In our first section of reading from 
Ovid, we're going to go back to Thebes. You'll recall in the week of the class 
when we looked at dissolving selves, and we looked at, Oedipus around the site 
of Thebes. And we looked at what happened, with 
Pentheus around the site of Thebes. Ovid's going to spend some time in 
Thebes. I mean, he is going to spend some time in 
a place where things kind of fall off, and, go, go a bit wrong. 
that is definitely something that, is interesting to him, 
so it's not surprising that he spends a good bit of a good bit of time reinvent-, 
reinvestigating these traditional tales around this city. 
Agave, yeah she makes a mistake. 
there's her son's head she's carrying in, thinking yes indeed, here's an animal. 
Well, it just really isn't. the themes of transformation, 
as we mentioned in the previous lecture are hugely important for Ovid. 
And that change is typically violent, and it's not a happy kind of change. 
He is also in his techniques a highly learned and elusive poet. 
He will go ahead and assume that you know everything already that he's talking 
about. So he'll at a very high level drop in 
things, and expect that you, deeply learned 
person, already know all this stuff. he's doing that because he's writing for 
a highly literate audience, not because he's trying to annoy contemporary 
contemporary human beings, trying to figure out what he was talking about 
2,000 years ago. He's writing for a highly literate 
audience who already knows this stuff. So you know, imagine yourself being 
involved in a set of stories that you already know a lot of the background 
about, you get very annoyed if someone spent a lot of time filling you in on all 
the details you already know about. So, [COUGH] Ovid does his own retelling 
of tales. the, the, the, figures, that revolve 
around Thebes are worth spending a little bit of time with. 
Recall at the beginning Cadmus has his engagement. 
he jumps in and finds these, this dragon in his way, sliced the 
dragon, takes the teeth and tosses them into the ground. 
We're going to see the slaying of the serpent, something that Ovid spends a lot 
of time on. He likes to kind of jump into this gory 
violence. He is not afraid of that at all. 
We have got the lavish treatment of the serpent getting cut down, and then the 
magic, the excitement of the transition that happens when these plants all of a 
sudden become humans and start to move and engage. 
From that background, we focus in on Actaeon Semele. 
We have story of Teiresias. We talk about Narcissus, we talked about 
Pentheus, all the kind of main themes in these different or sets of the family 
centered in Cadmus and around Thebes. In Actaeon the scene of Actaeon is in one 
we could spend a little bit of time with. He spends sadly he, he gets a glimpse 
sadly of this woman right here, Diana. Once again if you ever caught a glimpse 
of her you should be very cautious run the other way. 
There's a very, a strong intimacy in this scene. 
it's a close up detail in the life of the goddess Diana. 
What's she doing? Well she's like. 
In the bathroom. You know, she's got, putting on makeup 
and grooming herself. And it's just strongly close in a very 
imitate, and it's something that we ought not to see. 
You're not supposed to see that about strangers and you're surely not supposed 
see that about goddesses. Ovid's alluding I think in, in allowing 
in his presentation of the scene, Ovid's allowing us to be like Pentheus and kind 
of catch this special furtive glance at what it is to be a goddess. 
He's inviting us to commit the same crime that Actaeon does. 
looking with ogling eyes as, oh my gosh that's a goddess. 
Ooh, what's she doing over there? we get kind of pulled right in. 
note that when Diana reacts to what's happening, she is embarrassed. 
She actually blushes. So we got a goddess that blushes. That in 
itself, is embarrassing. Imagine divinity blushing. 
I mean it's just crazy. Who could think that, that such a thing 
would happen. But it does, 
Diana is embarrassed and she blushes. at that point all hell breaks loose. 
She has out after him. Actaeon gets chowed up by his own dogs. 
turned into a, a, an animal. and you can see his horns sprouting from 
his head in his depiction. We hear a story of Semoli and the 
description of Semoli's story, I want to focus in on one particular piece of it. 
Juno is prodding her and trying to get her to doubt that it was really Zeus that 
came to her. Right? 
whoever, whoever your lover was young girl you, you should just make sure that 
you know who that is because so often men go around claiming to be gods. 
Well, that little seed of doubt that Juno plants in Semoli's head is her undoing. 
She then insists that Zeus should show. Insult to her and does this in such a way 
that Zeus can't deny it so that when she gets the, the full view of Zeus, 
she gets immolated and she's destroyed. So the plant, the seed of doubt that Juno 
plants turns into her undoing and she is caught up and gone. 
[COUGH] Now, just as in the case of Actaeon and and Diana. 
In the case of Semele and Juno, the line between human and divine is 
psychologized. in the case of Actaeon, the reaction of 
Diana is embarrassment. in the case of Juno, it's doubt and 
jealousy. there's a psychological, emotioinal 
reading of what happens when human and divine come together. 
