulumque relata | menta retro), a movement pointedly denied to Ovid’s petrified Niobe, Met. 6.308-9 nec flecti cervix … potest ‘her neck could not be turned backwards.’
- 22 For examples of sisto of ‘setting up’ statues see OLD s.v. 1b.
- 23 post se is another parallel with the Virgilian Eurydice, Geo. 4.487 pone sequens ‘following behind. (...)
- 24 For the sense ‘pillar’, LS gives statua II ‘A pillar’: Vopiscus Aurelianus 37.2 sane Mnesteus poste (...)
24 The punishment for standing still (stat, steterat) is to be set up (sisti, cognate with sto)22 as a statue. statua is the word translated in English as ‘pillar’ in the Vulgate’s brief narrative of the fate of Lot’s wife, Gen. 19:26 respiciensque uxor eius post se,23 uersa est in statuam salis 24 ‘But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’ (King James Version).
- 25 On the ecphrastic aspects of Niobe’s metamorphosis see Feldherr 2004/05: 136 ‘… the moment when Nio (...)
- 26 Cf. Aen. 3.486-7 accipe et haec, manuum tibi quae monimenta mearum | sint, puer, et longum Andromac (...)
- 27 Cf. Ham. 67-8 idcirco specimen posuit spectabile nostris | exemplumque oculis ‘For this reason he s (...)
25The biblical statua intersects with a very Ovidian fascination with the connection between the products of metamorphosis and works of art.25 Prudentius turns from Adam and Eve to the example of Lot and his wife with the lines 723-4, accipe gestarum monumenta insignia rerum,26 | praelusit quibus historia spectabile signum.27 Given the plural monumenta, there may be some doubt as to whether this introduces all four of the following examples of the freedom to choose between good and evil, or just the story of Lot’s wife.
26However, monumenta at line 723 is picked up with specific reference to Lot’s wife at 748 antiquae monumenta rigentia noxae.
- 28 I am grateful to the anonymous referee for drawing my attention to these two texts. Gosserez 2019: (...)
27At one level, monumenta here alludes to the scriptural tradition of the memorial function of the fate of Lot’s wife, inviting successive generations to remember (OLD monumentum 3 ‘memorial’) her sin and its punishment, and warning (moneo) them against repeating it. This tradition is founded on two texts.28 Wisdom 10:6-8 records Wisdom’s liberation of the just man Lot, when he fled from the destruction of the impious, witnesses to which include et incredibilis animae memoria stans figmentum salis ‘and a pillar of salt standing as a monument to an unbelieving soul.’ The memorial function of the pillar, and of the other continuing physical effects of the destruction of the Pentapolis, is driven home in the sentences that follow, Wisdom 10:8 non tantum in hoc lapsi sunt ut ignorarent bona, sed et insipientiae suae reliquerunt hominibus memoriam, ut in his quae peccauerunt nec latere potuissent ‘For because they passed wisdom by, they not only were hindered from recognizing the good, but also left for mankind a reminder of their folly, so that their failures could never go unnoticed.’ At Luke 17:28-37, Jesus speaks of the judgments that will come when the Son of man is revealed, as it was in the days of Lot, when it rained fire and brimstone from heaven. memores estote uxoris Loth ‘remember the wife of Lot.’
- 29 Stam 1940 ad loc., in signum formatus; cf. Apul. Met. 2.19 uitrum fabre sigillatum ‘skilfully mould (...)
- 30 Palla 2010: 235 suggests the punning on signum ‘statue’.
28If the three words antiquae monumenta … noxae (748) taken on their own draw attention to the memorial function of the fate of Lot’s wife, in warning against repetition of her error, the participle rigentia focuses on the material consequence of her sin, her transformation into a hard, statue-like, monument to that sin (cf. 743 diriguit; rigeo and cognates are used frequently of transformation into stone or other hard materials in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The root of insignia and signum recurs at 769 en tibi signatum libertatis documentum. If neither insignia, nor signum, nor signatum denotes a work of art, we may yet see a pun on signum ‘statue’, as we may see a pun on statua at 744 stat mulier, sicut steterat prius, with more explicit language of statuary in the following words, 744-5 omnia seruans | caute sigillati29 longum salis effigiata.30
- 31 Rosati in Barchiesi and Rosati 2024: 652.
