Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses portrays love as a destructive passion. Often, a character in love is afflicted by a passion that causes them to betray their family, kingdom, or values. For instance, when Scylla falls in love with Minos, her kingdom’s enemy, she betrays her father and her kingdom to be with him. Similarly, when Myrrha falls in love with her father, she betrays the laws of nature. Even the gods are not exempt from the destructive power of love. Jupiter, the head of all the gods, constantly cheats on his wife Juno due to passion for another. In another example, Pluto (god of the underworld) falls so madly in love with Proserpina that he dramatically kidnaps her in a way that’s uncharacteristic of a divine being. Moreover, the many instances of rape throughout the Metamorphoses show that love can stir a person to violence. For instance, when Apollo falls in love with Daphne, he pursues her predatorily, wanting to rape her. These rapes often destroy female characters by ensuring that blame falls on them: the women Jupiter rapes are often punished by Juno and Diana. The destructive power of love comes to a head in the story of Procne and Philomela. When Tereus kidnaps his wife Procne’s sister Philomela and brutally rapes her, the two women later join together to get their revenge. However, their revenge takes the form of its own crime: Procne kills her son and feeds him to Tereus, her motherly love having been completely destroyed by her discovery that her child’s father raped her sister. This shows that rape, while destructive in itself, can also destroy bonds of marriage and motherhood. Not only does Ovid give ample proof that many things thwart and poison love, but his stories also seem to claim that love is always doomed to tragedy. In the story of Pyramus and Thisbe—two people who love each other consensually—miscommunication and poor timing lead their love story to end in death. In giving tragic endings to his love stories, Ovid portrays love as a passion that destroys, leading inexorably to violence and heartbreak.