BOOK: Boccaccio, "Genealogy of the Pagan Gods" (Vol. 2)

Giovanni Boccaccio: Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Vol. 2: Books VI–X. Edited and translated by Jon Solomon. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 81. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674975590. vi + 705 pp.

[Continued from vol. 1.]

Book 6

This book is mostly about king Priam of Troy, his ancestry and his descendants. He was descended from Jupiter some six generations back, but what especially surprised me was the amazing number of children he had. Boccaccio says (6.14) he had 50 children, the names of 38 of which are known; 18 or 19 children were by his wife Hecuba (you can supply the obligatory hotdog-down-the-hallway jokes by yourself at this point :]). Of course, many of these children are known only from some passing mention in a line of Homer or some other author.

There is also an interesting section about Anchises, the father of Aeneas, who was descended from king Tros (after whom Troy is named), Priam's great-grandfather. Thus, when Aeneas married Priam's daughter Creusa (6.53.3), they were actually third cousins. I didn't realize until now that Anchises was related to the Trojan royal family by blood and not just by marriage.

Of course, the other even more interesting aspect about Aeneas's ancestry is that his mother was none other than Venus herself. Anchises ostensibly went blind after (or as a result of?) sleeping with her, which Boccaccio tries to explain by saying that “it is most certain that intercourse causes some not only short-sightedness but even utter blindness” (6.52.7)! If we combine this with the well-known belief that masturbaton also causes blindness, it would appear that one is condemned to get blind one way or another :)) Or maybe it's just one of those lame excuses: ‘Oh no, I didn't get blind because of mere old age. I got blind because I had so much sex with Venus herself!’

Anyway, Boccaccio then also follows the descendants of Aeneas, all the way to Ilia, the mother of Romulus and Remus. If I counted right, Aeneas was their (thirteen-times-great)-grandfather. One of the kings about half-way through this line, Tiberinus Silvius, gave his name to the Tiber river after drowning in it; before it was called Albula (6.64). His great-grandson Aventinus Silvius gave his name to the Aventine hill in Rome (6.68). Ilia or Rhea, the mother of Romulus and Remus, got pregnant with them after being violated in a dream by Mars (6.73.1) — a scenario that sounds no less ridiculous in Roman mythology than it does on PornHub... :)))

Boccaccio gives short shrift to the claims of Aeneas' deification: this “is nothing other than the laughable folly of senseless people [. . .] he was [. . .] carried down to the sea, and became food for the Tuscan or Laurentian fishes” (6.53.27).

Apparently Achilles had a son named Pyrrhus, who was also involved in the Trojan war (6.26.2); this surprised me as I didn't think that Achilles was old enough to have a grown-up son — I thought of Achilles as a younger man.

In 6.6.2, we learn that Priam's father, king Laomedon, owned some “horses born from divine seed”. The only way this makes sense is if some god fucked a mare :)))

Apparently the medieval fad for claiming descent from the Trojans was more widespread than I thought. I knew about the British claim to descent from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas (Boccaccio mentions it with... brutal skepticism: “the Britons, desirous I think of ennobling their barbarity [. . .] not even close to genuine”, 6.57.3, 5), but it was knew to me that a similar thing existed in France as well: “Vincent of Beauvais seems to think that the present-day kings of the Franks trace their most ancient oigins to the sons of Hector. [. . .] a certain Francus, a son of Hector, had fled to the borders of Germany” (6.24.8). Boccaccio comments diplomatically: “Although I do not believe this much, I would not gainsay it altogether since all things are possible with God.” (6.24.9)

Two sons of Priam by the nymph Periboea were born because “Priam, as a young man, had secretly had sex with her during a hunting expedition” (6.45.1). Well, I guess it wasn't very secret if we're reading about it here :))

Boccaccio offers high praise for the unfinished epic poem of his friend Petrarch: “Achilles has Homer, and Aeneas, Vergil [. . .] in our era a third has risen, Scipio Africanus, who with no less glory and even greater justice was borne into the heavens by the verse of a most celebrated man, Francesco Petrarch” (6.53.2).

