5—
Metamorphosis, Metaphor, and Allegory in Latin Epic

Philip Hardie

Philip Hardie focuses here on the ways in which metamorphosis can serve as a guide to understanding the differing kinds of figurative meanings in epic narrative. Using Ovid's Metamorphoses as his principal example, Hardie explores the relation between metaphor, personification, allegory, and metamorphosis and argues that metamorphoses in Ovid's epic create an unresolved and shifting exchange of literal and figurative meanings that precludes identifying heroic essence as something stable or certain. Hardie shows that earlier epic, including especially Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey, can be profitably reinterpreted through this Ovidian lens, and concludes that both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, poems central to traditional definitions of epic, demonstrate the impossibility of pinning down the epic man as the philosophical personification of a perfected humanity. In this essay Hardie shows the centrality of Ovid for an understanding of epic and indeed suggests that as a strong rereading of its literary precursors, Ovid's poem makes visible hidden aspects of the figurative and moral construction of earlier epics.

My essay seeks to make a contribution to the history of the allegorical epic through consideration of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a poem undoubtedly central to the tradition of Latin hexameter narrative, but whose status both as an epic and as an allegorical poem is problematic. Metamorphosis as a narrative device is often supposed to be inimical to the deepest concerns of the epic genre, not least because by denying death as the end of human stories it is held to destroy the moral seriousness of epic. I shall press the generic issue in two directions: first by exploring the connection between the moral allegoresis of epic and metamorphosis, and second by asking why it might be that a poem of transformations should mark so significant a point in the development of personification allegory in ancient epic. Common to both parts of my discussion will be the emergence of a tension between the allegorical drive to fix and define univocal categories, and the text's resistance to interpretative fixation. If I wanted to give these two opposing tendencies allegorical labels, I could call the first Atlantean, after the giant immobilized through petrifaction, and the second Protean, after the shape-shifter who performs a whole series of transformations in order to elude those who would pin him down.^[1]

Metamorphosis and Allegory: The Linguistic Turn

The linguistic turn has become perhaps the favorite strategy of modern critics of the Metamorphoses: Ovid is read as the poet who (re)fashions the world in his own words. Already in Amores 1.3 the poet's promise to give immortality through his poetic language—indeed to give existence itself— to his as yet scarcely fashioned, and pointedly unnamed, mistress is set on a par with the poetic immortality of women famous for their involvement in tales of metamorphosis (Io, Leda, Europa). The linguistic screw is given another turn if we attend to the language itself of metamorphosis, as Frederick Ahl has done, with reference mostly to the lexicon of phonetic and morphological change, by way of prolegomenon to his discussion of Ovid's use of punning techniques. For Ahl the fundamental equivocation is that between the two senses of Latin elementa, "(physical) elements" and "letters of the alphabet." He claims: "As the material elements shift, transforming man into animals or plants, so the elements in words are shuffled to reproduce the changes in language itself."^[2] But the correspondence between the physical and the verbal may also be traced at the semantic level, of metaphor, simile, allegory, and other transferred uses of language, including translation and allusion. In Latin the lexicon of physical metamorphosis largely overlaps with the lexicon of linguistic change. Tra (ns )latio, "metaphor," is a verbal noun from transfero, which may mean "transform" (and also our "translate," for which Latin also uses uerto, literally "turn, change"). Cicero uses immutatio, "a changing," as a label to cover the Greek terms tropos, "trope" (literally "a turning"), and schema, "figure" (Brutus 69). Quintilian defines a figure (figura, literally "shape") as "arte aliqua nouata forma dicendi," "a shape of speaking altered by some art" (Institutio Oratoria 9.1.14). Cicero's definition of allegory as "continuae tralationes," "continuous metaphors" (Orator 94) might equally be translated as "successive transformations," a precise description of the Metamorphoses.

