Myrrha (Ancient Greek Μύρρα, Mýrrha), also known as Smyrna (Σμύρνα), is the mother of Adonis in Greek mythology. Daughter of a Cypriot or Near Eastern king — Cinyras in Ovid, Theias or Thias in other accounts — she conceived Adonis through incest with her father, fled his wrath, and was transformed into the myrrh tree from whose bark the infant was born. The aromatic resin of the tree was explained as her tears. This atlas node is the Cypriot Myrrha of the Cinyras–Adonis saga (id myrrha-cyprus), not a separate Smyrna of Asia Minor as a city eponym.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Myrrha" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Origin
The Myrrha tale is closely bound to that of Adonis, whose name Hellenizes Phoenician adoni ("my lord"). Greeks knew the Adonis cult from about the sixth century BC, almost certainly through Cyprus. Adonis himself was understood as a Phoenician fertility or vegetation figure; uncertainty over whether the mother was called Myrrha or Smyrna, and who her father was, likely arose on Cyprus before the story entered Greek literature. Classical authors then expanded the incest-and-metamorphosis narrative around the Near Eastern core.
II.Ovid's version
In Metamorphoses Book 10, Orpheus sings the tale as a warning of horror. Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras and Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus, burns with unlawful desire for her father; Ovid blames a Fury rather than Cupid. After a sleepless struggle she tries to hang herself; her nurse discovers her, extracts the secret, and — during the rites of Ceres, when wives abstain from their husbands — brings her to Cinyras as an anonymous girl of Myrrha's age.
The affair lasts several nights in darkness until Cinyras lights a lamp, recognises his daughter, and draws his sword. Myrrha flees across Arabia and Panchaea to Sabaea. Nine months pregnant, she prays to be neither among the living nor the dead; the gods root her as a myrrh tree, her tears becoming the fragrant sap. Lucina splits the bark and delivers Adonis.
III.Other versions
Apollodorus offers three Adonis parentages: Cinyras and Metharme (without the incest tree-birth); Hesiod's Phoenix and Alphesiboea; and, from Panyasis, Smyrna daughter of King Theias of Assyria, cursed by Aphrodite for neglect of her cult, who sleeps with her father for twelve nights, flees, and becomes the smyrna tree from which Adonis is born after ten months.
Hyginus names Smyrna daughter of Cinyras of Assyria; Cenchreis's boast that the girl surpassed Venus in beauty brings Venus's curse. Antoninus Liberalis sets the story near Mount Lebanon with King Thias and daughter Smyrna, aided by the nurse Hippolyte; Zeus transforms her, Thias kills himself, and Zeus has the child raised as Adonis. A rare variant attributes Myrrha's curse to Helios.
IV.Interpretation and reception
Critical readings treat the tree-metamorphosis as silencing punishment for taboo desire, or as marking the boundary between nature (where animals may mate across kinship) and human law. The story has been compared with Lot's daughters and with other Ovidian incest narratives such as Byblis.
Post-classical reception includes Dante's Inferno (Myrrha among the falsifiers in the eighth circle), Alfieri's tragedy Mirra, Mary Shelley's Mathilda, Byron's Sardanapalus (a slave named Myrrha), Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, and Frank Bidart's The Second Hour of the Night. Visual treatments range from Virgil Solis and Bernard Picart to Gustave Doré's Inferno plate and Franceschini's Birth of Adonis.