1-18

Juno, having descended to earth in the pre-dawn hours, expresses her anger at her husband Jupiter’s infidelities. She catalogs Jupiter’s lovers, rape victims, and illegitimate children (as well as some innocent bystanders) who have been turned into constellations. The catalog assumes advanced knowledge of the stories. As usual in Greek mythology, Juno’s wrath is directed not at Jupiter himself, but at the women and their children by him.

Act 1 Essay

Juno is particularly angry at Hercules, the latest and most prominent of Jupiter’s illegitimate sons, who has just completed his greatest exploit, coming home alive from the Underworld with the monster Cerberus. Now that Hercules has pacified the whole of the earth and conquered the Underworld, Juno feels sure that, unless stopped, he will threaten Olympus itself.

1 Tonantis: Ovid was the first Latin poet to call Jupiter “the Thunderer.” Poets after him frequently used this epithet.

2 relictum est: this phrase should be read relictumst. Prodelision is an exception to the normal rules of elision that occurs when the common word est follows a word that ends in a vowel or vowel + m. The final syllable of the first word is pronounced, and the e of est is prodelided instead. semper aliēnum Iovem: the adjective means “belonging to another,” and refers to Jupiter’s unfaithfulness: in Juno’s experience, Jupiter is never hers, and “always some else’s.”

3 templa summī … aetheris: “precincts of high heaven,” i.e., Olympus. A templum originally designated an open area in which the augurs observed the sky when taking the auspices; it later came to mean a building dedicated to a god. Poets accordingly can use templum in the meaning of “sky,” and often substitute plurals for singular (L-S templum I.B.1). vidua: “spouseless” or, more generally, “empty” or “deprived” of something. Here it can refer both to the templa of the sky that Juno has “emptied” by leaving, and also to Juno herself, abandoned by the unfaithful Jupiter.

4 caelō: ablative of place from which (AG 426) with pulsa > pello -ere. Juno claims that her rivals for Jupiter’s love have “expelled” her from the sky (L-S pello II.B.1). paelicibus: a paelex is a mistress installed as a rival or in addition to a wife. The word is abusive in the mouth of a wife; Fitch accordingly translates “whores.” The case is dative, either as the indirect object of dedī , or as a dative of agent after passive pulsa (AG 375) a common construction in poetry.

5 tellūs colenda est: “I must live on earth,”: passive periphrastic (AG 500.2) with the dative of agent (mihi) unexpressed. The alliteration in a chiastic pattern (tellūs – tenent, colenda – caelum) emphasizes the line’s bitter complaint.

6, 8 hinc … hinc: “on this side … on that side,” answered by 10 illinc “on that side.” Juno points to the various stars visible in the night sky before announcing the dawn at the end of her speech (123–4).

6 Arctos: a Greek nominative form (AG 52), referring to Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. Jupiter raped the nymph Callisto, and Juno transformed her into a bear. Callisto’s son accidentally shot his mother while hunting, thinking that she was in fact a bear. Jupiter transformed both mother and her son into the Great Bear and Lesser Bear constellations, Ursa Major and Minor. glaciālis: genitive modifying polī.

7 sublīme … sīdus: nominative, in apposition with Arctos. Argolicās: one of several poetic synonyms for “Greek,” evoking Juno’s favored city Argos. It also alliterates with agit and has a convenient metrical shape (Ārgŏlĭcus). Others poetic words for “Greek” include Grāius -a -um (619) and Argīvus -a -um (1123). classēs … agit: sailors since antiquity have navigated by Polaris, the North Star, the brightest star in the Ursa Minor constellation. Juno associates the constellations with sailing, as they were essential for navigation in antiquity.

8 quā: “where” (adv.). recentī vēre: “the new (i.e., only just begun) spring.” In several manuscripts tepentī (“warm”) stands in place of recentī. laxātur diēs: the sun is in the constellation Taurus (the Bull: the vector Europae in line 9) near the beginning of spring, when the days begin to lengthen. The day is accordingly “extended” in spring, or “loosened” from the frozen winter. Seneca later calls the constellation Taurus the “spring Bull” (951–52 vernī … Taurī).

