Hippolytus at the Isthmus

Nec vires tamen has rabies superasset equorum.

ni rota, perpetuum qua circumvertitur axem,

stipitis occursu fracta ac disiecta fuisset.

Even then, the horses’ madness would not have exhausted my strength, if a wheel had not broken, and been wrenched off, as the axle hub, round which it revolves, struck a tree. Meta. 15.

The story Hippolytus tells of his own death has to be one of the more semantically charged moments in the Metamorphoses. It would go far beyond the bounds of a blog post to develop a full reading of his character and acts in book 15 and in the poem as a whole. Suffice it to say Hippolytus speaks, as we've noted, without preparation or introduction, and immediately strikes an odd note.

He's not very sympathetic to mourning Egeria, and goes on to recount his chariot crash scene, as if it somehow trumps the nymph's tale of loss. Coming as it does after the long song of Pythagoras, the physicality of the description of his crash, the uncanny appearance of the mountainous wave and the bull, all this narrative energy inserts a strange shock between the reflections and prescriptions of the philosopher and the serene journey of serpentine Aesculapius that follows.

The disfiguring death of Hippolytus is enigmatic at all points: he's one of the greatest horsemen in the world, yet he dies neither in a war nor in an Olympic race, but in an accident involving no other "drivers." He is the son of Theseus, one of the most just, beloved, and balanced heroes of Greece, but he dies cursed by his father for an alleged crime of Venus, though he's a follower of Artemis. He is of the line of Pelops, who was the lover of Poseidon. The god is also his grandfather, yet it's Poseidon's gift that visits Theseus's curse upon Hippolytus.

To unravel this knot, we need to follow threads leading back to violent kings, acts of treachery, and an abandoned princess.

Oikoi in the Arician Grove

By now we're used to the fact that anything can happen in the Metamorphoses. This "fact" shouldn't inure us to the singularly strange transitions and juxtapositions woven into the text, because we are probably meant to be perplexed by them. The rapid reader will find sheer arbitrariness in a segue that moves swiftly from the end of a 400+ line speech by an ancient Greek philosopher to a telegraphic note on the death of Numa, to the transformation of his consort Egeria, to the sudden intrusion of the voice of a figure who claims to be the dead Hippolytus, now restored and assisting Diana in Aricia under the new identity of Virbius. And that fast reader's reaction would be understandable. But perhaps there's more to it.

For purposes of making some headway here, note that Ovid has turned from the voice of Pythagoras to the texts of several of Euripides' tragedies -- the Orestes, Iphigeneia at Tauris and Hippolytus. These plays deal with the fates of two of the great Greek houses (oikoi) -- of Atreus and of Theseus. (Of course the Oresteia of Aeschylus is involved as well.)

Orestes and Pylades kill Aegisthus

These two tales couldn't be more different, and their differences are worth pondering. For example, Agamemnon's son Orestes (who was sent to live in Phocis after his mother, Clytemnestra, begins her involvement with Aegisthus) is ordered by the gods to kill his mother. Pursued by the Erinyes, he goes insane before being restored, judged not guilty, cleansed (by nine men at Troezen), and elevated to succeed his father as ruler of Mycenae. He also recovers Hermione, daughter of Helen and Paris, who was betrothed to him by Tyndareus, but who, after he went insane, was given by Menelaos to Neoptolemus.


In a nutshell, the concern with Orestes is with intra-familial murder, revenge, justice, and the recovering of kingly succession. The kingdom passes from Agamemnon to his son, but not in quite the ceremonial and orderly fashion most states would prefer.

Athena, Orestes, Priestesses at Delphi

The house of Theseus is not so much of a house. Through his human father Aegeus (who shares paternity with Poseidon), Theseus can trace his line to Erichthonius, the allegedly autochthonous early king of Athens. Theseus had a somewhat peculiar marriage with the Amazon Hippolyta (the only Amazon ever to wed any man), and Hippolytus was their child. After the death of Hippolyta, Hippolytus was sent to live in Troezen with his great-grandfather, Pittheus, while Theseus married Minos's daughter Phaedra, Ariadne's sister. Phaedra's unquenchable desire for Hippolytus leads to his brutal death. She lies to Theseus, claiming Hippolytus had assaulted her, and Theseus uses one of three wishes granted him by Poseidon to cause the death of his son.

