Mater dolorosa

Author(s): Elaine Fantham

Source: Hermathena , Winter 2004 & Summer 2005, No. 177/178, Aetas Ovidiana?
(Winter 2004 & Summer 2005), pp. 113-124
Published by: Trinity College Dublin

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/23041543

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 Mater dolorosa

by Elaine Fantham

My theme is the mourning of a mother for her adult child as

Ovid represents it in the Metamorphoses. When I first
approached this topic I was troubled both by the lack of current
scholarly criticism, and by the apparently straightforward
presentation which these mothers - with the conspicuous
exception of Niobe - have been given by Ovid. And I thought I
saw good reason for this simplicity. Here is a universal situation
that has been canonized within the Christian liturgy; a scene
recurring in Greek poetry from the funeral of Hector in the
Iliad to the burials of Astyanax and Polyxena in Euripides. Isn't
it perhaps too fundamental for any kind of ironic or allusive
treatment? Since then I have found both complexity in Ovid
and at least one important scholarly contribution to
understanding his treatment.1 In considering mourning
mothers I also missed one significant aspect of female
mourning. These mothers grieve either in isolation or within
the family, and their sorrow is normally closural, not a stimulus
to public resentment or collective revenge. This made a sharp
contrast with the social function and political impact of the
mother's lament in ancient and modern Greece, so well
explored by Nicole Loraux, by Margaret Alexiou and by Gail
Hoist Warhaft.2 When children have been treacherously or
unjustly slain public protest is the mother's duty. In Argentina
the Mothers of the disappeared helped to bring an end to one
tyrannical government, and still move onlookers to act against
the continuing impunity of the murderers. Grieving Afghan,
Bosnian, Israeli and Palestinian mothers are still paraded across
our newspapers as a reproach against ubiquitous modern

1 Ovid's Poetics of Illusion by Philip Hardie (Cambridge 2002). See especially ch.3
"Death, desire and monuments", and ch.7, "Absent presences of language."
2 See most recently Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca 1998) = Les meres
en deuil, Paris 1996, especially "Black Wrath" 47-56, also Margaret Alexiou, The
Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, (Cambridge MA 1971) and Gail Hoist Warhaft,
Dangerous voices: women's lament in Greek literature, (London 1992.)

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114 Elaine Fantham

warfare waged on civilians. But here again, further scrutiny

shows that although Ovid was unconcerned with the socio
political impact of vengeance he shared the sense of personal
obligation to avenge the victimized dead.3
Dubliners will perhaps think first of a famous one act
tragedy, whose entire momentum and action is the mourning of
a mother for her sons - Synge's Riders to the Sea. Synge might
well have been reading Ovid's tale of the widowed Alcyone or
newly childless Hecuba: the opening scene of his tragedy shows
the matriarch Maurya's two daughters secretly examining the
clothes of a drowned man that have been brought to them in
case the victim is their brother Michael, lost at sea. Their
mother exists only to perform her duties to her dead sons: she
has even saved a special shroud and fine timbers against the
burial of her last surviving son, Bartley. Despite her forebodings
he is determined to go to the mainland to sell their horse, and
we know, as she does, that he will somehow be another victim
of the sea. Only when his drowning is reported and his corpse
brought on stage does she rest in the fulfilment of her fears and
her duties: 'They're all gone now and there isn't anything the
sea can do to me'. Burial makes closure: as the curtain goes
down she consoles herself: 'Michael had a clean burial in the far
north by the grace of almighty God. Bartley will have a fine
coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What
more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for
ever, and we must be satisfied.'4
It is natural as we read Metamorphoses to measure the
characters and behaviour of Ovid's mourning mothers against
the epic norms defined by the Aeneid as well as the models
provided by earlier versions of Ovid's myths. If recent critics
have neglected the type of the mourning mother to focus their
lenses on the raped maiden, it is probably because they believe
the bereaved mother is too stereotypical to offer any scope for
psychological subtlety. And yet I found, considering the half

3 Cicero in Tusc.3.60 talks in a different connection of the officii iudicium which

drives mourners to punish themselves.
4 I quote from the Everyman edition of J.M. Synge's Plays, Poems and Prose intr.
Micheal Mac Liammoir (London 1931) 29 and the final words of the play on p. 30.