9 Tyriae … vector Eurōpae: Jupiter took the form of a bull and carried Europa from Tyre in Phoenicia to Crete. Titian’s painting is the best-known image of this story.

10 illinc: answering hinc… hinc in lines 6 and 8. timendum … gregem: the unexpected use of gregem as the object of exserunt is a good example of Seneca’s inventive poetic style. Instead of a typical phrase such as “put forth their heads” or “put forth their faces,” the Pleiades “put forth a flock.” The gerundive timendum has the sense of purpose or necessity (AG 500.1). ratibus ac pontō: datives of agent after the gerundive timendum (AG 374). The stormy season on the Mediterranean began with the setting of the Pleiades in November, and so sailors are said to “fear” the stars. This autumn constellation contrasts with the springtime constellation Taurus that Juno has just described (8–9).

11 vagantēs … Atlantidēs: better known as the Pleiades, these are the daughters of Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky. Juno’s anger is caused by the fact that Jupiter engendered children with three of them: Maia, Electra, and Taygete. The Pleiades, like all stars, seem to “wander” through the sky over the course of a year, although the description is particularly apt because the stars are being imagined as a flock.

12 ferrō: either an instrumental ablative with terret (AG 409) or an ablative of specification with mināx. mināx … Ōrīōn: the hunter Orion is not normally thought of as a son of Jupiter, but of Poseidon and Euryale (Hes. fr. 148(a) M.-W.) or of the earth (Apollod. 1.25f.). Ovid has an odd story by which Orion was conceived without a mother, through the mixing of semen from Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury (Ov. Fast. 5.493–536). So he still counts for the purposes of Juno’s tirade as one of her husband’s illegitimate children. Orion is a violent, unsavory man (mināx), an interloper in heaven, and so in Juno’s view much like Hercules.

13 Perseus aureus: Perseus is called “golden” because Jupiter appeared to his mother Danaë in the form of a shower of gold (as shown on a 5th c. Boeotian krater). The -eu- in Perseus is a diphthong (unlike the -eu- in aureus, which are separate vowels).  suās … stēllās: plural because more than one star forms the constellation Perseus.

14 geminī …. Tyndaridae: nominative, in apposition to clāra … signa. These are Castor and Pollux (i.e., the constellation Gemini), Jupiter’s sons by Leda, also known as the Dioscuri or “sons of Zeus.” Here they are called by the Greek patronymic Tyndaridae, referring to their mortal stepfather Tyndareus.

15 quibusque nātīs: dative = nātī quibus, “those children for whom.” The antecedent has been attracted into the relative clause. These are Latona’s children Apollo and Diana, i.e., the sun and the moon. The sun is of course not visible to Juno in the night sky, but by mentioning both sun and moon Seneca gains a parllelism in his list of Jupiter’s illegitimate children: two heroic sons (Orion and Perseus, 12–13), and two sets of twins (Castor and Pollux and Apollo and Diana). mōbilis tellūs: Juno attempted to punish Latona by forbidding any land to allow her to give birth. The island of Delos was imagined to float in the sea, and so escaped Juno’s prohibition. In gratitude for allowing her to give birth, Latona fixed Delos in place.

16 nec … tantum: “not only,” emphasizing Juno’s frustration: the sky contains not only Jupiter’s illegitimate son Bacchus and his mother Semele (Bacchī parēns), but also Ariadne.

17 adiēre: an alternate form of adiērunt: Latin poets commonly shorten –ērunt, the third person plural form of the perfect active, to –ērĕ, in part because it provides a useful short syllable. Bacchus and Semele “have gone to” the gods, i.e., joined them: Bacchus rescued his mother from the Underworld after her death and brought her to Olympus to become the goddess Thyone. nē … probrō vacet: nē introduces a negative purpose clause (AG 531.1). Probrō is ablative of separation after a verb (vacet) that indicates absence or want (AG 401). qua pars: forms of the indefinite pronoun quis often follow the conjunctions sī, nisi, num, and nē (AG 310.a).

18 puellae … Cnōsiacae: Ariadne is the “girl from Knossos“ on Crete. Bacchus discovered her abandoned on the island of Naxos and took her as his wife, turning her marriage crown (called a serta here) into the constellation Corona, or “Ariadne’s crown.”