InGreek mythology,Oenone (/ɪˈnoʊniː/;Ancient Greek: ΟἰνώνηOinōnē; "wine woman") was the first wife ofParisof Troy, whom he abandoned forHelen. Oenone was also the ancient name of an island, which was later named afterAegina, daughter of the river godAsopus.[1]
Oenone was a mountainnymph onMount Ida inPhrygia, a mountain associated with the Mother GoddessCybele and the TitanessRhea. Her gift of prophecy was learned from Rhea.[2] Her father was either the river-gods,Cebren[3][AI-generated source?][4] or Oeneus.[5][AI-generated source?][6] Her name links her to the gift of wine.
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Paris, son of the kingPriam and the queenHecuba, fell in love with Oenone when he was a shepherd on the slopes ofMount Ida, having beenexposed in infancy (owing to a prophecy that he would be the means of the destruction of the city of Troy) and rescued by the herdsmanAgelaus. The couple married, and Oenone gave birth to a son,Corythus.[7] When Paris swore he would never desert her, Oenone (through her gift of prophecy) informed him that - whilst his love for her was true now - he would later sail across the sea to find another lover and bring ruin to his family. Paris, perhaps disturbed or afraid, always attempted to dismiss her warnings.[8]
Her prediction came true when Paris abandoned her, returning to his birth parents in Troy and sailing across the Aegean for Helen, the queen of Sparta. Out of revenge for Paris's betrayal, she sent Corythus to guide the Greeks to Troy. Another version has it that she used her son to drive a rift between Paris and Helen, but Paris, not recognizing his own son, killed him.[9]
One of the only extensive surviving narrations of Oenone and Paris isQuintus Smyrnaeus,Posthomerica, Book X, ll. 259–489, which tells the return of the dying Paris to Oenone.[10] Mortally wounded byPhiloctetes's arrow, he begged Oenone to heal him with her herbal arts,[11] but she refused and cast him out with scorn, to return to Helen's bed, and Paris died on the lower slopes of Ida. Then, overcome with remorse, Oenone, the one whole-hearted mourner of Paris, threw herself onto his burning funeral pyre, which the shepherds had raised.[12]
A fragment ofBacchylides suggests that she threw herself off a cliff,[13] in theBibliotheke it is noted "when she found him dead she hanged herself", and Lycophron imagines her hurtling head first from the towering walls of Troy. Her tragic story makes one of theLove Romances ofParthenius of Nicaea, where she jests to the messenger that Paris should have asked Helen to heal him but sets out to save her former husband all the same. Still, she arrives too late, and ends her life out of grief.[14]
Ovid includes an imagined reproachful letter from Oenone to Paris in hisHeroides,[15] a text that has been extended by a number of spurious post-Ovidian interpolations, which include an elsewhere unattested rape of Oenone by Apollo.[16]
Thomas Heywood wrote theepyllionOenone and Paris (1594) inrhyme royal.
William Morris included "The Death of Paris" inThe Earthly Paradise.
Lawrence Binyon publishedParis and Oenone, a one-actcloset tragedy inblank verse, in 1906.
Tennyson adapted the source material of Smyrnaeus for "The Death of Oenone" (1892), distilling its tragic essence.[17] This was Tennyson's second poem on the subject; his previous attempt, "Oenone", was critically panned when first published in 1833.[18] The poem was practically rewritten between then and 1842 and the revised version has been described as exquisitely beautiful.[19]
InRacine'sPhèdre, the name Oenone is given toPhaedra's nurse, a character who also commits suicide.
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