These lexical equivalences open up the possibility for metamorphosis to function as a narrative figuration of figurative language, as linguistic events are projected into the world "out there" as narrative fictions. The connection between metamorphosis and allegory may be envisaged as an axis between the literal and the figurative. Allegoresis (interpretative allegorization) takes a fragment of literal narrative and converts it into a figurative discourse. Thus the literal narrative of Circe's transformation of human beings into animals is converted into a tale about the figurative bestialization of the human soul through enslavement to the passions. A theory of allegory based on authorial intention will hold that originally a figure of speech has been literalized as the basis for a narrative. Paul de Man puts it thus: "From the recognition of language as trope, one is led to the telling of a tale. . . The temporal deployment of an initial complication, of a structural knot, indi-

cates the close . . . relationship between trope and narrative, between knot and plot. If the referent of a narrative is indeed the tropological structure of its discourse, then the narrative will be the attempt to account for this fact."^[3] Just so, a tale of metamorphosis may take a figurative expression and spin from it a narrative fleshed out with persons, times, and places, converting the paradigmatic structure of metaphor into a syntagmatic chain. Many critics have pointed to Ovid's habit of generating tales of transformation out of a literalization of the figurative;^[4] not so many, incidentally, have observed that this is one of the ways in which Ovid continues what had become a central feature of the Latin hexameter tradition through the structures of analogy and image deployed by Lucretius and Virgil.

This is a road open to two-way traffic: Jonathan Bate has noted recently, speaking of the bestial in Lear, that "Shakespeare converts literal Ovidian metamorphoses into metaphors."^[5] This shuttling between the verbal and the physical also characterizes Ovid's dealings with similes, figurative adjustments in perception or conceptualization that often anticipate physical transformations—what Leonard Barkan has called "protometamorphoses."^[6] For example, Apollo's dying boyfriend Hyacinthus is compared (in a traditional kind of simile with a specific Virgilian model) to a series of drooping flower heads; a few lines later the boy's blood is (literally) transformed into the flower that bears his name.^[7] Given the loss of most of the poetry of metamorphosis prior to Ovid, in particular that of the Hellenistic period, it is difficult to say how specifically Ovidian this constant allegorical matching of shape to narrative is, but the surviving fragments of the earlier tradition hint at a fair degree of innovation, or at least systematization, on Ovid's part.^[8]

Anthropologies Homeric, Virgilian, and Ovidian

The first regular tale of human metamorphosis in Ovid's poem is that of Lycaon ( 1.209-243). As the first such narrative, it invites us to accord it a paradigmatic status within the poem as a whole.^[9] Here the metaphor "Man is a wolf"^[10] becomes the occasion for a story about a savage man whose figurative wolflikeness finally turns him into a wolf. At the end of the tale Ovid makes very heavy use of what W. S. Anderson has labeled the "vocabulary of continuity" to ram home the underlying points of similarity between the man Lycaon and a wolf.^[11] This handling of a terminal metamorphosis "fixes" the meaning of the story, "making sense" of a bizarre and "primitive" tale.

Or so it would seem. Denis Feeney has properly located Ovid's Lycaon narrative within a centuries-long tradition of defining the human with reference to the categories of god and beast that lie on either side.^[12] In the Homeric epics the boundaries between the three categories are tested, but ultimately no transgression is possible. Jasper Griffin and others stress that Homer imposes a kind of censorship on the marvelous and the magical, in-

cluding the motif of metamorphosis. "The Homeric world is characterized by a rigid distinction between the main categories of existence that offers little room for compromise or ambiguity."^[13] The other obstinately remains the other. The Homeric anthropology emphasizes the inescapably fixed limits of human nature through a systematic set of contrasts with the not-human, on the one side the divine and on the other the bestial. And it is true that the chief examples in the Odyssey of a transformative power that transgresses these limits, the figures of Proteus and of Circe, are encountered by the human heroes in places on the margins of the human world.

Allegorization, especially moral allegorization, threatens this rigid classificatory system, to the extent that the gods and the animal (and inanimate) world become figures of, and thus collapse into, the category "human." Take two versions of the Circe story: in the Homeric narrative the companions of Odysseus have the heads, voice, bristles, and appearance of pigs, but "their nous remained fast in its place as before" (Odyssey 10. 240). Here, despite the radical physical alteration of the companions, we are left in no doubt as to what is human and what is not. On the other hand, the moral allegorization, which extracts from the Circe story a lesson about the dehumanizing effects of the passions, inverts the Homeric narrative by replacing a tale of physical transformation and mental fixity with a tale of mental alteration within an unaltered body, and as a result the limits of the human are put in question. But in a developed system of philosophical allegorization this propensity to alteration away from the "human" is controlled by an a priori, philosophically defined conception of what humans are (or should be). That is to say that the nonhuman is still exploited as a source of figures with which to prescribe the properly human.