The figure of a bull appears in a giant wave, frightening Hippolytus's horses, and fulfilling the apparent meaning of his name, which can mean "unleasher of horses," or, "destroyed by horses."

So, two stories of royal houses, fathers and sons, things going awry. In one, a son kills his natural mother; in the other, a stepmother brings about the death of the king's son. In one, order is restored, in the other, the house ends, but the son has a curious afterlife.

What brings these tales together in the Arician grove of "Oresteian Diana"? Why, after listening for quite some time to the voice of Pythagoras, do we suddenly out of the blue hear Hippolytus speaking to Egeria? What is at stake in this strange juxtaposition, and in the admittedly in-credible tale of how this tragic figure became Virbius? (Virgil's version of that tale is told in Aeneid 7).

To get a sense of the background, it might be useful to look at two of Ovid's Heroides in connection with this part of Metamorphoses 15: The letter of Hermione to Orestes, and the letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus.

Miletus and children

Miletus (Ancient Greek: Μίλητος)

Miletus was son of Apollo and Areia, daughter of Cleochus, of Crete.^[1] When Areia gave birth to her son she hid him at a place where the plant milax* was growing; Cleochus found the child there and named him Miletus after the plant.^[2] Another tradition relates that Miletus' mother by Apollo was Akakallis, the daughter of Minos. Fearing her father's wrath she exposed the child, but Apollo commanded the she-wolves to come down and nurse the child.^[3] Yet another source^[4] calls his mother Deione, and himself by the matronymic Deionides. Finally, one source gives Miletus as the son of Euxantius, himself son of Minos by a Telchinian woman Dexithea.^[2] 

He was loved by both Minos and Sarpedon, but showed preference for the latter, and this became the reason why Sarpedon was expelled from Crete by his brother. Following the advice of Sarpedon, Miletus also left Crete for Samos, then moved to Caria and became the mythical founder and eponym of the city of Miletus.^[1][2][3] Myths further relate that the hero Miletus founded the city only after slaying a giant named Asterius, son of Anax; and that the region known as Miletus was originally called 'Anactoria'.^[5] 

Miletus married either Eidothea, daughter of Eurytus, or Tragasia, daughter of Celaenus, or Cyanee, daughter of the river god Maeander, or Areia, and by her had a son Kaunos (Caunus) and a daughter Byblis, who happened to develop incestous feelings for each other.^{[6][3][7][8][9]}

*Milax = Smilax, a nymph beloved of Crocus, who in turn was beloved of Hermes. Crocus and Smilax are briefly alluded to -- Metamorphoses 4.283.

Byblis
In Greek mythology, Byblis or Bublis (Ancient Greek: Βυβλίς) was a daughter of Miletus. Her mother was either Tragasia, Cyanee, daughter of the river-god Meander, or Eidothea, daughter of King Eurytus of Caria. She fell in love with Caunus, her twin brother.

Caunus
In Greek mythology, Caunus or Kaunos (Ancient Greek: Καῦνος) was a son of Miletus, grandson of Apollo and brother of Byblis.

Caunus became the object of his own sister's passionate love. From some accounts it appears that Caunus was the first to develop the affection towards her;^[1][2] others describe Byblis' feelings as unrequited.^[3][4][5] All sources agree, however, that Caunus chose to flee from home in order to prevent himself from actually committing incest with Byblis, and that she followed him until she was completely exhausted by grief and died (or committed suicide). 

Caunus eventually came to Lycia, where he married the Naiad Pronoe and had by her a son Aegialus. Caunus became king of the land; when he died, Aegialus gathered all the people from scattered settlements in a newly founded city which he named Caunus after his father.^[1]

Miletus

Cities:

Miletus here and here.
Caunus
Byblos

Milesian Tales also here.

