A Serious Anti-Hero

      Mythic narrative is a funny thing, sometimes. You can go in with all these expectations that the good people will be rewarded and the evil will be punished and the heroes will marry the princesses and they’ll all live happily ever after…and that’s often not how myth works. Myths may follow folkloric conventions of promoting honor and virtue, but then again they may spin off in unexpected directions and provide endings that are difficult to understand as satisfying. In my opinion, Ino is one of the most extreme examples of a character rewarded who I didn’t want to see rewarded.

      Ino started her career as an evil stepmother. She married a king who had two children (a boy and a girl) from a previous marriage, and, as is often the case with stepmothers in folktales, she was eager to get her stepchildren out of the way and advance her own children in their place. To this end, she committed a crime so heinous I can’t even think of an appropriate word to encompass its atrocity (but please feel free to offer suggestions). She caused a famine by sabotaging seed corn to prevent it from sprouting. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the full scope of her evilness: she was so intent on killing her stepchildren, she deliberately destroyed a year’s food supply for an entire kingdom of people who depended on her as a leader; her ambitiousness almost certainly caused the death of many people who couldn’t afford food when the famine hit. After that, when the grain wouldn’t sprout, Ino staged a false oracle to report that the famine could only be ended by sacrificing the king’s children (her stepchildren). The children found themselves in the same predicament as Isaac or Iphigenia, all trussed up for sacrifice, but were saved at the last minute by (what sounds like something out of My Little Pony) a magic, golden, flying sheep. The sheep was sent by the gods to save the king from the sacrilege of needlessly killing his own children.

      The children went on with their own adventures: the boy landed safely in a distant kingdom and took up a new life. He married a princess and gained fame as one of the glorious heroes of old. In gratitude for saving his life, the boy killed the sheep in sacrifice (his gratitude was directed toward the gods who sent the sheep, of course, not toward the sheep itself, which he found expendable), and its golden pelt became a treasured artifact in the kingdom where he lived--you can find it again in the myths of Medea and Jason. At least, in some accounts he marries the princess; in other accounts the king of the distant kingdom kills him on arrival. The girl fell off the sheep while it was flying, landed in the sea and drowned, a misfortune that doesn’t seem to bother ancient authors nearly enough (there’s a clear narrative pressure to rescue her from the threat of being sacrificed, and the deus ex machina does intervene to whisk her away from that threat, but no one seems to care when she dies anyway in the rescue attempt). In my opinion, the stepmother Ino’s subsequent story deserves more attention, though, because she gets away with everything. She was the archetypal evil stepmother, plotting to kill her stepchildren and replace them with her own children; she engineered a famine to the detriment of her own populace; she arranged for her stepchildren to be killed; and in the end, one of the stepchildren certainly died, while the other was taken away to an impossibly distant kingdom and never bothered her again (or may have been murdered by someone else far away). Hurray, the evil stepmother goes home victorious! It seems like it would be much more satisfying (to me anyway), and more true to folklore conventions, for the evil stepmother to be found out and brought to justice. Yet in the versions we have, she gets her way and comes out as the hero of the story.

      Ino has some further changes in fortune, though. After she gets rid of her stepchildren, she and the king have two sons of their own and carry on as if those earlier children never existed. But their cozy new nuclear family is interrupted when Ino’s sister undertakes the sexually deviant practice of…extramarital sex. Apparently the guys who wrote these stories thought that extramarital sex was destructive enough to tear a woman’s entire extended family apart, at least in this case, because the one Ino’s sister was having extramarital sex with was none other than Zeus, king of the gods and husband of a famously jealous wife, Hera. Hera not only killed the young woman Zeus was having sex with, she also visited extraordinary horrors upon the woman’s sisters and nephews and brothers-in-law, but Ino was subject to an especially ghastly horror, for a specific reason. After Hera killed Zeus’ young mistress, Zeus handed the baby (the young god Dionysus) over to Ino to raise. Therefore Hera harbored a special grudge against Ino, and, after a substantial interval, one morning Ino and her husband suddenly panicked when their home was invaded by lions. In truth it was a delusion; the “lions” in question were actually their sons, and the king managed to kill one of them while trying to fend them off. (If this sounds suspiciously similar to the climax of the Bacchae, when Agave kills her son under the delusion that he’s a lion, it’s not a coincidence--in fact, Ino herself is one of the bacchae in the play.) Ino attempts to save her remaining son from her husband’s violence, and ends up running off a cliff.

      Surprisingly, this is not the end of her story. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods get together for a little conference as Ino and her son are plummeting down the side of the cliff. Venus begs Neptune to save Ino and her son. She doesn’t say why--you might assume it’s repayment for raising Bacchus, which probably makes more sense than anything else--but she pleads persuasively, and Neptune agrees to save them. In fact, he turns them into two sea gods, and they crop up in the Odyssey to save Odysseus from drowning by lending him inappropriately gendered clothing. At any rate, they become gods in their own right and live forever among the blessed.

      You can even find more beyond that, because Ovid continues on in a different work, the Fasti, to talk about how Ino traveled to Italy and became a local goddess there. She was known as Mater Matuta, worshipped by the Roman state, and had an annual festival celebrated by aunts, which, true to Ino’s nature, included the ritual harassment of an innocent slave woman. (Next time you’re in Rome, check out the two well-preserved temples in the Forum Boarium, one of which is sometimes identified as a temple to Hercules Olivarius but is more conservatively called “the round temple by the Tiber”--the rectangular temple next door is probably dedicated to Ino’s son, the one who wasn’t killed by his father). In fact, Ino’s story as related in the Fasti strongly resembles the stories of various founder figures who came over from the Greek world and established their own cities and cults in Italy: Aeneas, Diomedes, Hercules, Evander, the list goes on and on. (I feel a little bad for Evander, since he came all the way over from Greece to found a new city, and had these small-time hero conferences with Aeneas and Hercules, and yet his proud Greek settlement apparently disappeared before Romulus could meet his descendents. Certainly nobody mentions any Greeks hanging around on the Palatine when Romulus opened the Asylum on the Capitoline.) It’s tempting to think that at one point Ino might have been identified as a founder figure of some Italian city, and that we’ve lost any trace of it beyond Ovid’s legends of Ino in Italy; I’d like to believe that Ino is a rare female founder figure in the company of Dido (as opposed to women like Aegina or Europa, who are raped by gods and abducted to some locale distant from their homeland, where their sons go on to found cities). But then again, I hesitate to hang my hopes for female glory on someone so reprehensible as Ino.

      And I can’t read over Ino’s life story and hide my disbelief. She started out as an evil stepmother, an ABOMINABLY evil stepmother. She succeeded in getting rid of her stepchildren by means of starving her subjects. She never made any atonement for this crime and was rewarded for it when her own children became the king’s heirs. It’s like a sinister version of the Cinderella story where the stepmother is the hero, one of the stepsisters marries the prince, and Cinderella dies on the street. Later on Ino’s sister engages in deviant behavior that destroys the entire family, except that Ino alone is saved and promoted to divinity. If there is any story in classical mythology to show that you can be a completely reprehensible person and impose all sorts of terrible punishments on the people who depend on you and still be rewarded for it, this is it. Classical mythology isn’t populated by a lot of simple morality fables in which kindness and justice are rewarded; reading myth can be sobering in terms of how the endings you want to find are often thwarted for no apparent reason. I wish Ino’s story were more satisfying.