Mestra- Greek FigureMortal"Daughter of Erysichthon"

Erysichthon's Hunger

Mestra's story begins with her father's sacrilege. Erysichthon, a Thessalian king descended from Triopas, took an axe to an ancient oak in Demeter's sacred grove — a tree so old that the nymphs danced around it and its trunk was garlanded with votive wreaths. When he struck it, blood ran from the bark and a voice cried out from within. His servants recoiled, but Erysichthon swung again. Demeter cursed him with a hunger that no feast could satisfy, a craving that consumed first his wealth, then his household, then his dignity.

Sale, Escape, Return

Before her father's ruin, Mestra had lain with Poseidon, and the god granted her the power to change shape. When Erysichthon's hunger devoured his fortune, he turned to the one asset he could sell repeatedly. He sold Mestra into slavery, and in Ovid's telling her first escape set the pattern: standing on the shore in her new master's chains, she called out to Poseidon, and the god reshaped her into a fisherman mending nets. When the master came looking for the girl he had bought, the fisherman swore he had seen no one pass by. The master left, and Mestra walked home in her own skin.

Erysichthon saw the trick's potential. He sold her again and again, and each time she slipped free — as a mare, a bird, a cow — and returned to him. Sale, transformation, escape, return, sale.

The pattern held until Erysichthon had exhausted every resource, including his daughter. With nothing left to sell and no way to sate the hunger Demeter had planted in him, he consumed his own flesh. Mestra married Autolycus, the master thief and son of Hermes — a shape-shifter wed to a trickster. Through Autolycus she became grandmother to Odysseus.