Author: Douglas Galbi

I remember when I, Jason, son of King Aeson, lost my sandal on my way home. How could I have foreseen that my lost sandal would take me into the child-desperate embraces of you, crazy Hypsipyle? Why didn’t my father’s brother just kill me? I would have suffered less if he had mercifully cut off my all-too-active head.

Phineus offered sure prophecy to us, heroic Argonauts, blinded with our own folly. Phineus, a man who lived on his own, for dinner would prepare for himself a peanut-butter sandwich and some chips. What goddess would object to a man asking only for a sandwich? You would. You never got me a sandwich when I asked for one.

Phineus made his own sandwiches. But then horrid harpies would swoop down from their supervisory position, snatch his sandwich, and shit all over his plate. They watched and harassed him like you stalk and harass me. We chased the harpies away for Phineus. We would have killed them if the messenger goddess Iris hadn’t compelled us not to.

Phineus is now able to eat a peanut butter sandwich and chips for dinner in peace. I can’t eat dinner in peace because I fear for the children that I, too proud to practice a well-known Greek method of birth control, unintentionally had with you. Will you kill our children? Will you dismember their bodies and throw the pieces into the sea? Thinking of you makes me too sick to eat even a peanut-butter sandwich. I just want freedom from thoughts of you. I just want peace. May my children have a normal, wholesome life!

When we landed on your island of Lemnos, all of us smelled the sexual eagerness of you Lemnian women. We should have asked why no men lived on Lemnos. Instead, we joyfully imaged ourselves to be the first men who had gotten to you. You never told us that you had ceased the rites of Venus with your husbands, and that you had even ceased bathing. What husband wouldn’t then seek another woman? When your husbands did, you killed all the men on the island. You even killed the men wise enough never to have married. You never told me any of this.

Phineus had prophesied your Lemnian deeds. We were deaf and blind. Now I get letter after letter from you, begging me to return to you as if I remember nothing of your deeds. You threaten to stain your face with the blood of my new mistress Medea. You spread vicious falsehoods about what she has done. You utter horrid curses against her and obsessively refer to me being in bed with her. You are beyond crazy, and I long to be rid of you. Why shouldn’t I enjoy Medea’s gentle, loving embraces?

I beg you not to leave our children alone where a deadly snake might bite them. If you insist on chasing after soldiers for the same reason you chased after me, at least employ a servant girl to watch over the children. You have no reason to loiter around the spring until late into the night. Dear Hypsipyle, offering yourself for free to soldiers should be enough for you.

I never loved you the way I love Medea. Medea has a magic that thrills me beyond all understanding. She will do anything for me, unlike you, who only did what you desired. How many times did you punch me, kick me, and throw things at me, knowing that because you are a woman, I would never hurt you no matter how much you abused me. Medea would never hurt me or anyone else. You will never be Medea to me. I wish Medea could be the mother of the children I had with you.

Cease writing to me. I don’t want letters from you, except for you to write to me to tell me about our children. How I long to hug them, and to hear their voices, and to give them little gifts to light up their eyes. You have no right to keep them from me. I will return to Lemnos. Then you must let me be with my children. If you don’t, my men and I will kill you and any Lemnian women who support you as quickly as Achilles killed the Amazon queen Penthesileia.

I will be with you again soon at Lemnos. For the sake of our children, seek herbs or potions that might right your mind. Farewell.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Lynceus to virgin Hypermnestra, whose sisters murdered his brothers
• Psycho and Aphrodite through Apuleius’s Metamorphoses
• man benefits from not killing his father amid mass parricide

Notes:

The chorus in Aeschylus’s Cheophoroi (The Libation Bearers) declares (l. 631f), “of all the appalling deeds ever told, that deed by the Lemnian women holds first place.” The Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus gives the following account:

These {the Argonauts} with Jason as admiral put to sea and touched at Lemnos. At that time it chanced that Lemnos was bereft of men and ruled over by a queen, Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas. The reason was as follows. The Lemnian women did not honor Aphrodite, so she imposed on them a foul smell. Their husbands thus took captive women from the neighboring country of Thrace and bedded with them. Dishonored in that way, the Lemnian women murdered their fathers and husbands. Hypsipyle alone saved her father Thoas by hiding him. So having put in to Lemnos, at that time ruled by women, the Argonauts had intercourse with the women. Hypsipyle slept with Jason and bore from him sons, Euneus and Nebrophonus. … Having come to Nemea, of which Lycurgus was king, they {Argive soldiers} sought for water. Hypsipyle showed them the way to a spring, leaving behind an infant boy Opheltes, whom she nursed, a child of Eurydice and Lycurgus. For the Lemnian women, afterwards learning that Thoas had been saved alive, put him to death and sold Hypsipyle into slavery. She then served in the house of Lycurgus as a purchased bondwoman. But while she showed the spring, the abandoned boy was killed by a serpent.

