Erasmus did some (Herculean) Heavy Lifting

The Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein worked in 1523 a contemporary image of Erasmus of Rotterdam, still today one of the most important humanist thinkers. One of our contemporaries says that Holbein's Erasmus "arguably is the most important portrait in England. It's where portraiture actually begins." I like the painting for Holbein's learned inclusion of the Labors of Heracles.

Hans Holbein the Younger, "Erasmus"
(1523) National Gallery L658

Although the British National Gallery, which owns the portrait, has not made the painting available for reproduction, digital images of it are publicly available on the internet. The Wikimedia version I include here (at left) is color "enhanced", washed out, a far cry from the rich detail you can see in the segment of the portrait the Gallery does share (visit nationalgallery.org.uk). Indeed, the NatGal's site is additionally worth visiting because of the lucid instruction by Prof David Starkey (cited above) who contextualizes Holbein's contribution to portraiture.

Erasmus had published in 1506 a compendium of essays — Renaissance equivalents of mythmatters blogposts? — called the Adages or actually the Adagiorum chiliades tres ("the three thousand adagios"). The term "adagio" from Italian ad agio "at ease" implies something written or done in a leisurely manner. A musical piece or technically demanding ballet movement that ends up looking easy but was actually torturously hard to achieve is an adagio. Even though the Adagia are sometimes now called his "Proverbs", Erasmus published a set of three thousand sayings that come out easy, whose acquisition, however, was really really hard.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was a scholar of great consequence in the restoration of classical learning to Europe and the West. In the generation after the Fall of Constantinople, Erasmus took up residence in Venice because, among other things, that city at the top of the Adriatic was the cultural crossroads where speakers and scholars of Greek could and did meet up with scholars who wanted to learn whatever Ancient Greek thinking could be reborn in their new age. Erasmus learned Greek and advocated for writing and thinking in Latin as Cicero had done a millennium-and-a-half earlier.

The heavy lifting of the intellectual Renaissance was assumed largely by Erasmus and his peers. The humanist printer Aldus Manutius virtually invented the publication of Greek literature with Erasmus inspiring the efforts to forge ahead. It was Aldus who first published the Adagia in 1506 and then again in an expanded revision in 1508. Some wag once called Erasmus' Adagia the world's biggest bedside book. It spans actually seven volumes of the Toronto Collected Works (1982-2017).

If you were wondering, for instance, where the expression "She has eyes in the back of her head!" came from, you might find Erasmus' contribution worth your while. It's Adag. 3.3.41:

In occipitio oculos gerit — Ὄπισθεν κεφαλῆς ὄμματα ἔχει, He has eyes in the back of his head. Used of cunning and wary people [... like Mrs Dotson, my 6th grade teacher! RTM], and those whom it is by no means easy to deceive. Men of this sort are called by Perseus Januses: 'What a Janus you are! No stork can peck you from behind.' And Homer demands of a prince the he should have 'eyes before and behind.' Plautus in Aulularia: 'She has eyes in back of her head as well.' (Cited entire from Toronto edition.)

Erasmus could ... and did! ... go on in this vein for scores and dozens of scores of exempla, each one manifesting his mining of Latin and Greek literature and each one bringing to the surface some evidence of once ancient wisdom. This is what I mean by the heavy lifting of the Renaissance.

Holbein's portrait of Erasmus perches the scholar's hands on the rich leather volume. It bears the inscription ΗΡΑΚΛΕΙΟΙ ΠΟΝΟΙ ("The Labors of Heracles"). Erasmus himself equated the work of collecting proverbs from ancient texts with "Herculean Labor." The scholarly investigation of ancient adages is painstaking and not always well received.

All this time I need hardly say that any pleasure to be derived from compilations of this kind is entirely confined to the reader; nothing comes the writer's way except the unpopular and unvarying toil of collecting, of sweeping together, explaining, and translating. Yet pleasure, as Aristotle has truly said, is the one thing which makes it possible for us to remain at work for long spells of time. ... In this task [change] has not been 'twice-served cabbage,' as the Greek proverb has it; I have had to repeat the same things three thousand times — what does an adage mean, what was its original, and for what purpose was it suitable — so that never was there a context more suitable than this for that hackneyed Greek adage 'the twirling of the pestle.'

