I admit that I’ve always loved the story
of Procris and Cephalus (even though it has a maudlin ending), because the
characters seem designed to defy all the standard narratives of Greek mythology:
Cephalus is not a typical hero, Procris is not a typical heroine, and their
relationship has a well-balanced power dynamic. At the outset, Procris and Cephalus
are a besotted young Athenian married couple (Procris is a princess) who are inseparably
devoted to one another, not terribly promising as narrative subjects go. Never fear:
we would hardly be talking about them today if their romance had continued unproblematically
forever; you can be sure that conflict will arrive and make them interesting. The
dawn goddess Eos (who in an unrelated incident was cursed with a humiliating penchant
to develop crushes on handsome mortal youths) becomes infatuated with Cephalus,
and goes so far as to kidnap him and bring him to her home in the distant,
exotic east. According to Ovid, Cephalus dauntlessly resists Eos’s advances,
staying faithful to his beloved at home.
You can already see what sets Cephalus
apart from most mythic heroes. Greek marriage customs had no expectation of
exclusivity on the man’s part. While married women were required to refrain from
sex with anyone except their husbands, married men were only restricted insofar
as they could not (legally) have sex with other men’s wives--they would be
expected to have sex with slaves, prostitutes, and other available women.
Cephalus’ pledge to save himself for Procris alone is extraordinarily romantic.
More importantly, for all the innumerable young virgin girls who are kidnapped
and raped by aggressive gods, there are very, very few men in classical
mythology who are kidnapped by goddesses and subjected to their inappropriate
advances. Even more rare is for a man who is subject to a woman’s inappropriate
advances to turn the woman down. Remember Odysseus on Circe’s island--it’s
dangerous for a mortal man to get mixed up with a powerful goddess (she can
turn men into animals!), and Odysseus for this reason takes substantial precautions
before he even dares to approach Circe’s house. But once he has taken those
precautions and thinks he had overpowered Circe, he has no qualms about sleeping
with her at her suggestion, Penelope’s unceasing devotion notwithstanding. For
a more obscure (and in my mind, much more entertaining) myth, you can look up
the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in which Zeus humiliates Aphrodite by causing
her to become infatuated with a mortal named Anchises. Anchises knows how
dangerous goddesses are to mortal men, and he is naturally suspicious when a
gorgeous ambrosia-scented girl with a neckline cut down to her navel shows up
on his doorstep claiming to be a virgin. Nevertheless, once Aphrodite convinces
him that she’s a mortal who was brought to him via some improbable divine
intervention to be his bride, Anchises has no objection to jumping into bed
with her. (And for an amusing counterexample from a different culture, you
should read the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Ishtar propositions the
hero Gilgamesh, and he angrily rejects her, citing all the terrible fates that
befell her past lovers.) The message is clear: divine women are bad news for
mortal men, particularly in bed. Cephalus knows this, and he chooses to reject
Eos and save himself for Procris, even though Eos is a goddess and, it goes
without saying, divinely beautiful and not a virgin so probably great in bed,
etc.
Eos is upset. Having kept Cephalus in
captivity for a substantial period of time without having managed to seduce
him, she (with evident bitterness) agrees to release him. She takes a page from
Iago’s book and gets her revenge by congratulating Cephalus on his unshakable
fidelity and expressing her sincere wish that Procris has been just as faithful
in his absence.
So what has Procris been up to while Cephalus
was gone?
Spoiler alert: Procris has been faithful
all along. But Eos manages to plant enough doubt in Cephalus’ mind that he decides
to test her--in fact, to lay a trap for her. Eos, in her infinite charity,
provides him with a disguise that renders him totally unrecognizable at home,
and sends him off with gifts for Procris. Once in Athens, Cephalus uses the
gifts, and his disguise, and no doubt his extensive knowledge of his devoted
wife’s weaknesses, to seduce Procris. When she finally relents to his seduction,
he throws off his disguise and accuses her of adultery. (This is worse than
Odysseus and his barely coded talk about geese.)
In disgrace, Procris flees to Crete, and
this is where her story really starts to get interesting. As mentioned above,
she is Athenian, but in Crete she undertakes a liaison with King Minos
(remember him from Ariadne’s story?). Minos at the time is suffering from a
curse: his wife Pasiphae, fed up with his tendency to neglect her and have
affairs with other women, has placed an extraordinary curse on him, with the
result that whenever he has sex with someone other than his wife, he ejaculates
wild animals, scorpions, millipedes, etc., which in a bloody and disgusting
process kill the woman in bed with him. He is on the market for a Scheherazade who
could have sex with him without dying, and Procris steps up to be that
Scheherazade. She uses magic to cure him, in most accounts has sex with him, and
he is so grateful that he gives her some magical gifts and (in contrast to most
of the Athenians who showed up in Minoan Crete, cf. Theseus and friends) sends
her home unharmed. Like her husband, she also returns in disguise (as a man, by
the way), shows Cephalus the magical gifts--a hunting dog that will always
catch its prey, and a hunting spear that will always strike its target--and
declares that she will not sell them for any price other than sex. In his
eagerness to obtain the prizes, Cephalus agrees to sleep with the stranger, and
is duly ashamed when she reveals herself. They have a heartfelt reconciliation,
although the jealousy problem won’t go away.
Even outside of her involvement with Cephalus,
Procris is an extraordinary woman. She has magical knowledge that she can use
to remove curses. She has the wherewithal to travel to hostile places and
return unharmed. She has been given magical gifts by a foreign king, and these
gifts grant her unequaled prowess in hunting, not a typical pastime for married
women. Most incredibly, she has a sex
life outside of her marriage. There are so very few princesses in Greek
mythology who are allowed to have sex with anyone besides their husbands;
usually they become involved with a disreputable adulterer and are resoundingly
condemned for their wickedness, often even killed for adultery. Procris is a
princess who has a sexual partner outside of her romance with Cephalus and
doesn’t seem the worse for it; in fact, she comes home with magical gifts, and Cephalus
freely enjoys them. In respect to the fact that she enters an extramarital
sexual relationship of her own initiative, and the non-condemnatory way this
relationship is presented even in light of her primary romance with Cephalus,
she may be unparalleled among the women of Greek myth.
At this point the jealousy between Cephalus
and Procris spins completely out of control, and the story devolves into a
disappointingly predictable tragedy, in which a series of ironic
misunderstandings lead to Procris’ death. Procris covertly follows Cephalus out
on a hunting trip to make sure that he isn’t cheating on her; Cephalus says
some misleading things that make her think he is cheating; Procris starts
sobbing in the bushes; Cephalus thinks the noise is an animal and kills Procris
with her own spear. This is the end of what is, if not the greatest romance of
Greek myth, certainly the one in which devotion and fidelity are most important.
I find it disappointing that these two extraordinary characters are ultimately
flattened out into a tragic morality tale, after which Cephalus is exiled and
remarries another woman in a much more traditional, which is to say, not
heartbreakingly romantic, marriage. Cephalus and Procris deserve a better
ending, and in my mind the real tragedy is that they fall victim to ordinary
irony and jealousy, which they should have been able to escape.
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