94 pages • 3 hours read
OvidMetamorphoses
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Book 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4 Summary: “The Daughters of Minyas”
Like Pentheus, the daughters of King Minyas scorn Bacchus. One day, while they avoid his festival, they begin telling tales.
Book 4 Summary: “Pyramus and Thisbe”
In their first tale, Pyramus and Thisbe are two star-crossed lovers from enemy families. They arrange to meet at a tomb near a white-berried mulberry tree. When Thisbe arrives first and sees a lioness, she flees, leaving behind her shawl. Then Pyramus arrives and sees the shawl. Thinking Thisbe is dead, Pyramus kills himself. When Thisbe returns and sees Pyramus dead, she says, “men shall say of me, poor wretched Thisbe, / I was the cause and comrade of your fate” (78). She then kills herself, and her blood stains the mulberries purple.
Book 4 Summary: “The Sun in Love”
In the sister’s next tale, the Sun falls in love with but rapes the princess Leucothoe. Another girl, Clytie, becomes jealous and spreads rumors about Leucothoe, leading her father to bury Leucothoe alive. The Sun is distraught and turns the dead Leucothoe into a frankincense shrub. Abandoned, Clytie wastes away into the heliotrope flower.
Book 4 Summary: “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus”
In their third tale, the nymph Salmacis falls in love with the son of Mercury and Venus. When he rejects her, she follows him into a pool of water and clings to him, praying that they never be separated. Their two bodies merge, and Ovid writes, “they two were two no more, nor man, nor woman— / one body then that neither seemed and both” (85). This intersex person is then known as Hermaphroditus.
Book 4 Summary: “The Daughters of Minyas Transformed”
Bacchus, angry that the daughters of Minyas scorn him, scares the girls before turning them into bats.
Book 4 Summary: “Athamas and Ino”
One of Bacchus’ aunts, Ino, offends Juno with her pride. Juno asked the Furies in the underworld to punish her and her husband Ino, last of Cadmus’ house. The Fury Tisiphone poisons them both, and they grow mentally ill. Athamas, Ino’s husband, kills one of their children, and Ino jumps into the sea with their other. Venus and Neptune take pity on Ino and her son, however, and turn them into gods.
Book 4 Summary: “The Transformation of Cadmus”
Cadmus leaves Thebes with his wife to wander, mourning their family’s many tragedies. On their journey, he trips on a snake and they both turn into snakes. After this, they find peace in the divine fate of their grandson Bacchus.
Book 4 Summary: “Perseus and Andromeda
After Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa, he used her head to turn the titan Atlas to a mountain. Then he travels to the palace of Cepheus where he rescues and marries the princess Andromeda. At their wedding feast, Perseus tells how he defeated Medusa. He also tells how Medusa, “it’s said, / was violated in Minerva’s shrine / by Ocean’s lord”(in other words, she was raped by Poseidon, god of the sea) before Minerva transformed her into a Gorgon (98).
Book 4 Analysis
The first half of Book 4 is not narrated as previous myths have been. Ovid introduces the daughters of Minyas, using them to narrate the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe (which inspired William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), the Sun and his love for Leucothoe, and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. By framing these three stories as tales that the daughters of Minyas tell, Ovid contrasts them with the daughters’ own circumstances—namely, their refusal to honor the god Bacchus. In fact, after they tell the tale of the Sun, Ovid writes, “the miracle had held / them fascinated; one denies such things / could happen; others say true gods can do / all things—but Bacchus is not one of them” (82).
Each of the three stories has an example of some sort of miraculous transformation—the mulberry tree changing color, Clytie turning into the heliotrope flower, and Salmacis merging with the boy to become Hermaphroditus. In contrast, the daughters deny that Bacchus can perform such miracles, thereby denying that he is a god. The metacommentary here suggests that the nature of divinity and religion was a frequent topic of debate throughout antiquity, and certainly in the early Roman empire.
Ovid’s story of Perseus, on the other hand, is extremely typical of the archetypical hero in both Greco-Roman and other Indo-European mythologies. Among the elements of the hero pattern that Perseus story follows, Perseus defeats a monster (in fact, two monsters): Medusa, whose “snake-haired monster head” he carries (93), and “a monstrous beast” in the ocean who threatens Andromeda (95). He is also the son of a god, which he tells Atlas when he says, “I take my line / from Jove, my father” (93). He even marries a princess—after defeating the sea monster, “to his heart he took Andromeda, / undowered, she herself his valour’s prize” (97). Although Ovid tells Perseus’ story somewhat out of order, as he begins with Perseus saving Andromeda and continues by having Perseus tell the tale of Medusa in his past, the overall pattern fits a typical mythological narrative.
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