Gilgamesh’s goddess mother Ninsun, Achilles’ mother Thetis, and Aeneas’ mother Aph-rodite/Venus powerfully support their half-divine sons through their knowledge of and access to the divine world and the future. Enkidu dies for Gilgamesh, who survives with his mother’s help to become a great king. Thetis wins honor for her son from Zeus by insuring that the Greek army will be devastated by the angry Achilles’ withdrawal from battle in Iliad 1; when he returns to battle she provides him with divine armor. Yet Thetis’ knowledge of her son’s future - his choice between a long peaceful life and a short glorious one - spurs Achilles to question the mores of heroic life before he chooses to return to battle knowing that he will die. Statius’ Achilleid depicts the equally hopeless attempt of Thetis to hide the young Achilles on Scyros in female disguise so that he will not go on to die in Troy. Thetis’ painful brush with mortality is an example of a situation more frequent in epics for female than for male deities (other examples include the goddess Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the Latin prince Turnus’ immortal sister Juturna in the Aeneid). Neither Thetis nor Demeter can immortalize young males whom they bore or nursed, whereas Zeus can do so with the beautiful Trojan youth Ganymede. Thetis serves as a divine example of a female sacrificed to dynastic concerns in being forced to submit to a mortal husband, Peleus, lest Zeus sire on her a son destined to replace him. In the Aeneid, Venus also burdens her son with a difficult historical mission, a painful abandoned love affair with the Carthaginian Dido, and a divine shield with a depiction of the Roman future that awes Aeneas, although he cannot comprehend it. Nevertheless, her erotic and persuasive powers that seemed so irrelevant on the battlefield of the Iliad (she is even wounded by the mortal Diomedes in Iliad 5) ultimately prove successful in defending her son’s and grandson’s glorious destiny in Italy.
In the Odyssey Penelope feels forced to remarry in order to protect the status and life of her only son from the increasingly angry suitors; the poem develops Telemachus’ adolescent tensions with his mother as he grows into an adult role as his father’s son. In Statius the Lemnian princess Hypsipyle is finally rescued from slavery by the sons that she was forced to leave behind in Lemnos. Maternal lamentation for dead sons will be discussed below. Heroic epic generally both privileges and celebrates relations between mothers and sons, even if the mothers tend to resist their sons’ entry into battle and danger. The mother-daughter relationship, such as that of Arete and Nausikaa in Phaeacia or the Latin Amata and Lavinia in the Aeneid, generally remains at the margins of the predominantly public world of epic. Exceptions include the goddess Demeter’s devotion to rescuing her daughter Persephone from the underworld in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the relations between the Theban Jocasta and her loyal daughters Antigone and Ismene in Statius.
World History