Book 7

Book 7 is about Ocean and his various descendants; of the more well-known ones, we see Triton, Proteus, Nereus, Narcissus; a large number of nymphs, sirens and other such watery creatures; and (the tutelary deities of) various rivers, including the Nile and the Tiber. There are several mythological persons after whom various geographical features were suposedly named: Ethiops (Ethiopia; 7.39), Eridanus (the river Po; 7.41.13), Lygius (Liguria; 7.42). Boccaccio counts the Muses among the nymphs as well (7.14.6), which came as a surprise to me; it seems to be due to their association with the Castalian rill.

A curious factoid about Doris, daughter of Ocean, from 7.8.2: “she signifies bitterness and is therefore married to the sea god Nereus because the sea is bitter [. . .] bitterness is produced by the sun acting upon the water of the ocean”. And here I thought it was produced by all the whales ejaculating into the seawater!

Melantho, daughter of Proteus, “found favor with Neptune, who changed into a dolphin, [. . .] carried her off and violated her” (7.10.1). Nowadays the idea of rapist dolphins (not to be confused with dolphin rapists) is a well-established meme on the internet, but I didn't know it was already a thing in Greek mythology :))

A very bizarre interpretation of the sirens: “from the navel down they are fish so that we might recognize” that a woman's body is “beutiful and seemly only up to the point that it presents a human aspect. But it is widely believed that all the lustful desire of women resides in the navel, which alone the rest of the body further down serves. In light of this they are not preposterously likened to fish” (7.20.11).

Why be content with casual misogyny, when you can have casual classism as well! Some of the nymphs “were actual women [. . .] noble, unwed girls who, inhabiting the shade of bedrooms, are called nymphs because of their phlegmatic complexion, because of how they live, since they are moist, soft, delicate, and tender [. . .] But peasant women quite fatigued by their labors and moist from the heat of the sun are hairy and have hard skin, and so they have deservedly lost the name of nymphs.” (7.14.11)

Io was said to have been changed by Jupiter into a cow to conceal that he had been cheating with her on his wife. Boccaccio makes this whole story into a metaphor for the human reproduction cycle, crowning his interpretation with this gloriously silly idea: “it is said that a human is transformed into a cow because as a cow is a laboring and productive animal, so too is a human” (7.22.5).

On the other extreme, sometimes his interpretations struck me as a bit lazy, as if he were just phoning them in. Someone was said to be the son of the Nile; Boccaccio explains that this must have been some ruler who was called the son of the Nile because his territory lay next to that river (7.38.1). Someone else was called Sun, the child of Ocean, perhaps because he “the local inhabitants called [him] Sun to extol his name and his family, and whom they said was the son of Ocean, through which he had come perchance by ship” (7.65.1).

Book 8

This book is about Saturn and his descendants (except those who are covered elsewhere: Juno, Neptune and Jupiter): Ceres and Proserpina; Pluto; Faunus (and, from him, the fauns, satyrs and other goat-like beings); and to my surprise, king Latinus from the Aeneid, the distant ancestor of Romulus and Remos, was also the son of Faunus.

Saturn was the first to introduce money in Italy: “up to that time money consisted of sheep skin hardened by fire, he was the first to stamp bronze” (8.1.25).

An interesting interpretation of Proserpina's story: she represents “the abundance of crops” (8.4.13), and her spending half a year in the underworld and half above ground corresponds to winter and to the growing season.

A hilarious story about how Chiron the centaur came about: Saturn was cheating on his wife with some other woman and “while he was in the process of intercourse, his wife Ops interrupted, and so he immediately turned himself into a horse, so he would not be caught in the act” (8.8.1) So I guess that Ops got treated to the gruesome scene of that poor woman getting screwed by a horse? :)) Anyway, she got pregnant and, obviously, the baby was a centaur.