In Ovid the figuration of the human is not controlled by an overriding philosophical authority. Many readers have of course been tempted to find just such an authority in the Speech of Pythagoras in the last book of the Metamorphoses, and to see in it a ground for the interpretation of the rest of the poem. But the Pythagorean version of change simply will not fit as a model for the greater part of the mythological metamorphoses. A lack of fit, incongruity, it must be said, is the usual impression of the modern reader when confronted with ancient philosophizing allegorizations of myth, and it is tempting to see an implicit comment to this effect on the part of Ovid himself. That is, the Speech of Pythagoras presents itself as a mimicry of allegorizing commentary, a kind of explanatory appendix, but we are duped if we take this autoallegorizing seriously. The apparently authoritative speech of the philosopher Pythagoras provides no external point d'appui outside the poem from which finally to make sense of the poem but is itself inescapably implicated in the fictional web of the Metamorphoses. It succumbs to what we might now regard as a postmodernist failure of metanarrative and ends up as simply another set of stories about change.^[14]

Any attempt to press Lycaon's wolf-metamorphosis into the service of a definitive statement of what humans are must confront the previous history of the race of which Lycaon is a member.^[15] Lycaon is the kind of human that he is because he is one of the race of humans born of the blood of the Giants blasted by Jupiter (1.156-162). His attempt on the life of Jupiter is another version of the Giants' assault on Olympus; the two stories could even be thought of as allegorical retellings of each other. To become human, the Giants have already undergone a metamorphosis: "Lest no. . . memorials should remain ["ne . . . monimenta manerent"]^[16] of her offspring, Earth changed their blood into the shape of men" (159-160). Here the vocabulary of permanence^[17] will be betrayed (in typically Ovidian fashion) by the further transformation to which the Giants' son Lycaon, himself one of those "enduring monuments," will be subject. It is becoming very difficult to say what exactly does constitute the human.

As we read on in the Metamorphoses, the external policing of the boundaries of the human becomes harder to maintain. The open-ended set of analogies between the human and the nonhuman that is constructed by the relentless series of transformations in the poem has the effect of emptying the category of the "human" of any substantial content that is not "other." Recently Ernst Schmidt has argued that the metaphorical function of metamorphosis is the key to the understanding of the Metamorphoses, which he describes as "the narrative aetiology of the world as a store of metaphors for mankind."^[18] But this is a world where the literal meaning of humanity has become impossible to define, where "this isthmus of a middle state" has been washed over by the seas on either side, and the only enduring image for the human might be that Renaissance favorite, Proteus.^[19] Schmidt is reduced to an empty essentialism that cannot proceed beyond talking about "man in his unalterable human nature."^[20]

Schmidt also understands the Metamorphoses' focus on humanity to function as a generic marker of the work's status as epic, but an epic that represents "instead of the one epic hero, man of all times."^[21] The Odyssey's first word, andra, "man," marks that poem's concern with the nature of the one man, Odysseus, who to some extent may be exemplary for all people. That man is immediately qualified in the first line of the Odyssey as polutropos, literally "of many turns."^[22] The versatility of Odysseus, his ability to turn to all manner of shifts, to disguise himself physically or verbally, is of course the quality through which he successfully returns to his centered place in human society on Ithaca. Odysseus's changeability is at the service of the hero's own mastery, of himself and of others, and is not the sign of an essential instability. "The polutropos . . . is always master of himself and is only unstable in appearance."^[23] Quite the opposite is true of the many turnings of Ovidian humans, very few of whom have any control of their own mutability.

