Back to school: Arachne-phobia

Tonight for the first time in months I have thrown open the windows to let in cool air. There was a delicious evening walk with a fingernail moon hanging low; crickets still pulse, but it's fall, at least for a day. Across America and Greece, school is in.

Photo: The temple of Poseidon at Sounion, from across the bay.

Elementary school teachers are stapling leaves to bulletin boards, and preparing lesson plans on Greek mythology for their K-5 charges. No doubt many if not most of those plans include the tale of Arachne.

Arachne, a mortal, challenged the goddess Athena to a weaving contest. As we know from many other stories of this type, Arachne was doomed to lose. And not only did she lose, Athena turned her into a spider for her trouble.

In some versions, this story is claimed to be the ancient Greek explanation of where spiders came from.

I would very much like for teachers to give this story a rest. The version we all know did not come from Greek mythology, but from a poet named Ovid in a poem called Metamorphoses ("Transformations"). There is no evidence that this was a story told by Greeks to Greeks, if we believe Timothy Gantz's Early Greek Myth.

And not even Ovid says the story explains where spiders come from. That was a creation of the nineteenth century, when western Europeans believed that Greek myth was supposed to be nothing but explanations.

I'm under no illusion that anyone will change her ways just because I asked. It is a good thing that Greek mythology is taught by anyone, anywhere.

But maybe there's something else teachers can emphasize besides just the origin-of-spider idea.

The Arachne story has some delightful details, which tell us a lot about Ovid and the time in which he was writing.

It turns out that this contest between Arachne and Athena is not just about who can weave the best. It's about who can weave the best story.

Long ago, textiles, like pottery, were used as a kind of still movie. Large rugs and tapestries could be woven to contain pictures, frequently of mythological tales. In the contest, both Athena and Arachne put a huge amount of mythology into their fabric, mostly about the gods. And Arachne's is particularly full: Ovid, who wrote in Latin, peppers his description with Greek names:

addidit, ut satyri celatus imagine pulchram
Iuppiter implerit gemino Nycteida fetu,
Amphitryon fuerit, cum te Tirynthia, cepit,
aureus ut Danaen, Asopida luserit ignis,
Mnemosynen pastor, varius Deoida serpens.

"She added [in her tapestry] how Juppiter, disguised as a satyr, impregnated the beautiful daughter of Nycteus [Antiope] with twin offspring, how he was Amphitryon when he took you, daughter of Tiryns [Alcmene], how as a golden shower he deceived Danae, how as fire, the daughter of Asopus [Aegina], how as a shepherd, [the mother of the Muses] Mnemosyne, how as a spotted snake, Proserpina."

[Click here for an etext/hypertext version]

All of this is extremely complex and full of allusions, hence all the explanatory brackets. Also, Arachne was interested in making fun of the gods, and so in this section put in all of Jupiter's adulterous affairs.

The number of mythological names per capita in Arachne's version is much larger than in Athena's version, and even she sees that Arachne has succeeded better as a storyteller than she has.

Athena, in a rage of jealousy, beats Arachne, who tries to hang herself, and it is then that Athena turns her into a spider.

So this is not really about textiles. It's not about being a better maker of fabric. It's about whose story is better. In other words, who is a better poet? Athena, the original INTJ, was never famous for her poetry.

For those who know Latin literature, this poetry contest looks a lot like Ovid trying to call attention to a pop-culture contest of his own day: the great god of poetry, recently crowned, was Vergil, whose Aeneid had become an all-time best seller. All epic poetry that came after-- for the Aeneid was an epic-- had to stand in the shadow of that great work. The epic Metamorphoses shivered in this shadow.

Now Ovid was a poetic genius. He had an outsized ego and was famous for it. So it would make sense to cast himself as Arachne, the overconfident weaver of stories, and set himself up against a divinity, Athena (= Vergil). Then he could have some fun on his reader by showing that he (Arachne) was really better than Athena (Vergil).

But Ovid pokes a little fun at himself by showing that his competition with Vergil only ends up changing him into a very small and insignificant creature-- albeit one that weaves some pretty webs.

So, assuming that this interpretation holds any water at all, what has this to do with a fifth-grade classroom?

Change the focus.

Instead of saying that the Greeks used myth to explain things and that Arachne was the first spider, emphasize that textiles could be a form of storytelling. If possible, use white t-shirts and fabric paint to get students to weave (paint) their own stories. Or use large sheets of paper and markers to make a tapestry of stories.

Emphasize the authentic details of the story, not fantasies about the story. And let students know that there is a context to myth. "The guy who wrote this was a poet himself who was competing with another poet."

Write me if you want more details or have other questions about this.

And enjoy the crispness of the season, once it comes in its harvest moon fullness.