#ah... i love this one. thank u ovid

[officialpenisenvy]

it's half past midnight and now i'm so deeply invested in the potential of this story i'd never heard about in my life.

if it's incest it most definitely has all the horror elements for it. and the fact that it's sisters and not cousins or even mother and child makes it even more apparent.

besides the end result is the loss of something from the both of them, one's voice and one's child. so truly it's a no one escaped the violence situation. no matter if the child was on purpose i think.

im not great at putting ideas in writing. but thank u for the little puzzle. i think you've cracked it saying consummated pseudo-incest. elements are there but it's more interesting if it's not direct. much love.

oh anon i LOVE you and you truly understand what im saying and what ovid was implying. i think you should read the story for yourself (metamorphoses VI 401-674 is what im specifically examining here) but spoiling the ending a bit, procne and philomela turn into birds and procne specifically turns into a nightingale singing the mourning song of her dead child and her profaned sister, the element of mutual loss is very much there in the text. i also really love this passage that highlights procne's internal struggle about her plans for revenge:

[The son’s] arrival suggested what she might do, and regarding him with a cold gaze, she said ‘Ah! How like your father you are!’ Without speaking further, seething in silent indignation, she began to conceive her tragic plan. Yet, when the boy approached, and greeted his mother, and put his little arms round her neck, and kissed her with childish endearments, she was moved, her anger was checked, and her eyes were wet with the tears that gathered against her will. But, realising that her mind was wavering through excess affection, she turned away from him, and turned to look at her sister’s face again, till, gazing at both in turn, she said ‘Why should the one be able to speak his endearments, while the other is silent, her tongue torn out? Though he calls me mother, why can she not call me sister? Look at the husband you are bride to, Pandion’s daughter! This is unworthy of you! Affection is criminal in a wife of Tereus.’

i really love this myth, i even made it the subject of a true crime-style breakdown back in high school (linked here if you want to see that bit of cringe), and lately i have been really interested in dissecting the nature of its potential incestuous implications.

[clodiuspulcher]

Heroides I: Penelope to Ulysses/Ulixes/Ὀδυσσεύς/𐌄T𐌔OV

Penelope sends you this, long-suffering Ulysses,

but don’t write back to me: come yourself! Troy lies in ruins, hated by us Greek girls; Priam and all of Troy were hardly worth so high a price. O would that when Paris with his Spartan fleet sought Helen, That womanizer had been buried by the wild waves! Then I wouldn’t lay here, cold in our empty bed , Nor mourn, abandoned, the days slowly passing, Nor would my heavy web exhaust my widowed hands, weaving deception all night. When have I not feared imagined dangers, greater than the truth? Love is a thing full of anxious fear. I imagined Trojan soldiers marching against you; I grow pale, always, at the mention of Hector. And if anyone told a story about, say, Antilochus conquered by the enemy, Antilochus made me afraid; Or if they said Patroclus had fallen in his false arms, I wept that such tricks could lack success. Tlepolemus made the Lycian spear warm with blood, Now I worry again that he might die. And further, whoever of the Greek camp had been killed, The heart of their lover turned cold as ice. But the fair-minded god looked after my chaste love. Troy was overturned, incinerated, with my man safe and sound. Our generals return, our altars smoke; barbarian treasure is placed before the gods of our fathers. Women give thanks for the gift of their husbands safe; Their men sing of the doomed Troy they conquered. Upright old men and fearful girls marvel; A wife hangs on every word of her husband’s tale. And someone at the table re-enacts the fierce battles, He paints all of Troy with a little wine: “Here ran the Simois; Here was Sigean earth; Here stood the high palace of old Priam. Here Achilles camped, here Ulysses; Here the mangled Hector terrified the horses urged to gallop.” Indeed, old Nestor told all this to your son, sent to ask about you, and he relayed it to me. And he told of Rhesus and Dolon cut down by your sword, One of whom was betrayed by sleep, the other by deceit. You dared - Oh, you so very, astoundingly forgetful of us at home! - to attack the Thracian camp with nocturnal trickery, And so many men you slaughtered, aided only by one! You were sure careful then, thinking of me first! And how my heart shook with fear, while you, my dear hero, were said to have ridden through the battle lines on Ismarus’s horses. But how does it help me if Troy falls to your arms, and its great walls fall to earth, If I remain alone, as I was when Troy once stood And my man is absent, stolen from me, by this forever war? To others, Troy might have fallen, but to me alone it stands, Where now the victor lives, and plows with captive oxen, Already a field where once was Troy seeks the scythe’s harvest, the earth grows rich with Phrygian blood; The half-buried bones of men are struck by the curving plow, grass occupies ruined homes. You, oh victor, are absent, and I’m not allowed to know what killed you or in what world you’re cruelly hiding! Anyone who turns his wandering ship towards this shore leaves only after I’ve drilled him about you.  And what he will give you, if he ever sees you, are the letters written by my hand, handed over to him. I sent to Pylos, to the Nelean fields of ancient Nestor; half-truths and rumors came back form Pylos. I sent to Sparta, nothing of truth from Sparta either. Which lands are you living in now, or with whom do you delay? Apollo’s walls standing even now would be of more use to me, I grow angry, alas, at my useless prayers! I might have known where you were fighting, and feared the great war, And my complaints would’ve been joined to those of many. But I don’t even know what to be afraid of now - so I fear all things, out of my mind with worry, And the wide plain of my worry stretches out, out. Whatever dangers the sea holds, or the earth, such long delays make me fear both. And- stupidly- I fear this, which is to say, your will- You could be captured by a foreign love. And perhaps you will tell them, how your wife is a simply country woman, Only fit to work raw wool  Let me be deceived, and let this crime vanish into thin air, Please, let it not be that you, with the freedom to return, would rather be away! My father Icarius compels me to leave my widowed bed and chides my long delays. He can chide as long as he wants - I am yours, I should be called yours. Penelope will ALWAYS be the wife of Ulysses. My father is broken by my piety and faithful prayers and he tempers his will. A luxurious, excessive crowd of suitors rush me into ruin, of Dulichium and Samos and those who high Zacynthos holds, And with no reservations, they rule YOUR palace; My heart, your riches are torn to pieces. What should I say to you about how Pisander, Polybus, cruel Medon, the greedy hands of Eurymachus and Antinous, and others, those who you, shamefully absent, nourish with riches won by your blood? Destitute Irus and Melanthius the driver of your flock - for eating - are the final shame heaped upon your ruin. Us unwarlike number only three: Your unarmed wife, old Laertes, and young Telemachus. My son was almost  stolen from me recently, through deceit, When he was preparing to go to Pylos, with all opposed. I pray that the gods order that, with the will of the fates, he will close my eyes in death, and yours! To make this happen: the guardian of your cows, the aged nurse, the third the faithful watchman of the filthy pigsty; But Laertes, as he is unable now to bear arms, is now unable to hold the palace with so many enemies. Age will make Telemachus a stronger man, if only he lives; Now he must be guarded, with his father’s help- I don’t have the strength to drive away these enemies from our home. Swiftly, you, come, a safe harbor and altar for your own! You have a son (I pray he’ll still be alive) who needed to be taught the skills of his father in his more tender years. Consider Laertes: who, so that you might close his eyes, holds back death to the very last day. And I, but a girl when you left, as fast as you may arrive, will seem to have become an old woman.