Teiresias, we get to hear about Teiresias, long story. 
We get inside of his head, but mostly just to, so that we can get 
inside the tale of Narcissus. he has a, a, a way of us getting into a 
story about someone who Teiresias knows all kinds of things. 
How does he knows this? Well, it turns out that he has, uniquely, 
been able to experience sex as both a man and a woman. 
And because of this experiential dimension that he has, he has now all 
knowledge. those two, 
pieces of knowingness add up to total knowledge. 
It's like they're multiplicatory. And now Teiresias has a full knowledge of 
all things. Juno is of course jealous. Juno is 
typically jealous, and she then blinds him. 
just as she does when she takes away the voice of Echo. 
We'll see this. she punishes humans by making them 
defective. And she might take away their eyesight or 
their voice or whatever it happens to be. and then typically other things happen 
after that. Narcissus we get into his story, and some 
of you will recall hearing about the story of Narcissus, and you might recall 
it as a tale about, you know, where flowers come from. 
Where did this beautiful flower come from? 
Well, there's a story of a guy, and he gets frozen. 
You know, he gets, he gets transfixed on his own vision a vision of himself, at a 
pond. And he just stands there, and he turns 
into a flower. Well it's, 
that's usually the way it's retold for the kids version of the story. 
But, think about the way that Ovid presents this story here. 
Remember what Teiresias runs into. He's told be Tyr, he, er, that what, what, he, 
Narcissus runs into. He's told by Teiresias that he'll be fine 
as long as he never knows himself. Well, in this story, what we've got is, 
Narcissus knowing himself. And what he does is see himself as an 
object, he himself. Like you and I, a subject, he's able to 
see and think about the world, he himself has his own person. 
When he sees himself as an object, he gets frozen. 
and in Otto's case it's, it's packaged for us as a kind of erotic love which is 
completely misplaced. but I think there's a further dimension 
to this story about what it is to be human. 
It's strange to be a self aware, self conscious subjectivity. 
It would be a little easier not to be one of those. 
if, if I were my puppy. I've got a little puppy, and if, if were 
my puppy right now, there'd be no question of what I wanted. 
I'd be happy if I had some food in my bowl, and if I could go for a walk. 
That, that would be enough. As a self conscious human being, life is 
a little more complicated. most of the time that's good, but some of 
the times it's not so good, and that complexity to life understand, is, I 
think leads here in a kind of cap stone experience for Narcissus, of 
understanding, sure, lots of things about the world out there and having to make 
complex decisions etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 
But now Narcissus understands himself, a knowing subject, as an object to other 
people. Now that's really strange because he is 
not only himself a subjectivity who can see, sense, and feel things but he's also 
an object to other people. That is a disturbing recognition. 
and that disturbing recognition I think freezes him in a state where he can't 
advance from. So his life ends there. 
he doesn't get out of the greased funnel of self- contemplation. 
Staring into his navel, turns out for Narcissus to be a very bad thing. 
we then hear the story of Pentheus [COUGH]. 
Sorry. Narcissus closes, we come back to 
Teiresias and we hear about Teiresias' duel with Pentheus. 
and then the Pentheus tale jumps in. But for Ovid, it's really more of a story 
about Pentheus versus Teiresias, where you hear, hear the full back story. 
But he shift, shifts it in, quite dramatically to make it more of a 
discussion between Pentheus and Teiresias. 
we get a further story about Bacchus' birth and his coming into being, 
and men who don't recognize that they have a god around them. 
That's troublesome. and the full story of what we saw 
happening at Thebes, in the earlier parts of the, of the, of the course, gets 
played out through these close in connections between the human, and the 
divine world. here, Narcissus, look at him. 
Poor guy. [LAUGH] Can't get out of that, the 
greased funnel of contemplation. In each of the stories that we see framed 
in this set of Theban tales in Ovid, Actaeon, Semele, Teiresias Echo and 
Narcissus and Pentheus, talks about a close in connection between the human and 
the divine. Something goes terribly wrong and that 
close in connection is psychologized. It's shown, in the case of Actaeon in 
the, in Diana's embarrassment, in Semeele, it comes out as jealousy and 
Semele herself might actually be a little bit embarrassed. 
we hear about Pentheus, who's, uninitiated and wanting to see what he 
ought not to see, temptation. 
and in the case of, Narcissus, his emotional reaction to himself, gets, he, 
becomes his undoing. these passions show, that the human 
transgression, vis-a-vis the divine, leads to some kind of problem. 
That problem shows in a psychological manifestation, and it ends in a corporeal 
undoing. the human being dissolves, is ripped up, 
is torn. and we separate now, humans and divine, 
because, as humans might aspire to get a glimpse of that other divine world what 
we see mostly there is danger. So, stay away.