Lien van Geel, Columbia University
The focus of this talk is, according to Williams 1973, “the most incongruous episode in the whole Aeneid,” otherwise known as Aeneid 9.77-122—the mystical moment when Cybele causes Aeneas’ burning fleet to be transformed into naiads. Schenk 1984, O’Hara 1990: 74-8, Glei 1991: 204-6, Papaioannou 2002: 35-7; 40-3 interpret this episode as a manifestation of the Trojans’ divine favour, their finished wanderings, and as representative reflections of Turnus’ hybris and Aeneas’ pietas. This group of scholars predominantly focuses on the episode’s masculine experience, from which I depart. Additionally, whereas Fantham 1990/2 and Hardie 1992, 1994 regard the episode’s predecessors (Od. 13, Argonautica, Catullus 64), I read this episode with a focus on Cybele’s maternal role, which, in connection with the subsequent Ovidian reworkings, can elucidate and reconstruct this famously challenging episode.
To this end, I use McAuley 2015’s framework of repressed maternal representations in the Aeneid, which habitually erases the female experience and time and again depicts maternal loss. The epic teems with matres relictae (cf. Creusa, Dido, Euryalus’ mother, and Amata) and represses the maternal experience on its dogged mission to establish the Roman empire. McAuley identifies Venus as an important maternal agent, but I purport that Cybele’s importance should not be understated. Whereas Dauge 1983, Hardie 1994, and Zgoll 2004 have cursorily touched on Cybele’s motherhood, I first read this episode with a focus on the mother goddess’ maternal influence and request to Jupiter, her relation to her ships/nymphs/children (cf. Hardie 1987 and 1994). I show her influence on the Odyssean part of the poem, where parental interaction and grief are central themes, especially when paired with the reference to this transformation and Phaethon and Cygnus in Aen. 10.
Secondly, I supplement this reading with two Ovidian reworkings: in Amores 12, where the aspiring vates alludes to these nautical Naiads and Phaethon’s Heliades, as well as Met. 14.530-65, where this episode seems decidedly less out of place. Fantham 1990/2, Solodow 1992: 128-31, and Hinds 1998: 106-7 have compared Aen. 9 with Met. 14. Focusing on Ovid’s meticulous description of the anthropomorphised ships/nymphs helps us understand the startling effect of the episode’s Virgilian counterpart. In Ovid, the female experience is ubiquitous: it is the nymphs’ “positive,” “upwards” transformation that may strike a reader as startling, even more so if one considers the usual change from animate virgo to inanimate tree such as Daphne, Myrrha, and the Heliades (cf. Porte 1985, Bömer 1986: 181-4, O’Hara 1990: 195-6, Fantham 1990/2: 108, Sharrock 1996: 189-23, and Meyers 2009: 143-6). Whereas Delbey 2011 reads Met. 14 as the transition from feminine-based to masculine-based power (from Circe to Romulus), I argue that, here again, Cybele’s actions as a mother are essential in continuing the ships/nymphs’ “lives” and in the narrative. I thus read these different versions of the ships’ transformation side by side and regard the latter and Cybele’s maternal influence as retrospective both between Virgil and Ovid and within Ovid’s works.