The Milesian tale (Milesiaka, in Latin fabula milesiaca, or Milesiae fabula) originates in ancient Greek and Roman literature. According to most authorities, it is a short story, fable, or folktale featuring love and adventure, usually being erotic and titillating. M. C. Howatson, in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1989), voices the traditional view that it is the source "of such medieval collections of tales as the Gesta Romanorum, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre." 

But Gottskálk Jensson of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, offers a dissenting view or corrective, arguing that the original Milesian tale was 

a type of first-person novel, a travelogue told from memory by a narrator who every now and then would relate how he encountered other characters who told him stories which he would then incorporate into the main tale through the rhetorical technique of narrative impersonation. [1] 

This resulted in "a complicated narrative fabric: a travelogue carried by a main narrator with numerous subordinate tales carried by subordinate narrative voices." 

. . . the name Milesian tale originates from the Milesiaka[1] of Aristides of Miletus (flourished 2nd century BCE), who was a writer of shameless and amusing tales with some salacious content and unexpected plot twists. Aristides set his tales in Miletus, which had a reputation for a luxurious, easy-going lifestyle, akin to that of Sybaris in Magna Graecia; there is no reason to think that he was in any sense "of" Miletus himself.

Milesian tales gained a reputation for ribaldry: Ovid, in Tristia, contrasts the boldness of Aristides and others with his own Ars Amatoria, for which he was punished by exile.

From Tristia:

Aristides associated himself with Milesian vice,
but Aristides wasn’t driven from his city.

Miletus and Maeander

The daedal fates of Icarus

As noted the other day, Ovid's Daedalus has much in common with his Arachne. Both are painstaking artificers who seek to go beyond merely imitating nature. Daedalus' design for the labyrinth of Crete was, Ovid notes, inspired by the Maeander River, near Miletus in ancient Caria:

No differently from the way in which the watery Maeander deludes the sight, flowing backwards and forwards in its changeable course, through the meadows of Phrygia, facing the running waves advancing to meet it, now directing its uncertain waters towards its source, now towards the open sea:

His design for his escape from Crete was based upon nature's model as well:

he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. (Kline)

Like Arachne, Daedalus is entirely absorbed by his art, his techne. He is a problem solver. He solves Pasiphae's problem, then has to contain the problematic issue of that "solution" for Minos:

The ant and the shell: Daedalus and Minos in Sicily

After the curiously juxtaposed tales of Daedalus and Icarus and Daedalus and Perdix/Talus, Ovid gives very short shrift (8.260-62) to two tales that bring some closure to the careers of Daedalus and Minos. (We really should give further thought to the fact that Ovid differs from most storytellers in being exceedingly nonchalant about giving his stories what Frank Kermode would call The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (with a New Epilogue)).

Here's the story: This version comes from: Daedalus and Minos at the court of King Cocalus in Sicily:

After the loss of his son Icarus, Daedalus managed to reach Camicus or Cumae in Sicily, the kingdom of Cocalus, on his own. But King Minos of Crete did not stop hunting him. He knew that the wise Daedalus would find a way to cover his tracks, so he had to think up a way to flush him out of his hiding-place. 

Nautilus fossil: Golden Ratio

Minos sent word to all the kings of the known world, that whoever of their subjects was able to solve a puzzle would be richly rewarded. Minos believed that only Daedalus could solve the difficult puzzle: to string a thread through a conch shell.

King Cocalus, who had given Daedalus shelter in his court, had of course realised the abilities of the legendary craftsman and asked him to solve the puzzle. He hoped that if Daedalus solved it, his kingdom would gain prestige and perhaps even Minos’ favour. 

Daedalus pierced a hole in the tip of the conch shell, smeared it with honey, and tied the thread around an ant, which, attracted by the honey, wound its way through the spirals of the empty shell taking the thread with it. 

Cocalus joyfully announced to Minos that the puzzle had been solved, never suspecting that he was thus betraying Daedalus, the most-wanted fugitive in Minoan Crete.

