And lastly, Iphis and Ianthe! A Roman story taking place in Crete where Egyptian gods save the day!
Funnily enough, the story of Iphis and Ianthe is the only mythological account that explicitly depicts female same-sex desire of Graeco-Roman mythology. It's a story that uses words you cannot simply reinterpret as something different nor erase. The story explicitly tells the reader that Iphis and Ianthe loved each other. End of sentence.
So it all started with Iphis' mother Telethusa hiding her daughter's gender from Iphis' father's knowledge. Iphis' father wanted a son and told Telethusa that he would kill his child if it were born a girl, so, like any mother would do, she raised Iphis as a boy. When Iphis was 13, her father (still ignorant of Iphis' true sex) arranged for her to marry Ianthe, daughter of Telestes. During their engagement, they were instructed alongside each other and shared the same teachers, and they fell deeply in love with one another. Ianthe loved Iphis and was looking forward to the day they married. But Iphis loved Ianthe with a broken heart.
Here is Iphis' lament to the goddess Hera, from Ovid's Metamorphoses:
"O what will be the awful dreaded end, with such a monstrous love compelling me? If the Gods should wish to save me, certainly they should have saved me; but, if their desire was for my ruin, still they should have given some natural suffering of humanity. The passion for a cow does not inflame a cow, no mare has ever sought another mare. The ram inflames the ewe, and every doe follows a chosen stag; so also birds are mated, and in all the animal world no female ever feels love passion for another femaleâwhy is it in me?"
The story ends with Telethusa drags Iphis to the goddess Isis' temple and ask the goddess to help her daughter. When Isis hears the mothers call for help she grants their wish to be true and turns Iphis into a man. And then Iphis and Ianthe gets married and lived happily.
In my illustration, I depict the front side as when the girls first meet, their arrangement. I decided to use the Hellenic symbol to show their connection to Greece/Crete. On the other side is when Iphis becomes a man with the help of the Egyptian goddess Isis, so the symbol changes to Isisâ instead. The symbol is a bit hard to see, but I imagined that they would have golden hot stamps, so as a keychain they would stand and pop out much more.
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