Here are my favorites from the second half of Ovid's Metamorphoses (Books 8-10):
Orpheus and Eurydice: This is a sad story but it also seems like a turning point in the mood and themes of the unit. It kind of reminds me of that story from the bible where the guy is leaving a city and he's not supposed to look back at his wife, but he does and she turns into a pillar of salt. While the ending is tragic like so many other Greek myths, they kind of throw you a curve ball at the end. The narrator tells you how Orpheus never married again and you think, "Awww, how sad and sweet," but then they slip in at the end "Oh, by the way, he switched teams to men and was the first gay guy is Thrace." They just throw that last sentence in there and you don't really know what to think about it. It doesn't make me like the story any less, but it just makes it feel like the ending was rushed and there's probably an interesting story there that we don't get to hear.
Ganymede and Hyacinthus: This story was interesting because it was sort of an anomaly. Most of the time, the stories are about gods and their female lovers or goddesses and their male lovers, but this story is about two of the gods' male lovers. I didn't even know they had those until I read this story (although, it doesn't really surprise me because Zues/Jupiter has always been a very promiscuous character). Of course, the ending can't be too happy; it is a Greek myth after all. The male lover of the god Phoebus, named Hyacinthus, is killed when the earth throws Phoebus' discus back to him that Hyacinthis was going to retrieve and the discus ends up striking the boy in the head, killing him. Apparently, the male lovers of the gods are as prone to tragic ends as the female ones.
Pygmalion: This story is just odd. A guy falls in love with a statue he carved and Venus turns her into a real woman. But before that, he touches it and kisses it and puts clothes on it and lets it "sleep" in the bed with him as if it were a real person. If this story were to be told today, it would be about a creepy guy who treated a life-size doll or something like his girlfriend. If I were to rewrite the story, though, I would do something kind of like the movie Her. The guy (or girl) falls in love with a computer program or machine that (s)he created and it becomes a real person in a dream (s)he has. Overall, it was an interesting story but still very odd.
The Foot Race: The last story that caught my attention was about Hippomenes and Atalanta. The girl is literally running from being married and killing all the males who fail to beat her in a foot race, but she's so pretty that guys keep coming to race her. Hippomenes manages to beat her with some divine help, but it's alright because they are actually in love. If only the story had ended there. The two end up desecrating a sacred temple and are both turned into lions. Did any people in Greece NOT have a tragic tale of woe? Imagine being raised on these stories instead of the classic fairy tales we know and love. I think our ideas of life and love would be a lot different. Maybe I could do a story about that, about a modern day girl who is brought up on Greek myths instead of fairy tales and how her romantic relationships are affected by this. Would anyone be interested in reading that?
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| The Race between Hippomenes and Atalanta by Noël Hallé(Wikimedia Commons) |
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