Minos immediately understood that Daedalus was in Sicily, and sailed there in person to get him back from Cocalus. Cocalus did not want to oppose the powerful King of Crete, but neither did he want to lose Daedalus’ services. So, although he promised to deliver the craftsman to Minos, he decided to murder the latter. The great King of Crete met an inglorious end in a boiling bath. The murder was planned to look like an accident, ensuring that the crafty Cocalus would go unpunished. 

All of the above may be no more than a myth, but it conceals the historical truth that the Minoan Cretans founded colonies in Sicily, such as Minoa in Acragas (Agrigentum), Hyria in Messapia and Engyos in the interior of the island. (Links added. Another version of the story can be found in Apollodorus, E.1.13-15.)

A bit about labyrinths

Book 8 is the central book of Metamorphoses, and perhaps not entirely by chance contains Ovid's memorable description of the labyrinth of Crete. We'll look at that description in more detail in a later post, but for now, it's worth noting that in order for something to be a labyrinth, it must have a center. Mazes can offer a confusing multiplicity of paths, but labyrinths should have one route, however intricate, leading from outside to center:

Cretan Labyrinth

Websters Online has quite a lavish page about the word "labyrinth," including this brief definition:

The term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center.

As my son Sawyer noted, when you actually trace the route of a labyrinth like the one above, you in fact traverse every inch of it.

For more about the distinction between mazes and labyrinths, and about the history and types of labyrinths, see Labyrinthos.

Another brief overview that sorts the three basic designs into Cretan, Roman, and Medieval, can be found here.

The labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral is one of the glories of Medieval design:

Chartres

A very detailed and generously illustrated history of labyrinths and mazes from Egypt to recent times by Roberta Barresi can be found on multiple pages beginning here. As Barresi finds, the labyrinth took on different kinds of meanings and uses in different cultural epochs. More on that here as well.

Italian image of Roman Labyrinth

Some motifs in Metamorphosis 8

If Book 7 of the Metamorphoses addresses foedera -- faith, trust, and the ultimate investments individuals and nations place in bonds with others -- Book 8 seems preoccupied with a set of perspectives on vulnerability, strategies of defense, and the infamy of treachery, the betrayal of foedera.

One word for the moral repugnance of traitorous acts is the adjective foedus:

foedus m (feminine foeda, neuter foedum); first/second declension (physically) filthy, foul, disgusting, loathsome, ugly, unseemly, detestable, abominable, horrible (mentally) disgraceful, vile, obscene, base, dishonorable, shameful, infamous, foul

In the tale of Scylla and Nisus, not all the arma of Crete, but rather one young girl's amor brought down her father's city. Look for parallels as the book moves on to the tales of Minos, Daedalus, and Meleager. What do the various unexpected deaths have to tell us about vulnerability?

Aetolia and Achelous

The book is also rich in at least two other motifs: rivers and forgetting. The second half is largely taken up by a conversation with Achelous, the largest river of Greece, the one that defines Aetolia and Acarnania.

We'll be hearing about the nymphs who forgot him:

At the mouth of the Achelous River lie the Echinades Islands. [They] were once five nymphs. Unfortunately for them, they forgot to honor Achelous in their festivities, and the god was so angry about this slight that he turned them into the islands.

Achelous

Prophetic resonance: Scylla, Minos, and Megara

The other day, as we were reading aloud the story of Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, and the siege of Megara, a few strange features of the tale stood out.

The horns of a new moon had risen six times and the fortunes of war still hung in the balance, so protractedly did Victory hover between the two, on hesitant wings. There was a tower of the king, added to walls of singing stone, where Apollo, Latona’s son, once rested his golden lyre, and the sound resonated in the rock. In days of peace, Scylla, the daughter of King Nisus, often used to climb up there, and make the stones ring using small pebbles. In wartime also she would often watch the unyielding armed conflicts from there, and now, as the war dragged on, she had come to know the names of the hostile princes, their weapons, horses, armour and Cretan quivers. Above all she came to know the face of their leader, Europa’s son, more than was fitting. (Kline)

We were reminded of Helen and Priam, looking out upon the opposing armies before Troy. Unlike Helen, Scylla is not the cause of the war, but she does have knowledge of the vulnerable purple hair of her father, King Nisus. Knowledge, in her case, is power -- she has the means of ending this uncertain siege.

