Byblis And Myrrha

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compel readers to feel sorry for the girls in their situations; they seem to be victims of their desires.
both denounce their passions. After Byblis awakes from dreaming intimately about her brother, she claims she would never want to see this scene in daylight (Mandelbaum 308). Later in her speech, she refers to her incestuous pursuit as a “forbidden course” and to her burning desires as “obscene, foul fires” (309). According to Crane, Byblis calls her non-sisterly affection an “evil love” (on-line). When Myrrha confesses her love for her father, she calls on the gods to “check [her] sacrilege” and “prevent [her] sinning” (Mandelbaum 339). In Crane’s translation, Myrrha labels her non-filial love a “crime” and refers to her desires as “forbidden hopes” (on-line). Her “evil adhor” compels her to stay and pursue this “lawless mating” (Mandelbaum 340). Since identify their passions as wrongs, they seem well aware of the situation at hand, not merely driven by mad passion. ...

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She begins asking, “Where has my mind led me?” (339). She does not know if this incestuous passion is unlawful because “[she has] not heard that any god or written law condemns the union of a parent and his child” (Crane on-line). She decides that “human scruples” repress unions like these; envious law forbids what nature permits (Mandelbaum 339). Later, she states she does not want to “defile the code of nature with a lawless flame” despite her previous conclusion that only men reject this union that nature accepts. Similarly, Byblis passionately wishes the gods had granted she and Caunus all their similarities, excluding their common parents; then abruptly shifts her thoughts and ...

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