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 Mater dolorosa 115

dozen major examples in the Metamorphoses, that they provided

considerable variation of both personality and treatment.
The immediate Roman model would seem to be Euryalus'
mother in Aeneid 9. Virgil has told his readers that she alone has
followed the Trojans beyond Sicily to stay with her son. The
most acceptable form for his death to take would have been that
of Pallas or Lausus, killed in courageous action and returned to
his parent(s) for burial. But this is not Euryalus' fate, nor that of
any of the grown sons and daughters who will concern us in the
Metamorphoses. This mother sees her son's head impaled with
that of his lover, and in enemy possession. Her speech moves
from bewailing his death, (9.481-6, reprised 490-92) to her
inability to care for him in death by preparing him for burial
(486-9) to lamenting her own empty future as survivor (493-7).
These three components are basic to the mother's lament, but I
found no example of a mother's speech in Ovid without added
complexity of emotion and argument.
If we except Mother earth,5 the first to lose her son is
Clymene, mother of Phaethon. In Euripides' tragedy his
mother had his body brought back to hide in the treasury of
Merops' palace, where (gruesomely) the smoke from the
charred body escaped and betrayed the disaster to Merops6. But,
as Diggle has shown in careful detail, Ovid followed only the
earlier episodes of Euripides' tragedy, which centered around
Merops, and the impending marriage of his son (as he believed)
Phaethon. In Met. 2.319-24 he ends his fiery chariot ride in a
fiery death: struck by Jupiter's bolt he falls into the Eridanus,
near the western limits of the world and far away from his
mother.7 Ovid must somehow leap this gap, but makes it less

5 1.155-8 Perfusam multo natorum sanguine Terraml immaduisse ferunt,

calidumque animasse cruorem / et ne nulla suae stirpis monumenta manerent/ in faciem
vertisse hominum.
6 See Euripides: Phaethon ed. J. Diggle, (Cambridge Classical Commentaries,
Cambridge 1970) introduction and 194-97 'The sequel'. For the surviving text see,
besides Diggle, the bilingual edition of Collard / Cropp / Lee Euripides: Selected
Fragmentary Plays Vol I, Warminster 1995, 214-219, and for Phaethon's death, fr.
786, 'my dear one lies a corpse in the gullies, rotting and unwashed,' with
commentary, 232.
7 As Diggle (6-7) shows, the tradition of his fall into Eridanus was Alexandrian,
(cf. Apollonius 4.597f, Aratus Phaenomena 360). At Rome, however, the mysterious

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116 Elaine Fantham

apparent because he naturally begins the chain of mourning

with Phaethon's father the Sun-god, who has witnessed his fall.
By 2.333 Clymene knows he is dead (perhaps from the
appalling climatic phenomena), and sets out desperately to look
for him (235 totum percensuit orbem) like Ceres in search of
Persephone (cf. 5. 438-40 pavidae nequiquam filia matri
omnibus est terris, omni quaesita profundo). Ovid shrinks her
lament to the rhetorical minimum - postquam dixit quaecunque
fuerunt / in tantis dicenda malis,8 and focuses on her search for
his body - which she finds already buried by the nymphs:
deprived of fulfilling her last service to him she can only
embrace the tomb and his name inscribed upon it. As Hardie
has shown, it is a characteristic of Ovid's thought to contrast
corpus and nomen and find in the latter both a memorial and a
consolation, whether on a cenotaph or in this case the tomb.9
What can she do for him now? In fact the poet has not
stinted her role, only reserved her to witness and suffer further
bereavement, as she watches his sisters, the Heliades, grieve
night and day for four months. These are, after all, her
daughters, and as each in turn is gradually transformed into a
poplar Clymene frantically tries to release them. But the bark is
their flesh, and as she struggles to peel it away the saplings bleed
and beg her not to touch their bodies. They can just manage to
say farewell, leaving her, again, with no scope for the service of
burial. Thus Clymene both mourns her son and is robbed of
her mourning daughters. She disappears from the narrative to
make way for the lament of Phaethon's lover Cycnus who will

western river was identified with the Po; cf. Cicero Pbaenomena 146-8, Virgil
Aen. 10.198-200 on the grief of Cycnus. Ovid has it both ways, mentioning the Po
among the parched rivers (2.258) and treating Eridanus as the great Italian river.
8 He shows here a sense of the predictability of parental response to a fatality
which cannot be blamed on others; compare the mother of the suicidal Iphis at 14.
742-45 complexaque frigida nati membra sui postquam miserorum verba parentum /
edidit et matrum miserarum factaperegit, / junera ducebat...
? See now Hardie Poetics 81-4, also 84-91 and 239-49, and compare the grief of
Meleager's sisters (8. 540-41 signataque saxo / nomina complexae lacrimas in nomina
fundunt, and the consolation anticipated by Alcyone (11.705-7 si non ossibus ossa
meis, at nomen nomine tangam), Priam as father of Aesacus (12.2 tumulo quoque
nomen habenti / inferias dederat.