29Gianpiero Rosati suggests (on Met. 6.310-2) that marmora at Metamorphoses 6.312 perhaps alludes to the appearance as a statue of Niobe’s rock, as if were a monumentum, an οἰκτρὸν ἄγαλμα ‘pitiable statue’ (the phrase used of the petrified Niobe at Nonnus, Dionysiaca 12.81).31 Greek epigrams on Niobe play with the conceit of a stone statue of a living woman who was metamorphosed into stone: Anth. Pal. 16.129 (adapted by Ausonius, Epigram 57 Green) ‘From a living woman, the gods made me stone; from stone, Praxiteles has made me a living woman again.’ Anth. Pal. 16.130 (Julian of Egypt) ‘You see the true shape of the wretched Niobe, as if still mourning the fate of her children, but if she has not received a soul, don't blame this on the artist, for he portrayed a stone woman.’
- 32 See Hardie 2002: 178-80.
30monumentum is used at the climactic moment of another Ovidian tale of petrifaction, Perseus’ transformation of the suitors of Andromeda into a statue gallery, with the ‘monumentalization’ of Phineus, at Met. 5.227-35 (with other verbal parallels in the Prudentian narrative):32
‘quin etiam mansura dabo monimenta per aeuum,
inque domo soceri semper spectabere nostri,
ut mea se sponsi soletur imagine coniunx.’
dixit et in partem Phorcynida transtulit illam, 230
ad quam se trepido Phineus obuerterat ore.
tum quoque conanti sua uertere lumina ceruix
deriguit, saxoque oculorum induruit umor,
sed tamen os timidum uultusque in marmore supplex
submissaeque manus faciesque obnoxia mansit. 235
‘Nay, but I will make of you a monument that shall endure for ages; and in the house of my father-in-law you shall always stand on view, that so my wife may find solace in the statue of her promised lord.’ So saying, he bore the Gorgon-head where Phineus had turned his fear-struck face. Then, even as he strove to avert his eyes, his neck grew hard and the very tears upon his cheeks were changed to stone. And now in marble was fixed the cowardly face, the suppliant look, the pleading hands, the whole cringing attitude. (Loeb transl.)
- 33 Schol. Ver. Probus malo epitheto putat usum poetam, critici uero naturalia [epitheta a poetis] nusq (...)
- 34 Prudentius refers explicitly to Virgil’s sweating Palladium at Contra Symmachum 2.545-6 Pallas … ub (...)
31salsis sudoribus, the ‘salty sweat’ that pours off the metamorphosed wife of Lot (Ham.749), is a Virgilian iunctura, applied to a literal statue, the Palladium. According to Sinon’s story in Aeneid 2, after Ulysses and Diomedes had removed the statue of Minerva to the Greek camp, it manifested a number of typical statue portents, including sweating, Aen. 2.172-4 uix positum castris simulacrum … salsusque per artus sudor iit ‘Scarcely had the statue been set up in the camp … when a salty sweat flowed over its limbs.’ The ancient commentaries, and Probus in particular, were vexed by the epithet salsus, for reasons that are not entirely clear from the reports.33 But, whatever the reasons, the epithet salsus is entirely appropriate when the ‘statue’ is one made of salt. Prudentius perhaps ‘corrects’ Virgil.34
- 35 fugio, fuga in Aeneid 4: 281, 314, 328, 338, 430, 543, 565, 575.
- 36 When Aeneas realises that his wife is missing as he flees from the burning Troy in Aeneid 2, he ret (...)
- 37 Gosserez 2019: 196.