Bibliotheca 1.9.17, 3.6.4, from Greek trans. James George Frazer (1921) for the Loeb Classical Library. I’ve adapted the translation non-substantially for readability. For a more detailed narrative of the Argonauts’ visit to Lemnos, Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 1.609-909. In that account, the old nurse Polyxo points out the Lemnian women’s need for men to plow the fields, reap the harvest, and engender children.

The above letter is a counterpart to Ovid, Heroides 6 (Hypsipyle’s letter to Jason). Here’s the Latin text, and English translations by James M. Hunter and A. S. Kline. Hunter has provided a useful introduction to Heroides 6. Vaiopoulos (2013) insightfully discusses intertextuality between Heroides 6 and Heroides 12 (Medea to Jason).

Hypsipyle’s letter to Jason continues to resonate today. A recent work explained:

Who is Crazy? … Crazy is an ex who is unwilling or incapable of letting go of her former partner and does her level best to continue to control and interfere with his life. … Crazy is often very entitled. She acts as if she is owed the sun and the moon and everything in between just because she was once married to and bred with your husband. When trying to describe Crazy and her antics to your family, friends, attorney or therapist, you probably find yourself using words and phrases like controlling, bully, entitled, self-obsessed, hypocrite, liar, hateful, terrorist, vampire, bitch, Jekyll and Hyde, psycho bitch from hell, personality disordered, stalker, whack job and, well, crazy.

Palmatier & Elam (2016) p. 9.

[image] Hypsipyle writing to Jason. Illumination on folio 36r of manuscript Ovide, Héroïdes, traduction d’ Octavien de Saint-Gelais, copied by Jean Michel in 1497. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 875, ark:/12148/btv1b8427253m. Thanks to Gallica.

References:

Palmatier, Tara, and Paul Elam. 2016. Say goodbye to crazy: how to get rid of his crazy ex and restore sanity to your life. (review)

Vaiopoulos, Vaios. 2013. “Between Lament and Irony: Some Cross-References in Ovid’s Heroides 6 and 12.” Mediterranean Studies. 21 (2): 122-148.

I, Lynceus, send this letter to my virgin wife Hypermnestra, sister of my brothers’ murderers, the Danaides.

My dreams recall you, dreams brighter than the beautiful day, and I find you there, although you are absent from this place. Sleep does not hold onto its delights long enough. Often I dream that your arms are around my neck, and I recognize in sleep your kisses that you used to give and take with your tongue. Sometimes I delude myself and speak words that seem like the truth. Then my mouth keeps watch over my senses. Yet I’m ashamed to mention the things that happen beyond this … but I’m not permitted to sleep dryly, all happens, and I delight.

Why did I take more pleasure than I should in your golden hair, and your comeliness, and the lying favors of your tongue? If not, once your hostile ship had beached on our sands, and had brought you young Danaides here, what great treachery would have died with you, you wicked women! What great evils would have been averted from my brothers’ lives!

My father is betrayed, kingdom and country forsaken, for which my reward is to suffer exile. Your virginity remains the prize of a frigid wife, my most dearly beloved sister, meant to be my lover. Where is divine power? Where are the gods? Justice is near us in the deep, you punished for fraud, I for credulity. I wish that the clashing rocks, the Symplegades, had crushed us, so that my bone might bang against your bones. Or ravening Scylla might have caught us, you to be eaten by her dogs. Scylla is destined to harm frigid women with murderous sisters. And Charybdis, who so often swallows and spews out the tide, should also have sucked me beneath Sicilian waters.

As you ordered, I left the house, unaccompanied by my brothers, and, what will pursue me always, with my love of you. When suddenly the songs of Hymen came to my ears, and the torches shone with illuminating fire, and the flutes poured out the marriage tunes for me, and I mournfully dreamed of you. I was afraid. I hadn’t thought till now so much wickedness could be, but still I was chilled to my bone. In my dream the crowd rushed on, continually shouting, ‘Hymen, Hymenaee!’ and the nearer they came, the worse it was for me. The servants in the morning would weep — who wants to be the bearer of such evil news?

It would have been better for me not to know what happened. My brothers’ shades find in me offerings to the dead. I abandon my lost kingdom, my country, my home, my virgin wife, who loved me only not to kill me. The day does not please me. I awake from wet dreams to the bitterness of being alone at night. I beg you, by the gods, by the light of the Sun, by my grandfather’s fire, by my kindness to you, and by the specter of your childless future, return to the bed for which my brothers, insanely, have been so brutally murdered! Add truth to your words, and love me in a way you would not love your father.