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 Mater dolorosa 117

become a swan, and for his father, who turns his grief and guilt
into reproach against Jupiter.
Ceres is no less a mourning mother than Clymene, and
rightly grieves as deeply for her lost daughter as if she were
conventionally dead. Persephone was lost below earth as
Phaethon was above it, and Ceres seeks her world-wide (5. 438
45, 462-4, 489) until she is informed that Proserpina is in
Hades as its queen. Ovid has to accompany her successive
experiences with a transformation of her grief, and Ceres first
becomes dazed like one bereaved; 5.509-10 stupuit ceu saxea .../
attonitaeque diu similis fuit. This numbness literally evokes one
thunderstruck, and Ovid glosses her condition in the next line
as gravis amentia: this in turn gives way to the fiercer, more
active, condition of dolor, utque dolore pulsa gravi gravis est
amentia. We may compare the evolving phases of Ceres'
emotion in the alternative version of Fasti 4: when she hears her
daughters' companions cry out she is attonita (4.455), and
mentis inops (457). Only when Ceres knows that her daughter
has been sent to the underworld, traded by Jove to his brother,
does dolor take over as she confronts Jupiter; maximaque in
voltu signa dolentis erant (4.509), non secus indoluit (4.609). As
we shall see, Dolor covers many shades of emotion from grief, to
jealousy, to resentment, and active anger or vengefulness.10
Ceres has been wronged and in her anger goes straight to the
top, exploiting the ritual streaming hair of her mourning as a
reproach to Jupiter. We shall meet again this yielding of grief to
anger, characteristic wherever the mother's child has been
wrongly taken from her. But what Ceres has to say is not a
speech of lament but an accusation ad hominem- or ad deum- of
Jupiter who has violated her maternal rights in order to gratify
his brother Hades.
Since Andrew Feldherr in this volume argues a separate and
extratextual significance for the figure of Niobe, I will pass

10 Dolor is, for instance, the dominant emotion of Seneca's Medea {Med. 48, 907,
914, 944, 951, but it is allied with ira, as the jealous anger that drives her to kill her
children. For Hecuba's bitter anger in mourning see Cic. Tusc. 3.63 propter animi
acerbitatem quandam et rabiem fingi in canem esse conversant. But Cicero does not
consider the contrast between the grief of mourning a natural or heroic death in
battle, and the anger provoked by a criminal killing.

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118 Elaine Fantham

beyond her to a special case which must stand for two others. In
Althaea, who causes her own son Meleager's death to avenge her
brothers, we have the most fully developed of the murderous
mothers, for Ovid rightly plays down the maternal grief of both
Procne (reserving her emotions for the crisis of a sister's grief
and anger that drives her to kill young Itys, 6.624-43) and
Medea (condensed to 7.396-7).
Is it a coincidence that three of Ovid's most complex
portraits of the mourning mother have antecedents in
Euripidean tragedy? We have seen that preference for the
Eridanus legend, the desire to exclude Merops' role in the crisis
and his interest in the metamorphoses of the Heliades and
Cycnus all necessitated a change in Ovid's presentation of
Clymene. He will treat Hecuba with far more fidelity to
Euripides' famous characterization. But the fragments of
Euripides' Meleager provide no evidence of whether or how he
presented the murderous decision of Althaea and her
subsequent suicide. It is hardly imaginable that he did not stage
the battle within the divided soul of Met. 8.463-4 pugnat
materque sororque/ et diversa trahunt unum duo nomina pectus.
Strictly speaking this is the mourning of a mother, but as a
sister.

