Daphne

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Daphne is the nymph of Greek myth who escaped the pursuit of the god Apollo by being transformed into a laurel tree — the plant whose Greek name, daphnē, is hers. The story turns on that pun, and the most influential telling makes the pun its hinge: as the god closes on her, the girl prays for release and her running body becomes the tree, leaves for hair, bark for skin, roots where her feet had been.

The fullest surviving narrative is Roman, the first long tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There Daphne is a daughter of the river-god Peneus, a huntress sworn to remain unmarried after the manner of Artemis; Apollo’s desire is set running by Eros, whom the god had mocked, so that the pursuit is itself a small revenge of the slighted love-god on the archer who thought himself the better shot. The Greek tradition behind Ovid is older and more various. Several ancient writers, Pausanias among them, report a different version set in Arcadia by the river Ladon, in which Daphne is loved by the mortal youth Leucippus, who disguises himself as a girl to join her band of huntresses; when he is exposed and killed, Apollo’s pursuit follows, and the earth opens or the nymph is changed to the tree. The parentage shifts from source to source — Peneus in one line, the river Ladon or the Earth herself in others — which is the ordinary condition of a figure who lived in local cult and oral story before any single author fixed her.

What the myth does, beyond its plot, is explain a fact of cult: the laurel was sacred to Apollo. His priestess at Delphi was said to chew its leaves; victors in his Pythian games were crowned with it; the daphnēphoria, a laurel-bearing procession, was held in his honor. The transformation story binds the god to his tree by giving the plant a former life, and reading the order of things in reverse — cult first, story second — is how much of modern scholarship approaches such tales, treating the narrative as an account grown up around an older ritual attachment rather than its cause.

Later readers found in Daphne more than an origin for a wreath. To poets and painters of the Renaissance she became an emblem of chastity holding out against force, or of the cost at which the laurel of fame is won — Petrarch playing on lauro and the name Laura, Bernini freezing the half-changed body in marble. The interpretations are the readers’, not the myth’s; what the early sources give is sparer, a woman who would rather be a tree than be caught, and a god left holding the branch.

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