Transformations In The Bacchae And The Metamorphoses

Throughout Greek literature, the gods dictate everything; from stirring a body of water to sink a ship to transforming people into inanimate objects and sometimes animals, the gods don’t feel the need to completely destroy their humans when their behavior is not up to par with the gods expectations. The use of transformations rather than destruction becomes particularly evident in The Bacchae and The Metamorphoses. In The Metamorphoses, there are several instances in the lives of the characters in which a disheartening, or even destructive, event takes place and the gods take the situation and turn it into something favorable. Likewise, The Bacchae focuses heavily on transformations, however, instead of the transformations creating something …show more content…
These transformations prove that the gods could use unfortunate situations that humans had placed themselves in and make something commendable. The flood brought about many changes to the physical world, some of the most constant aspects of life were altered by Jove, the god of the sky, when he chooses to flood the earth. While reading about the flood, the power of the gods is represented in the imagery of the drastic changes that the flood brought to the earth. A man “row[s] where once he plowed the earth in rows, while yet another sails above his grainfields” (Ovid, 27). These details of the earth after the flood show an alternate world, where water is above land instead of below it, a change that could only be made by a god. This transformation was made to protect all of the demigods such as Nymphs, Satyrs, and Fauns that still live on earth because Jove feared that they will be deceived by Lycaon like Jove himself was when he went down to earth. In book two after Phaethon’s unfortunate mishap with his father’s chariot, Phaethon’s friend Cycnus is stricken with grief and turns into a swan, whose characteristics are the antithesis of the elements of his friend’s death, as swans do not fly and stay close to water. When Cycnus is transformed into a swan, he was “a bird that had no faith in Jove or heaven, recalling all too well the thunderbolt unjustly hurled.” (Ovid, 66). This …show more content…
In Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, the transformations that took place were more reactionary, they happened in response to a human action, this was not the case in The Bacchae, where the transformations served more as a cautionary tale to those who were not pious to the