POETS Day! Ovid and the Rape of Europa
It’s hardly shocking material, certainly less graphic than any given episode of Law & Order SVU.
My favorite librarian is missing. He’s been gone ever since I asked about a collection of James Dickey poetry. We couldn’t find it in the Jefferson County system or through inter-library loan systems with universities and other institutions (I have no idea what other institutions participate in library loan systems, but I’m told there are others). He said he owned a copy of the book personally and would let me borrow his copy. I haven’t seen him since.
Did he violate a librarian code? Do they have non-competes? Did they take him away for re-education? Are there really investigators like Mr. Bookman from that Seinfeld episode? It’s like he’s been shushed out of existence.
It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Ditch work. There’s an afternoon of fun to be had, but first take a look and make sure any library books you’ve checked out aren’t late. Be safe.
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There’s a very good article called “Ovid in exile” in last month’s New Criterion. Ovid’s out at Columbia University. I had a stumble when I came across the embedded quote by Lisa Libes, described as a “veteran of Literature Humanities” by article author David Lehman: “Ovid was sent on a three-year furlough, returning to the syllabus briefly in 2018 before being nixed entirely.” I stumbled wondering why a 2018 controversy, settled with seeming finality in 2021, showed up as consideration meat in the October 2025 issue, but the editors published it under the “Reflections” heading and Lehman, aside from being a poet and critic is the founder and series editor of The Best American Poetry anthologies, so he can bring up what he wants when he wants and we’re all the better for it.
Per Lehman, “In plain English, the students singled out the Metamorphoses because of the Greek and Roman god’s habit of coming to earth, pursuing mortal nymphs, and raping them.” He then lists the rapes of Perserpine by Pluto, Europa by Jupiter, Philomena by Terseus, and Apollo’s attempt at Daphne.
I had four takeaways. First, good God what mindless little Philistines these feinting couch students are and what an embarrassment that they’d publicly come forward to demand they be shielded lest one of the most widely known and revered works of literature, unfeared for two thousand years, should overcome them. Second, there is a terrifying possibility of overlap; that there are people at Columbia for whom the fictional rape of mythical figures in literature is intolerable and the literal rape of Jews at music festivals, regrettable. Third, that banning books from college curricula is not viewed with the same distaste as banning books from elementary school reading lists. Four, that poetry is relevant enough to get canceled.
Four is cause for celebration. Professors have been complaining about incoming freshman reading habits and comprehension, an anecdotal wave that culminated in a Twitter shaking (momentary, but that’s Twitter) article in The Atlantic. The article, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by Rose Horowitch, while presenting sourced testimony that students are less and less prepared to tackle what used to be standard college reading loads, admits “No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences.” The italics is mine. At least seventeen professors agree.
But it comports. Comports! I believe reading and real literacy are waning. I look around and see kids not reading books. It’s all phones and rap and roll music. The Atlantic article made the rounds because older people like me always think younger people are amiss. That there seems to be something to the concern – and there does – is also something older people like me always think.
Columbia is mentioned prominently in the article prompting this refutation, “The Atlantic said ‘elite’ college students ‘can’t read books.’” by Emily Pickering, in the Columbia Daily Spectator. My reading is that Pickering’s defends admirably, but the tone is servingly soothing. All she writes may be indisputable, but were I concerned alumni/donors/US News & World Report had read The Atlantic article and needed calming reassurance that the ship was right and all their precious offspring getting the highest and best education, hers would be the salve I’d want sent out.
Whatever the truth of the matter—and as I said, I’m of the belief the kids are failed before college—here comes proof out of rightly or wrongly defamed Columbia that at least some cohort is capable of comprehension. So capable, they worry about empathetic suffering. That, or some clever students looked ahead to Arthur Golding’s fourteeners or Ralph Humphries iambic pentameter and figured to clear the way for less rigorous assignments. Maybe Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Horowitch writes that Riordan’s books “although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon.” To be fair, there’s an implied smirk.
Leda’s assault by swan shaped Zeus is the probably the best known Greek god rape these days. Poems H.D. and Yeats capture malevolent intent and violence respectively and famously in poetry reading circles. It gets a mention in The Metamorphoses, but in passing; another damning incident in a list of divine misadventure.
Here’s the relevant part from Book VI, starting at line 103, as translated by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969):
[Warning: triggering and offensive material.]
Arachne also
Worked in the gods, and their deceitful business
With mortal girls. There was Europa, cheated
By the bull’s guise; you would think him real, the creature,
Real as the waves he breasted, and the girl
Seems to be looking back to the lands of home,
Calling her comrades, lifting her feet a little
To keep them above the lift and surge of the water.
There was Asterie, held by the eagle,
And Leda, lying under the wings of the swan,
Antiope, pregnant with twins, whose father
Was a satyr, so she thought, but it was really
Jove in disguise again; he took Alcmena
In the semblance of Amphitryon; he came
To Danae in a shower of gold; he was
A flame to Aegina, to Mnemosyne
A shepherd, a mottled snake to Deo’s daughter.
And that’s just Jupiter’s beastliness.
Neptune, Jove’s brother, was another cheater,
A bull to one Aeolian girl, a river
To another, or a ram; a stallion to Ceres,
The fair-haired mother of the wingèd horse
Received him as a wingèd bird; Melantho
Took him as a dolphin. To them all Arachne
Gave their own features and a proper background.
Apollo, too, was there, a country bot
At times, or a shepherd, deluding Isse so,
At times a hawk, at times a tawny lion.
