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In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Demeter’s grief is demonstrated through the concepts of divinity and humanity being symbolically contrasted with a woman’s purpose and social status as a mother or daughter.
While “terrible” is a word we would expect to describe grief, “brutal” is interesting due to its violent connotations (Hymn to Demeter, 90). As a “brutal grief that seized the heart” it lends itself to a comparison with the violent seizing of Persephone, echoed here in Demeter’s emotions about her daughters’ capture, and perhaps denoting that the nature of what causes grief may be reflected in how it is felt (Hymn to Demeter, 90). The words “brutal” and “seized” also portrays grief itself as uncontrollable and forceful, even to the non-human
Being described as “like four goddesses” while Demeter herself is divine and yet, unrecognisable as such seems to hark back to their youth and beauty as a divine gift, while Demeter, in her grief, appears to lose divine status (Hymn to Demeter,108, 94-95, 108). Her grief is almost transformative, the lines “men nor… women recognised her when they looked” characterises grief as something that has made Demeter look human (Hymn to Demeter, 94-95). In travelling from Mount Olympus to earth, an action fuelled by her grief, she becomes a metaphor for a step-down in status from deity to mortal (Hymn to Demeter, 92-93). This reflects the implications of women losing their status as mothers and membership to a family in ancient Greece, when they either cannot bear children, or lose their children.
In humanising Demeter, grief detrimentally effects the goddess’s power as a deity and a woman. In Hymn to Demeter, Demeter’s grief for her daughter works to warn women that their status as a mother is inseparably tied to emotional
In Hesiod’s Theogony and the Homeric hymns, we see various mothers many of which are gods. Throughout these texts there is a repeated behavior displayed by mothers; by analyzing them and their behavior one can determine what the role of a mother consists of in these texts. The actions of Gaia, the earth, her daughter Rhea, and the goddess Demeter display some of the key characteristics that make up the role of a mother in these ancient texts.
In the poem “Demeter,” an ancient myth retold by Edith Hamilton, celebrates on the agony a mother experiences when they lose a child. A mother love is unconditional and non forgotten. The speaker states the following, “The high hills echoed her cry and
As one of the most well known ancient Roman love poets, Ovid has demonstrated bountiful talents within his writing. When reading myths from his book titled Metamorphoses, you gain an enlightening insight of how he viewed mythology. To Ovid, love was the origin of everything. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that most of his poems relate to the theme of love. However, not all poets are the same and every re-telling of a myth has its own unique perspective. In this paper I will compare and contrast the myth of Medea in Euripides Medea and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 7. I will then explain how Ovid’s approach to love and loss correlate to his general approach to myth as a whole. I will support my belief with evidence from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 14.
Yet, despite the fact that no two women in this epic are alike, each—through her vices or virtues—helps to delineate the role of the ideal woman. Below, we will show the importance of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Clytaemestra, and Penelope in terms of the movement of the narrative and in defining social roles for the Ancient Greeks. Before we delve into the traits of individual characters, it is important to understand certain assumptions about women that prevailed in the Homeric Age. By modern standards, the Ancient Greeks would be considered a rabidly misogynistic culture. Indeed, the notoriously sour Boetian playwright Hesiod-- who wrote about fifty years before Homer-- proclaimed "Zeus who thunders on high made women to be evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil (Theogony 600).
Most can agree that random evil and suffering, such as accidents, war, illness, crime, and many more, have the power to disrupt human happiness. Most would also agree that it is not the evil and suffering that affects one, as much as it is how one responds to the evil and suffering that occurs in one’s life. It is undeniable that suffering occurs to everyone in some shape or form, and while others may not believe that it is suffering, it all depends on one’s life. There are many examples a reader can draw from in recent and ancient literature that provides examples of other’s suffering and how they responded to those stimuli. This essay explores how the problem of evil is addressed by Greek tragedy and by Western monotheistic tradition.
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
There are many lessons that can be learned from reading Homer's The Iliad. One of which is understanding the stages of grief. One can literally watch Achilles go through all five stages when he morns the death of his comrade Patroclus. Achilles moves through Denial and Isolation, Depression, Anger, Bargaining and Acceptance in the short time after his close friends death.
