Sample commentary prepared by DM as a model for students in the Seminar on Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1998

The epyllion Europa ends with the description of a young woman's "garments filling and fluttering in the breath of the sea-wind." This is also the end of Book 2 in the epic. Assuming that the separation of the poem into books was not an accidental feature of its production but an aspect of its literary structure, this strong visual image, positioned at an important point of closure, can be seen to function as a trope acknowledging the place of feminine desire in the poem's unfolding narrative of human lives overtaken by divine impulses.

By the end of Book 2, many a female character has caught the eye of a lusting god: the nymphs Daphne, Io, Syrinx, Callisto, Coronis; the mortal Herse, wooed by Mercury; and Corone, daughter of the king of Phocis, rescued from rape by Poseidon when Minerva changed her into a crow; and last, Europa, daughter of the king of Tyre. Coronis is sexually so self-assured that (allegedly, for we cannot trust the tale-tellers in this passage) she puts at risk her liaison with Apollo in order to sleep with a mere man. The others are described as maidens, virgins, and almost all of them invoke the protection or example of the virgin goddesses Diana and Minerva, and, for a range of reasons, disdain or fear the sexual advances of the gods. The exceptions among these maidens are Herse and Europa. Herse is silent; but Ovid gives a fullness of treatment to Europa's subjectivity that permits us to observe the process of her sexual awakening, a process that culminates in the trope of the billowing dress.

Ovid makes an efficient, 46-line exposition of the action in this epyllion, using an omniscient narrator and the technique of indirect discourse to represent the workings of thought behind the character's actions. This permits him to construct two self-interested actors who achieve different purposes in the same scene. Ovid shifts dramatically back and forth between the points of view of Jove and Europa. The god delegates, strategizes, role-plays; the girl wonders, fears, tentatively approaches; the god conceals his intentions in foreplay; the girl loses fear and climbs on his back; the god moves gradually across a boundary; the girl trembles but hangs on.

Equally dramatic is the shift in tone that characterizes the two points of view. Jove is a comic figure, his actions in this epyllion incongruous with his divine role of father and ruler of the gods, and with his status as an object of human awe and reverence. Descending to the fields of Sidon to join a herd of cattle, Jove puts off not only the symbols of his power but the very essence of majesty itself. "Putting aside majesty" ("Laesa Majestas") was the term Augustus himself had given to crimes of sexual dereliction; Ovid was taking some risks with the emperor in rendering Jove a comic figure here. Yet, while Jove lowers himself to become a lover, the poem suggests that the disguise also releases him into carnality and playfulness. It is as though the erotic attraction Jove feels for a mortal permits him to discover a new capacity in his own being.

For the girl, on the other hand, the encounter with Jove is a liminal moment in the life cycle, her passage from maidenhood to womanhood. With the greatest delicacy, Ovid sketches the state of ambivalence with which the girl responds to the body of the god as he offers himself to her, how she "little by little / Got over her fear....of course, all unsuspecting." Europa may be a king's daughter but she has spent her life among cattle; she both knows and does not know what the bull's attention means. But the tone of Humphries' translation tells us that Europa accepts sexual initiation as her human destiny as a fertile woman. It is the instinctual in her own nature that responds to the bull; it is her own awakening sexuality that causes her to garland his horns with flowers, and that draws her to straddle his back; the hand clasping his horn signifies her assent to the motion and direction of his body; she glances back at what she is leaving but she does not resist. To point the contrast between the divine and the human: Europa is not diminished but elevated by her assent to the part she plays in this episode. It is as though the girl works a reversal in the god's shape-shifting: Jove expresses The Bull Within, and the effect is comic; Europa detects the phallic godhead embodied by the animal, and the effect is ceremonial.

Habiliment is expressive throughout this brief epyllion. Jove, in order to accomplish his seduction of this rustic princess, "put aside" the trappings of majesty and "took upon himself the form of a bull." A disguise, not a transformation: the distinction is underscored by the added details that show the bull's form to be artefactual rather than natural, in the detail of horns "as perfect / As if a sculptor made them, and as shining / As any jewel." The description of Jove's magnificent bullishness is metaphoric: a way of conveying his complete possession by lust. The image of Europa's flowing garments, on the other hand, is metonymic ("container for the thing contained"). The draperies she wears conform to the girl's trembling body, revealing the powerful emotions that flutter her nerves; their billowing shape foreshadows the births of Minos and Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, the sons of Jove with Europa.