It's always nice to see Boccaccio give up from time to time in his efforts to explain every myth, no matter how silly. “In fact I detest these riddles and ambiguities and gladly lay them aside” (8.12.4)

Book 9

Book 9 is about Juno and her descendants. Actually Boccaccio starts with a nice little rant (pp. 347–51) addressed to the king of Cyprus (who commissioned this book): he describes the impressive ruins of a temple of Juno and wonders why the christians don't put in the same amount of effort into glorifying their god as the pagans did into theirs; such as, say, by doing something about all those Saracens occupying the holy land (hint, hint) :)))

Among Juno's descendants, we see Hebe, Mars, Cupid, Tereus (from the gruesome story about Philomela and Procne), Deianeira (wife of Hercules, whom she inadvertently poisoned with a bloody shirt), Aesculapius, Ixion (father of the Centaurs, of which Boccaccio lists more than 50 in 9.32, apparently from Ovid's Metamorphoses), and even Romulus and Remus (children of Mars).

It is said that Juno “conceived a daughter Hebe by eating wild lettuce, so also Mars by being touched by a flower” (9.1.4). If Jupiter fell for these excuses, he must have been even more idiotic than I usually imagine ancient Greco-Roman gods to have been... In 9.2.1, we learn more about the lettuce story: “Apollo had prepared a banquet for his stepmother Juno in the house of his father Jupiter, and to her he served, among other things, wild lettuces, and when she had eagerly eaten them, Juno, to that point barren, immediately became pregnant”. I've seen enough stepmom-themed pr0n to know what must have *really* happened at that banquet...

It is the function “of Venus to join the husband and virgin in coitus” (9.1.19). Why on earth do they need a goddess to help with that? I can't help getting a mental image of that glorious story of the morbidly obese couple who required the assistance of the mother-in-law and a broom handle to accomplish the deed :))

Boccaccio reproduces a bizarre list of supposed effects of menstrual blood by Isidore of Seville: in contact with it, among other things, “dogs become rabid no matter what they eat“ and “sticky asphalt, which can be dissolved by neither iron nor water, dissolves when polluted with this blood” (9.3.7)...

An odd belief from 9.3.15: “Albericus says that grass is sacred to him [i.e. Mars] because this plant, according to Pliny, procreates from human blood, and therein, as he again says, the Romans when making war used to build a grassy altar for a sacrifice to Mars.” The amazing thing is that the Romans could be simultaneously such a practical people in so many spheres of life and yet also believe in arrant nonsense like this.

“The astrologers say [. . .] that when, during the birth of someone, Mars happens to be found in the house of Venus [. . .] he who is born under that sign will be luxuriant, a fornicator, and abusive of all things venereal, and a man wicked in this regard.” (9.4.6.) It just crossed my mind how monstrous it would be if some totalitarian regime took astrology really seriously. Why, you'd feel compelled to set up an official astrologer in every maternity ward, standing by with a stopwatch and an astrology app on his phone, ready to strangle the little shit if he crawls out into the world at the wrong second and thus ends up destined to become a wicked fornicator and all that...

I think we've discovered the ancient Greek equivalent of the anime body pillow: Ixion “dared to proposition Juno sexually. She complained to Jupiter, so he ordered a cloud to be fashioned in her likeness and given to Ixion in her place. He impregnated this and thereby fathered the Centaurs.” (9.27.1.) And if you thought that's ridiculous, Boccaccio's interpretation is even more so; he makes the whole thing into a metaphor for an unjustified “hope of kingship” (9.27.7).

Some nice dirty laundry from early Roman history: Romulus and Remus “were nursed by a wolf because they were nursed by Acca Laurentia [. . .] They caled her ‘the wolf’ (lupa) because she was a respected prostitute, and such women are called ‘wolves’ (lupe) on account of their avarice [. . .] That they were fathered by Mars was invented to conceal the disreputable origin of the founders of such a renowned nation, with the behavior of the youths befitting the invented story, for they were rapacious thieves with arrogant spirits, and bellicose.” (9.40.5–6.) That's music to the ears of an old Roman-hater like me :))

Book 10

This book is about Neptune and his descendants. Among the better-known of these we find Scylla (of Scylla and Charybdis), Medusa (“daughter of Phorcys by herself”, 2.11 — another marvel of ancient medical science!), the Cyclopes (especially Polyphemus — Boccaccio has a nice summary of the story of his blinding by Odysseus), the winged horse Pegasus (I *don't* want to know what happened there :P), Nestor (the old Achaean chief from the Trojan war; grandson of Neptune).

