Your gateway to endless inspiration
Ovid - Blog Posts
Boreas and Oreithyia
Boreas and Oreithyia
François Boucher. Oil on canvas. 1769.
...And now impetuous Boreas, having howled resounding words, unrolled his rustling wings — that fan the earth and ruffle the wide sea — and, swiftly wrapping untrod mountain peaks in whirling mantles of far-woven dust, thence downward hovered to the darkened world; and, canopied in artificial night of swarthy overshadowing wings, caught up the trembling Orithyia to his breast: nor did he hesitate in airy course until his huge wings fanned the chilling winds around Ciconian Walls... Ovid. “Metamorphoses”. Book 6, 702
...и раскинул Мощные крылья свои, и их леденящие взмахи Землю овеяли всю, взбушевалось пространное море. Вот, по вершинам влача покрывало из пыли, метет он Почву; мраком покрыт, приведенную в ужас и трепет, Темными крыльями он Орифию свою обнимает. Так он летел, и сильней от движенья огонь разгорался. И лишь тогда задержал он ристанья воздушного вожжи, Как до твердынь, где киконы живут, долетел похититель... Овидий. «Метаморфозы». Книга 6, 702 - 710
AND IF we’re talking about Ovid’s take on the Persephone myth anyway, and the other story Ovid inserted, the comparison between the boy being turned into a lizard for laughing at Demeter and the Demophon myth are so different in every single aspect that I cannot fathom what the use of the second one is to the Persephone myth, only to Ovid’s overall themes. While Demophon is a temporary stand-in for Persephone and perhaps even a tool Demeter uses to one-up her brothers, and is a cultic display of her matronly side as a goddess, the lizard tale just…provides comedy? Characterizes her as petty or fickle? It really is the most derailing story line in this part of the text, as Demeter is searching before it and after it. It only provides the mandatory metamorphosis, but so does Cyane? And the fun part is that the episode reflects the Homeric hymn in that Demeter is received as a guest and receives a specific type of food tied to her role as goddess of the grain, but here it has absolutely no payoff, nor any ambiguity to make us guess at more. It just…is.
Thinking about how, to let the myth of Persephone fit the themes of the Metamorphoses, Ovid had to insert two rather unknown/unpopular side stories about a river nymph turning into water/liquid in her own stream, and a nymph giving Demeter the news, and how this affects the myth
Like for one the Metamorphoses in essence is caught up with the gods’ violence against lesser beings, mostly nymphs, women and mortals in general, and deals with the utter helplessness and loss of control these beings experience when they are transformed, as punishment or to escape a worse fate or simply because their suffering becomes too great for any mortal to bear. And here’s Persephone, a goddess and a rather major one, who by all means experiences the same type and amount of suffering. Ovid literally calls her a goddess on par with the other gods, and reasons this is why the six-month rule comes about. Where do you take that myth? The outcome is set in stone, her cyclical seasons-bound fate is so integral to the ancient cosmos, and yet it falls flat in a story like the metamorphoses, where the Olympian gods are usually on the other side of the fence. But here we have these two nymphs, who both experienced the violence done to Persephone and either give it a voice or dissolve into nothing, have their body and being entirely taken away from them.
So I really think Cyane and Arethusa are almost stand-ins for Persephone, where the the former gets the metamorphosis that symbolizes the pain and suffering that the abduction causes, as she literally dissolves into tears and cannot speak anymore when she manifests again, and Arethusa’s story of her own nearly successful abduction and subsequent exile/displacement give us Persephone’s side of the story, but in a less repetitive way than in the Homeric hymn.