Smyrna is the mother of Adonis in Greek mythology. The myth details the incestuous relationship between Smyrna and her father, Cinyras. After discovering her identity, Cinyras draws his sword and pursues Smyrna. She flees across Arabia and, after nine months, turns to the gods for help. While in the form of a plant, Smyrna gives birth to Adonis. According to legend, the aromatic exudates of the Smyrna tree are Smyrna’s tears.
A critical interpretation of the myth has suggested that Smyrna’s refusal to engage in conventional sexual relations led to incest, with her subsequent transformation into a tree as a silencing punishment. She was also the inspiration for the scientific names of several species and an asteroid.
1. Origin and etymology of Smyrna
A possible route for the spread of the myth of Smyrna derives from an epic poem: Myrrh was precious in the ancient world and was used for embalming, medicine, perfume, and incense. The modern English word myrrh (Old English: myrra) derives from the Latin myrrh (or murrha or Murra, all Latin words synonymous with the substance from the tree).
Myrrh is mentioned in the Bible as one of the most desirable fragrances and, although mentioned alongside incense, it is usually more expensive. Several passages in the Old Testament refer to myrrh. In the Song of Songs, which scholars date back to the 10th century BC as a Hebrew oral tradition or to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC, myrrh is mentioned seven times.
This makes the Song of Songs the passage in the Old Testament that refers most to myrrh, often with erotic overtones. In the New Testament, the substance is associated with the birth of Christ when the Magi presented their gifts of “gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
2. Myths about myrrh
The stories and poems about myrrh are told in various versions that recount its metamorphosis from a horrible relationship between father and children involving incest.
Ovid’s version
Published in 8 AD, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has become one of the most influential poems of Latin writers. The Metamorphoses showed that Ovid was more interested in questioning how laws interfered with people’s lives than in writing epic tales like Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. The Metamorphoses are not narrated by Ovid, but by the characters within the stories.
The myth of Smyrna and Cinyras is sung by Orpheus in the tenth book of Metamorphoses. After telling the myth of Pygmalion and before moving on to the story of Venus and Adonis. As the myth of Smyrna is also the longest story sung by Orpheus and the only story that corresponds to his announced theme of girls punished for forbidden desire, it is considered the centerpiece of the song. Ovid opens the myth with a warning to the audience that this is a myth of great horror, especially for fathers and daughters:
The story I am about to tell is horrible: I beg daughters and fathers to keep their distance while I sing, or if you find my songs enchanting, refuse to believe this part of my tale, and suppose that it never happened: otherwise, if you believe that it happened, you must also believe in the punishment that followed.
According to Ovid, Smyrna was the daughter of King Cinyras and Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus. It is claimed that Cupid was not to blame for Smyrna’s incestuous love for her father, Cinyras. Ovid further comments that hating one’s father is a crime, but Smyrna’s love was a greater crime. Ovid, therefore, blamed the Furies.
Over several verses, Ovid describes the psychological struggle Smyrna faces between her sexual desire for her father and the social shame she would face for acting on it. Sleepless and losing all hope, she attempted suicide, but was discovered by her nurse, whom she trusted. The nurse tried to make Smyrna suppress her infatuation, but then agreed to help her get into her father’s bed if she promised not to attempt suicide again.
Esmirna’s escape from her father
During the festival of Ceres, the women who worshipped (including Cenchreis, Esmirna’s mother) were not to be touched by men for nine nights; so the nurse told Cinyras about a girl who was deeply in love with him, giving him a false name. The affair lasted several nights in complete darkness to hide Smyrna’s identity, until Cinyras wanted to know the identity of his lover. When he brought a lamp and saw his daughter, the king tried to kill her on the spot, but Smyrna escaped.
From then on, Smyrna walked in exile for nine months, beyond the palms of Arabia and the fields of Panchaea, until she reached Sabaea. Fearful of death and tired of life, and also pregnant, she begged the gods to find a solution and transformed herself into the tree of Smyrna, with its sap representing her tears. Later, Lucina freed the newborn Adonis from the tree.
Other versions
The myth of Smyrna has been recounted in several other works besides Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Among the scholars who recounted it are Apollodorus, Hyginus, and Antoninus Liberalis. The three versions differ.
The daughters at some point became victims of Aphrodite’s wrath and had sexual relations with foreigners, eventually dying in Egypt. For the second possible parentage of Adonis, Apollodorus cites Hesiod, who posits that Adonis could be the son of Phoenix and Alphesiboia. He does not elaborate further on this statement.
For the third option, he cites Panyasis, who claims that King Theias of Assyria had a daughter named Smyrna. She failed to honor Aphrodite, incurring the wrath of the goddess, who fell in love with her father; and with the help of her nurse, she deceived him for twelve nights until her identity was discovered. Smyrna fled, but her father caught up with her later.
Smyrna then prayed to the gods to make her invisible, which led them to turn her into a tree, which was called Smyrna. Ten months later, the tree split open and Adonis was born from it.
In his Fabulae, written around 1 AD, Hyginus states that King Cinyras of Assyria had a daughter with his wife, Cenchreis. The daughter was named Smyrna, and the mother boasted that her son surpassed Venus in beauty. Angered, Venus punished the mother by cursing Smyrna to fall in love with her father. After the nurse had prevented Smyrna from committing suicide, she helped her to engage in sexual relations with her father.
When Smyrna became pregnant, she hid in the forest out of shame. Venus took pity on the girl’s fate, turning her into a tree of Smyrna, from which Adonis was born.
In Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, written sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, the myth is set in Phoenicia, near Mount Lebanon. Here, King Thias, son of Belus and Orithyia, had a daughter named Smyrna. Being very beautiful, she was sought after by men from all over. She had devised many tricks to delay her parents and postpone the day when they would choose a husband for her.
Smyrna had become mad with desire for her father and wanted no one else. At first, she hid her desires and finally told her nurse, Hippolyte, the secret of her true feelings. Hippolyte told the king that a girl of exalted parents wanted to lie with him, but in secret. The affair lasted for a long time, and Smyrna became pregnant.
At this point, Thias wanted to know who she was, so he hid a light, illuminated the room, and discovered Smyrna’s identity when she entered. In shock, Smyrna gave birth prematurely to her son. She then raised her hands and said a prayer, which was heard by Zeus, who took pity on her and turned her into a tree. Thias committed suicide, and it was Zeus’s wish that the child be raised and named Adonis.
3. Interpretation
The myth of Smyrna has been interpreted in various ways. Smyrna’s transformation in Ovid’s version has been interpreted as punishment for breaking social rules through her incestuous relationship with her father. Like Byblis, who fell in love with her brother, Smyrna is transformed and left voiceless, rendering her unable to break the taboo of incest.
Smyrna has also been thematically linked to the story of Lot’s daughters. They live with their father in an isolated cave and, because their mother is dead, they decide to get Lot drunk and seduce him in order to keep the family alive through him. Nancy Miller comments on the two myths:
Incest is sanctioned by reproductive necessity; because it lacks consequences, this story is not a socially recognized narrative paradigm for incest. In both the cases of Lot’s daughters and Smyrna, the seduction of the father by the daughter must be concealed. While other incest configurations allow for consensual agency, father-daughter incest does not; when the daughter displays transgressive sexual desire, the prohibitive father appears.
Smyrna has been interpreted as the development of a girl into a woman over the course of the story: at first she is a virgin who rejects her suitors, thus denying the part of herself that is normally devoted to Aphrodite. The goddess then strikes her with the desire to make love to her father, and Smyrna becomes a woman in the grip of uncontrollable lust.
The marriage between her father and mother is then established as an obstacle to their love, and incest is forbidden by both profane and divine laws. The way in which the daughter seduces her father illustrates the most extreme form that seduction can take: the union between two people who are strictly separated by social norms and laws.
James Richard Ellis has argued that the taboo of incest is fundamental to a civilized society. Based on the theories and psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, this is shown in Ovid’s version of the myth of Smyrna. When the girl is seized by desire, she laments her humanity, for if she and her father were animals, there would be no impediment to their union.
Smyrna’s transformation into a myrtle tree has also been interpreted as influencing Adonis’ character. Being the son of both a woman and a tree, he is a divided person. In Ancient Greece, the word Adonis could mean both “perfume” and “lover,” and Adonis is both the perfume made from the aromatic drops of Smyrna and the human lover who seduces two goddesses.
Cinyras’ relationship with a girl the age of his daughter was not unnatural, but Smyrna was in love with her own father. Doll explains in more detail that Smyrna’s lament that animals can mate without problems between parents and children is a way for Ovid to express a paradox: in nature, a father-daughter relationship is not unnatural, but it is in human society. Regarding this doll, it is concluded that “nature does not follow laws.
In 2008, The Guardian newspaper mentioned Smyrna’s relationship with her father, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as one of the ten most important stories of incestuous love. It complemented the myth for being more disturbing than any of the other incestuous relationships depicted in the Metamorphoses.
4. Cultural impact
The incestuous sexual relations between Smyrna and her father have been a literary example for many artistic approaches throughout history.
Literature
One of the earliest recordings of a play inspired by the myth of Smyrna is found in Antiquities of the Jews, written in 93 AD by the Roman historian and Jew Flavius Josephus. It mentions a tragedy entitled Cinyras, in which the main character, Cinyras, must be killed along with his daughter Smyrna, and “a great deal of fictitious blood was spilled.” No further details are given about the plot of this play.
Smyrna appears in Dante Alighieri’s poem Divine Comedy Inferno, where Dante sees her soul being punished in the eighth circle of Hell, in the tenth bolgia (pit). Here, she and other counterfeiters, such as alchemists and forgers, suffer terrible diseases, Smyrna being insane. Smyrna’s suffering in the tenth bolgia indicates that her most serious sin was not incest but deceit.
Dante had already demonstrated his familiarity with the myth of Smyrna in a previous letter to Emperor Henry VII, written on April 17, 1311. Here he compares Florence to “Smyrna, wicked and impious, longing for the embrace of her father, Cinyras”; a metaphor, Claire Honess interprets, referring to the way Florence tries to “seduce” Pope Clement V away from Henry VII. It is incestuous because the Pope is the father of all, and it is also implied that the city in this way rejects its true husband, the Emperor.
Music
In music, Smyrna was the subject of a piece by John Philip Sousa’s 1876 band. Smyrna Gavotte and in 1901, Maurice Ravel and Andre Caplet wrote cantatas entitled Smyrna. Caplet finished first over Ravel, who was third in the Prix de Rome competition. The competition required candidates to pass through a series of academic hoops before entering the final round, where they had to compose a cantata based on a prescribed text.
Art
The illustration of Smyrna was titled The Birth of Adonis and featured Smyrna as a tree delivering Adonis while surrounded by women. In 1857, French engraver Gustave Doré made a series of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, depicting Smyrna in the eighth circle of Hell.
In 1690, Italian Baroque painter Marcantonio Franceschini depicted Smyrna as a tree delivering Ad onis in The Birth of Adonis. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, which ran from December 16, 2008, to May 3, 2009.
