Myrrha- Greek FigureMortal

The Curse

Myrrha was a princess of Cyprus, daughter of King Cinyras. In Ovid's account, her mother Cenchreis boasted that her daughter surpassed Aphrodite in beauty, provoking the goddess's wrath. Aphrodite inflicted upon Myrrha an unnatural desire for her own father. The girl recognized the horror of her affliction and struggled against it, at one point attempting to hang herself before her nurse discovered her and cut her down.

The nurse, horrified but bound by loyalty, devised a scheme. During a festival of Ceres, when Cenchreis was obliged to abstain from her husband's bed, the nurse told Cinyras that a young girl desired him. Under cover of darkness, over several nights, Myrrha entered her father's chamber. When Cinyras finally brought a lamp and discovered who lay beside him, he seized his sword. Myrrha fled into the night.

Transformation and the Birth of Adonis

Myrrha wandered for nine months, pregnant and exhausted, crossing lands until she reached Arabia. When she could go no further, she prayed to the gods, asking to belong neither among the living nor the dead. Her prayer was answered: the gods transformed her into the myrrh tree. The tears she continued to weep hardened into drops of aromatic resin, the precious myrrh that bore her name.

When the time came for the child within her to be born, the bark of the tree split open. In Ovid's telling, the goddess Lucina attended the birth. The infant Adonis emerged from the cleft wood.

The variant tradition preserved by Apollodorus names the girl Smyrna rather than Myrrha and identifies her father as Theias, king of Assyria. Panyassis, the epic poet and uncle of Herodotus, appears to be the source for this alternate genealogy. Antoninus Liberalis provides another version in which the gods transform her before Cinyras can kill her.