32This is not the only occasion on which Prudentius includes Virgilian moments in what is predominantly an Ovidian remake. We have seen that the failure of Lot’s wife to obey the injunction not to look back, as she and her husband make their way out of the hell that is the burning Sodom, alludes to Orpheus’ disastrous backwards glance in Georgics 4, as he leads his wife out of the Underworld. Virgil alludes to that episode in Aeneid 2, when Aeneas disastrously fails to look back, as he and his family make their way out of the hell that is the burning Troy, and so loses his wife, Creusa. But it is the backwards glance at another woman, who claimed, at least, to be Aeneas’ wife, to which Prudentius alludes at Ham. 758-9, Loth ingressus iter, nec moenia respicit alto | in cinerem collapsa rogo. Obedient to the angel’s command not to look back, and unbending in his quest for salvation, Lot does not repeat Aeneas’ backwards glance at a city lit up by flames, at the beginning of Aeneid 5, 1-4 Interea medium Aeneas iam classe tenebat | certus iter … | moenia respiciens, quae iam infelicis Elissae | conlucent flammis ‘Meanwhile Aeneas now held his fleet steadfastly on its course on the open sea… looking back at the walls, which were now glowing in the flames of poor Dido’s pyre’. But, in other respects, the cities which Aeneas and Lot put behind them have a number of things in common. Both Aeneas and Lot are in flight from a city lit up by flames. In Aeneid 4 Aeneas is repeatedly told to flee.35 Lot flees from the burning Sodom, without even so much as a backwards glance, while his wife reverses flight into return, Ham.765-7 haec fugisse semel satis est; non respicit ultra | Loth noster, fragilis sed coniunx respicit, et quae | fugerat inuerso mutabilis ore reuisit.36 Here again, the classical is interlaced with the biblical: Laurence Gosserez points out that Lot’s refusal to look back coincides with Paul’s determination at Philipp. 3:13-14 quae quidem retro sunt obliuiscens ad ea uero quae sunt in priora extendens me ad destinatum persequor ad brauium supernae uocationis Dei in Christo Iesu ‘forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’37
33The burning Sodom is a figurative funeral pyre (758-9 alto | in cinerem collapsa rogo). Dido dies, and is cremated, on a literal rogus, Aen. 4.640 rogum, 646 conscendit furibunda rogos, the pyre on to which she ‘collapses’, 664 collapsam, when she stabs herself. The flames of Dido’s pyre foreshadow the flames that will eventually destroy the city of Carthage (Aen. 4.669-71). They also reflect the flames of the burning Troy in Aeneid 2. Austin (1971) comments on considere, at Aen. 2.624-5 tum uero omne mihi uisum considere in ignis | Ilium, ‘Troy settled down into the flames like a corpse upon a pyre.’
- 38 Gosserez 2019: 198-203 wants to see allusion to the third city in the Virgilian sequence of Troy – (...)
- 39 I owe this point to the anonymous referee.
34Given the intratextual Virgilian connection between the burning Carthage and the burning Troy,38 one might further see in the typological link between the burning of Sodom and the end of the world at Ham. 735 memor Sodomae, quae mundi forma cremandi est, recognition of the Virgilian allusion to the end of the world at Aeneid 2.363 (Troy) urbs antiqua ruit multos dominata per annos ‘An ancient city that had ruled for many years crashes down’, through the memory of Lucretius’ forecast of the end of the world, 5.95-6 multosque per annos sustentata ruet moles et machina mundi ‘The massive structure of the world, held up for many years, will crash down.’ If so, classical allusion is once more intertwined with biblical allusion, since Jesus’ recollection of the days of Lot at Luke 17:28-32 is in an eschatological context (similiter sicut factum est in diebus Loth, looking forward to the last days, just as the destruction of Sodom in the Hamartigenia is the mundi forma cremandi).39
35It is the mutability and inconstancy, mobilitas, of the wife of Lot that makes her an ideal subject of Ovidian metamorphosis: Ham. 738-40 at leuis uxor | mobilitate animi torsit muliebre retrorsus | ingenium; 766-7 sed coniunx respicit, et quae | fugerat inuerso mutabilis ore reuisit. In contrast, Lot is not for turning, 756-8 uoti | propositum contra non commutabile seruat | Loth … But his wife’s feminine mobility and mutability also makes of her a Virgilian Dido, if we are to believe Mercury’s misogynistic comment at Aen. 4.569-70 uarium et mutabile semper | femina ‘Woman is always a fickle and changeable thing.’ ‘La donna è mobile’: the point is made at Ham. 739 in the assonance of mobilitate and muliebre.
36My obsessively close reading of this passage of Prudentius shows, to myself at least, a poet fully in control of his intertextual technique, here and elsewhere in his œuvre, reading Ovid - and Virgil - in a way that I find it hard to see as qualitatively different from, for example, Ovid reading Virgil, and, furthermore, writing for an ideal reader who is cut from the same cloth.