Erica Krause (University of Virginia)
The goal of this paper is to explore the relationship between humans and nonhumans, i.e., between people and their environment, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by analyzing the Ceyx and Alcyone storm scene as an ecological parable (Met. 11.444-572). This idea comes from ecocritical scholar Steve Mentz, who argues that all literary shipwrecks are metaphors “for the conflict between human bodies and nonhuman power” (Mentz xxv).
Ceyx’s shipwreck is singular in the previous epic tradition because the gods play no role in it. In Homer, Apollonius, Vergil, and elsewhere in the Metamorphoses, only gods cause storms at sea and only gods can end them. In this Ovidian passage, however, waves and winds act as independent forces, devoid of divinity and personification. This lack of heavenly intervention is unique not only in the previous lineage of epic shipwrecks, but also in the mythological tradition of Ceyx and Alcyone, which before Ovid was a tale of divine punishment or divine reward. In Ovid, it becomes instead a story of humans trying to survive severe weather with no one to help them but themselves.
Previous scholarship on the Ceyx and Alcyone episode has tended to focus on binaries: epic vs. elegy, absence vs. non-absence, conjugal vs. elegiac love, pietas vs. furor, serious vs. comic. This paper submits one more binary for closer study: human vs. nonhuman. It has already been acknowledged by Otis that the absence of divinity makes this a “duel between man and the blind malevolence of nature,” and that “Ceyx is forsaken by the gods and abandoned to nature itself” (Otis 245). Thus, it is no revelation to say that Ovid’s storm is on some level an examination of the human vs. nonhuman binary. However, it is an innovation to reframe that binary as human vs. nonhuman, rather than human vs. nature, and to acknowledge the fallacy of the idea that humans have dominion over all that is not human. Because nature is now widely considered by ecocritics to be a social construct, the “nature” against which Otis alleges that Ceyx is fighting must be reexamined.
Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton argues that, in order to avert the current climate crisis, we as a species must adopt thinking that acknowledges that humans are just as fragile and vulnerable as everything around us. I propose that the storm in Met. 11 is an example of exactly that kind of thinking. Key to my argument is a series of Homeric similes that Ovid reverses: rather than comparing humans at war to nonhuman elements sweeping through the world, as Homer does, Ovid instead compares winds and waves to both nonhumans and warring humans.
The ultimate work of this paper is to build upon and reframe previous scholarship on Ceyx’s shipwreck, applying recent ecocritical theory to the scholarly tradition as well as to Ovid, in order to better understand the relationship between humans and nonhumans in this scene, in the Metamorphoses as a whole, and in our world today.