Althaea's pure mourning for her brothers is only turned into

vengeance (450 in poenae versus amorem est) when she learns it
was Meleager who killed them. She has the power to repay him
with death through the talismanic brand of wood she saved at
his birth, and as she makes her decision to destroy it Ovid
prefaces the mimesis of her speech with ten lines of narrative
description (8.467-78) inviting his readers to visualize and
shudder at her cruelty (467-8), then pity her pain and tears
(468-70, enhanced by the simile of the boat buffetted by
contrary winds). This at least is his own non-dramatic
contribution to her personality. At last (478) she breaks into the
extended formalized soliloquy of divided purpose. Mourning
her brothers as sister, reflected in the recurrence offraternus and
fratres at 488, 505, 506, 509, she is also mother, mourning in
anticipation the son she will kill: compare mater, maternus at

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 Mater dolorosa 119

491, 498 and 508." But there are other elements in her
thinking: the masculine competition reflected in her use of
victor (486,494) and transference of vincere to her brothers in
509, and the notion of power struggle between the house of
Thestias and of Oeneus, her natal and her marital family.
Driven to vow the death of her brothers' killer as their funeral
offering (inferiae, 490), she is three times held back by love of
her son, 491, 499 and for the last time in 508: nunc animum
pietas maternaque nomina frangunt. All this must give way to the
prior claims of the dead, reflected in her repeated apostrophes
488-91, 496, 509-11.12 The dilemma can only be resolved by
her own resolve to die: dummodo quae dedero vobis solacia vosque
/ ipsa sequar. Once Meleager is dead, the universal mourning of
men, young and old, humble and aristocratic, of the ritually
lamenting matrons and of his aged father (strangely close to the
aftermath of Amata's suicidal assumption that Turnus is dead,
Aen. 12.595-611) is followed by the parenthetic comment that
his mother's hand, guilty of its dreadful crime, had exacted
punishment on herself with the sword (exegit poenas 531-2); an
ending symmetrical with her original urge to punish her son
(450, quoted above) and predicted by her invocation of the
Furies at 481-2: poenarum ... deae triplices, furialibus ...
Eumenides, sacris vultus advertite vestros. You may feel that
Ovid's portrayal of Althaea's mental torment is somewhat
undermined by the rhetorical artifice of her sentiments. Ovid's
contemporaries criticized him for the same excess in his more
moving portrayal of Hecuba.
When Cicero, who knew what it was to lose a beloved adult
child, wrote about grief in Tusculans 3.63, he contrasted Niobe,
turned to stone to represent her everlasting silence in sorrow,

" It should be pointed out that maternus and fraternus are parallel in form but
not in function. Althaea is suffering as a mother and a sister, but the difficulty of
using sororius in dactylic poetry (only sororia [nom.f. sing or nom./acc.neut.pl], is
possible, cf. Fasti. 3.559-60), like the archaic or colloquial tone of the word and the
convenient assonance with maternus explain Ovid's organizing linguistic choice of
fraternus.
12 But note the apostrophe to her son at 501-6. Generally each kinship name acts
as pivot for each shift of purpose, culminating in 508 pietas, maternaque nomina
frangunt.

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120 Elaine Fantham

with Hecuba, who 'by reason of a sort of fierceness and fury of

soul, was imagined to have been changed into a bitch' (propter
animi acerbitatem quandam et rabiem fingi in canem esse
conversam). Ovid redesigned his own fall of Troy to avoid
emulating Homer, and moves through a rapid transition from
the great contest over the dead Achilles' armour, to an extended
panel centred on Hecuba. We are lucky to have Ovid's main
model for this sequence - Euripides' tragedy Hecuba, formed
from the double action of Polyxena's sacrifice on the tomb of
Achilles and the queen's revenge on the treacherous Thracian
king Polymestor for the murder of young Polydorus.
Neil Hopkinson's recent introduction and commentary to
book 13 has pinpointed many echoes of Euripides - which
would again be echoed by Seneca in the double allusions of his
Trojan tragedy.13 But I would like to draw attention to other
aspects of Ovid's Hecuba sequence. Many editors, most recently
Tarrant in his O.C.T. (2004), have athetized the opening four
lines 13.404-7 because they anticipate the outcome of his
narrative:

Troia simul Priamusque cadunt, Priameia coniunx

perdidit infelix hominis post omnia formam,
externasque novo latratu terruit auras
longus in angustum qua clauditur Hellespontus

I would like to suggest that in prefacing these lines, Ovid was

alluding to the apparently equally summary treatment of this
metamorphosis by Nicander (fr. 62, preserved by a scholiast on
the Hecuba):

when Hecuba, daughter of Cisseus, beheld her home in flames

and her husband dragged gasping out his life besides the sacrificial
victims, she leaped into the sea and changed her aged form, which
took the semblance of a Hyrcanian hound.
Fr. 2 Gow-Schofield: their translation)

13 Ovid: Metamorphoses Book XIII, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics,

(Cambridge 2002) especially introduction 22-27.