Minos and Scylla

Sieges often depend upon walls, and the walls of Megara were special. They were built for Alcathous, son of Pelops, by Apollo. Alcathous had built temples to both Apollo and Artemis after killing the Cithaeronian Lion and winning the hand of the princess of Megara. During construction, Apollo lay down his golden lyre, making the walls where it rested resonant -- saxo sonus eius inhaesit. Scylla had been drawn to this place before the war, tossing little stones to hear it ring. It's here that she now falls in love with King Minos, who's trying to sack Megara as part of his war on Athens precipitated by the death of his son, Androgeos. (Other cities had charmed walls -- the Cadmea was raised by the music of Amphion).

Two odd features of this tale:

1. Instant closeness to the distant other, distance from one's own: From her perch on the parapet of Megara, Scylla seems like any adolescent watching TV. The consequential reality of the war doesn't enter her mind. She's completely conquered by Minos, whom she's only seen from afar, and around whom she's constructed a story. Minos has no idea of her existence until she appears at his camp with her father's purple lock. Like Medea, she betrays her father, city, and people, but unlike Jason's helper, she has no opportunity to make his pledge of commitment a precondition of her fateful act. Her decisive act precipitates out of a flight of fantasy.

O ego ter felix, si pennis lapsa per auras
Gnosiaci possem castris insistere regis 

O I would be three times happy if I could take wing, through the air,
and stand in the camp of the Cretan king

When Minos shrinks from her in revulsion, she feels betrayed.

It's clear that Scylla has been so charmed as to lose all grounding in her historical, ethical and material reality. Her fascination with Minos (who, astride his white horse, wearing royal purple, from a distance might resemble her father's regal head) draws her from realities into a Quixotic dream.

She fancies that she is equal to the great deeds of other heroines:

Another girl, fired with as great a passion as mine, would, long ago, have destroyed anything that stood in the way of her love.

Ciris

Horrified by her action, the king of Crete calls Scylla an infamy, a monster (infamia, monstrum). He's about to discover further infamy, closer to home, and "another girl," his own daughter, who will open the heart of the labyrinth to Theseus.

Both stories -- Scylla and Nisus, Minos and Ariadne -- link victory not to martial prowess, but to the destructive power of wounding amor that finds the vulnerabilities of mighty walls and daedal defenses. (Ovid never tires of turning pitched battles into love tales.)

The narrator doesn't share insight into the motives of Amor, but:

2.  An end uncannily near its beginning: More speculatively, the extreme infatuation of Scylla seems bound up with the lyrical place where it takes hold. It's as if this girl, moved by the echoes of Apollo's lyre, could not but fall for this shining king. The question, then, might be: As the god of prophecy, Apollo must have known that setting down his lyre on the walls would end in the fall of the city. In helping Alcathous to restore the defenses (which had been once before brought down by Crete), did Apollo "happen" to build into their fabric a fatal charm? One that leads to another sacking by Cretan force? An echo?

Regia turris erat vocalibus addita muris,

15

in quibus auratam proles Letoia fertur

deposuisse lyram: saxo sonus eius inhaesit.

There was a tower of the king, added to walls of singing stone, 

where Apollo, Latona’s son, once rested his golden lyre, 

and the sound resonated in the rock

The walls of Megara, it seems, have been vibrating with fatal song since they were rebuilt. That they are vocalibus -- speaking, sonorous, singing, crying -- suggests that inherent in their fabrication, clinging to it, was the song of their destruction, the "thing spoken":

fate late 14c., from L. fata, neut. pl. of fatum "prophetic declaration, oracle, prediction," thus "that which is ordained, destiny, fate," lit. "thing spoken (by the gods)," from neut. pp. of fari "to speak," from PIE *bha- "speak" (see fame). The Latin sense evolution is from "sentence of the Gods" (Gk. theosphaton) to "lot, portion" (Gk. moira, personified as a goddess in Homer), also "one of the three goddesses (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) who determined the course of a human life." Related: Fated; fating. The native word was wyrd.