Erasmus concludes that paragraph, which forms about three percent of his essay on the adage "The Labors of Hercules", with a rumination on "the conditions in which I labor and the demands I have to meet! — On every single adage I must content the leisured reader, give the hungry man what he needs, and satisfy the disdainful." (Adage. 3.1.1) To get to his point, i.e. to expand upon the Labors of Hercules generally, Erasmus fills a fifteen-page essay with references to Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, Aristotle, Chrysippus, Clearchus, Didymus..."and other men as well of whom not the smallest fragment has come down to us." Toward its conclusion he summarizes: "I have been fearing for some time that my readers may find it a Herculean task to read through the discourse of inordinate length into which I have been drawn by an adage which has proved a task for Hercules. And so, I will make an end, but after adding a further point — that when this was first published I had surpassed all the labors of Hercules...."

By the time of Holbein's portrait, Erasmus' life-long labor of the Adagia properly filled a considerably larger volume than the elegant tome Holbein slips under the scholar's hands in the portrait. Even if the Paris edition had included only a couple hundred adages, the collection numbered over four thousand proverbs at the time of Erasmus' death. By any accounting, the intellectual gravity of Erasmus' scholarly accomplishment is monumental. Thus, the portraitist chooses wisely to tinge the humanist's hands with a little ink and to perch them on top of such a weighty accomplishment.

One subtle touch remains to be noted in the Erasmus portrait. Holbein uses the painting itself to comment with subtle irony on the magnitude of his own work. The fore-edge inscription Holbein paints on the book shelved above and behind Erasmus' head an original, learned (if imperfect) elegiac couplet in unpunctuated Latin:

Ille ego Ioannes Holbein non facile ullus 

  tam michi mimus erit quam michi momus erit.

This translates into something like this: "The famous Johannes Holbein, painted this. It seems more likely that somebody will copy my work than malign it." The wit at the heart of the boast spins blithely in the erudite wordplay that pits mimus (Lat. "imitator") against momus (Grk. μῶμος "reproach"). μωμήσεταί τις μᾶλλον ἢ μιμήσεται — "Somebody will more likely malign this than copy it" — is itself an adage of considerable background. Holbein the Elder used it in Latin, borrowed from Erasmus, a decade earlier: "Carpet aliquis citius quam imitabitur," is ascribed to Greek painters originally, according to Erasmus Adag. 2.2.84 and treated separately, s.v. "momo satisfacere" at Adag. 1.5.74.  All this learning goes back prodigiously to Erasmus, the sitter and subject of Holbein's portrait.

—— RTM

OGCMA references
    HeraclesLabors2.0001_Holbein
    HeraclesLabors1.0015_Erasmus

The piece is informed by J. Mähly (1868), "Miscellen," Jahrbuch des Vereins von Altertumsfreunden im Rheinlande, 44:269-70, and by
H. Vredeveld (2013) "'Lend a Voice': The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer," Renaissance Quarterly 66.2: 549-50. doi:10.1086/671585.

Medusa and the affair with Poseidon

What was the nature of Medusa’s involvement with Poseidon? Perseus beheaded Medusa and weaponized her head. That bothers me. It also has long rankled me that in the myth Medusa was transformed from a lovely young woman into a hideous monster. But right now I am more bothered that an encyclopedic source I normally trust reports that Medusa’s transformation was

H. Goodhue Hosmer "Medusa" (1854)
Detroit Institute of Arts

punishment by Athena in her temple for “allowing Poseidon to violate her” there. This authority conflicts with my view. I have long held that Poseidon forced himself upon the girl, a virginal acolyte of a vindictive goddess. Why have I been thinking that? 

     What do the classical sources say about Medusa’s involvement in her relations with Poseidon? Did she really allow Poseidon to violate her? Did she or did he transgress the sanctity of Athena’s temple? Wherever the inquiry leads, I will still be irked that the lovely girl is hideously transformed, that her sudden death is so brutal, and especially that her mutilated body is weaponized by Perseus.

     Ovid’s Metamorphosesis the where the confusion might be resolved. That remarkable poem, written in the meridian of western mythological time (ca. 8 BCE), digested mountains of Greek mythographical peculiarity into one compendium for subsequent generations. When Rome’s descendant cultures forgot to read Greek, Rome’s uncrowned laureate poet continued to be read in accessible 

B. Cellini, "Perseus" (1546-54)
Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

Latin. The Metamorphoses’ result has become canonical. The text has directed the narratives about the gods’ interactions for centuries now. What Ovid says about, say, Medusa and her disposition is going to matter. His text certainly lies behind this summary by Graves: “The Gorgons were … all once beautiful. But one night Medusa lay with Poseidon, and Athene, enraged that they had bedded in one of her own temples, changed her …” (Greek Myths: s.v. “33. The Children of the Sea”). I will not be distracted by Graves’ minor accreted detail that the intercourse happened at night. Graves’ reliance upon Ovid’s canonicity is what matters at the moment.

