Caeneus

Poseidon and Caenis, woodcut illustration of Ovid by Virgil Solis, 1563.

In Greek mythology, Caeneus (Ancient Greek: Καινεύς, Kaineus) was a Lapith hero of Thessaly. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, he was originally a woman,[1] Caenis, daughter of Atrax.

In Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica,[2] he is briefly noted as the great father of a lesser son, Coronus, who sailed forth among the Argonauts.[3] The striking mythic image of this hero is that, indomitable through his more-than-human power, his enemies the Centaurs resorted to driving him into the ground with timbers.[4]

they could neither force him to yield, nor yet dispatch him,

but unbowed, unbroken, he went into earth down under,

crushed by a shattering hail of heavy pine trunks.[5]

Myth

Caeneus fighting with a centaur, Attic lekythos with decoration in superposed colours, ca. 500-490 BC, Louvre (CA 2494).

Originally a woman named Caenis, he was abducted by Poseidon, who fell in love with him. Afterwards, Poseidon promised to grant any wish to him and Caenis wished to have a man's body. Not only did Poseidon grant this, he also granted Caenis impenetrable skin. Soon, Caenis changed his name into Caeneus.

Caeneus met his fate in the battle between the Lapiths and the centaurs (see Pirithous). Similarly, in the Iliad (without referring to these transformations) Nestor numbers Caeneus among an earlier generation of heroes of his youth, "the strongest men that Earth has bred, the strongest men against the strongest enemies, a savage mountain-dwelling tribe whom they utterly destroyed".

In Ovid's description of the tale, a particular centaur, Latreus, mocks Caeneus and denies his skill as a fighter when he realizes Caeneus' female origin. Caeneus strikes Latreus a blow in the side, and is unharmed by the centaur's last attempts at wounding him. In revenge for this, the centaurs piled pine-tree trunks (some say fir trees) and stones upon him, since he was immune to weapons.

There are several descriptions of Caeneus' fate after he had been crushed down by the trunks. One vase, for instance, depicts him as sinking down into the earth, upright, and buried at the waist; this legend is described in Ovid's Metamorphoses as well, and implies that Caeneus is falling directly into Tartarus. Ovid states that Caeneus flew away from the pile of tree trunks as a golden-winged bird. This version of the ending is given two witnesses, Mopsus and the "son of Ampycus", as well as Nestor, who tells the story.

Caeneus' legend is found in Metamorphoses, where he is mentioned briefly as a participant in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. Awhile after this appearance, Nestor tells the story of Caeneus to Achilles in fuller detail, describing his transformation from female to male. In Ovid's retelling, placed in the mouth of the aged Homeric hero Nestor, Caenis, the daughter of Elatus (a Lapith chieftain) and Hippea, was raped by Poseidon, who then fulfilled his request to be changed into a man so that he could never be raped again; he also made Caenis invulnerable to weaponry. Caenis then changed his name to Caeneus and became a warrior, traveling all over Thessaly, and later taking part in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar.

Virgil also says that Aeneas sees him, having been returned to his original female form by the Fates, in the Fields of Mourning as he visits the underworld in Book Six of the Aeneid. He was also mentioned in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.[6]

Notes

  1. ↑ Ovid, Metamorphoses XII.170ff, 459ff
  2. ↑ Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica I. 56-64.
  3. ↑ Sophia Papaioannou, Redesigning Achilles: 'Recycling' the Epic Cycle in the 'Little Iliad': (Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.1–13.622), (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, 89) Berlin/New York: Walter De Gruyter, 2007, divides the Argonauts among "Orphics" and "Heracleans", those of skill and those of brute strength: Carneus is among the Heracleans. Ovid's story of the transsexual Caeneus "revisits and reverses the gendered polarity of traditional epic", according to Ioannis Ziogas (Cornell University), reviewing Papaioannu in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.
  4. ↑ "Caeneus, struck by the green fir-trees, cleft the ground with his foot, where he stood, and passed beneath the earth." (Pindar, Frag. 16, noted at Theoi Project, which illustrates an Attic vase-painting depicting the centaurs also using boulders to crush Caeneus. Ovid mentions oaks.
  5. ↑ Peter Green, The argonautika(1997) 2007:44f.
  6. ↑ Hesiod, Catalogue of Women fr. 87.

References

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