Humphries' translation shows us a Europa who finds and keeps her balance in this moment: "Looking back to the land, her right hand clinging / Tight to one horn, and the other resting easy / Along the shoulder." He gives gravity and dignity to the image by heightening with emotional connotations ("clinging tight," "resting easy") what in Ovid are neutral descriptive terms: "et dextra cornum tenet...altera dorso imposita est" (the right had holds the horn, the other is placed on [his] back). The syntax of Humphries' lines cleverly expresses the progress of Europa's awakening to her sexual destiny, by constructing the whole transition in one long sentence with phrases linked by coordinating conjunctions, the subject shifting from "He" to "girl" as the bull begins swimming. That is, in Humphries' translation, the agency of Jove dissolves as, mission accomplished, he bears away what is for him "booty." Ovid's phrase is fert praedam, but Humphries does not translate it. Instead, Humphries shifts the subjectivity of the sentence to Europa's balancing act. The strong sense of closure in the last lines comes not from the completion of the movement of the syntax, but from the alliterative deliberateness of the rhythm, and the visual power of the image: "...her flowing garments / filling and fluttering in the breath of the sea-wind." Wind becomes metaphor ("breath"), what was natural becomes symbolic--a forecast of Europa's destiny as the founder with Jove of the House of Cadmus.

Other translators put other inflections on these lines, and other commentators--transfixed by the comic incongruity of Jove's disguise, viewing the epyllion as "about" Jove-- interpret "Europa" as one more revelation of Jove's divine brutality. Ovid himself wrote two other versions of this story, one in Fasti, and the other in Book VI of Metamorphoses, in the epyllion where the mortal artist Arachne challenges the immortal Minerva as a spinner of tales. These other versions throw into sharp relief the degree to which the epyllion Europa in Book II is being used to insert into this epic acknowledgement of the separate sphere of feminine sociality.

Fasti, Ovid's poem on the Roman calendar, explains the story behind the constellation Taurus that rises on 14 May:

The eve of the Ides reveals Taurus lifting his starry face.

There's a famous story behind this sign.

When Jupiter, as a bull, offered his back to Phoenician Europa,

wearing phony horns on his forehead,

she hung on, his mane in her right hand, dress in her left,

and her very fright was a fresh source of her charm.

The breeze made her dress billow, and made her blonde hair stream--

nice for Jupiter to behold the Phoenician like that.

Often she drew up her girlish feet from the sea's surface

for fear of the touch of the cresting waves.

Often the god intentionally dipped his back in the water

to make her cling more tightly to his neck.

At landfall Jupiter stood there with no horns at all;

he had been transformed from cow into god.

The bull entered heaven while Jupiter entered the Phoenician,

and one of the continents now bears her name.

It is a combination of the versions in Fasti and Metamorphoses Book II that Arachne appears to be illustrating on, so to speak, in the tapestry she weaves in her competition with Minerva in Book VI.

[Arachne] Worked in the gods, and their deceitful business

With mortal girls. There was Europa, cheated

By the bull's guise; you would think him real, the creature,

Real as the waves he breasted, and the girl

Seems to be looking back to the lands of home,

Calling her comrades, lifting her feet a little

To keep them above the list and surge of the water.

So skillful is Arachne's tapestry that the nymphs, whom Minerva has appointed to be judges of the contest, cannot decide whether goddess or mortal has won the prize. Minerva then attacks Arachne with a distaff, claiming by force what she did not win by craft. Arachne is transformed into a spider. But she is clearly meant, by Ovid, to stand for female resistance; she may well be the first feminist critic in the history of poetry-the Sylvia Plath of the ancient world, enraged by the appropriations of female bodies that have been made so jauntily in patriarchal art.

Arachne's masterful tapestry contributes to what was, by Ovid's day, already an established tradition of visualizations of this myth. Crucially, Arachne's version in Book VI of Metamorphoses omits the elements in Book II that support an interpretation of Europa as purposeful in achieving sexual knowledge. Depicting Europa's lifting feet (from Fasti) and the backward look to home and comrades (from Book II), Arachne's "reading" of the story emphasizes Europa's helplessness and fear. Yet in Book VI, by the method of indirect discourse, Ovid permits the reader to observe a development within the subjectivity of Europa, who, by the end of the epyllion "loses...all fear...grows bolder, / Climbs on his back." Arguably, the bull has become for Europa at this moment the masculine principle itself, of which any male is only the temporary embodiment. (As Molly Bloom says at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses, "Might as well him as another.") In an ironic reversal of the sort typical in Ovid, Jove has become the hunter hunted, a purely phallic animal whose patient responsiveness opens Europa to consciousness of her own desire.