Love in Antiquity

Ancient

Interpretations of Ovid's Love Stories

The first story from Ovid's Metamorphoses to be interpreted is "Echo and Narcissus." There are some traditional elements to the story as a love story paradigm. There are stories of "boy meets girl" and often part of that story is that one or both of the romantic leads like each other, but have difficulty synching together to have a romantic interlude. Narcissus calls out to Echo in the woods for them to meet together. She is excited but she can only repeat the last phrase or so of what Narcissus says, keeping them from meeting together. In another way, the story is a traditional love story, in that the girl loses the boy. What is non-traditional is that the girl loses the boy to himself. Narcissus sees his reflection in water while roaming the forest and falls in love with himself. Thus, this is a love story, but an odd one. Some times people are too much in love with themselves that they go blind to the other sources of love in their lives, just as Narcissus did with Echo. True, many ladies desired Narcissus, but none of them touched his heart. Echo was the woman who was the closest in reaching his heart, but his heart was overwhelmed with romantic love for himself, which ultimately led to his death, which was intensely mourned. Echo does not really have a self; she is a portion of and/or a reflection of the last person with whom she is speaking. Where Echo has too little of a self, Narcissus suffers from an excess of self. Too little self left Echo lonely, and too little self left Narcissus dead and alone in the underworld, as he still stares at himself in the river Styx.

The story of "Salamacis and Hermaphroditus" is another odd love story in Metamorphoses. In this case, 1 + 1 does not equal 2; it equals both one and two. Salamacis love a boy so much that in her romantic and sexual frenzy to be close to him, she wished for hers and her lover's bodies to never be apart. The gods her heard wish and granted it -- literally. The gods performed a magical act and connected the lovers bodies together, giving birth to the "bi-sexed" Hermaphroditus, with soft skin and limbs like a woman, but also retaining male traits and physical characteristics. This is a love story, certainly. Salamacis was a beautiful woman who took excessive care of her body to make it soft and touchable. She was overwhelmed with her feelings for her lover, a young man who was less sexually experienced than her. When they could finally be together physically, and she felt as if he was hers, she cried out and made a wish that many other people have likely made in their lives, in the heat of a sexual moment. The story goes sideways when the gods hear her wish and grant it, albeit not in the way she intended. There is a strange sense of self in this story, as two selves join to be one self in one body. The story does not mention whether there were two people or personalities living within one body, only that one body shared the physical characteristics of male and female. The moral here seems to be "be careful what you wish for because you just might get it."