#ovid's metamorphoses

[timecrayon]

"Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?)"

Dead Boy Detectives (2024) / Hadestown (2016) / Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) / Kaos (2024) / Talk - Hozier / Metamorpheses - Ovid

[7pleiades7]

The Death of Icarus (19th century), (detail), by Alexandre Cabanel (French, 1823-1889), oil on canvas, 44" x 31.5", Private Collection

[orpheus-has-lyreizz]

reading Metamorphoses by Ovid

[hycinthrt]

you are laughing, his dying head sunk into his shoulder like a broken flower and you are laughing

[lionofchaeronea]

Jupiter and Mercury at the House of Philemon and Baucis, workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, ca. 1620-25

[dykeganseythethird]

to die in your lovers arms

bluesey as françois gérard’s orpheus tries to hold on to eurydice, ca. 1791

[illustratus]

Tereus' Banquet (Tereus Confronted with the Head of his Son Itylus)

by Peter Paul Rubens

[nighttimeclassics]

so im just thinking about the Orpheus and Eurydice metaphor in Dead Boy Detectives again...

so i really cant get over the symbolism in the show's comparison between Edwin and Charles and Orpheus and Eurydice. I'm sure someone else more succinct than me has already talked about it but man i just have to because as a classicist it has been consuming my brain since it happened... this is going to be a shitty ramble, but we vibe

so in the show, it is Edwin who first realises his feelings for Charles, and is the first to to truthful about them. Given that, in most translations of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus' devotion to his wife is seen as the "stronger love" between the pair. highlighted in later adaptations such as Hadestown, as Eurydice makes the active choice to go to the underworld and leave her husband rather than their wedding being overshadowed by issues "worse than any omens". therefore, Edwin could initially be seen as the Orpheus parallel. particularly when you consider that Edwin 'guided Charles from the darkness' when he was dying of hypothermia with the lantern

however, unsurprisingly, given that is it Edwin who escaped from Hell, and is returned to it, Charles appears as the Orpheus parallel, with Edwin being his Eurydice. this is obviously then made super explicit in the show with it being Charles rescuing/ leading Edwin out of Hell. but even then it is not that simple

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, when pleading with Hades and Persephone, Orpheus states "my wife is the cause of my journey. A viper [...] robbed her of her best years. I longed to be able to accept it, and I do not say I have not tried: Love won." and obviously at the core of both of these relationships, is a deep deep love between them, regardless of how that manifests. Something i think is a massive parallel that i haven't seen anyone talk about yet is the willingness to remain in the Underworld/Hell for their respective partners.

going back to Metamorphoses, when Orpheus is requesting Eurydice's return to the mortal world, he gives Hades and Persephone an alternative solution of sorts. he says "if the fates refuse my wife this kindness [of returning to life], I am determined not to return {to the mortal realm]: you can delight in both our deaths." now is this not effectively the same thing Charles says to the Night Nurse when bargaining with her to open a door to Hell??? Charles says "then open up a door and I'll go get him, then we're stuck in Hell and you know where we are, or, I bring him back and we're all yours. It's a win-win." tell me that these aren't the same. you cant.

But i do think the most interesting parallel is when Charles and Edwin are running up the spiral staircase. i am not mentioning the times when escaping Hell, Edwin overtook Charles running, because let's be honest, we all know he is the faster sprinter of the two given the 70 years he spent practising. so I am disregarding that. but what I do find fascinating is this - and why I said it was more complicated earlier; in the metamorphoses Orpheus is obviously given the stipulation that he must not look at Eurydice when guiding her out of the underworld, or the agreement "would be null and void". and its here that we see another reversal. during the majority of the run up the staircase, Charles is behind Edwin, because like we have established, he's speedy. but in this key moment, Charles takes the lead in their escape, walking in front of Edwin whilst making it clear that they need to keep moving. just like in the tale, Charles, fulfilling Orpheus' role, "Afraid [they] was no longer there, and eager to see [them], the lover turned his eyes", turns to look back at Edwin, delivering the ridiculously romantic, 'sorry, no version of this where I didn't come get you is there?'. however, after this he refocuses on continuing up the staircase, which is where Edwin steps in:

as you can see in the gif, currently, Edwin is in, what I'm going to call the 'Eurydice position', following the lover out of the afterlife. and it is Edwin, as Eurydice, who basically chooses to condemn himself to the underworld/ hell, allowing the demon to catch up with them just to 'see [his] lover' and ensure Charles knows that '[he] had been loved'. t

im just going to put the section where Orpheus looks back at Eurydice in here because I think its all relevant:

"Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?). She spoke a last ‘farewell’ that, now, scarcely reached his ears, and turned again towards that same place"

by forcing Charles to turn around and face him, Edwin is fulfilling the roles of both Eurydice and Orpheus. in this instance, he is the one 'stretching out his arms' to hold Charles, but he is also the one that could be sent/ dragged back to the afterlife for this, but he just had to make sure Charles was aware of his feelings for him, to know that he was 'loved'. and I think Edwin was potentially prepared to return to the Doll House, or at least believed he would be able to find it more bearable knowing that he had been able to bear his soul to Charles, eve if that meant Charles couldn't come back again and try to rescue him for a second time, which Orpheus tried to do in the Metamorphoses, "Orpheus wished and prayed, in vain, to cross the Styx again, but the ferryman fended him off" and I feel like we all know Charles would have also kept trying if he lost Edwin again.

i guess, what im trying to say, in the most long-winded way, is that Charles and Edwin don't fill binary roles of one of them being Orpheus and the other being Eurydice, they are both of those things to one another throughout the show and I think that's really beautiful and I have to give massive credit to whoever did episode seven because I really feel like they did their homework. even after all the ramble I have written I still feel like I haven't fully made the point I was trying to make, but I definitely got some of the way there I think

[aguavivia]

John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth | John William Waterhouse, Circe Invidiosa

[dreamconsumer]

Kronos.

[phrogarmyinvasion]

no because literally, icarus is such an emotionally charged story. bro spends his life trapped, longing for escape, and when his father finally invents one, he struggles to maintain the perfect balance between the sky and the ground. even in his freedom, there are conditions, and they are arguably more limiting than those he endured during his captivity. not to mention the fact that his father's freedom is on the line as well. he's got so much riding on him, and little to no guidance on the matter

[arylleth]

sua lumina, sidus.

[dabiconcordia]

Echo and Narcissus by Ovid

A woman gives birth to a beautiful boy, called Narcissus, and is told by the prophet, Teiresias, that he will have a long life unless he learns to know himself. Meanwhile Echo, a talkative wood nymph, falls foul of the goddess Hera. The chatterbox is punished and left only able to repeat the last words of others. One day Echo sees Narcissus by chance and falls desperately in love with him. He, however, makes it clear that her love will never be reciprocated. Constantly pining for him Echo wastes away until all that remains of her is her voice.

Beautiful Narcissus, so loved and yet unloving, sees no one worthy of his love until he catches sight of an exquisite being in a pool of water as he bends down to take a drink. Filled with longing for the figure, he tries in vain to reach the person in the water. Eventually he recognises it is himself and just as Echo suffered so does he: he too wastes away and his body is transformed into a delicate flower leaning over the edge of a pool.

[ombre-originelle]

Jean-Léon Gérôme - Pygmalion et Galatée (1890)

[h0bg0blin-meat]

To every new person in the Greek myth fandom who shits on Athena because of what she did to Medusa....

Can y'all like..... Idk maybe NOT take Ovid's Metamorphoses as your ONLY source of Medusa's origin story?? (Furthermore that version isn't Greek either, it's Roman. So it's not Athena anyway, it's Minerva in that case).

And maybe like... Idk look at the GREEK myths (where Medusa didn't HAVE a traumatic backstory) that PRECEDE Ovid's version?? Would really not hurt you to look at and/or consider more than just one interpretation of the story.

PS: This is NOT to say that you CAN'T consider Ovid's version at all. You can, but atleast don't consider only THAT version to be canon. Cuz it's not. Myths like this don't follow a linear path. They are branched into several different versions. And cherry-picking only one of them while actively pretending the other versions don't exist at all is not gonna help you in your theological development.

[mask131]

I just want to clarify something: If you want to understand how Greek mythology and the Greek gods were represented and received from the Roman world onward, you NEED Ovid's Metamorphoses. For the Roman times, for the Middle-Ages, for the Renaissance, for the Modernity... ESPECIALLY for the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance since the Greek texts were either completely absent or really hard to obtain in these eras, unlike the Latin texts (such as Ovid's) which were everywhere and known by everybody. Ovid's Metamorphoses is, in this sense, a key element on how Greek mythology (but in truth Roman mythology in disguise) was shaped throughout Europe's popular culture and Europeans subconscious mind.

HOWEVER if you want to completely understand and thoroughly study Greek mythology in its - dare I say - "true" form, as in how it existed back in the times of Ancient Greece ; if you want to see and get how the Greek gods were seen and perceived by the Ancient Greeks themselves ; if you want to know the folktales and legends the Ancient Greek cities kept alive through their plays and their poems - do NOT use Ovid's Metamorphoses and get him the f*ck out of your mind, because Ovid did not play any part in actual Greek mythology, as he was a Roman man who wrote in Latin for a Roman audience, and went from simply slightly modifying some legends by mixing actual Latin/Roman religion-folklore in Greek traditions, to INVENTING ENTIRE GODS AND CHARACTERS OUT OF NOWHERE.

(Well not out of nowhere, to be fair, he always had a basis somewhere on late Greek myths or extrapolations of Greek texts - but he still invented a lot of things that then became somehow "canon" retrospectively to Greek mythology, but only through this new Greco-Roman mythology completely rebuilt and reshaped by the medieval and Renaissance authors, artists and scholars)