James Calvin Taylor (Colby College)
In analyzing the geologist James Hutton’s cyclical conception of an eternal Earth, Gould remarked that “history demands a sequence of distinctive events” but that “[u]nder the metaphor of time's cycle in its pure form, nothing can be distinctive because everything comes round again” (Gould (1987) 80). If one zooms out far enough and sees the earth’s existence as an endless series of repeating cycles, then events in its history cease to look like unique occurrences resulting from the coincidence of peculiar circumstances and more like natural phenomena that occur regularly due to the operation of immutable laws. This paper argues that Ovid plays with several aspects of geological discourse in the speech of Pythagoras (Met. 15.75–478) to motivate a similar conclusion, in which the historical character of events is effaced by their contextualization within a cyclical conception of geological processes operating over deep time.
This paper demonstrates that Ovid uses two motifs of geological discourse in Pythagoras’ speech, namely the difficulty of securing evidence, and the cyclical operation of geological processes. In the first case, reincarnation allows Ovid’s Pythagoras to remember many lives and thus to witness first-hand the impact of geological processes, such as the interchange of land and sea (Met. 15.262–3), which within natural philosophy are recognized to take place so gradually over such long periods of time that humans are unlikely to remember them from beginning to end (e.g. Arist. Mete. 1.14 351b8–22). Pythagoras’ ability to remember his past lives liberates him from the usual problems of evidence that bedevil those attempting to speculate upon the geological development of the earth from their narrow temporal perspective.
Secondly, unlike the other paradoxographical material in this speech (Myers (1994) 147–59), geological processes are arranged in such a way that their alterations to the earth compensate for each other. Such an arrangement confirms that Ovid’s Pythagoras has a homeostatic view of the earth system: he believes that the earth does not undergo radical transformations and could theoretically have always existed and continue to exist forever. By including such a perspective, Ovid complicates his own poem as a linear narrative extending from the creation of the world to his present, and opens up the possibility that the relevance of the Metamorphoses as a perpetuum… carmen (Met. 1.4) extends beyond the segment of time that it depicts and into Pythagoras’ world without beginning or end (cf. Davis (1980) 124).
In closing, the paper argues that Ovid’s use of anachronisms, such as the submersion of Helice (Met. 15.293–5), reinforces each of these themes. On the one hand, it stresses that Ovid does not possess the same liberated perspective as Pythagoras and must rely on the meagre evidence available to him. On the other hand, it suggests that from the deep temporal perspective of Pythagoras, who not only remembers former lives but also represents himself as a prophet (Met. 15. 144–5), that past and future events lose their distinctive identities and render history as traditionally understood impossible.