Apollo and Daphne and so on

I was a junior in high school when I read the myth of Daphne and Apollo for the first time. This year, I’ve had the opportunity to teach the story to my own classes.

 

There was always something about the story that intrigued me. Mostly what intrigued me was a feeling. I didn’t know quite how to articulate what was interesting. But, I felt that the story was incredibly pertinent and important because it mirrored something that I was learning, and in some ways already knew, about relationships. Maybe the feeling was that Apollo’s speech to Daphne reminded me an awful lot of the cat calls directed at me as I walked down the sidewalks downtown. A feeling that the story was about more than the origin of the laurel tree, and about a young woman making an escape, but mostly not, from an unwanted lover. How did I already know, at seventeen, that once you got married, people expected you to have children and would ask you about it, as if it was your one duty in life as a married couple?

 

As I’ve had the chance to study Apollo and Daphne once again, the first time as an adult (I had, of course, read it a few times in college, enough times to know that I still had the same feelings I did in high school, and that it was a story I wanted (needed) desperately to write about), I have come to see the lines that struck me, now that I have a greater command of the language, spend less brain power on wading through Latin vocabulary and grammar and more time on what the story means. I can pinpoint the details that made me want to write and that made me question mythology and its power to transcend time and place, its power as an archetype.

 

Lines 481-482

Saepe pater dīxit, “Generum mihi, fīlia, dēbēs”;

saepe pater dīxit, “Dēbēs mihi, nāta, nepōtes.”

Give me a son-in-law!

Give me grandchildren!

Raise your hand if your parents or your parents-in-law have asked you recently when you are going to give them grandchildren. It’s almost like this could be a dialogue with any woman or female-bodied person today. I could be in the living room of the everyday American. There are people who ask you about babies before they ask about work. Like it’s our job to get married and then produce children.

 

486-487

“Dā mihi perpetuā, genitor carissime,” dīxit,

“Virginitāte fruī; dedit hoc pater antea Diānae.”

Give me perpetual virginity!

Daphne wants to be like Diana, the virgin goddess, to run free through the woods and learn to hunt. What would we ask for today in place of virginity? Freedom? A chance to date people with no strings attached? Choice of spouse? Choice to get married or not? Acknowledgement that all love is love?

 

Lines 488-489

Ille quidem obsequitur; sed tē decor iste, quod optās,

esse vetat, vōtōque tuō tua fōrma repugnat.

That beauty forbids you to be what you want to be.

Your form opposes your prayer.

“She (Daphne) is too beautiful to be left alone,” one of my students said in class when I asked what these lines are trying to say. It is the girl’s fault that she is pursued. Be careful what you wear. It is the female bodied person’s responsibility to make sure you don’t bring on unwanted attention. How often are girls told that they bring about their own problems by wearing short skirts and strappy summer dresses?

 

504-524

“Nympha, precor, Pēnēi, manē! Nōn īnsequor hostis;

nympha, manē! Sīc agna lupum, sīc verva leōnem,

sīc aquila pennā fugiunt trepidante columbae,

hostēs quaeque suōs; amor est mihi causa sequendī.

Mē miserum – nē prōna cadās, indignave laedī

crūra notent sentēs, et sim tibi causa dolōris!

Aspera, quā properās, loca sunt: moderātius, ōrō,

curre, fugamque inhibē; moderātius īnsequar ipse.

Cui placeās, inquīre tamen; nōn incola montis,

nōn ego sum pāstor, nōn hīc armenta gregēsque

horridus observō. Nescīs, timerāria, nescīs

quem fugiās, ideōque fugis. Mihi Delphica tellūs

et Claros et Tenedos Patarēaque rēgia servit;

Iuppiter est genitor; per mē concordant carmina nervīs.

Certa quidem nostra est, nostrā tamen ūna sagitta

certior, in vacuō quae vulnera pectore fecit.

Inventum medicīna meum est, opiferque per orbem

dīcor, et herbārum subiecta potentia nōbīs;

ei mihi, quod nūllīs amor est sānābilis herbīs,

nec prōsunt dominō, quae prōsunt omnibus, artēs!”

 

“Stop!… Stop!

I am not an enemy! Prey run from their predators because they don’t know who pursues them. I follow you because I love you. I’m not a shepherd, but a god! Jupiter is my father. I’m the inventor of medicine, the bringer of aid for the whole world. The medicines which benefit everyone don’t benefit the master (i.e. me).”

First of all, if you have to say that you’re not the enemy, you probably are. Love is an ok reason to chase someone, someone you don’t know, have never met before. Is love the reason that people whistle out of rolled down windows? And when love doesn’t work, there’s the recital of his pedigree, his father, he’s the inventor of medicine for Christ’s sake! Can it be true that such a man doesn’t have a cure for love? The progression of appeals is concerning. How long before someone pulls the strings on Apollo and accuses him of sexual harassment? How long before someone takes out a restraining order?

 

Line 547

“Quā nimium placuī, mūtandō perde figūram!”

(Daphne to her father:)

“That which pleases too much, destroy by changing my form.”

How often do women or female bodied people blame themselves? How often do we sit down after some chance encounter and wonder if we just hadn’t worn that or hadn’t pulled our hair back just so, or hadn’t followed someone into the back storage room, that there might have been a different outcome?

 

Lines 552

… remanet nitor ūnus in illā.

Beauty alone remains

Of course there is the transformation. (This is The Metamorphoses, after all.) she has become a laurel tree, and even as a tree she is beautiful. So beautiful in fact that (line 553) Apollo loves this one.

 

Lines 556

ōscula dat lignō; refugit tamen ōscula lignum.

He gives kisses to the wood; the wood, however, recoils from the kisses.

Surely I am not the only one who has let someone kiss me that I did not really want, or did not really love?

 

Line 557-559

Cui deus “At quoniam coniūnx mea nōn potes esse,

arbor eris certē,” dīxit, “mea! Semper habēbunt

tē coma, tē citharae, tē nostrae, laure, pharetrae.”

“If you can’t be my wife, certainly, you will be my tree! Always my hair, my cithara, my quiver will display you.”

Every time he says “te” I feel like I’ve lost a battle. Every time I read that the tree will be Apollo’s, I feel defeated. Is she supposed to be free? A tree is rooted. Stuck. She no longer has to run, but she no longer has to do anything else either.

 

There are people who look at mythology and see old stories about gods and goddesses might wonder why or how those stories are even relevant today. I look at mythology and see human nature. The stories express some archetype that I’ve seen in my reading somewhere, in my life somewhere. A person who doesn’t realize that he’s so close he’s suffocating. A person who is emotionally unavailable. These stories recur. They get retold boasting different characters and different names, but they are a similar story. Recently, listening to the news, is it so hard to see how many Apollos there are, pursuing, making some claim on a person (female or not) who isn’t theirs to claim?
(N.B. The Latin comes from Love and Transformation: An Ovid Reader, edited by Richard A. LaFleur, the textbook I use in my classes.)