“giddyup!” he said, his fist wrapped tightly around my ponytail. i had long hair, then, down to my thighs, and thicker than it is now, after puberty. it was darker, too, closer to black than my current mousy brown. just like a horse’s tail. he yanked on my hair, violently, and a sunspot of pain flowered at my scalp. he did this often, and had been doing it since we met. when i begged my teacher to make him stop, she only laughed and said: “it’s because he likes you. he’s hurting you because he likes you.”
i thrash my head the next time he grabs me by the hair; side to side to side, like a pony fleeing from gunfire. i am trying to shake him off, but my fear only thrills him, and he attempts to mount: still holding fast to my hair, he tosses one of his wiry boyish legs over my hip. at that age, we’re all the same height. i was even a tall girl for a while. he eclipses me, using his free hand to push down on my shoulder, hoist himself up high enough to curl his other leg around my waist. i scream, stumbling, as he piggybacks, elbow tucked under my throat. “giddyup!” he calls, more intent this time. and then i trip, and then we’re falling. i hit the pavement first, he crashes like a meteor on top of me. my hands are caught and folded up beneath my chest, and i’m eating gravel. something is bleeding. i feel somebody pull him off me, and ask if he’s alright. it’s almost a minute before i am tended to, curled now in a fetal position. i sniff back a nosebleed, i lick my cut mouth, i open and close my torn up palms and my knees flare.
“he was only playing,” the vice-principal scolds me. “you shouldn’t have encouraged him.”
i was marched to the office, as if a prisoner. as i went, i saw him, showing off some pulled strands of my hair to his friends. i wondered, distantly, if he would keep them.
the ancient greek word ὕβρις, ‘hubris’, does not equal what the english word ‘hubris’ means. our hubris is arrogance, pride, and excess. ὕβρις, on the other hand, is something more like defiance, or false emulation, claiming to be something you are not. in mythology, this is typically divine defiance, but in history and literature, it involves more so a breach of station or social boundary. in ancient law, ὕβρις describes crimes ranging from rape to property theft; physical breaches of body and hospitality. exhibiting ὕβρις is more of an action taken, whereas ‘hubris’ is a characteristic of personality. ὕβρις is something you shouldn’t do, as opposed to something you shouldn’t be. i have long been fascinated by ὕβρις, even before i really understood it. ὕβρις was an almost magical, scarily close yet invisible set of parallel lines that everybody existed in between, and should not dare to step over. the ways to commit ὕβρις are innumerable, but the punishment is always singular: in mythology, death, and in history, shame, which is often just as bad.
the first story of ὕβρις i ever learned was that of arachne, who boasted she could weave a tapestry better than athena. what’s striking about arachne, however, is that she was right. in ovid, after athena evaluates the tapestries, she is horrified to admit that arachne’s work was, indeed, better than her own. she beats arachne on the head with her shuttle, and later, arachne kills herself out of shame, and is turned into a spider. arachne’s ὕβρις is twice performed here: first, in her claim (however true) that she might outshine athena, and then in the outperformance itself: she disturbs the hierarchy of being and therefore must be eliminated. the moral is not that you shouldn’t be prideful, not even that you shouldn’t be arrogant, but that you should understand your social role and perform it accordingly: as a woman, as a human.
and there was psyche, of whom the townspeople said she had a beauty to rival aphrodite’s. though psyche herself never made this claim, aphrodite sought to punish her: simply being as she was happened to be an act of ὕβρις. sometimes, ὕβρις finds you. sometimes, you are born outside the lines, and there is nothing you can do to crawl in.
“kiss, marry, kill,” i say, when my turn comes. i list three people from my grade, voice low, so that our drama teacher doesn’t hear the five of us not-rehearsing: me and four boys, reading shakespeare. he grins at me, wolflike, and answers, and i grin back. it’s not a nice game, but i have been trying to show that i am not a nice girl, either.
“you know, in the real game, it isn’t kiss,” he says. “do you know what it is instead?”
i’m eleven; i don’t. i shake my head. he turns his wolf-grin to the other boys. “that’s good. it’s not appropriate,” he tells me seriously, but something dances behind his eyes.
“fuck, marry, kill,” he says, to the boys, and this time, he lists my name as well. it’s a word i know as a curse, but not as a verb. snickering, eyeing me, they answer one at a time: fuck you, they say, and laugh.
“you really don’t know what it means?”
i shake my head again.
“that’s good,” he echoed. i’d never seen him look so pleased.
sometimes, ὕβρις, is not so simply identified. it is not named as ὕβρις, but it is punished in the same way. the story of hermaphroditus, told by ovid, is one such case. he, a beautiful, lithe boy of fifteen, bathes in the spring belonging to the nymph salmacis, and she finds herself insatiably desperate to have him. she begs him for affection, and he denies her, too sheepish to comprehend what she wished to do. hermaphroditus’ childlike innocence, his misunderstanding of salmacis’ intention for him, simply inflames her lust: “a blush raced across the young man’s face, for he was ignorant of what she meant by love, but blushing made him even more attractive,” writes ovid. his submission is more enticing, later, when she attacks, coiling her body around him like a snake, a squid, as he flings himself in all directions to remove her body from his. salmacis then sends a prayer to the heavens that she might never be parted from the boy, and the gods, answering, fuse their bodies together, effectively killing salmacis as she surges inside of him, and leaving hermaphroditus with both male and female genitalia.
the digressions from self are manifold. hermaphroditus is prudish, with the enticing innocence of a young girl; and the nymph of diana, who are typically chaste and devoted to the hunt, is here predatorial and penetrative. ὕβρις, for hermaphroditus and for salmacis, is betrayal of gendered expectation, and betrayal of assignment: any other myth would have had hermaphroditus chase while salmacis fled.
another story: the sun god, helios, finds himself enraptured by a young woman, leucothoe. he disguises himself as her mother to be allowed into her private chamber, reveals himself, and goads leucothoe into sex. she is nervous, unsure, skittishly looking around the room, to the door, for one of her handmaidens. but, like hermamphroditus, leucothoe’s inexperience and terror is only sexy: “the girl trembles. the distaff and the spindle slip from her unmoving fingers. but her fear makes her more lovely, and the god can wait no longer.” to helios, fucking her afraid is even preferable to fucking her eager.