I tentatively raise the possibility that viewed from a generic perspective,

this feature of the Ovidian "epic" world may be understood as a reflex of the distance between Homeric and Virgilian anthropologies. The Aeneid, like the Odyssey, has the central agenda of defining a "man" ("arma uirumque"), a task given greater urgency by the contemporary relevance of this act of definition (what and who is Augustus, what should the Romans be?). Instead of a polutropos hero, we find a man forced to "tot uoluere casus," "roll around so many misfortunes" (Aeneid 1.9); the incongruity of an active verb applied to the passive sufferings of a hero rolled around by misfortunes was resolved by the ancient commentators through its classification as an example of hypallage.^[24] The career of Aeneas in the Aeneid is one that begins and ends with doubts about the stable identity of others, and possibly of the hero himself, as an examination of the language of transformation at the beginning and end of Aeneas's story will demonstrate. In book 2 Aeneas is confronted with the dream-vision of a Hector strangely altered from expectation: "Alas, the look of him! How much changed from that Hector," "ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo" (2.274). At the end of the poem, after a scene of literal metamorphosis as the Fury sent down by Jupiter transforms herself into a screech owl in order to terrify Turnus, Turnus is first taunted by Aeneas with the impossibility of escape through shape-shifting (12.891-893): "Turn yourself into all shapes [uerte omnis tete in facies], summon up all your nerve and skill; pray to fly aloft on wings to the stars, or to bury yourself close in the hollow earth."^[25] But if this taunt has the immediate effect of reinscribing the Virgilian narrative within the limits of reality and mortality that prevail in the Homeric poems, Turnus then undergoes a different kind of metamorphosis through diminution of powers, changing into a shadow of his former self, unrecognizable to himself. The approach of death seems to undermine his self-definition, rather than confirm it in the Homeric manner: "As he ran and came on he did not recognize himself" (903); "Our tongue is powerless, our body's familiar strength does not hold up, and not a sound or word will come" (911-912, in the dream-simile).^[26] "Quantum mutatus ab illo! " Both passages are used by Ovid in tales of metamorphosis: with the description of Hector compare, for example, Metamorphoses 6.273: "Alas how very different was this Niobe from that Niobe of before" ("heu quantum haec Niobe Niobe distabat ab illa"), a figurative mutation, consequent on the mother's loss of her sons, that will soon be followed by the literal metamorphosis through petrifaction of the living woman. Valerius Flaccus, humorously perhaps, reuses Aeneas's anguished exclamation in the context of a narration of the story of Io in Argonautica 4.398: "How she looked, how much changed from the heifer that she was to begin with!" ("qualis et a prima quantum mutata iuuenca!").^[27] Less humorously Virgil places the image of Io transformed into a cow on the shield of Turnus at the end of Aeneid 7 (789-792), a book very much under the sign of Circe, whose palace and weird animals are described right at the beginning. The "great matter" of the shield

device of the transformed Io is an emblem of the dehumanization suffered already in Aeneid 7 by the Italians, and by Turnus in particular. If Turnus's realization near the end of book 12 that Jupiter is his enemy appears to mark his emergence from his "Circean" bestialization, Ovid spots the irony in Turnus's final loss of identity through transformation into a dream-shadow of himself when he picks up a detail of that passage in his own account of Io at Metamorphoses 1.647: "And, if only the words would come, she would have asked for help, and told him her name and misfortune" ("et, si modo uerba sequantur, / oret opem nomenque suum casusque loquatur").^[28]

But Io's metamorphosis is one of those in which a personal, human consciousness does survive change into animal shape (see above). The Aeneid's parting irony lies in the implicit contrast between the defeated enemy Turnus, sadly changed but in a sense also restored to humanity, and the conquering hero, for Aeneas's identity—and humanity—are subjected to an intensive destabilization at the end of the poem, as the violence of his emotions sways him between identifications with a fulminating Jupiter, a storm wind, an avenging Fury, and a reincarnation of the dead Pallas.^[29] This scene of alienation, as has often been noted, presents the strongest contrast with the scenes of reintegration within the society of living humans that conclude the two Homeric epics. If then the world of the Metamorphoses is one in which it is impossible to identify and stabilize the centrally and inalienably human, can we understand this as a commentary on—even an implied allegorization of—a Virgilian anthropology?