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 Mater dolorosa 121

In support we might note that Ovid prefaces the death of

Actaeon in book 3 with a similar five-line anticipation of his
fate (3.38-42). At 13.408 he leads into Hecuba's situation by
recalling the sequence of horrors from Aeneid 2, the death of
Priam, Cassandra's rape, the seizure of the women taking refuge
in the temples: he recalls the tower demolished in Aeneid 2, by
making it the site of Astyanax's death. At 418, passing beyond
Virgil, the Greeks are eager to sail and Hecuba, surrounded by
the tombs of her sons (423) pays her last tribute to Hector's
tomb and is carried with the other captives to Thrace.
Ten lines (429-38) incorporate the crime of Polymestor and
cast the body of Polydorus into the sea, while a new thread of
narrative (430 looks back to 4l7f) introduces in direct speech
the demand of Achilles' ghost for Polyxena's sacrifice. Much in
Ovid's narrative of her ritual death echoes Talthybius' report in
Euripides; her courage, baring her throat and breast, her request
to die as a free woman and a princess, and her modest collapse,
but the Roman poet has readjusted Polyxena's speech to focus
the reader on Hecuba: first 462-4:

Mors tantum vellem matrem mea fallere posset

mater obest minuitque necis mihi gaudia, quamvis
non mea mors illi, verum sua vita gemenda est.

'It is not my death but her life that must be lamented.' Then as
her final request Polyxena asks that her body be returned to her
mother, and without a ransom of gold, (471-3) a request less
appropriate to Hecuba's helpless poverty than as a hostile
reproach against Achilles' previous injustice to her family. As
Trojans and Greeks alike grieve for Polyxena, Ovid
apostrophizes Hecuba:

teque gemunt virgo, teque, O mo do regia coniunx,

regia dicta parens, Asiae florentis imago,
nunc etiam praedae mala sors; quam victor Ulixes
esse suam nollet, nis quod tamen Hectora partu
edideras-, dominum matri vix repperit Hector.
(483-7)

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122 Elaine Fantham

Euripides had given a whole episode to Hecuba's farewell to the

living Polyxena, but Ovid pours all her passion into a single
speech (494-532) uttered over her daughter's dead body.
I would like to say pathos, rather than passion, and argue
that this speech matches the pathos of Euripides, but it is a
strange hybrid. Already in the first address to her daughter:
nata, tuae dolor ultime matris, which seems to echo Euripides'
apostrophe (585 to 0uyaTep), Hecuba has appropriated
Polyxena's suffering as her own dolor. More significant, while
Euripides spoke of the continuing blows of misfortune (586-9)
Ovid points forward to the drama of Polydorus with the bitter
irony of dolor ultime. Hecuba's next line: videoque tuum, mea
vulnera, vulnus (495) again appropriates the Euripidean
suffering of Polyxena (589 to |_iey gov ... TTaBos) to herself.
The speech soon modulates into a tirade against Achilles (499)
'who killed your brothers and now you, the destroyer of Troy,
and our own bereaver (nostrique orbator)-, even his ashes rage
against this family, and I have been fertile only for the benefit of
Aeacus's descendant'. Seneca the elder quotes Votienus
Montanus's criticism of these lines to illustrate Ovid's inability
to leave well alone (nescit quod bene cessit relinquere, Contr.
9.5.16-7).
From 507-21 Hecuba dwells on her own dreadful lot, when
Troy is fallen but her anguish still continues: in cursuque meus
dolor est. She is now a penniless exile, imagining her future as a
slave of Penelope in Ithaca although Priameia coniunx (513 =
404). When she returns to Polyxena at 514, quae sola levabas /
maternos luctus, it is as her own comfort: she is the grammatical
and psychological subject ofpeperi (516 = fecunda fui, 505), as
she deplores the enemy's exploitation of her daughter as inferias
hosti (516). Even the last reprise of what should have been the
main theme, Polyxena's need for burial (521-25), quickly leads
back to Hecuba's own losses (omnia perdidimus, 527 = 405) and
her single remaining source of hope; young Polydorus,
entrusted to Polymestor.
As Polyxena herself said: sua vita gemenda est, 464. The lot of
the living and enslaved old woman is worse than that of the girl
who has died heroically. So the egotistic rhetoric of Hecuba's
lament would be seen by the ancient audience as justified by the