King Aegeus of Athens (father of the better-known Theseus), after whom the Aegean sea is named, was apparently also a son of Neptune (10.48). He was a widower and later married Medea after the latter had been abandoned by Jason (10.48.1) — an interesting factoid that was quite new to me. Aegeus and Medea had a sun named Medus, after whom the region of Media is named (10.54.2) — implausible, but a nice story anyway.

The early Roman poet, Ennius, also traced his ancestry to one Mesappus, son of Neptune (10.25.2).

A fine contribution to the science of zoology: “a whale is a marine monster [. . .] when it opens its mouth, the area around it is filled with such an odor that all the fish come close, and it takes what it wants until it has satisfied its hunger” (10.10.3). There must be a ‘your mom’ joke in there somewhere...

Medea “persuaded Pelias' gullible daughters to drain all the cold, old blood from the trembling body of the elderly Pelias with knives so that she could insert new and vibrant blood into his veins.” (10.33.1) A more sober interpretation is that she “sowed discord between Pelias and his daughters”, inducing them to kill him (10.33.2).

*

In my post about vol. 1 I expressed some skepticism as to whether Boccaccio's idea of organizing all of ancient mythology into a huge genealogical tree is a worthwhile effort, but now I'm really starting to warm up to it. This approach often draws your attention to connections between otherwise quite disparate parts of ancient mythology, jumping easily and suddenly from Greece to Rome and back, from one author to another, and giving you a sense that everything really is deeply linked in all sorts of unexpected ways.

BOOK: Boccaccio, "Genealogy of the Pagan Gods" (Vol. 1)

Giovanni Boccaccio: Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Vol. 1: Books I–V. Edited and translated by Jon Solomon. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 46. Harvard University Press, 2011. 9780674057104. xxxvii + 887 pp.

I didn't particularly enjoy reading this book, but I couldn't help admiring the author's gumption: he boldly waded into the unholy morass that is ancient Greek and Roman mythology and tried to arrange all the various mythological entities into one huge genealogical tree!

Judging by the translator's introduction (p. xii), he was neither the first nor the last person to make a compendium of classical mythology, though I'm not sure if other authors also tried to arrange everything into a genealogical tree. In any case, I imagined it would be obvious enough to everyone that ancient mythology is simply too messy, incompletely known, and internally inconsistent to be neatly arranged into one huge genealogy. Sure, you could extract numerous small genealogical fragments from it — Aeneas is the son of Venus, who is the daughter of Jupiter, who is the son of Saturn, etc. — but for many minor characters mentioned in ancient mythology, we probably simply don't have enough information about their ancestry to reliably place them into a genealogical tree.

Besides, when the same character is mentioned in several sources, they are often inconsistent with each other. Boccaccio, like other authors before him, tried to work around this by imagining that sometimes several characters with the same name got conflated into one, so that when things get too inconsistent, you can simply pretend to resolve them by disentangling one character into several different ones, who lived at different times and did different things. Thus you hear mentions of things like ‘the first Jupiter’, ‘the second Jupiter’, and so on (among other things there are at least five Minervas, 4.64; four Apollos, 5.3.1; three Aesculapii, 5.19.7 — incidentally, most of this stuff seems to be coming from Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods). On the positive side, this numbering of Jupiters provided the translator with the opportunity to sneak an excellent pun into the text (2.4.1): “Eusebius writes that Jupiter copulated with her [= Niobe] before any other mortal, and so he was the first Jupiter, for the others come much later.” :]

I wonder if the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves really thought of their mythology as being interconnected into one huge genealogical tree. Frankly, I doubt it, and as a result I doubt if works like Boccaccio's really help us understand ancient mythology any better. His genealogy just gives us an illusion of order and completeness where most likely no such things ever really existed, even during the ancient times themselves.

