Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis

[icymist]

Richard Buxton, Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 281. ISBN 9780199245499. $100.00.


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Reviewed by Barry B. Powell, University of Wisconsin-Madison ([e-mail])
Word count: 973 words
In story, things change shape, and in nature too, when a worm becomes a butterfly. This intriguing study of metamorphosis in ancient literature looks squarely at examples from the Greek tradition, beginning with Homer's Odyssey. (Ovid and Apuleius apparently are too Latin for inclusion, although features of each are recounted in the introduction.) Of course we cannot always be sure whether metamorphosis has taken place, or whether the poet is speaking figuratively--did Athene fly away from Pylos in the actual form of a bird or only "like a bird" Buxton wonders? Can we take literally descriptions of the gods as animals, harking back to an ancient theriomorphism, or is something else going on? In the Odyssey Proteus certainly changes his shape, and Circe makes pigs of men. Odysseus himself is now a decrepit old man, now a shining young man. In the Iliad fewer transformations take place, and neither poem allows a permanent change from man to beast, as so common in Ovid's poem.

From Homer, Buxton turns to Athenian drama, where he rounds up the usual suspects: Dionysus looks like a man but is a god. Io is a cow. Tereus may have become a bird. Hekabe will turn into a bitch, Kadmos and Harmonia into snakes. Still, as in epic, in general, only death can release the human from its form. In comedy, Aristophanes' Birds testifies to metamorphosis into birds, although Buxton may lose his focus in seeing disguise, so important in Aristophanic comedy, as a genre of metamorphosis (I wonder, does not the masked character pretend to be different, but never is?).

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