Essay for Week 3: The Power of Appetite

Whether it's sexual, physiological or intellectual, appetite is one of the most powerful motivators. It creates a vacuum of need that desire seeks to fulfill, and that feeling of emptiness is difficult to ignore. Throughout the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses, a trend exists in which appetite--almost without fail--overcomes the character without much resistance on the character's part.

It's best to begin with the power of physical hunger, and thanks to his punishment from Ceres, Erysichthon's plight provides a effective literary example. Once he's been visited by Famine, Erysichthon finds himself completely unable to satisfy his physical hunger, and "the more he puts away inside, the greater his desire." This voracious appetite nearly commands him to sell everything he has to the point where he's even willing to sell his daughter. To avoid disaster for Mestra, Neptune intervenes eventually leaving Erysichthon to be destroyed by his own hunger in an episode of autocannibalism. In this case, the very presence of powerful appetite became the undoing for a mortal. Erysichthon would rather eat himself alive rather than die of hunger.

For Erysichthon, any price is worth paying to satisfy his hunger. Wikipedia Commons.

The same type of victory of hunger occurs in the story of Myrrha and her incestuous love for her father, but in this case the hunger involves sexual appetite. Interestingly enough, once Myrrha's nurse realizes what troubles Myrrha's mind, she even concede that Myrrha will be unable to overcome her misaligned passion. Ovid beautifully portrays this by describing the way in which "a shudder of cold penetrated the nurse's flesh and bone." Furthermore, once her nurse advises the Myrrha should refrain from killing herself and, in turn, satisfy her desire, the reader gets the feeling that nothing can be done to extinguish this misguided passion. The rest of the story plays out as one might expect.

Perhaps one should not be surprised that appetite is a consistent, formidable foe in Greek mythology. After all, one would need more than two hands to count the times that the gods themselves had fallen victim to sexual appetite and raped mortals. That, however, is one of the aspects that makes the Greek gods more human--more relatable.