Ovid's Metamorphosis - Reading Diary A - Week 2

This picture is from here, by Francois Boucher

The unit of readings is found here

I find it interesting that the whole unit starts out with a flood story, with Deucalian and Pyrrha surviving. The obvious comparison to this story would be that of Noah, but it's morbidly funny how Zeus/Jupiter is angry at mankind for their misdeeds, when it becomes apparent later in the unit how monstrous Jove can be to both other Gods and the mortals.

When it gets to Jupiter's activities: wow, what a tale.... Whenever I read of him, I'm always somewhat astonished by Jupiter's/Zeus' messy combination of crassness, pettiness, and brutality. He almost reminds me of the God of the old testament, plus the whole business of bestowing virgins with children and all (which is new testament, I know). Not only that, but Juno/Hera does a lot of victim blaming as well whenever she learns of her husband's debauchery. This kind of brings up a point about the Greek mythos that I haven't been able to answer: did all of the gods pretty much go with whatever Jupiter did because of his power? As if they were all just incapable of doing anything about it?

Anyway, it's also funny how any number of Gods seem to have extremely human-like characteristics in stories. They all seem to have vices one way or another, and I guess this stems from these stories about deities being written by mortals. But the main difference between the deities and mortal characters is: the plot always seems to agree with what the deity winds up doing, and discounts mortal/non-Godly characters as just a peripheral result of the deity's actions.

Specifically on the tale of Callisto, I question about stories featuring virgins conceiving children from Gods: if the stories are based on alleged real-life accounts, would it be more likely that a virgin conceived deity's child, or that she's just being untruthful about her encounters with men? This point is also brought up in this tale, when Diana sees Callisto's rounded belly. The Goddess of the Hunt doesn't even allow Callisto to defend herself morally, instead immediately banishing her.