I can definitely sympathize with the impulse to do this sort of things, the fannish urge to present an orderly overview of some fictional universe that has delighted us — it's the same impulse that drives the contributors to many wikis and other such websites nowadays. I myself, many years ago, toyed with the idea of making a huge genealogy of the characters in Tolkien's works, but fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned it before wasting too much time on it. And similarly I couldn't help wishing that Boccaccio had recognized his effort with the pagan genealogy as futile and spent his time doing something else. We know that he was a great writer in his own right — he wrote the Decameron, after all — how interesting it would be if he had written his own retellings of the stories from ancient mythology, similar to the ones written more recently by people like Gustav Schwab or Robert Graves.

Instead, what we got here is a curious reference work where I'm not quite sure who is intended to benefit from it. (Boccaccio actually wrote it on commission for the king of Cyprus; p. viii.) If you want to find information about a particular mythological character, it isn't easy to find without an alphabetical index (which this edition has, of course, but I doubt that the manuscript copies of Boccaccio's time had anything of that sort; although it seems that the first such index was compiled soon after his death, see p. x). And it isn't terribly suitable for reading from cover to cover either, or at least I found it boring to read that way. Insofar as it contains retellings of stories from ancient mythology, these retellings tend to be very minimalistic, bare-bones, matter-of-fact abridgements which retain very little of the charm of the original stories.

(There are some exceptions to this, e.g. the story of Cupid and Psyche in 5.22 is written up nicely and with a reasonable level of detail. In fact as soon as Boccaccio steps away from making terse summaries and inane interpretations of ancient myths, he immediately begins to write in an interesting an engaging way; see e.g. 4.68.5–10 for the delightful tale of the discovery of a giant man's body in a cave near Trapani in Sicily, which he claims occurred in his own time; I wonder what was really behind this story.)

If someone unfamiliar with ancient mythology tried to acquaint himself with it by reading Boccaccio's genealogy, he would probably end up wondering why people are making so much fuss about such a boring jumble of absurdities. Still, I guess the problem is that I'm looking at his book too much from a present-day point of view, and thus I'm missing the real point — in the 14th century, when he wrote it, it was probably a very valuable reference work since so few other things of that sort were available.

A big part of Boccaccio's book are his attempts to find some quasi-reasonable explanations behind the various events and factoids mentioned in ancient sources. Boccaccio can't seem to bring himself to admit that most of the stories from ancient mythologies are basically random assemblages of bits and pieces that emerged over the centuries through the efforts of countless people involved in re-telling the stories to each other. Instead, he is determined to find some underlying deeper meaning behind every detail. He usually claims that a mythological character was based on a real person whose actions and personality traits were gradually inflated into the claims we now find about that character in ancient myths. These explanations required no small amount of ingenuity on Boccaccio's part, although much of the time the resulting explanations are just as ad-hoc and arbitrary as the original myths themselves. And of course it's easy to come up with several wildly different ‘interpretations’ of the same story — but in Boccaccio's eyes, that's a feature and not a bug (see his interesting discussion in 1.3.6–8).

A fine example of this sort of interpretations from 1.12: Tages was said to be “a son of Earth from an unknown father [. . .] the earth became a little swollen” and a local farmer, after a little digging, unearthed the little Tages. The baby quickly “became an old man” and “taught the locals the art of divination” (1.12.1–2). Boccaccio's heroic attempt to make sense of this mess: “It could be that there was someone who was studying divination for a long time [. . .] living apart from other humans, he suddenly appeared a learned man from an unknown place. And perhaps because he seemed to come out of a cave, it was said that he was the offspring of Earth. Alternatively, he appeared unexpectedly before the eyes of a man cultivating his fields, as if he came out of the glebes, and was called the son of Earth by the rustic people” etc. (1.12.4)

See also his hilarious interpretation of the Pygmalion myth in 2.49.4. And the story of Europa being abducted by Jupiter in the form of a bull turns into a tawdry tale of white slavery in 2.62.3 (Mercury, who also helps in the process, must be “some procurer leading a maiden from the city to the shore, or a beguiling merchant promising to show her jewels if she will climb aboard his ship”; the Jupiter/bull thing must be “a ship on which the emblem was a white bull” — practically the ‘Free Candy’ van of the ancient world). In 4.10.5–8 there's a rather moralistic interpretation of the tale of the Minotaur (Pasiphae = the human mind; Minos = reason; the bull that seduced her = “delights of the world”, etc.); similarly, he has a thorough interpretation of the story of Orpheus in which Eurydice stands for “natural concupiscence, which no mortal lacks” (5.12.7). See 4.46.5 for a rare occassion where he admits defeat: “In this story there are so many contradictory aspects of both the events and time periods that not only odes it eliminate any credibility in the story but it makes it utterly impossible to find any semblance to the truth.”

