Outside the Academic world, we are free to regard Ovid’s Metamorphoses as what it probably is: a series of stunning set-pieces, loosely strung together on a somewhat rambling mythological framework designed both to show off Ovid’s virtuosic knowledge of myth, and to flatter his audience by implication on the breadth of their own. Few are more striking than this portrait of Tisiphone, chief of the furies. The background is that Bacchus, product of a liaison between Jupiter and Semele, daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, has recently come onto the scene as a new god: the Bacchic rites have been celebrated for the first time, and three women who have refused to join in have been punished by being turned into bats. Now Juno, jealous of the worship newly given to Bacchus, and angry at both Jupiter and Semele (who has been blasted by her lover’s divinity, fully revealed to her at her own insistence, and been transformed into a constellation), has decided that the House of Cadmus must fall, and this is the task she gives Tisiphone in this edited extract. Tisiphone’s targets are to be Ino, another daughter of Cadmus, and her husband Athamas, son of Aeolus. Athamas, driven mad by Tisiphone, will kill one of his and Ino’s children, believing him to be an animal that he is hunting: Ino will jump from a cliff with her other child, but the two will be saved from destruction by being transformed into water divinities. Grief-stricken, Cadmus, who is still alive in retirement, will wish to be turned into a snake: the wish will be granted, and Cadmus’s wife will choose to share the same fate (do keep up).
See the illustrated blog post here.
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