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Baucis and Philemon

Baucis and Philemon, an old married couple living in Phrygia, were the only ones to welcome Zeus and Hermes in disguise when the gods were seeking shelter. While others rejected the gods, the humble couple served them a meal and wine. Realizing their guests were gods, they humbly asked for forgiveness. Zeus warned of destroying the wicked town by flood, commanding the couple to climb a mountain. Looking back, they saw the town destroyed but their home was now a temple. As guardians of the temple, they were granted a wish to die together, transforming after death into intertwining trees. The story illustrates the virtue of hospitality shown to strangers as some may be gods in disguise.

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2K views

Baucis and Philemon

Baucis and Philemon, an old married couple living in Phrygia, were the only ones to welcome Zeus and Hermes in disguise when the gods were seeking shelter. While others rejected the gods, the humble couple served them a meal and wine. Realizing their guests were gods, they humbly asked for forgiveness. Zeus warned of destroying the wicked town by flood, commanding the couple to climb a mountain. Looking back, they saw the town destroyed but their home was now a temple. As guardians of the temple, they were granted a wish to die together, transforming after death into intertwining trees. The story illustrates the virtue of hospitality shown to strangers as some may be gods in disguise.

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api-3755120
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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In Ovid's moralizing fable (Metamorphoses VIII), which stands on the periphery of Greek mythology

and Roman mythology, Baucis and Philemon were an old married couple in the region of Tyana, which
Ovid places in Phrygia, and the only ones in their town to welcome disguised gods Zeus and Hermes
(in Roman mythology, Jupiter and Mercury respectively), thus embodying the pious exercise of
hospitality, the ritualized guest-friendship termed xenia.
Zeus and Hermes came disguised as ordinary peasants and began asking the people of the town for a
place to sleep that night. They were rejected by all before they came to Baucis and Philemon's rustic
and simple cottage. Though the couple were poor, they showed more piety than their rich neighbors,
where were "all the doors bolted and no word of kindness given, so wicked were the people of that
land." After serving the two guests food and wine, which Ovid depicts with pleasure in the details,
Baucis noticed that although she had refilled her guest's beechwood cups many times, the wine pitcher
was still full. Realizing that her guests were in fact gods, she and her husband "raised their hands in
supplication and implored indulgence for their simple home and fare." Philemon thought of catching
and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it into a meal for the guests. But when
Philemon went to catch the goose, it ran onto Zeus's lap for safety. Zeus said that they did not need to
slay the goose and that they should leave the town. Zeus said that he was going to destroy the town and
all the people who had turned him away and not provided due hospitality. He said Baucis and Philemon
should climb the mountain with him and not turn back until they reached the top.
After climbing the mountain until an arrow shot from the summit, Baucis and Philemon looked back on
the town and saw that it had been destroyed by a flood. However, Zeus had turned Baucis and
Philemon's cottage into an ornate temple. The couple was also granted a wish; they chose to stay
together forever and to be guardians of the temple. They also requested that when it came time for one
of them to die, the other would die as well. Upon their death, they were changed into an intertwining
pair of trees, one oak and one linden, standing in the deserted boggy terrain.
Baucis and Philemon do not appear elsewhere in Greek myth, nor anywhere in cult, but the sacred
nature of hospitality was widespread in the ancient world. After Abraham and Sarah had feasted them,
two strangers were revealed as "two angels" (Genesis 19:1; the story is in the previous chapter).
Hebrews 13:2, which may be aware of Ovid as well as of Genesis, converts hospitality stories into a
virtue injunction: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have
entertained angels without knowing it." The possibility that unidentified strangers in need of hospitality
were gods in disguise was ingrained in first century culture. Acts 14:11-12 relates the ecstatic reception
received less than two generations after Ovid's publication of the tale by Paul of Tarsus and Barnabas:
"The crowds shouted 'The gods have come down to us in human form!' Barnabas they called Zeus, and
Paul they called Hermes".

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