Theme of Divine Revenge in Metamorphoses Book III

This book begins auspiciously, with the founding of Thebes. However, divine revenge soon takes center
stage. The gods punish nearly every major character for a crime, regardless of whether the crime was
committed wittingly or unwittingly. Diana punishes Actaeon for accidentally stumbling upon her when
she is naked. Juno punishes Semele for her love affair with Jupiter. She also punishes Tiresias with
blindness for agreeing with Jupiter. And Bacchus punishes Pentheus for failing to worship him. By
focusing on the theme of revenge, Ovid invites comparisons with Virgil’s Aeneid, which portrays
Aeneas’s quest to establish a city, and Juno’s resulting wrath. Ovid outdoes Virgil, whose sole villain was
Juno. In Ovid’s account, three divine figures damn the household of Cadmus and the founding of
Thebes: Diana, Juno, and Bacchus.

Each act of revenge is accompanied by an ironic twist at the expense of the victim. Actaeon, a hunter,
becomes the hunted. The reversal is completed when Actaeon’s own dogs tear him apart. Semele is
slain by her lover’s overwhelming prowess, and she requests her own manner of death. Tiresias
extensive knowledge causes his blindness. Narcissus, who has rejected all suitors, is rejected by himself.
He becomes both the object and the subject of spurned love. Pentheus’s death is ironic for three
reasons. First, his threat to kill Acoetes is turned against him when he himself is killed for impiety.
Second, Bacchus’s worshipers mistake Pentheus for an animal—ironic, considering that Pentheus is not
an animal or even a transformed animal, as are many of the characters in the poem. Finally, despite his
refusal to worship Bacchus, Pentheus becomes a central figure in a worship rite, as he is sacrificed at the
hands of his mother and aunt.

In this book, Ovid focuses on the danger of transgression. In almost all of the episodes, boundaries are
crossed, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Semele, a human, sleeps with Jupiter,
a married god; Actaeon stumbles into the sacred and secret grove of Diana and sees something he
should not; Tiresias lives as both a man and a woman and offers a verdict on pleasure and sexuality from
the perspective of both; and Pentheus witnesses and unwillingly takes part in the secret the rites of
Bacchus. The result of each of these boundary-crossings justifies Ovid’s dictum, "do not call someone
happy until he dies and his funeral is over" (III.136–137). When people cross boundaries, the result is
blindness, death by sex, death by dogs, or an equally horrible fate. While Thebes is founded happily, its
subsequent history quickly grows grim.