“two hours starts now,” said the coach. it was six in the morning, a foggy wet november, and we trained for cross country in the graveyard, hurrying down winding paths of tombstones in our local cemetery.
to my right, a boy: “if i win, will you kiss me?”
we weren’t racing. i picked up my speed imperceptibly. “no.”
he yanked at my hood a little; playful. i thought he was joking, and then i saw his face. he counted down from three, and i ran so fast the dead sang. i heard him laughing wildly behind me as he chased.
apollo is a god known for two great loves. the first is daphne, whom he did not love inasmuch as he coveted. after slaying the monstrous python, apollo was big-headed. he noticed eros, sitting by his lonesome, brandishing his arrows, and this made him laugh. what use, he demanded, did such a soft boy have with such weapons? here, it is the god who engages in ὕβρις, as he trespasses and denies the duties of another. apollo jeered at the other god until eros stood it no longer; he took his arrows and dealt two blows: one to daphne, cursing her to loathe apollo, and one to apollo, cursing him to love daphne. apollo chases daphne through the fields, calling to her, persuading her of his love, and she flees: “his speech went on, but daphne fled in fear away from him and his half-finished words. then too he thought her lovely”.
daphne sends a prayer to her father, the god of the river, begging that he change her form. she could run no longer. there, he transforms her into a laurel tree with a hanging head, and apollo vows to continue to love her forever. i often ask myself whether she would have wanted that.
apollo’s second love was hyacinthus. a spartan boy; strong, lean, bright. and, unlike every other story, hyacinthus loved him back. it did not save him. one night, they played discus, and one way or another, apollo’s throw is too strong; it strikes hyacinthus in the head, and kills him. in some versions, it was the west wind, zephyrus, who too loved hyacinthus and in his jealousy rerouted the wind after apollo had taken his throw, killing the boy. in most versions, it’s simply an accident. apollo cries: “but what did i do wrong—unless it’s wrong to play a game, or wrong to be in love?” apollo’s ὕβρις, here, is his doubt of his own strength, trespassing below his station rather than above it. and in the space where love once was, hyacinthus is transformed into the hyacinth, a flower destined to echo the sorrowful moans of apollo forever.
the first time somebody told me i was pretty, i was crying. i have wondered for a long time why i was, as a child, only ever wanted in distress. as i grow, and as i read stories, i learn it’s always been this way. it’s manageable, it’s easier to dissuade. hesitation is an aphrodisiac to the powerful, and denial is ὕβρις to the predator; it is defiance, and must be tamed. this is true of gods, and it is true of man.
echo is a nymph cursed by hera to repeat only the last words of what she says. while wandering through the woods one afternoon, she spots narcissus: a fantastically beautiful boy of sixteen, who has lost himself in the trees. he calls for help, and she calls back. they speak back and forth, and yielding to her desire, echo embraces him. narcissus flees, and echo, scorned, turns into the mountains, though “her love endured, only growing by the pain of rejection”. her body withers away until she is nothing but a voice.
narcissus, in the meanwhile, continues to reject the affection of the dozens of boys and girls who prostrate themselves for it. he is content on his own, and demonstrates no conceivable desire to yield to anybody else. however, one of these rejected boys demands retribution in his anger: he prays to the goddess nemesis — revenge — to ensure that narcissus learns the pain of being shunned by himself.
she curses him, then, to fall in love with his own reflection. and while he sits there, transfixed, reaching out to himself, attempting to touch, to kiss, to speak, ovid himself interjects: “why try to seize a fleeing image in vain?” but ovid cannot stop the story he is telling. even after narcissus realises, coming to his terrible sense, that he yearns for himself, it does not stop the crescendo of desire. he sits there until he dies, killed for the crime of not-wanting; the ὕβρις of rejecting the supposed ultimate purpose of mankind.
as narcissus wilts; shrivels from hunger at the riverbed; and passes into sickly grey from grief, he says: “alas, in vain, beloved boy.” soon, in the place of his body, there rests only a flower: a narcissus flower, or a daffodil, and at last his too-wanted body would be desired by nobody.
in these stories, there is sometimes pyrrhic respite found in transformation; freedom afforded through flora. their human selves are dead, but this way, there is life elsewhere. wild life, in dirt, with roots, and rainshower.
i dream of a garden. daffodils; hyacinths; leucothoes; surrounding the bed of a laurel tree, gently bristling in the wind. here, love is inconsequential. not because it doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t hurt. i am barefoot in this garden, and i am not running.
quotations from sections of helios and leucothoe and hermaphroditus and salmacis are translated by ian johnston. quotations from sections of daphne and apollo and hyacinthus and apollo are translated by stephanie garber. quotations from sections of narcissus and echo are translated by myself.