That you live, that you have a father and beautiful siblings — all that’s been slashed away from me. I remember I used to say: “Lying, faithless whores!” Then my brothers married your murderous virgin sisters, and you became my virgin wife. Now I cry, “Men, never trust in women!” My love is betrayed: only the wind has changed. The worm will turn … but why should I be concerned to warn you of your punishment? My anger throngs with monstrous warnings. Where my anger leads, I’ll follow. Perhaps I’ll regret my deeds. I regret having concern for a frigid woman with murderous sisters. Let the god see to it, who now disturbs my heart. Something momentous surely now drives my mind!

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Margery Kempe’s husband: humiliation of sexless married men
• Ovid castrated & called misogynist for defying goddess Cybele
• Photis lovingly consoled Lucius after triple-murder trial farce

Notes:

Greek myth about Danaus and Aegyptus and their fifty daughters (the Danaides) and fifty sons dates to the archaic period. References to this myth exist in surviving fragments of Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women. The myth is recalled in the early fifth-century BGC works of Aeschylus (The Suppliants, Prometheus Bound) and odes of Pindar (Pythian 9, Nemean 10). Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca (Library), written perhaps in the second century GC, provides a summary of central aspects of the myth:

Both {the brothers Aegyptus and Danaus} had children by many wives; Aegyptus had fifty sons, and Danaus fifty daughters. As they afterwards quarreled concerning the kingdom, Danaus feared the sons of Aegyptus, and by the advice of Athena he built a ship, being the first to do so, and having put his daughters on board he fled. … But the sons of Aegyptus came to Argos, and exhorted Danaus to lay aside his enmity, and begged to marry his daughters. Now Danaus distrusted their professions and bore them a grudge on account of his exile; nevertheless he consented to the marriage and allotted the damsels among them. … When they had got their brides by lot, Danaus made a feast and gave his daughters daggers; and they slew their bridegrooms as they slept, all but Hypermnestra; for she saved Lynceus because he had respected her virginity. In response, Danaus shut her up and kept her under guard. But the rest of the daughters of Danaus buried the heads of their bridegrooms in Lerna and paid funeral honors to their bodies in front of the city. Athena and Hermes purified them at the command of Zeus. Danaus afterwards united Hypermnestra to Lynceus, and bestowed his other daughters on the victors in an athletic contest.

Apollodorus, Biblioteca 2.1.4, 2.1.5, from Greek trans. James George Frazier (1921) for the Loeb Classical Library. That men raced to win as brides the husband-murdering Danaides underscores men’s folly in marriage.

Ovid’s Heroides 14 is a letter that Hypermnestra wrote to Lynceus. Hypermnestra describes herself as a virgin and a sister to Lynceus. Heroides 14.55, 123.  Hypermnestra asserts that she is wholly innocent of the murder of Lynceus’s brothers. She claims that she deserved to be honored for not killing her husband after she nearly did so three times. She implores Lynceus to come and rescue her, at considerable risk to himself. In short, Hypermnestra’s letter is completely self-centered. Moreover, as Vaiopoulos (2014) shows, Hypermnestra seems to have implicitly expressed sexual interests.

The above text is adapted from Ovid’s Heroides 15 (Sappho to Phaon), Heroides 12 (Medea to Jason), and Fasti 3 (March 8, Ariadne’s lament). In the later, Ariadne declares:

I remember I used to say: “Perjured, faithless Theseus!”
He abandoned me: now Bacchus commits the same crime.
Now once more I’ll cry: “Woman, never trust in man!”
My fate’s repeated, only his name has changed.

From Latin trans. A.S. Kline. The text above is adapted from the translations of Kline and James M. Hunter.

Hunter’s site provides an excellent resource for studying the text of the Heroides. For critical perspectives, Vessey (1976) and Fulkerson (2005) are helpful. The Latin text of the Heroides is available online.

[image] The Danaides kill their husbands (detail, enhanced). Folio 170v in Les Epistres d’Ovide,… translatées par feu monsieur l’evesque d’Angoulesme, nommé Octovien de Saint Gelais, 1496-1498. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), Français 874, through BnF Gallica.

References:

Fulkerson, Laurel. 2005. The Ovidian heroine as author: reading, writing, and community in the Heroides. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Vaiopoulos, Vaios. 2014. “Hypermestra as Soror Querens. Reading Ovid’s Her., 14.” Rivista Di Cultura Classica E Medioevale. 56 (2): 273-314.

Vessey, D. W. T. 1976. “Humor and Humanity in Ovid’s Heroides.” Arethusa 9(1): 91-110.