And she worked Bacchus in, whose bunch of grapes
Deceived Erigone, and there was Saturn,
As a horse, to father Chiron. Flowers and ivy
Ran round the border as the work was ended.
These myths have roots in real events. Take the rape of Europa in Book II, beginiing at line 856, again, from Humphries:
And the king’s daughter looked at him in wonder,
So calm, so beautiful, and feared to touch him,
At first, however mild, and little by little
Got over her fear, and soon was bringing flowers
To hold towards that white face, and he, the lover,
Gave kisses to the hands held out, rejoicing
In hope of later more exciting kisses.
Is it time? Not quite. He leaps, a little playful,
On the green grass, or lays the snowy body
On the yellow sand, and gradually the princess
Loses all fear, and he lets her pat his shoulder,
Twine garlands in his horns, and she grows bolder,
Climbs on his back, of course all unsuspecting,
And he rises, ever so gently, and slowly edges
From the dry sand towards the water, further and further,
And swimming now, with the girl, trembling a little
And looking back to the land, her right hand clinging
Tight to one horn, and the other resting easy
Along the shoulder, and her flowing garments
Filling and fluttering in the breath of the sea-wind.
The final image is claimed by Robert Graves, in his The Greek Myths, Vol I, evocative of a pre-Hellenic Moon-priestess “triumphantly riding on the Sun-Bull, her victim.” Every image of woman is Moon-goddess and Moon-priestess to Graves, but he claims there are surviving plaques from Midea which back him up. Graves also writes that “It is possible the story of Europe also commemorates a raid on Phoenicia by Hellenes from Crete.” That confuses me.
There’s consensus surrounding what the rape recounts, specifically a Cretan raid on Tyre in which King Agenor’s daughter was supposedly abducted. In myth-work, Europa’s probably a synecdoche for women and others taken as slaves by the invaders. That’s not why I’m confused. Graves says the invaders were Hellenes. I thought the Minoans were in competition and so outside Hellenic culture.
Inscrutable Linear A is believed to record other than Ancient Greek. Later Linear B recorded Mycenaean Greek, but that alphabet arose long after the death of King Minos, who myth holds was Europa’s child by Jupiter’s rape and for whom the Minoans are named. The Hellenes eventually dominated and incorporated the Minoans, but all this happened before, making a Hellenic raid on a Phoenician city which resulted in the founding of a pre-Hellenic culture a Dr. Who timey-wimey mess.
The name Minoan is a tag given by Arthur Evans in 1905 or so, after his excavations of Crete proved the existence of an ancient people. He snagged the name from legend, so it’s possible that the raid on Tyre happened after ~ 1450 BC when the Minoans fell and that Minos was king of a post Minoan Crete. A mess, but fuel for curious Sunday reading and web surfing.
[A quick aside for those looking for further curious Sunday reading: In the September issue of The New Criterion, there’s an article by Paul A. Rabe titled “Minoans unknown.” There’s history, etymology, and myth origin speculation.]
Europa’s rape is implied in The Metamorphoses. How subtly in the original Latin, I can’t say. Translations differ. Humphries’s could be misread as a bad day at the beach. The off-page nature leads to consideration of rape as “the act of carrying away,” per Oxford’s Shorter English Dictionary. She was kidnapped, but ancient readers and on understood that she was raped in the sexual sense as well. Ovid begins Book III only with,
And now the god put off the bull’s disguise,
Revealed himself at last.
That’s on arrival at Crete. Other sources of Greek and Roman mythology tell that Zeus/Jupiter revealed himself and raped her, or revealed himself and seduced her, or revealed himself as an eagle and raped her. There’s little doubt that it didn’t stop at the carrying away. The poetry relies on the reader already knowing.
Arthur Golding’s (1536-1606) translation is racier, more foreboding, the motion of the waves more suggestive. He piles allusions on allusions building a heap of brazen coy. The same excerpt from Book II as from Humphries above:
Agenor’s daughter marvelled much so tame a beast to see,
But yet to touch him at the first too bold she durst not be.
Anon she reaches to his mouth her hand with herbs and flowers;
The loving beast was glad thereof and neither frowns nor lowers,
But till the hopèd joy might come with glad and fawning cheer
He licks her hands and scarce, ah, scarce, the residue he forbear.
Sometimes he frisks and skips about and shows her sport at hand;
Anon he lays his snowy side against the golden sand.
So fear by little driven away, he offered eft his breast
To stroke and coy and eft his horns with flowers to be dressed.
At last Europa, knowing not (for so the maid was called)
On whom she ventured for to ride, was ne’er awhit appalled
To set herself upon his back. Then by and by the god
From main dry land to main moist sea gan leisurely to plod.
At first he did but dip his feet within the outmost wave
And back again; then further in another plunge he gave,
And so still further, till at the last he had his wishèd prey
Amid the deep where was no means to scape with life away.
The lady, quaking all for fear, with rueful count’nance cast
Aye towards shore from whence she came, held with her right hand fast
One of his horns and with the left did stay upon his back.
The weather flasked and whiskèd up her garments, being slack.
It’s hardly shocking material, certainly less graphic than what you’d find in any given episode of Law & Order SVU. Rape is ugly, no matter how dressed in flowers and ivy. So is murder. So are a great many conflicts dealt with in literature read by millions through centuries.
Is The Waste Land on notice? A Streetcar Named Desire? It’s a joke in conservative circles that every time someone tries to keep a sexually themed comic book off elementary school curricula, MSNBC cues up talking heads to claim the right is going after Toni Morrison. It gets pretty rapey in Beloved.
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]