Many of his interpretations are based on ‘etymologies’, which I put into scare quotes since I suspect that most of the time they are based just on random similarities between words and not on a real etymological relationship. Thus we learn that Earth is called Terra “because she is ‘tread upon’ [teratur]’ ” and Tellus “because ‘we take [tollamus] from her’ ” (1.8.5) etc. And death is mors because “she ‘bites’ [mordeat] [. . .] or from ‘Mars’ [Marte] who is the murderer of men; or in that death is ‘bitterness’ [amaror]” (1.32.4) etc.

The scope of this work is impressive — this volume contains just one third of it, and is already one of the thickest that we've seen so far in the ITRL series. Boccaccio includes not just well-known gods like Jupiter and Athena, but also various abstract concepts (Eternity in 1.1, Chaos in 1.2, Night in 1.9, Fame in 1.10, etc. etc.) and numerous minor, utterly insignificant characters that just happen to be mentioned somewhere in passing in some ancient work. (In 4.46 he even mentions Isis and Apis, which I imagined more as part of Egyptian mythology than Greco-Roman.) And he clearly put in a huge amount of effort in combing through his sources, which range from ancient authors like Ovid and Cicero to medieval reference works of Isidore, Fulgentius, Rabanus and others (see the very interesting introduction by the translator, pp. xiv–xv). I was also awed by the translator's effort — while Boccaccio usually just cites his authorities by name, the translator then hunted down the title, chapter etc. of the passage which Boccaccio must have had in mind at that point, and all this is included in the notes at the end of the book. For the right sort of readers, I imagine such things must be extremely valuable.

Miscellaneous

I was interested to learn that Homer apparently had a teacher named Pronapides — this is the first time I've heard of this. See the translator's note 49 on p. 794: “All of Boccaccio's nearly one dozen citations of Pronapides of Athens, traditionally said (e.g., Diodorus of Sicily 3.67.5) to be the teacher of Homer, were derived from Theodontius.” See also the very interesting wikipedia page on Theodontius.

“Sleep is said to be the son of Erebus and Night because it is caused by moist vapors, rising from the stomach and blocking the arteries, and calm darkness.” (1.31.5) :)))

There's a very interesting paragraph on the definition of a day (1.34.4). Nowadays we are used to the idea of a day lasting from midnight to midnight, which appears to be derived from an ancient Roman custom while other ancient nations did it differently: for the Athenians, a day was from sunset to sunset; for Babylonians, from sunrise to sunrise; and for the Etruscans, from noon to noon (“This custom is still observed by astrologers”).

Nowadays rape is considered to be a very grim subject, but in ancient mythology it always comes across as downright merry. From 1.25.1: “While happily hunting in the forest, with her spear she inadvertently struck a satyr who desired to have his way with her. Amymone called upon Neptune for assistance. But the maiden Amymone, once the satyr was chased away, suffered from the greater god what she would not suffer from the satyr, and conceived with Neptune and gave birth to Nauplius.” You can practically imagine Neptune unzipping his pants while saying ‘I guess this is simply not your lucky day’ :)))

Apparently there's also a myth that myrrh, an incense-bearing tree, was initially a girl named Myrrha who was turned into a tree after seducing her father into some hot incest action (after her transformation, she gave birth to Adonis); 2.52.

