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The weak king and father, Pandion, is now replaced by a powerful father-figure, Erechtheus, who will not surrender his daughter, Oreithyia, to a Thracian husband, even though the latter is a god (682ff.).37 Like Tereus, Boreas resorts to violence. Indeed, his highly rhetorical soliloquy, in which he reminds himself that he is a big bad storm-god, full of potential saevitia and vis (687ff.), recalls Tereus' readiness to play the role of Paris and launch a massive war (cf. 46166). Like Tereus too, he yields to the blazing fires of passion (708) and carries his Athenian beloved off to the snowy wilds of Thrace (707ff.). |
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Unlike Tereus, however, Boreas makes his Athenian captive his wife and the mother of twin sons. The bird-metamorphosis that follows is now gradual and happy rather than sudden and destructive (contrast 66674 and 71418). The two sons, Zetes and Calais, have their wings as part of the joint attributes of both parents (gemellos / cetera qui matris, pennas genitoris haberent, 712f.). For the young Itys, "likeness to father" meant death (a! quam / es similis patri, 621f.); here that likeness is the source of special powers that ensure heroic success. These bird-like qualities emerge only in the due course of the Boreads' maturation (71418), just when they are useful for their spectacular and literally radiant breaking away on the Argonautic expedition (720f.): |
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vellera cum Minyis nitido radiantia villo
per mare non notum prima petiere carina. |
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Along with the Minyans (the Argonauts), through an unknown sea and on the first ship, they seek the shining fleeece with its bright hair. |
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These are the closing lines of the book; and they offer an image of bright, happy, and expansive travel, in contrast to the movement toward enclosure and darkness in the tale of Tereus (cf. especially iubet ille carinas / in freta deduci, "He orders the ships to be brought down to the sea," 443f., of Tereus' ill-fated voyage from Thrace to Greece). They also show us the children of a Thraco-Athenian union reaching a glorious adolescence rather than being cut off horribly in childhood. |
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Ovid thus ends this grim book on a lighter and more pleasant note. If we read with the flow of Ovid's elegant and pleasant surface, the Boreas-Oreithyia episode allows us to see the murderousness of the preceding tale in comic relief. But if we read it in the light of the disjunctions and unsuccessful resolutions of the preceding tale, it appears as a strategy to smooth over the very difficult problems that the Tereus-Philomela episode has raised. The resolution that is impossible inside the Tereus story is made by a supplement from outside, as it were, in another story. But like all |
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37 Note too the motif of blanditiae here, 685. Unlike those of the Tereus story (440, 626, 632), these do not succeed. |
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