Ovid's Metamorphoses Essay Sample

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is rife with a web of fascinating and complex characters all of whom can have multiple essays written on them, but one that continues to endlessly fascinate me is the young god Bacchus. Young, effeminate, beautiful, and terrible, his stories hold the grand scope of divinity while being closely connected to mortals, and it is this relationship with mortals, particularly women, that I want to focus on in this essay. I’ll be covering the circumferences of his childhood, as well as his role as liberator, and even protector of women. I’ll be primarily using Ovid’s myths as a source, and will be treating his version as canon for the sake of keeping this essay contained.

While multiple male god’s have relationships with mortal women throughout Metamorphoses it almost always falls into the same pattern of the passionate, perusing god and the fleeing, scared women or girl. Although Bacchus does have a relationship with a mortal woman, Ariadne, she’s a consort, like Persephone is to Hades. Furthermore, his extending relation to mortal women is that of the ‘Bacchantes’,

The Bacchantes were the female followers of Bacchus and the most significant members of Thiasus, the god’s retinue. In Greek, their name, the Maenads, literally translates as “raving ones”.

To quote Ovid himself on their description, “With serving women, freed of toil, and ladies as well as servants, dressed alike, in skins of animals”, (Ovid, p. 81 ).

The Bacchantes go against every convention a woman was expected to follow, both from Ovid’s time and the time the poem was set, they were raving instead of meek, sexual instead of innocent, and as seen by the quoted passage, lived outside the class structure.

Although one of Bacchus’s titles is the Deliverer from Sorrow because of the delivering nature of wine I’d argue it was also because of this, this chance to leave a patriarchal society.

Additionally, it wasn’t just his followers who found freedom- freedom for vengeance, freedom for themselves- in his rites. As we can gather from the beginning of Book IV, his rites were commended to be followed through by every woman once a year, it is during one of these rites that one of the most chilling examples of female vengeance in Metamorphoses occurs.

“And so by night the queen went from the palace, armed for the rites of Bacchus” ( p. 148 ), this passage is from the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, in this nauseating story Procne takes revenge on her husband, King Tereus for brutality raping her sister Philomela, on the night of the festival of Bacchus. And she does this in the way that would hurt him most, by killing his firstborn son Itys.

The killing is brutal and yet the act feels cruelly correct; a sister in exchange for a firstborn son. After all, the main purpose of a wife was to birth a son, by killing him and feeding him to Tereus she does the only thing that feels terrible enough to avenge the brutality of what happened to Philomela.

Although the psychological study of the bond between sisters is relatively new as it only gained more interest in the nineties, Ovid offers us an interesting story of a sister's willingness to go to such lengths, as Procne declares “I am prepared for any crime” ( P. 149 ).

Consequently, this wouldn’t have been possible on any other night, since it was the circumstances of The Bacchus rites that allowed for this, this madness that is a reflection of an earlier story of Bacchus, that of King Pentheus, and I believe that Ovid deliberately used similar language in describing the murders, as both have hauntingly similar imagery when it comes to the dismemberment. These women who were possessed by their own madness, who hailed Bacchus during the rescue, and performed a revenge parallel to that of Agave and Pentheus, who gave, an eye for an eye. Such rarity, in an epic filled with assaulted women who wept and never received closer.  

In conclusion, even though multiple male gods have relationships with mortal women throughout Metamorphose none are quite like the one Bacchus has, they are not the lovers of the story, beautiful, meek, and victimized, instead, they are either a vital part of the plot or the protagonists themselves. We see how his upbringing might have had influenced him, how the bacchantes turned convention on its head and his rites offered a cover for vengeance for a wronged sister.

To finish up, the stories of Bacchus are very often brutal, unconventional, and filled with madness, and yet you don’t want to look away, you cannot help feeling satisfaction at the poetic justice of it. These stories of Bacchus appeal to us because they are not afraid to throw those terrible desires in our face, the desire that typically stays hidden, especially in women and others slighted by society for not fitting in.