      Ovid’s account does attribute Medusa’s metamorphosis to Athena’s — well, to Minerva’srage. It says precious little about Medusa’s role in the Neptune affair. Using the verb vitiarehe says that Medusa was violated; but he introduces some uncertainty by reporting the act indirectly (dicitur)— “Neptune is said to have violated her…” Upon close reading, Ovid’s text certainly does not say that Medusa allowed the god to violate her.

L.-H. Marqueste, "Perseus and Medusa"
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

      Ovid leaves unsaid what role Medusa might have played in fateful relations with Neptune. Ovid’s tacit ambivalence comes at the mid-point of his lengthy Perseus narrative in Metamorphoses4.610-5.209. Perseus, at this mid-point (4.790-803) is regaling the wedding feast, Cepheus’ guests, with the tale of how he had come to rescue Andromeda. He ends his story abruptly (ante expectatum tacuit). One of the guests eggs him on to tell how Medusa alone of her sisters had come to have those snakey tresses. Perseus tells that Medusa once had had many suitors and the most glorious hair. “The sea-god is said to have violated her in the temple of Minerva; Jupiter’s daughter averted her eyes and covered her chaste face with her aegis; then, so as to prevent this act from going unpunished, the goddess changed the Gorgon’s hair into poisonous snakes. Even now, she wears those snakes, which she created, on the front of her chest, so as to devastate her foes with dread.”

     The Latin I translate, for the record, goes like this:

   ante expectatum tacuit tamen; excipit unus / ex numero procerum quaerens, cur sola sororum

   gesserit alternos inmixtos crinibus angues. / hospes ait: ‘quoniam scitaris digna relatu,

   accipe quaesiti causam. Clarissima forma / multorumque fuit spes invidiosa procorum

   illa, neque in tota conspectior ulla capillis / pars fuit; inveni, qui se vidisse referret.

   hanc pelagi rector templo vitiasse Minervae / dicitur: aversa est et castos aegide vultus

   nata Iovis texit, neve hoc inpune fuisset, / Gorgoneum crinem turpes mutavit in hydros.  [angues.

   Nunc quoque, ut attonitos formidine terreat hostes, / pectore in adverso, quos fecit, sustinet

Ovid fails in this passage to specify that Medusa might have shared some of the blame. But he doesn't exonerate her either. I guess I had always been reading the nuance into the passage. Whether Medusa had enticed Neptune, yielded willingly to advances, or succumbed to the sea-god’s lust, Ovid leaves for the reader to infer. Clearly, though, the girl alone takes the brunt of all the goddess’ ashamed raged, and no punishment is directed at Neptune. In a mytho-theology where condign punishment is rarely measured, Ovid’s readers may likely be justified in reading Neptune’s guilt and Medusa’s innocence between these lines.

     Michael Simpson’s Apollodorus(p. 87, ad2.4.2 fn.11) observes that Ovid makes Medusa creative, both in life as in death. Her petrifying gaze made her a sculptor. Along those roads leading to the Gorgon’s home, Perseus had seen many simulacra. And at the fiasco in Phineus’ hall when Perseus used Medusa's head to stay his new enemies, many a new statue was created by her severed head. Whether or not this can have played with great subtlety into Ovid’s redemption of Medusa’s shame, it is intriguing to see Ovid regarding Medusa the artisan, like Arachne, who would be despised by the jealous Minerva for any cause.

     The Metamorphoses account has held more lasting sway than Hesiod’s Theogony on the matter of Medusa’s involvement with Poseidon. The archaic didactic poem covers the creation of the Cosmos and sometimes dabbles in nuanced details, often unsatisfactorily. Theogony270-329 treat among other genealogies the ancestry and descendants of Medusa. Several lines of descent crisscross inside the passage. When his focus passes over Medusa herself, Hesiod says precious little about the girl’s relations with Poseidon. I read Theogony as a treatise that justifies patriarchy’s suppression of the matriarchal, the imposition of order in the world. This poet’s business is hardly about such fine details as whether or not the girl resisted a god’s advances. 