There's a very interesting chapter on Dido, which mentions another (and even sadder) version of her story, very different from what we find in Virgil. In both versions she starts as a widow; in Virgil, she then falls in love with Aeneas and eventually commits suicide after he departs for Italy. But “Justin says that the Carthaginian leaders, under threat of war by the king of the Massitani, ordered her to marry [. . .] she requested a specific day on which she would promise to go to her husband [. . .] drawing a knife which she had secretly taken with her, she said, ‘Noble citizens, as you wish I go to my husband’; and after saying those words she killed herself, choosing death rather than staining her purity.” (1.60.3–4)

A very odd claim from 3.3.2: “as sailors say, saltiness is mixed into only the surface of sea water, while ten paces below the water is found to be sweet.”

Even more odd ideas from 3.21.4–5: “in the wombs of females there are seven chambers suitable for conception: there are three on the right side of the uterus, and an equal number on the left, and one in the middle [. . .] When those on the right receive the seed, they produce males, those on the left females, while those conceived in the middle are born having both sexes, and we call them Hermaphrodites.”

Venus apparently had a belt or cestos; “Lactantius says [. . .] that Venus did not wear this belt except for reputable marriages, and on account of this every other type of intercourse, in which the cestos is not worn, is called ‘incest.’ ” (3.22.10; and see also 4.47.4.) (Judging by dictionary.com, the second part of ‘incest’ actually comes from castus ‘chaste’.)

Boccaccio has a sudden outburst of skepticism in 4.18.5: “Lactantius used to say [. . .] and some other things which should be laughed at more than written about”. And in 4.24.2: “Fulgentius [. . .] pours out the longest, and in my judgment, the least apposite abundance of words”. And I love his sour tone in 4.30.4, disagreeing with some earlier interpretations: “There are, moreover, those who want this Hercules to be Perseus and the Hesperides to be the Gorgons; they are entitled to their opinion.” For someone who lived in a glass house, he sure liked to throw stones :))

I was surprised to see that he considers Pandora to have been a man, not a woman (4.45; citing Fulgentius).

One of the advantages of living in ancient times was that you could write the most obvious absurdities and people a thousand years later would still quote them as valuable bits of information: “The crow, as Fulgentius says, unique among the birds, has sixty-four mutations of voice” (4.28.65; and see also 5.3.8). Sometimes I wonder if the ancient authors ever deliberately decided to troll posterity by including this sort of things in their books :)

An interesting superstition from 6.3.8: “if laurel leaves are bound to the head of someone sleeping, they say he will see true dreams”.

You thought christianity has weird relics? The Greeks had the rattle of Dionysus! “Albericus adds, saying it was affirmed by Remigius, that at Nysa they preserve the rattle of Father Liber as evidence that he was nurtured there.” (5.25.14)

A gloriously silly interpretation of the story of Thyoneus, who stole a cow and was therefore pursued by the peasants; his father, the god Bacchus, helped him by transforming him into a hunter and the cow into a stag. “I think that he was a thief, and because the peasants were drinking heavily when they went to find their cow, he demonstrated to them with ease that he was a hunter and the cow a stag.” (5.27.2)

From 5.42.1: “When Bacchus took a liking to her, he deceived her, as Ovid says, in the guise of a grape, and ravaged her.” Talk about putting the rape into grape :))) I tried to find out more about how exactly this was supposed to work, but didn't find anything useful. The translator's note cites Ovid's Metamorphoses 6.125, where Ovid is actually telling the story of Arachne's weaving contest with Minerva; Arachne's work depicts many scenes from mythology, and Bacchus disguised as a cluster of grapes is one of these. Ovid just mentions it in passing, without going into detail.

There's an interesting but sad story behind the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (5.49). The nymph Callisto was raped by Jupiter and gave birth to a son, Arcas; Juno was angry at her (where's the logic in that?) and transformed her into a bear; Jupiter, the idiot, instead of transforming her back into a human, decided to ‘help’ by transforming her son into a bear as well, and then by transforming both into constellations. When it cames to idiot gods, the ones from Lovecraft's mythos are paragons of sanity compared to those from Greek mythology...

By the way, speaking of huge genealogical trees, I recommend the following website: fabpedigree.com. It's a genealogical tree of stupendous proportions which includes all sorts of actually existing historical persons, mostly royalty and aristocrats, but then goes without interruptions all the way back to bona fide mythological gods like Poseidon, Cronos, Uranus and Chaos... :))