What will be sung was woven in the warp of the world when it began. For Ovid, it's the song he's singing to us. (For us, it's the song we hear through the meta -ana- morphosis of interpretation.) It was put there by the god of poetry and prophecy, who so happened to set his fatal lyre down, the way Perseus set down the head of Medusa, and created coral.

Sea Eagle, or Haliaeetus 

Beginning and end are very close here -- like your DNA and you -- almost "the same," yet not entirely, and not harmoniously. As Minos sails to his destiny, the Sea-Eagle swoops down to tear the treacherous child who betrayed the sleeping king. She clings (haeret) to the bark of Minos, then drops in terror into endless flight.

True Love, Cretan Lies, and Monsters

The tale of Cephalus and Procris ends the seventh book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is rich in strange and magical elements, speaking of love, mistrust, coincidence, necessity, inescapable devices and fatal paradoxes. It has a long afterlife, extending to Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, as E.H. Gombrich and other scholars have noted.

The story seems simple, but has enigmatic elements - we'll look at a few of them here, but this is by no means exhaustive.

Exit Medea, Enter Theseus

Medea

The mini-recognition scene in which Theseus and Aegeus discover they are father and son is also the moment when the ever-industrious Medea disappears from the Metamorphoses. She invokes a dark cloud via an incantation (carmen) and vanishes.

Immediately we are present at a communal celebration, marked by a public song, a festive carmen that recalls several of the heroic feats of Theseus, the elimination of hideous thugs and monsters from the roadways of central Greece.

That song begins:

‘Great Theseus, admired in Marathon,
for the blood of the Cretan bull,
your act and gift made Cromyon’s fields
safe for the farmers plough.
Epidaurus’s land saw you defeat
Vulcan’s club-wielding son,
and the banks of the River Cephisus
saw evil Procrustes brought down.


Theseus has made the fields safe for farmers, and the roads secure for travelers -- exactly what the Muses told Athena they need for art and culture to flourish.

The song of the Athenians contrasts sharply with Medea's incantation that invoked the moon:

‘Night, most faithful keeper of our secret rites;
Stars, that, with the golden moon, succeed the fires of light;
Triple Hecate, you who know all our undertakings,
and come, to aid the witches’ art, and all our incantations:
You, Earth, who yield the sorceress herbs of magic force:
You, airs and breezes, pools and hills, and every watercourse;
Be here; all you Gods of Night, and Gods of Groves endorse. (7.192 ff)

Where Medea's song speaks of silence, night, secrecy and Hekatean arts -- all perfectly consistent with what we have seen of this witch's dramatized introspective consciousness -- the song to Theseus is sung by the polis in broad day:

It is said no day ever dawned for the Athenians more glad than that.

and it's helped along with the natural magic of wine: carmina vino ingenium faciente canunt.

Interestingly, the paean to Theseus begins in the middle of line 433, the dead center of Book 7.

        te, maxime Theseu, 


It might just be coincidence, and certainly there are vagaries of textual integrity -- a line lost here, or interpolated there -- that would offset the structural precision. But let's note that the figure of the greatest Athenian hero enters here, and returns in books 8 and 9 as well. So he's present in the three central books of the poem. While he's given less space than Medea or Cephalus, we have to remember that sometimes, in Ovid, the most important figures can be fleetingly, allusively present.

So consider the possibility that Ovid chose to insert Theseus at this point in Book 7 to mark a golden moment of Athenian balance, harmony, and centrality. In this bright day of his arrival, we are poised between the disappearing eastern witchery of Medea and Hecate, and the ships of Minos that soon appear over the horizon from the south, seeking vengeance upon Athens.

If Medea, the solitary secretive spellbinder, dominated the tale of feckless Jason and the first half of book 7, Minos dominates the latter. He is the king of 100 cities, son of Zeus and Europa, husband to the daughter of the sun who has cursed his sexuality, and caretaker of the land that gave baby Zeus a place hidden from his devouring father, Cronos. As we'll see, the realm of Minos is woven through the latter half of Book 7 and the first half of Book 8.

