Gods on Fire

As I related in my previous blogs, Ovid Metamorphoses is colored by stories of characters who are "hot with love", set aflame by passion, and how I am enjoying this colorful description of our nature. We have seen Zeus emerge as the biggest womanizer of all, raping beautiful women frequently throughout Ovid's stories. While our class reads on in disgust at Zeus' lack of control, in greek mythology madness was actually looked upon as a gift of the gods. Dionysus had the power of freeing people from their inhibitions by bestowing madness (often induced by wine). In Phaedrus, Socrates speech declares that madness is not a bad thing, and that the greatest goods come through madness when it is "divinely inspired". In fact, he goes on to say that love is madness. In greek mythology, when characters are set on fire with desire, it is a sign that god is near.
Psycology seeks to give complex names and explanations for the forces of madness, for those "powers that act upon us" (Calasso 94). In this modern age, we attempt to assign some responsibility for the feelings that overcome us. Mythologies of the past are different...

"The homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them it was as if every
crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant
that a god was present and at work. What we consider as infirmity they saw as
'divine infatuation' (ate). They knew that this invisible incursion often
brought ruin: so much that the word ate would gradually come to mean 'ruin'. But
they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that "moral life can never
have anything great about it except through ate" -"The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" Roberto Calasso

Ate- ruin: from Sophocles, the great tragedian, ruin being the defining characteristic of tragedy. It seems all mythology is dependent upon this principle of madness.