23 – Gods Are Useful – Classical Mythology (Vol 24) by Elizabeth Vandiver
Run time: 30:32 / 2011-01-04
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)
Elizabeth Vandiver – Hello and welcome back to lecture 23. In the previous lecture, we began discussing the way Roman culture adopted and transformed Greek myth to fit its own cultural needs. In this lecture, we’re going to focus directly on the author Ovid and his work Metamorphoses, to which we’ve referred throughout the course, and try to discover exactly what kind of work metamorphoses is and what the implications of its nature might be for our understanding of the myths Ovid recounts in it. Now, metamorphoses is Ovid’s great mythological work.
He wrote many other books as well, but in Metamorphoses he focuses on classical myth as it is inherited by the Romans from the Greeks. And Metamorphoses is our primary source and many times our only source for some of the best known, most famous classical myths. Just to give three examples, Metamorphoses gives us the fullest accounts that we have of the stories of Apollo and Daphne, of Phaeton, and of Narcissus. Apollo and Daphne is a story that’s frequently shown in art and that’s I think still quite well known.
Daphne was a nymph. Now, nymphs are beings who are sort of intermediate between gods and humans. They personify trees, rivers or lakes and caves or mountains. And they are, if not immortal, at least very long lived. But a tree nymph or dryad would die when her tree was cut down, for instance. A water nymph would die if her stream dried up and so forth. Daphne is a nymph and the daughter of a river god.
Apollo is struck with desire for her when he’s shot by an arrow of his younger brother Cupid, eros in Greek terminology, and wants to marry her, or at least wants to mate with her, But Daphne has vowed to remain forever a virgin. And so Apollo chases Daphne, trying to catch her. As Daphne runs away, she prays for help to her father, the river god, and she’s turned into a laurel tree.
Apollo then makes the laurel his sacred tree and takes a wreath of laurel leaves to wear on his head and that becomes one of his common attributes in art afterwards. So clearly this myth is mainly ideological. Why does Apollo use the laurel wreath? Why is the laurel tree sacred to Apollo? Daphne in Greek just means laurel.
The point here is, as I said, Ovid is the author who gives us the fullest account of this story. Another such story that we know mainly from Ovid is the story of Phaeton.
Phaeton was the son of Apollo in Apollo’s aspect as sun god. By the time Ovid writes, Apollo has taken over from Helios as the god of the sun. And in his role as sun god, Ovid tends to call him Phoebus. That’s another name for Apollo, which basically just means bright or shining. So Phaeton is the son of Phoebus, and a mortal mother.
And Phaeton wants to find out if the sun god, Phoebus, really is his father. So he journeys to the palace of the sun god in the remote east and asks the god, if you truly are my father, promise on the river Styx that you will grant me my one request. Apollo or Phoebus makes the promise, and Phaeton’s one request is to be allowed to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky for a single day.
Now, his father, Apollo, knows that such an attempt will be fatal. He tries to reason with the boy, tells him that not even another god, not even Jupiter himself, can drive this chariot. But Phaeton insists, and since Apollo has promised by the river Styx he can’t go back on his word, he lets the boy drive the chariot, and of course Phaeton is, in fact, killed.
A third story, very famous, that we know mainly through Ovid, is the story of Narcissus. Narcissus was a youth too proud to yield to any lover. Though many people desired him, he did not think any of them were worthy of his affection or attention. As a punishment, he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and starved to death, staring into the pool, unable to tear himself away from his beloved, whom he thought apparently was a water nymph, long enough even to eat and of course this is where psychology gets the term narcissism from the name Narcissus.
Now those are just three examples there are many many more of myths that we know existed in Greek mythology because we have passing references to them in other authors.
But it’s Ovid who preserves the fullest versions of the stories that we have, who allows us to recognize the story behind the other fleeting versions. I suppose the best example of all might be Niobe, who is referred to throughout Greek literature, but whose story is recounted for us in full by Ovid.