in this temple which doubled as Rome’s Mint. Thesenmatters were not lost on either of our poets.nIn the long harsh winters of Pontus, Ovid worked at hisngreatest love letter to the city he would never see again, hisnFasti, a calendar of the events that made Rome Rome. Nearnmid-January occurs the anniversary of the founding of thentemple of Juno Moneta, which the poet marks with:nThee hath the next lig ht.nWhiteness,nset within winter’s temple,none lofty stairway to the birth of coin:nnow, Concord, canst thou scrutinize thy hordenof Romans,nnow sanctifying hands have made thy House.nNowhere (so far as I know) has Pound alluded to thisnpassage—probably the most exalted lines ever written aboutnthe moral grandeur of honest currency—but everywherenThe Cantos aspire to its spirit and at one point they actuallyncreate Ovid’s passage’s exact inversion:nThat the Pontifex ceased to be holyn—that was in Caesar’s time—nwho was buggar’dnand the coin ceased to be holy,nand, of course,nthey worshipped the emperor.nThe Caesar mentioned here is, of course, Julius, whosensexual degradation was noted by Catullus and merelynparallels his other desecratory activities: as Pontifex hendebased the coin, destroyed his own human integrity bynpretending to be a god, and ruined the state, turning thenRepublic into the Empire. “The temple is holy,” asserts ournmodern poet in the spirit of our ancient one, “because thentemple is not for sale.” The temple is not for sale (at least inna moral epoch such as we might presentiy hope to return to)nbecause access to the mysteries of the cosmos is one thingnmoney can’t buy.nWearing the masks of our various historical personae, wenhave passed through the valley of the shadow of money intonElysian Fields of mythos. Let us pause a moment to notenthat I employ the Greek term for a reason. Loose journalisticnusage has all but destroyed any pure sense of the wordnmyth, now indicating convenient political fictions maintainednby coercion or inertia against the truth over time.nThere is also the merely decorative tradition of the verses ofnthe troubadours or a multitude of high Renaissance rapesn(various lecherous excuses for a display of giggling cleavage);nthere is some of that sort of window dressing even in thenCommedia: There’s a lot in Shakespeare, in the tusheries ofnFrench Classical Tragedy. Almost all of it goes back to thenoften titillating verse of Ovid himself Yet all these poetsnalso used such things in a more serious sense; there is ancurrent of profound wisdom communicated through thenmedium of myth whose devotion to the cultivation of whichnhas set Pound in a class by himself among moderns whilenmaking him, as mentioned at the start, Ovid’s mostnsignificant disciple.nNeither the skeptical urbanities (“Gods are convenient sonwe tend to believe in them”) of our ancient poet nor thencaustic empiricisms of our modern one were, in the end.nproof against urgent accesses to the “truth” of this form ofnknowledge:nDwelleth within us the god. We warm warmed tonhis motion.nHis cast soweth seeds of sacred mind.nI have outstanding right to have gazed uponngods’ faces:nI am a medium; I am a singer of truths.nSo Ovid. The initial phrase (“esf deus in nobis” etc.) weavesnthrough the late cantos of Pound and leads Ovid on (in thenoriginal) to a vision of that same deity, Juno Moneta, whosentemple was the shining mint atop Rome’s highest hill.nIn mythos we enter another world: Perhaps it would benmore accurate to suggest that another world enters us {estndeus in nobis . . . ) wherein our usual state of rational mindnno longer obtains. “A god,” said Pound, “is an eternal statenof mind”:nThe dogs leap on Actaeon,n”Hither, hither, Actaeon,”nSpotted stag of the wood;nGold, gold, a sheaf of hair,nThick like a wheat swath.nBlaze, blaze in the sun.nThe dogs leap on Actaeon.nThat a man out hunting has stumbled onto the secretnbathing-place where the Moon renews her virginity; thatnthe goddess in outraged modesty turns him into a stag; thatnhis own hounds run him to earth: through this poet’snglorious sleight-of-hand we see {hear) it all. If this be butnwishful thinking, it is not a kind that most of us have everndone unless in our most intimate horrific nightmares. Arensuch things so?nI have seen what I have seen.nWhen they brought in the boy I said:n”He has a god in him,nthough I do not know which god.”nAnd they kicked me into the fore-stays.nI have seen what I have seen . . .nSo the boy-god Dionysus, shanghai’d by King Pentheus’npirates, is betrayed (we have mentioned this before).nNow, the questing genius of poetic imagination mightncarry one (an Ovid, a Dante, a Pound) very far into merelynassuming mysteries of the cosmos on intuition and languagenalone. Yet unless the universe itself in some even unfathomablenfashion respond, one is left forever wonderingnwhether such traditions of the literally marvelous are notnjust instances—however esthetically superior—of contagiousndelusional systems of nightmarish wishful thinking.nAfter all. Pound was adjudged to have been, officially, mad.nNo one answers such a question for another; probably onencan’t even answer it for oneself But by the closing book ofnMetamorphoses (wherein Pythagoras actually teaches thencentral doctrine of transconsciousness to Rome’s KingnNuma), Ovid has passed from any putative state of superficialnfascination with mythos to something approachingncertitude.nThis personal witness is the root significance of the stuffn{continued on page 47)nnnMARCH 1987/23n