James Uden (Boston University)
‘At the moment that our wellness is disturbed’, writes Max van Manen, ‘then we discover, as it were, our own bodies’ (1998: 12). Everyday bodily actions such as walking and talking are not typically the object of our attention until they become difficult, at which point our illnesses force us to reflect on our bodies as something distinct from our own minds and wills. This paper reads a famous episode of transformation in Ovid – the metamorphosis of Macareus into a pig by Circe – as a representation of the process of defamiliarization that frequently accompanies an experience of illness or severe injury. Ovid encourages us to read the episode within a medical frame: Circe was famous in antiquity as a mythic prototype of the mixer of drugs, and Ovid converts her home into a veritable ‘herbal pharmacy’ (Myers 2009: 107). In the Metamorphoses, I argue, Macareus’ account of his shame, suffering, and hesitant re-familiarization with his own body offers an unrecognized window on to the experience of the suffering patient in the ancient world.
‘It shames me, but I’ll describe it’ (et pudet et referam, 279) are the words with which Macareus begins the account of the loss of his own body. Ovid’s close, almost clinical attention to anatomical detail has often been noted (Segal 1998; Williams 2009), and the description of Macareus’ transformation is no exception. His swollen face ‘hardens’ (occallescere, 282) into a snout; Celsus uses the same verb to describe a patient whose swellings have ‘hardened’ (tumores iam etiam occalluerint, 4.31.4). Tantum medicina possunt (‘so strong were her drugs!’), exclaims Macareus, as he realizes that his body has been completely changed by Circe’s concoctions (Met. 14.285).
After Ulysses demands that Circe restore his comrades’ human form, Macareus remembers that ‘we were scattered with the better juices of some unknown herb’ (299). In describing their healing, Ovid shows us a metamorphosis in reverse. By cataloguing body parts, he makes the body seem uncannily unfamiliar to the person inhabiting it. ‘Our forearms were placed below our upper arms’ (subiecta lacertis bracchia sunt, 304-5), remembers Macareus. Myers calls this a ‘humorously literal detail’ (Myers 2009: 111), but the curious description also evokes the patient’s struggle to acquaint him or herself with body parts after experiencing their incapacitation or loss. ‘Serious illness changes everything: our sense of time and priorities, our experience of space, our felt relations with others, and our sense of self and of the body’ (van Manen 1998: 12).
Ovid’s description of Macareus and his men gives us a glimpse, I argue, into the experience of those in ancient Rome who become estranged from their bodies through wounding or illness, and then, perhaps miraculously, found them again. The Metamorphoses in its entirety is a fascinating source of evidence on Roman embodiment. This paper uses a specific episode to illuminate the relationship in Roman thought between metamorphosis and illness – both experiences in which the body, usually unwittingly, is transformed into something other than what it was.