In the word Adonis could mean both 'perfume' and 'lover' and likewise Adonis is both the perfume made from the aromatic drops of myrrh as well as the human lover who seduces two goddesses.In her essay 'What Nature Allows the Jealous Laws Forbid' literary critic Mary Aswell Doll compares the love between the two male protagonists of ' book (1997) with the love Myrrha has for her father in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The way the daughter seduces her father illustrates the most extreme version a seduction can take: the union between two persons who by social norms and laws are strictly held apart.James Richard Ellis has argued that the incest taboo is fundamental to a civilized society. The marriage between her father and mother is then set as an obstacle for her love along with incest being forbidden by the laws, profane as well as divine. The goddess then strikes her with desire to make love with her father and Myrrha is then made into a woman in the grip of an uncontrollable lust. While other incest configurations - mother-son, sibling - permit consensual agency, father-daughter incest does not when the daughter displays transgressive sexual desire, the prohibitive father appears.Myrrha has been interpreted as developing from a girl into a woman in the course of the story: in the beginning she is a virgin refusing her suitors, in that way denying the part of herself that is normally dedicated to Aphrodite. In the cases of both Lot's daughters and Myrrha, the daughter's seduction of the father has to be covert. Nancy Miller comments on the two myths:Lot's daughters' incest is sanctioned by reproductive necessity because it lacks consequences, this story is not a socially recognized narrative paradigm for incest. Upon bringing in a lamp, and seeing his daughter, the king attempted to kill her on the spot, but Myrrha escaped.Thereafter Myrrha walked in exile for nine months, past the palms of and the fields of, until she reached. The affair lasted several nights in complete darkness to conceal Myrrha's identity, until Cinyras wanted to know the identity of his paramour. Myrrha's flight from her fatherDuring the, the worshiping women (including Cenchreis, Myrrha's mother) were not to be touched by men for nine nights wherefore the nurse told Cinyras of a girl deeply in love with him, giving a false name. The nurse tried to make Myrrha suppress the infatuation, but later agreed to help Myrrha into her father's bed if she promised that she would not again try to kill herself. Sleepless, and losing all hope, she attempted but was discovered by her nurse, in whom she confided. Ovid therefore blamed it on the.Over several verses, Ovid depicts the psychic struggle Myrrha faces between her sexual desire for her father and the social shame she would face for acting thereon. Ovid further comments that hating one's father is a crime, but Myrrha's love was a greater crime. It is stated that was not to blame for Myrrha's incestuous love for her father, Cinyras. Ovid opens the myth with a warning to the audience that this is a myth of great horror, especially to fathers and daughters:The story I am going to tell is a horrible one: I beg that daughters and fathers should hold themselves aloof, while I sing, or if they find my songs enchanting, let them refuse to believe this part of my tale, and suppose that it never happened: or else, if they believe that it did happen, they must believe also in the punishment that followed.According to, Myrrha was the daughter of King and Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus. As the myth of Myrrha is also the longest tale sung by Orpheus (205 lines) and the only story that corresponds to his announced theme of girls punished for forbidden desire, it is considered the centerpiece of the song. The myth of Myrrha and Cinyras is sung by in the tenth book of Metamorphoses after he has told the myth of and before he turns to the tale of Venus and Adonis. The Metamorphoses is not narrated by Ovid, but rather by the characters inside the stories. The Metamorphoses showed that Ovid was more interested in questioning how the laws interfered with people's lives than in writing epic tales like 's and 's.

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