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Bernard EvslinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Throughout Evslin’s collection, gods and mortals both show themselves capable of extreme emotions and actions that lead to tragic outcomes, while moderation and restraint are portrayed as sources of success and happiness.
Gods’ extreme emotions and responses repeatedly lead to tragic outcomes. Demeter’s extreme despair leads to an innocent child’s death. Apollo’s jealousy provokes him to engineer Marsyas’s brutal death. Artemis punishes Actaeon with death for a mistake. Aphrodite torments Psyche because she is beautiful. Prometheus cannot resist bringing fire to men, against Zeus’s explicit command, with devastating consequences. And the gods create Pandora to deliver grief to men, causing human suffering on a large scale.
Except in the case of Prometheus, who disobeys Zeus, each of these cases involves an innocent mortal (or all of humanity) suffering because of something they could not have known about or controlled. Men do not ask Prometheus for fire, and Pandora has no choice in the gifts she receives. The child Demeter turns into a lizard does not understand that the goddess has lost her daughter. Marsyas and Psyche cannot help being talented and beautiful. Actaeon is not spying on Artemis but accidentally stumbles onto the scene where she is bathing. Though the extreme responses belong to the gods, it is almost always the mortals who suffer their worst consequences.
When mortals experience extreme emotions, their actions can also become monstrous. Daedalus murders his nephew out of jealousy. Pasiphae’s arrogance provokes her to mock the gods, leading to a series of tragic events. Midas’s greed results in his daughter transforming into a gold statue. Arachne’s arrogance, Phaethon’s pride, and Icarus’s extreme curiosity lead to the deaths of all three, while Orpheus’s lack of trust in Hades causes him to lose the love of his life. Mortal lack of moderation, even when unintentional, draws negative attention from the gods—thus the safest course of action is for humans to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
Mortals who practice forethought and restraint achieve positive ends. Arion escapes the clutches of a sea captain and crew who want to rob and kill him because he maintains his calm and strategizes his way to safety. Perseus receives the help of Atlas’s daughters because he resists their temptations. Theseus makes it safely from Troezen to Athens by following the advice of Poseidon’s gull: When faced with opponents of extreme strength, the greatest chance of success lies with deploying those strengths against them.
The advice Poseidon’s gull provides Theseus speaks to another central theme in the collection, which moderation enables: When weaker parties, usually mortals, are vulnerable to stronger ones, usually gods, the weaker benefit when they can find a way to align their wills with those of the stronger party. This does not mean succumbing to the stronger. Rather, the ideal outcome results from working with rather than against the figure with the greater strength.
When suitors appear to woo Atalanta, for example, her father knows that he cannot outright reject them. He explains to Atalanta that “They are too powerful” and “will make war upon me, conquer me; and you will be dragged off, a captive instead of a wife” (194). In response, Atalanta devises a cunning compromise: She sets the terms to the suitors, making them almost impossible to fulfill. Hippomenes’s success requires the intervention of Aphrodite. He understands that he cannot beat Atalanta in tests of strength and speed, thus his best chance is not coercion but love. Aphrodite rewards his decision to pray to her by gifting him the three apples he needs to distract Atalanta during the race. Both Atalanta and Hippomenes work within the limits set by a stronger power.
Alignment of weaker and stronger wills is also at work when Arion decides not to let fear keep him from traveling after the oracle informs him he will not return home safely by ship. He goes ahead with his plans expecting that he may have to meet a challenge, and when it arrives, he draws on his skills to meet it triumphantly. Similarly, the oracle that decrees that Psyche is not destined for a mortal man saddens her parents, but they do not allow fear to prevent their compliance. Psyche’s marriage to the god Eros results. These myths suggest that aligning oneself with the force of fate, rather than trying to outsmart or outrun it, is the wisest course of action.
The fables that conclude the collection portray the ideal alignment of wills. Midas essentially punishes himself by making a foolish accusation and then a request born of excessive greed. Apollo does not inflict a random punishment in response to Midas’s insult but simply gives him what he asks for. When Midas realizes his folly, Apollo revokes the punishment, with no tragic long-term consequences. The donkey ears Apollo leaves Midas with, as a lasting reminder, work effectively: When Midas has an opportunity to punish a servant for a mistake, he chooses the path Apollo chose with him: mercy. In a similar vein, when Aphrodite instructs Pygmalion to marry, he does not insult the goddess by rejecting her order. Recognizing that it is not possible for a mortal to resist the goddess’s demand, he instead flatters and cajoles her, buying himself time. Ultimately, the alignment of their wills enables them to reach a compromise that pleases both: Aphrodite succeeds in marrying off Pygmalion as promised to the women of Cyprus, and Pygmalion marries the woman of his choice.
As in ancient versions of the myths, in Evslin’s collection, love is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It is a primal force that can have positive or negative outcomes. Love can lead to obsession and tragedy, or it can save mortals’ lives.
Love can become destructive when it is obsessive. This is evident in the myths of Narcissus and Meleager, among others. Narcissus becomes so consumed with the object of his love—himself—that he cannot tear himself away from the riverbank and ends up fusing with it in the form of a flower. Meleager’s intense love for Atalanta causes him to lash out at his uncles in a rage. When they rebuke his decision to award the Calydonian boar pelt to her, he slices off their heads, leading his mother to retaliate by throwing the piece of wood that represents his life into the fire. In both cases, love kills the person who practices it too fully or too forcefully.
Love has positive outcomes when it is moderate and focused on serving the beloved. Ariadne falls in love with Theseus and leads him safely through the Labyrinth. Perseus falls in love with Andromeda and kills the monster that threatens her life. Pygmalion’s love for Galatea convinces Aphrodite to bring her to life. Hippomenes wisely puts his faith in love, literally when he prays to Aphrodite for help and figuratively by waiting patiently for his opportunity to win Atalanta’s hand in marriage on her own terms.