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 Mater dolorosa 123

facts. But is it perhaps also genuine characterization, the

supposed solipsism of old age?
Ovid's epic narrative streamlines elements of the dialogue in
the Euripidean drama, eliminating other figures and
maintaining emotional continuity as grief and anger against
Achilles give way to new grief for Polydorus and anger against
Polymestor. By-passing the maidservant's report of the corpse,
and Agamemnon's visit, Ovid takes Hecuba directly to
encounter her son's body, (536-7). Now dolor reduces her at
first to grim silence 538-40: obmutuit ilia dolore/ et pariter
vocem, lacrimasque introrsus obortas / devorat ipse dolor, echoing
the final condition of Niobe: duroque simillima saxo / torpet
540-41.14 Through contemplation of her child's wounds se ...
armat et instruat ira. / qua simul exarsit ... ulcisci statuit,
poenaeque in imagine tota est, 'she arms herself with anger, and
inflamed, is utterly absorbed in the prospect of vengeance'
(544-6). Both the silence imposed by dolor and the words
poenaeque in imagine tota est echo the impulse to a more
perverted revenge by another mother, Procne, in 6.583. Hecuba
too is ready for murder.
Anger and grief (cum luctu miscuit iram, 549; tumidaque
exaestuat ira, 559) carry Hecuba through the deception and
mutilation of Polymestor, until she is stoned by his Thracian
followers. This is how men treated dogs, and her suffering
assimilates her howling to the cries of a bitch under attack. The
transformation is logical, and her fate gives the name to the
landmark Cynossema. The stage prophecy reported by
Polydorus from the Thracian bard Dionysus (Eur. Hec. 1259
73) is realized in Ovid's epic narrative
The poet's epilogue acknowledges her undeserved suffering,
but immediately, as if conscious that he has become too tragic,
Ovid counters Hecuba's endless bereavement with a lighter
episode. One figure is too preoccupied to share the universal
sympathy for Hecuba. This is another mourning mother,

14 Compare 6.301-9 describing Niobe's actual transformation; intra quoque

viscera saxum est. But Hecuba's stony grief remains a metaphor.

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124 Elaine Fantham

Aurora, who saw her son Memnon slain - also by Achilles.15 In

fact Ovid has had to introduce a major anachronism in order to
place the petition of Aurora in this position. Achilles was dead
before book 13 began, and must have killed Memnon at a time
during the narrative distractions of book 12. But Ovid needs
Aurora to provide an antidote to Hecuba, and creates for her a
scene modelled on the petition of Thetis to Zeus. Unable to
endure the sight of her son's corpse, she goes to Jupiter weeping
and with streaming hair, to make a falsely modest request (587
99) - not for herself, but for Memnon. Ovid compared Hecuba
to a bereaved lioness (orbata, 547-8); Aurora calls herself
Memnonis orba mei (595). She now asks for some honour that
will be a solaria mortis for her son, and soothe her mother's
wounds. Here too she echoes Hecuba's maternal wound
(ma tern a vulnera 599 = mea vulnera, vulnus 495).
Jupiter accompanies his assent with the creation of the
miraculous fighting birds that rise from Memnon's pyre, and
finally fall as funeral offerings, inferiae again (615 = 516), to
their kinsman, as they will do every year to come. This is why,
according to Ovid, Aurora does not share others' pity for
Hecuba's humiliating transformation, but remains obsessed
with her own mourning; indeed, this is the origin of dew: nunc
quoque dat lacrimas et toto rorat in or be (622). It is a congenial
aition, and a welcome return to the calmer and less tragic
present, but something has slipped in Aurora's psychology, for
despite the granting of her request, this mother is not content
with her son's honours and still grieves, showing a real sorrow at
variance with her calculated approach to Jupiter.
So Ovid's matres dolorosae prove very different from each
other; but also show by their actions both their primary
commitment to burying and mourning their children, and
wherever a wrong has been done, to pursuing vengeance: only
vengeance, it seems, is even stronger than grief.

Elaine Fantham
Princeton University

15 On Aurora and the Memnonides, see now Hopkinson Metamorphoses XIII 27

29, with his commentary on 13.576-622.

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