Dore: Minos in the Inferno 

Setting and background in Metamorphoses 7

In the latter half of Metamorphoses 7, Ovid pointedly stage manages meetings between Aeacus and Minos, and then Aeacus and Cephalus. These latter happen to be ancestors, respectively, of Achilles and Odysseus -- the chief heroes of the Homeric epics.

Aeacus, son of Zeus and father of Peleus, was the king of Aegina - an island to the west of Athens - and grandfather of Achilles. Cephalus, grandson of Aeolus, was the great-grandfather of Odysseus through Clymene, the woman he married after the death of Procris. The line (known as "the line of only sons") is Cephalus -> Arcesius -> Laertes -> Odysseus -> Telemachus.

Aeacus while he reigned in Aegina was renowned in all Greece for his justice and piety, and was frequently called upon to settle disputes not only among men, but even among the gods themselves.[12][13] He was such a favourite with the latter, that, when Greece was visited by a drought in consequence of a murder which had been committed, the oracle of Delphi declared that the calamity would not cease unless Aeacus prayed to the gods that it might.[2][14] Aeacus prayed, and it ceased in consequence. (Aeacus)

Rich Gifts: The Shape of Metamorphoses 7

Book 7 of the Metamorphoses offers recurrent patterns -- there's sorcery, a prophetic dream, rejuvenation, a fulfilled wish, dangerous gifts, and an enchanted spear. As usual, Ovid does not offer to spell out their relationships for us.

The overall narrative can be broken into three major parts and one introductory vignette, as outlined below. Challenging!

Vignette: The sons of Boreas save Phineus the Seer

-- Zetes and Calais rescue Phineus from the Harpies
    (Note: Phineus was married to their sister, Cleopatra.)

I. Medea - Sorcery






-- Jason and Medea - dramatic monologue, plighted troth, Medea as auctor of Jason's feat.
-- Rejuvenation of Aeson - making the old young
-- Medea and Pelias - children kill their father
-- Medea, Aegeus and Theseus - father recognizes son - rejuvenation of Athens

II. Aeacus, Minos and the Myrmidons - Dream


-- Plague, Dream, and Rejuvenation of the kingdom









III. Cephalus and Procris - Gifts of the Gods

-- Gifts of Diana: Laelaps the magical dog and the Teumessian vixen.
-- Love, Mistrust, L'Aura, and an Enchanted Javelin
    (Procris was a daughter of Erechtheus and sister to Orithyia, who was ravished by Boreas)

Eos carries off Cephalus

"I saved your skin"

I will lighten my grief by reviling you
and you will feel the sting in hearing it.
I will begin at the beginning.

I saved your skin, as all the Greeks know
who boarded the Argo with you,
when you were sent to master the fire-breathing bulls
with yokes and to sow the deadly field;
and the dragon which guarded the golden fleece
and, never sleeping, protected it with its many coils,
I killed it and held up the light of safety for you.

As for me, after betraying my father and my home
I came to Iolcus near Pelion
with you, eager but not prudent.
Then I killed Pelias, in the way that he would die most tragically
at the hands of his own children and I confounded their entire house.

And you, after receiving this from me, you, the vilest man alive,
you have betrayed me, and you have made a new marriage,
though you already have children. If you were still childless
you could be excused for craving another marriage bed.
Gone is the faith of oaths. I cannot understand
whether you believe the old gods are no longer in power
or that new covenants are established for men today,
since you must know that you have not kept your oath to me...

~ Medea to Jason (Medea 472-494)

Medea, the curse of Pelias 1, is the princess, priestess, and witch, whom Jason brought to Hellas on his return from Colchis. Medea has been called daughter of Hecate since she served this goddess as her priestess, but otherwise her mother is said to have been Idyia, one of the OCEANIDS. Her father Aeetes, [son of Helios] who had been king of Ephyraea (Corinth) before he emigrated to Colchis, was brother of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos 2 of Crete, and of the witch Circe. And whereas the latter lived in the island of Aeaea in the Mediterranean, Aeetes ruled in the city of Aea in Colchis.