In The Metamorphoses, Ovid’s book six tells us a story about Arachne who is the daughter of Idmon and an incredible weaver, challenged by the goddess Minerva. When Arachne wins the challenge it causes Minerva to strike back with violence. While reading Ovid’s stories, we recognize that he wrote stories based on the way the mind contemplates trauma. Ovid is interested in human awareness, and he helps us comprehend the emotions of the powerful and powerless. The gods express possessiveness, envy, and anger towards each other. At this time, in Ovid’s Roman World the gods have the power to manipulate and use their evil strategies. I will be concentrating on Arachne and Minerva; how their emotions take a big sorrow during the time when the powerful takes over the less powerful and punishes them abusively. I will deliberate primarily on the themes of emotions, power, of the gods to show the powerless.
She places in people the desire to have sexual relations and causes fear in men of the power of seduction by women. Her marriage to her husband was ignored as she had affairs with immortal and mortal men. Her infidelity in her marriage places her on the side with Greek men, rather than Greek women because only Greek men were able to cheat on their wives; not the other way around. In conclusion, the three important rules discussed in this paper that Greek women were required to obey, can be seen in the myths of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Whether or not the Greek goddesses obeyed or did not obey these rules, their importance to the Greek culture is ever strong.
Beloved by Toni Morrison is the tale of family connection, death, happiness and pain between a mother, Sethe and her two daughters, Denver and Beloved. Reading this tale, one will be able to understand its’ many influences from mythology. The storyline between Sethe and her two daughters draw connections to the Greek God Demeter and her daughter, Medea, a Greek princess who love story turned tragic and resulted in her killing her two songs, and the ever familiar feminine trinity shown in mythology stories that show strength in women and in numbers.
Demeter shows the theme of isolation when she disguises herself as an old woman of no childbearing and lives among the mortals, shunning herself from the gods and turning her grief into anger against Zeus. So when she arrives at Elusis, she take upon the duty of raising the child of Keleus and Meraneria, Demophoön. The part of the myth show Demeter's anger when she attempts to make Demophoön into a god. It symbolizes the fact the she is replacing a female child with a males, meaning...
Ten missed phone calls from your mother. The first thoughts running through almost anyone’s mind: panic and fright. These are thoughts that many people have because mothers can be scary. Women in general can be scary; they are seen as more emotional, caring, and passionate than men. Most mothers are seen as great role models because of this. The fact that they only want their children to grow up happy and healthy is a good thing. In society, this is seen as normal female behavior and is expected. However, because of this behavior, Greek society believed that women, especially mothers, were not fit to be rulers or to have strong power because of their emotional instability, their passion, and their deceitfulness. The Hymn to Demeter and Oresteia,
“The Poem as Mask” by Muriel Rukeyser is used as a protest to the myths and masks of the female goddess. The myth of the female goddess essentially places a woman on a “pedestal,” this “pedestal” tells women that they must conform to the standard actions and behavior of society, which in return removes them from society itself. When a woman is placed on a “pedestal” it is an elevation that comes with a higher power. The elevation, however, can also be restricting in the sense that those women are upheld to a higher standard and have guidelines for how they are expected to behave to conform to the way that society is set to perceive them.
Medea and Lysistrata are two Greek literatures that depict the power which women are driven to achieve in an aim to defy gender inequality. In The Medea, Medea is battling against her husband Jason whom she hates. On the other hand, in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the protagonist Lysistrata plotted to convince and organize the female gender to protest against the stubbornness of men. In terms of defining the purpose of these two literatures, it is apparent that Euripedes and Aristophanes created characters that demonstrate resistance against the domination of men in the society.
Women’s lives are represented by the roles they either choose or have imposed on them. This is evident in the play Medea by Euripides through the characters of Medea and the nurse. During the time period which Medea is set women have very limited social power and no political power at all, although a women’s maternal and domestic power was respected in the privacy of the home, “Our lives depend on how his lordship feels”. The limited power these women were given is different to modern society yet roles are still imposed on women to conform and be a dutiful wife.