Myrrha
Myrrha ( Greek Μύρρα ) also Smyrna , is a figure in Greek mythology . She is the mother of Adonis . There are different versions of the birth of Adonis:
In a version that is passed down in Fable 58 of the Hyginus Mythographus , Kenchreis , the wife of King Kinyras of Assyria , boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than Aphrodite . In order to punish the mother, Aphrodite let the daughter fall in love with her father, who, seduced by the goddess, fathered Adonis with the daughter . Kinyras then wants to kill her. Out of pity, Aphrodite turns Smyrna into a myrrh tree .
In the variant handed down in the library of Apollodorus , the girl herself refused to respect Aphrodite and, as a punishment, was put into blind love for her father Theias . With the help of her midwife , there was an incest between father and daughter. When Theias realized this, he was furious and wanted to kill his daughter. The gods, however, turned it into a myrrh tree . The tree jumped up after ten months and gave birth to Adonis , who was raised by nymphs .
In another version, Myrrha was turned into a myrrh tree by Aphrodite while fleeing from her father. Adonis was born when Theias shot an arrow into the tree (or when a wild boar was grinding the bark of the tree with its tusks).
In Ovid's version of the story, the father of Myrrha is Kinyras , the king of Cyprus . At a festival that forbade men to sleep with their wives, Myrrha's wet nurse managed to make them her father's bed companion. Before that, Myrrha had attempted suicide, desperate to discover that she loved her father. When the father asked what the girl was who was available to him, the nurse only replied "Equal to myrrha". After the second night, the father discovered the vertigo and tried to kill the daughter.
Myrrha also appears in Dante's " Divine Comedy ", where she has to suffer from rabies for all eternity in the eighth circle of hell . This sentence was imposed not because of the incest, but because of their deceptions.
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Ovid, Metamorphoses , Book X, verses 306-519