Personification Allegory

The Metamorphoses are not in fact usually accorded an important place in the history of the allegorical epic, save in one important respect: Ovid's development of personification allegory. What intrinsic relationship might there be between metamorphosis and personification? Joseph Solodow comments well on one of the connections, seeing in the univalent and abstracted nature of the personification "brilliant examples of the general striving towards clarity", which for him is the defining feature of Ovidian metamorphosis, as a making visible, plain and clear, of essences. "The figure of Hunger displays the same clarity as does Lycaon after his metamorphosis. Essence lies on the surface. Though in one it is the end of a process whereas in the other it is a given, the result is the same."^[30] There is a paradox in this affinity between personification and metamorphosis, for a personification seems to represent the unchanging essence of some abstraction; and this paradox Solodow resolves thus: "Metamorphosis. . . is. . . a change which preserves, an alteration which maintains identity, a change of form by which content becomes represented in form." Thus for Solodow metamorphosis is to be understood as primarily a process of abstraction. The difference between

metamorphosis and personification might appear to be that the abstraction involved in metamorphosis usually results in theriomorphic representation rather than anthropomorphic personification. Yet of the four major personifications in the Metamorphoses, Envy (Invidia, 2.760-782) and Hunger (Fames, 8.799-808) are persons of a distinctly dehumanized and desocialized character. Fame's (Fama, 12.39-63) shape and personality are left very indistinct, but she is the immediate descendant of a very inhuman Virgilian personification. Only Sleep (Somnus, 10.592-645) might unproblematically be described as a sleeping human being. The active personifications in his house, however, are the artificers of dreams: Morpheus, Icelos, and Phantasos, "persons" who between them are responsible for the whole gamut of mutable forms, human, animal, and inanimate, that populate the stage of the Metamorphoses.

But if metamorphosis considered in its aspects of abstraction and fixation tends to coincide with personification, conversely personification betrays an inherent shiftiness. The "givenness," as Solodow would have it, of a personification is in fact bound up in process. In the first place a personification may be regarded as the product of a process of metamorphosis, the changing of a linguistic abstraction into a concrete person. As Georgia Nugent puts it in her study of Prudentius's Psychomachia, "Personification allegory performs yet another substitution, in fact, an inversion: allegory attempts to turn the word back into an object, to reify it. This is a fraudulent turn, or trope, which is inherent in the making of allegories."^[31] Personification is a particularly visible example of the deceptive and transformative power of words, the ability of words to construct a reality and impose it on the "real world." And this, as we have seen, is as fair a description as any of what is going on throughout the Metamorphoses.^[32] Personifications may also be the de facto end product of that kind of allegorical interpretation whereby a person, human or divine, possessed of a highish degree of mimetic reality is transformed into a figure for a virtue or mental attribute: Athene is changed into wisdom, or polutropos Odysseus, the versatile and manifold human hero, is turned into the monolithic paragon of philosophical virtue.

The personification thus appears in the disguise of immutability, a mask concealing the processes of metamorphosis that brings it into being. Further, when a personification is put to work in a narrative, her (or his) actions are radically transformative: the personification has the power to change "real" human actors into versions of herself. Ovid's Erysichthon is the type of this kind of transformation. He steps into the narrative as a stagy villain, but nevertheless an epic actor of full human status; once Hunger has got at him he is turned into a demonic eating machine, not surprisingly, since Hunger has "breathed herself into him" (Metamorphoses 8.819).^[33] While it may be strictly true that "metamorphosis into an abstraction is not something that ever happens in Ovid"^[34] in the way that in Spenser Malbecco is transformed into an

abstraction with the name Gealosie, Erysichthon is well described by Harold Skulsky as a "victim . . . refined into an abstraction."^[35]

The two Ovidian personifications whose direct action on human characters is narrated, Envy and Hunger, are both closely related to the Virgilian Fury, Allecto, by origin a fully mythological being, but one who has almost been sublimed into a personification. Feeney writes of her: "She is a creature who embodies [my emphasis] and revels in all manner of evil. . . . She need not necessarily have been so. Euripides' Lyssa is an interesting case of a divine agent of madness who remains rational, emancipated from her characteristic effect. Allecto, on the other hand, is her essence." After thus virtually defining Allecto as a personification of madness, Feeney goes on to note that "above all, Virgil stresses how variable and multiple she is: "tot sese uertit in ora," "She turns herself into so many shapes."^[36] For Feeney this variety is the occasion for a discussion of the variety of Allecto's modes of action within the narrative. This is a perceptive move, but it obscures what I think is another important point about Allecto's multiformity and changeability, namely, the close connection with her status as a personification. Her primary mode of action is indeed to transform her victims into versions of herself.

