Erysichthon the Thessalian king scorned the gods and felled Ceres' ancient oak with an axe — and the goddess sent Famine to sit upon him, an endless hunger that sold his daughter Mestra again and again until he devoured himself, while she inherited Proteus' power to change her shape.1
The sacred oak
After Baucis and Philemon, Ovid turns to impiety. Erysichthon son of Triopas — not the childless son of Cecrops whom Apollodorus names in another genealogy — ordered his men to cut timber for a hall and struck with his axe the oak Ceres loved, where garlands hung and votive tablets praised the goddess. The tree bled; a nymph warned him; he threatened her and felled the holy trunk.2
Famine
Ceres, too far in Erysichthon's punishment to send her own wrath, asked Famine to cling to him. The hag flew on midnight wings and breathed her pestilence through the king's mouth — a hunger no feast could satisfy, no gold could buy away. Callimachus tells a like vengeance when the impious man cut down Demeter's grove.3
Mestra
His daughter Mestra had inherited Proteus' power to change form — Ovid makes her wife of Autolycus — and when creditors closed on the starving king she was sold as slave, then mare, then fish, escaping each time until her price fed his maw. He sold her again and again; she returned in new shape; the curse only deepened.4
Self-devouring
At last Erysichthon gnawed his own limbs to feed the void Ceres had opened in him — a metamorphosis of the body consumed from within rather than changed to tree or beast. Ovid's age of iron had found its perfect glutton: the man who violated the goddess of grain was eaten by hunger itself.5
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
Erysichthon Sells His Daughter Mestra
Jan Steen, c. 1650–1660
Rijksmuseum oil: Steen stages Ovid's cruel sequel — Erysichthon, wasting under Demeter's hunger-curse, sells shape-shifting Mestra for food. Sacrilege rewritten as market-day desperation.
Ceres' Nymph Telling Famine to Strike Erysichthon
Antonio Tempesta, 1606
Tempesta Metamorphoses plate (MET): Ceres' nymph carries the order that Famine enter Erysichthon's vitals — the divine machinery that turns the felled oak into endless appetite.
Erysichthon Selling His Daughter
Antonio Tempesta, 1606
Plate 81 of the same cycle: Mestra sold again and again in shifting guise while her father eats through every ransom — appetite that consumes the household.
Erysichthon and Mestra
Johann Wilhelm Baur, c. 1639–1641
Baur's Metamorphoses etching: Erysichthon bargains over Mestra while Ceres' hunger still claws at him — seventeenth-century print culture's stock image of the Thessalian curse.
In play
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book 8: Erysichthon fells Ceres' oak and Famine sits in his gut — Mestra sold again and again until the king eats himself.
Hymns (Callimachus)
Callimachus
Hymn 6 to Demeter — the Hellenistic source Ovid reworked: sacrilege in the grove and hunger that ruins a house.
Erysichthon of Thessaly
The Thessalian king punished with endless hunger — still the mythic face of appetite that no feast can fill.