Hesiod does mention that Medusa alone of three sisters was mortal and ill-fated: Σθεννώ τ᾿ Εὐρυάλητε Μέδουσά τε λυγρὰ παθοῦσα· / ἡ μὲν ἔηνθηντή,  αἱδ᾿ ἀθάνατοι καὶ ἀγήρῳ, / αἱ δύο· (276-78). The classical tri-colon style — the third element is spatially as long as the first two combined — emphasizes Medusa’s misfortune. Hesiod’s next detail seems to linger a bit too long on the other sisters’ immortality, doubling up gratuitously on their immortality by the enjambed repetition. Medusa’s exceptionality seems to hinge unsaid on her having slept with a god. Cause and effect seem implied: She was mortal: Poseidon had lain beside her in a flowery meadow. 

     τῇ δὲ μιῇ παρελέξατο Κυαναχαίτης / ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι καὶ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσι.  (278-79) The peculiarity of Hesiod’s oral style lavishes more detail on the meadow’s plushness than upon the girl’s attitude. Did that intercourse render the daughter of Phorcys mortal? Hesiod fails to clarify. 

     It may be fair to unpack here what little information Hesiod provides. Poseidon is the verb’s grammatical subject. The verb tense, the aorist, suggests that the encounter was a singular act, not a repeated or habitual affair. The verb’s middle voice may possibly imply that the god engaged the activity for his own interests; but this observation may represent philological overreach! I think the poet’s judgment of Medusa lies in his tight sequencing of events. What is certain is that Hesiod’s text jumps immediately from verdant meadow to the death-blow.

     τῆς ὅτε δὴ Περσεὺς κεφαλὴν ἀπεδειροτόμησεν, /  ἐξέθορε Χρυσάωρ τε μέγας καὶ Πήγασος ἵππος. (280-81) Hesiod’s predicate for the girl’s beheading — to sunder head from neck — might surpass Homeric battle savagery. (Cf. Il. 18.336, 23.22; Od.11.35, where the verb occurs before Hesiod.) Hesiod’s Medusa is vilified by her monstrosity; she acquires the monstrosity by the bedding of Poseidon. She dies pregnant and bears her offspring posthumously. And her progeny in Hesiod’s account includes some of the most frightful monsters ever seen in her Cosmos.

     Apollodorus observes that “[Perseus] flew to Ocean and found the Gorgons, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, asleep. Medusa alone was mortal, and it was for this reason that Perseus went after her head.” ((2.4.2, Simpson’s trans.) Then, after the decapitation, Apollodorus describes the birth of Pegasus and Chrysaor who “leaped forth from the Gorgon. She gave birth to these by Poseidon.” Apollodorus is matter-of-fact. No details of the mating, nothing on either location nor consent, are given. Not much later in the text (2.4.3), Apollodorus justifies Medusa’s punishment — the beheading, not her serpentinization — by attributing it to divine jealousy. Athena fixed Medusa’s head on her shield, and he adds that “some say that Medusa was beheaded because of Athena, for she wished to be considered as beautiful as the goddess.” 

     A final thought: Chris Columbus' cinematic adaptation of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson works with the Medusa myth. Auntie Em, played by Uma Thurman, hisses at Percy, "Son of Poseidon, I used to date your Daddy!" Did we know that Medusa and Poseidon were "in a relationship", actually? Ovid's report suggests that the violation might have happened on one occasion. Hesiod's aorist verb suggests that the meadowing happened (probably just once). And in Apollodorus no intercourse with Poseidon, but divine jealousy effected the change.
     At the end of this rumination, I am left to my own prejudgments. I think that my “authoritative” source — OK, it's J.D. Reid's OGCMA — where the revisiting inquiry began, has overstated Medusa’s involvement in the Poseidon affair. I have yet to find in the classical sources any indication that Medusa allowed the god to violate her in Athena’s temple. Of course, other authors have added that detail to the myth ad lib. I suspect the bothersome detail to be a modern accretion, though. But that’s how myths work. 

Uma Thurman plays Medusa in C. Columbus (dir.)
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

—— RTM 

#ogcma.byu.edu    Medusa Perseus  Ovid Metamorphoses Hesiod Theogony

http://ogcma.byu.edu/Medusa1.0000_Reid.htm