Okay. That’s New
I am a classics student. This means that I study classical myth, religion, literature, society, archaeology and history. I am also studying Latin for the second time in my life.
While some aspects of classics can be rather serious, Greek and Roman myth at times most certainly is anything but serious. To quote a friend, when asked how she could laugh at Greek myth, she replied with “how can you not?”
Seriously. With Achilles sitting on the sidelines like a whiny kid who didn’t get to do everything he wanted, “deviant sexuality” and random transformations abounding, how can one take some things seriously? There’s a reason we sit in the back of the lecture theatre giggling at some of the stories we hear.
But today’s lecture on Procris and the many variations of her story, from innocent virgin unfairly tested, to a more culpable adulteress, created a new level of WTF. Even for me, and I liked to consider myself reasonably well-versed in at least some weird and wacky myths.
In his Metamorphoses, Ancient Greek grammarian Antoninus Liberalis writes the following in his tale of Procris and her hound:
In shame Procris forsook Cephalus and went off as a fugitive to Minos the king of Crete. She found on arrival that he was afflicted by childlessness and promised a cure, showing him how to beget children. Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes, killing the women with whom he had intercourse.
But his wife Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, was immortal. Procris accordingly devised the following to make Minos fertile. She inserted the bladder of a goat into a woman and Minos first emitted the snakes into the bladder; then he went over to Pasiphaë and entered her. And when children were born to them, Minos gave Procris his spear as his dog. No animal could escape these two and they always reached their target.
Just in case you missed it, here’s the point which made us go, “Ouch.” Not to mention WTF.
Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes, killing the women with whom he had intercourse.
Now that sounds like a bad STD. Yowch.
And thus concludes my tale of the myth that made even me go “WTF?!”.
I Hear What You Say There
Of my (immediate) family, I am the only one who could possibly be considered multi-lingual (y helo thar five years of German, three years of Latin and one year of Maori). What this meant to my family was that (besides having to shell out money to send me overseas) whenever we went on holiday my parents would ask me to listen in on the conversations of (German-sounding) tourists. Although I did understand some of what they said, I refused to tell my parents.
Although I haven’t taken German for a few years now, I was very much delighted to learn that I still can understand a lot of German. My speaking has always suffered from my shyness/stagefright, but I have not lost my ability to understand. So when I heard a two guys sitting behind me on the bus talking about the movie 10,000 BC and how it was awesome but they forgot most of it, I smiled.
Still got it.
Although it’s not exactly the same, upon starting at Victoria University I have taken up a new hobby: tourist watching. What does my university have to do with tourists? Well, to get to and from the university I take the cable car, which is somewhat of a tourist attraction around here. So occasionally I see people with parliament tour stickers or lanyards with the names of cruise ships on them.
And it’s fun to watch them, and silently giggle when they say something really dumb about NZ.