The story of Baucis and Philemon
As a girl, Christl read.
Books became her escape from the rubble of bombed-out Vienna after World War II and from the bombed-out psyches of the adults around her. In the silence of the printed word, she entered a world of possibilities beyond even what the kindly, busy nuns taught her at boarding school.
An uncle gave Christl an illustrated book of Greek and Roman myths then. She read it repeatedly, till the stories and their images lived in her imagination. Most of these myths dissolved into the culture that was dominated by Catholicism, by the art in the churches, the grandeur of the bombed-out cathedral, and by Mozart with music as clear as the heaven in her head.
In that book, one story stayed with her above all others — the tale of Baucis and Philemon, whom Christl described as faithful lovers who lived a long life together, and, when they died, were turned by the gods into two mighty trees that intertwined with one another as they grew.
The source is found only in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the most widely read works of antiquity — and the original, longer version is worth knowing. Like most of these myths, the story takes place in a world that is beautiful and deadly, with few guarantees, a place where life could be cheap or inexplicably blessed — echoed perhaps in the ruined glory of post-war Vienna.
In Ovid’s account (which I retell here based on the word-by-word transliteration from Latin in Wikisource), an aging couple lived in a rustic cottage on a hilltop overlooking a city in Phrygia — now coastal Turkey — so contented to have each other that they did not need the bustle of the city below. (The names are usually pronounced BAH-sis and fuh-LEE-mon.)
One day two of the gods visited the city disguised as travelers. As a test, these gods went around town seeking shelter, but a thousand busy residents of the busy town refused them hospitality and shut their doors. So the gods — Zeus and Hermes, still in disguise — worked their way through rejection after rejection till they came to the remote cottage where Baucis and Philemon welcomed them in. The gods found the door so low that they had to stoop to enter.
Ovid depicts the scene with a sophisticated Roman’s romantic, somewhat comic view of rural life, an eye for detail, and a keen appreciation of food:
After seating the guests, Baucis added sticks from the thatch roof to wake up yesterday’s fire and, on her creaking knees and huffing, blew it into flame. She wedged a shard to level the three-legged table and scoured it clean with fresh mint. Then she chopped turnips with the vegetables Philemon had just gathered from their garden, and cooked them with a sliver from the smoked fatback hanging from the rafters.
While that simmered, Baucis spread a ceremonial cloth, worn and somewhat tattered, and brought out cherry preserves, radishes, roasted eggs, all served in the plainest earthenware — and then the wine cups and mixing bowl, carved from beechwood and sealed with a rub of beeswax. Nuts and figs followed the vegetable stew, next plums, apples, purple wild grapes — and then, in the center of the table, a white waxen comb dripping with honey capped the meal. Bright faces and good spirits carried conversation through the hours.
Filling the cup of Hermes again, Baucis noticed that no matter how much wine she poured, the jug never became empty. Time and again, the cups seemed to refill themselves. Taking his with other clues, the couple recognized that they were in the presence of a mystery and threw themselves to the ground before the gods, welcomed them profusely and begged forgiveness for their meager meal.
Then they ran to catch their only goose, the one that guarded the house, to sacrifice it as a feast for the guests. But a blundering chase broke out between the limping couple and the quicker goose—the goose hiding here, there, under the table, then under the skirts of the gods who—laughing out loud at the slapstick scene — ordered a stop to the chase and decreed a reprieve for the wild-eyed goose.
At that, with blinding radiance, the gods lit up the little cottage with the revelation of their nature. In such stories, this is a moment of glory but also unpredictable danger. The luminous gods abruptly ordered the couple to follow them up the mountain and, under a stern penalth of death, not to look back until told to do so.
After Baucis and Philemon painfully hobbled to the top behind the gliding gods and were finally allowed to look back, they saw with horror that their entire home city had been devastated by a flood, sucked into a swamp, and all its inhabitants punished in the terror of drowning.
In a sudden change of the kind that gives this collection the title Metamorphoses, the gods transformed the rickety old cottage into a majestic temple with slender fluted columns, a roof the color of sunrise, high carved doors and spacious marble floors — while Baucis and Philemon looked on, terrified, and nearly paralyzed with grief for the death of everyone they knew.
Zeus, with the detached glory of those deities, bestowed upon the couple a wish. They consulted with one another, then Philemon stammered that they wished to continue all their lives in that same place as keepers of the temple and, when the time came, to die at the same moment, so neither of them would ever be alone.
As if it were but a pleasant trifle, Zeus airily granted them this wish.
Now we get to the part of the story that lived inside Christl for the rest of her life. Continuing with Ovid’s account:
After they lived a long life and grew old and frail as keepers of the temple, the couple received the second part of their wish. One day, leaning near the marble steps and recounting once again to visitors how the the city had been destroyed and the temple raised up by the gods, Baucis and Philemon noticed on one another’s wrinkled bodies that buds were sprouting, green shoots beginning to cover them with branches and sprays of leaves, and they realized first in shock, then with resignation, that their time had come.
Completing this book exiled for life from the Rome inside him, Ovid refused to make the tales sweet or pretty, as he described how the two aged lovers locked onto one another’s eyes and called out a farewell, and then another, and, more quietly, again, as long as they could speak, but more faintly, fading as the multiplying leaves and spreading bark hardened over their eyes and cemented their mouths and ears and sealed them in eternal silence — as the gods transformed them — metamorphosed them — into two mighty trees whose trunks and branches intertwined and spread their embrace wide over the sacred site.
Today, next to the rubble of that ancient temple, that ancient double, single tree still stands.
The first time Christl told me this story, she left out the struggle, the suffering, the vengeful gods, and celetrated the core of sweetness that made it all worthwhile. It was early in our marriage. We lay quietly in one another’s arms, talking about everything and nothing, when the voice of this strong, independent woman became small and vulnerable as she related how:
Baucis and Philemon were a loving couple who honored the gods and were rewarded by a long life together. Then they were changed into two ancient trees that grew into one.
She confided with shy tenderness that since girlhood, she had wanted to find someone to grow old with — like the couple in the story, and the two trees.
In four decades together, we did become, in our way, like that couple, like those two ancient trees that intertwined and held one another and spread above and protected the eternal, tender, nurturing, dangerous, and sacred mystery of love.
Most mysterious of all, our way there was guided by an old story in a children’s book — and by the girl who read it.
Gerald Grow is a retired journalism professor. More at longleaf.net.