Virgil's narratives of the approach of Allecto to her victims, most clearly in the case of her assault on Turnus, establish a transformative pattern followed by Ovid and Statius. The personification approaches the human, often initially in a disguise (another kind of transformation) that is then cast aside; she then infects or inspires her victim, the crucial point of metamorphosis, simplified by Ovid, followed by Statius, into expressions of the kind "She breathes herself into the man." The effects of the personification then find two forms of expression: first in the use of abstract nouns and verbs referring to the passion or emotion of which the personification is an abstraction, and second in a simile or similes, a "purely" linguistic kind of transformation.^[37] The narrative action of the personification has the effect of triggering a hallucinatory explosion of figurative language, for in the personification resides the essence of language's power to reshape the world in its own image.

Fama

The one Ovidian personification taken directly from the Aeneid is Fame, Fama. In the Metamorphoses she appears appropriately at the beginning of book 12 at the point where Ovid sets out to rework the subject matter of the Homeric epics themselves (12.39-63) ^[38] She is the personification of Homeric epos (but also the spirit presiding over Ovid's own retelling of the Homeric epics). In the Aeneid Fame is the most developed example of a personification allegory. She is introduced as a negative force, an evil (malum ) a female demon

spawned by an angry Mother Earth to oppose the dispensation of the masculine ruler of Olympus; yet curiously she also insists on being read as a figure for the male poet's own propagation of words.^[39] As chthonic source of disruption she has strong affinities with Allecto; there is also a marked parallelism between the representation of Fama and that of the Jovian double of Allecto, the Dira whom Jupiter dispatches at the end of book 12 in order to effect a closure within the human narrative.^[40] These connections form part of a wider pattern of association within the Aeneid, and in later Latin epic, between fama, female rumor-mongering, and lament, madness, and infernal demons.^[41] And like Allecto, Fama is a distorter and a shape-shifter, whose twistings and perversions have the effect of transforming the human narrative. For a personification she is notably inhuman; the genealogy that makes of her a sister of the giants Coeus and Enceladus might incline us to visualize her as an anthropomorphic monster, but she is then represented as a far less humanoid monstrum, with a multiplicity of wings, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears, and in her nocturnal flight and rooftop perching she turns into a kind of bird.

Fama is a linguistic construction of the linguistic slipperiness that has infected the story of Dido at this point. Jon Whitman, in his excellent discussion of Fama, observes that she appears at a "moment of moral and linguistic breakdown,"^[42] immediately after Dido's attempt to impose her own reading on events: "She calls it a wedding, with this name she disguises her fault" (Aeneid 4.172).^[43] But Fama may also be read in a larger context as a figure for the fictional powers of the epic poet himself: Fama herself is self-reflexively caught up in the chain of fama, "as they relate," "ut perhibent" (4.179).^[44] Furthermore the whole Dido and Aeneas story, a meeting that could never have taken place, is notably a fiction of epic fama.

The intervention of Fama in Aeneid 4 is the beginning of a narrative structure, which interrupts the primary action of the Dido and Aeneas story and which continues at 198-221 with the African prince Iarbas's transmission, through prayer, of the human rumors about Dido and Aeneas up to the divine level of Jupiter, an upward motion reversed when Jupiter sends down his conveyor of words, Mercury, as winged messenger-god, the Jovian double of the chthonic Fama, to order Aeneas to leave Carthage. Mercury breaks his downward journey to alight on the weird mount Atlas (246-258). Elsewhere I have analyzed this sequence with reference to the trope of hyperbole (in generic terms, the "greatness" of epic).^[45] I now wish to shift my ground and consider it in the light of the trope of allegory. And allegory, it will appear, is inseparable from metamorphosis.

Right at the beginning hyperbole and metamorphosis are united in the allegorical image of Fama's expansive power: "Small at first through timidity, but she soon raises herself into the sky" (4.176). This is a kind of metamorphosis recognized by Ovid (Metamorphoses 15.434, Pythagoras on the city

of Rome): "Through growth she changes her shape." Pythagoras's authority for this statement is none other than Fama herself: "Even today rumor [fama] has it that a Trojan city, Rome, is rising" (431-433).^[46] But quantitative change, hyperbolic exaggeration, is not the only effect of Virgil's Fama. She is also responsible for the qualitative change involved in distortion and misrepresentation: "as persistent in fictions and distortions as she is the messenger of truth" (4.188). This echo of the Hesiodic Muses' claim "We know how to speak many falsehoods like true things, and we know how to utter true things, when we wish" (Theogony 27-28) is usually referred to the power of the epic poet to create fictions.^[47] But the "fictional/true" opposition also structures the practice of allegory: Jesper Svenbro analyzes the interpretative practice of Theagenes, the first recorded allegorizer of Homer, in terms of a transposition of the Hesiodic distinction between truths and lies from the social conditions of poetic discourse to the interior of the discourse, where it becomes the binary opposition between surface sense, the "lies", and the deep allegorical sense, the truth.^[48] Fama's account of the winter of luxury in Carthage tells the story in another way, but her form of "all-egory," "other-saying," perverts the expected distribution of truth and falsehood.^[49] Her version of the story moralizes, with a tendency to reduce the complex human situation to the abstractions of luxus and cupido (Aeneid 4.193-194); it is like a prevalent moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacian court in the Odyssey, on which Dido's court is modeled, as a figure for decadent luxury and hedonism, an "Epicurean" voluptuarism.^[50] One might think also of that reductive moralization of the real-life history of Cleopatra and Antony, a clear example of "allegorizing" to ideological ends. Iarbas's account to Jupiter of what is going on (206ff.) repeats this "allegorical" version of "reality" but then adds another layer of allegory when he calls Aeneas a Paris (215) .^[51] The Epicurean color of the moralizing interpretation of the Phaeacians seems to tinge Iarbas's own rebuke to Jupiter at 208-210: "Do we shudder for nothing when you hurl your bolts? Are they blind, those flames in the clouds that fill our minds with terror, and is it empty rumblings that they stir up [inania murmura miscent]?" This materialist view of the thunderbolt would transform Jupiter and the other gods into nothing more than the "empty report," inanisfama (or Fama ) the words with which Iarbas concludes his complaint (218).^[52] At this point the literal reality of the epic narrative is in danger of drifting before the winds that lead to allegorization. The primary narrator lays his hand on the tiller to guide us back to a very present and very epic (and Ennian) Jupiter "the all-powerful heard," "audiit omnipotens" (4.220).^[53]

The initial expansion and subsequent upward progress of Fama thus generate a series of competing interpretations of the epic action and of the cosmic order of epic. Jupiter's authoritarian intervention, through his straight-speaking messenger Mercury, aims at reimposing an Olympian order on the narrative and its meanings. This is the context for the description of the

strange figure of Atlas, the man-mountain on whom Mercury alights on his downward flight. The mountain is the product of a metamorphosis, but change in the past is now memorialized in an image of eternity: mountains are proverbially the most enduring of monuments. This terminal metamorphosis contrasts with the indefinitely proliferating, Protean, metamorphoses of the giantess Fama. Atlas within the Aeneid is also a figure for the origins of epic, for at the end of the first book we learned that he had been the teacher of the exemplary bard Iopas (1.740-741). We might say then that the source of epic tradition has been set in stone. Moreover, this terminal metamorphosis is of the kind that does not alter the subject's previous shape: Atlas still has a head, shoulders, chin, and beard.^[54] The petrified Atlas remains in some sense the same. However, as we advance through Aeneid 4 we will find that he may also be read allegorically, but in the manner of that kind of philosophizing allegory that attempts authoritatively to fix meaning: the picture of the ever-during Atlas foreshadows the famous simile later in book 4 that compares Aeneas unmoved in the face of Dido's pleas to an oak weather-beaten but fast-rooted on a mountaintop (4.441-446), an image of Aeneas in his ideal role as the impassive Stoic hero, unchangeable in his inner self while outside only tears are "rolled over," "mens immota manet, lacrimae uoluuntur inanes" (449).^[55] This heroic role corresponds to the philosophizing abstraction of Odysseus into a figure of the wise man.^[56] But, as we have seen, the events of the poem will finally demonstrate the impossibility of pinning down the epic man as the philosophical personification of a perfected humanity.

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