Baucis and Philemon

Also Known As: Greek Βαῦκις and Φιλήμων; Philemon from philein, “to love” or “to show affection”; Latin Baucis et Philemon
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: They have no powers of any kind, which is the point of them, and their one distinction is that they were the only household in a Phrygian district that opened its door to two strangers.
Role in Mythos: They are the surviving example in Ovid’s flood of the impious, kept alive to be made priests of the temple their own cottage turned into, and then turned into a linden and an oak growing side by side.
Relation to Humans: They are entirely human themselves, poor smallholders in late old age, and the story exists to be told about people rather than about gods. Ovid’s narrator says he was shown the two trunks on the spot and hung a garland on them, which makes them the rare mythological figures who end the story as a place a traveller could go and look at.

A thousand doors were bolted that evening. The thousand and first was too low to walk through standing up, so Jupiter stooped, and Mercury, who had left his wings somewhere back on the road, stooped after him, and the two of them straightened in a single room roofed with straw and marsh reed on a hillside in Phrygia.

The couple inside had married young and grown old without leaving that room. Ovid says they made their poverty light by admitting it, and that there was no point asking which of them were the masters and which the servants, because the whole household was two people and the same two both gave the orders and obeyed them. He also says something that sounds like a throwaway and is not: a thousand houses had turned the strangers away first.

What follows is the most carefully observed dinner in Latin poetry. Baucis rakes the warm ash aside and wakes the fire with leaves and dry bark and her own breath, feeding it split kindling from under the roof. Philemon takes a two-pronged fork to a smoke-blackened side of bacon hanging from a beam and cuts a small piece off a back he has been saving a long time. There is a cabbage from the watered garden. There is a mattress of river sedge thrown on a willow frame, covered with the cloth they only put out at festivals, and even that cloth is old and cheap. The table has three legs and the third is short, so Baucis wedges a bit of broken pot under it and then wipes the top level with green mint.

Then the food: olives, cornel cherries kept in wine lees, endive, radish, curd cheese, eggs turned lightly in the warm ash, all of it on earthenware. The mixing bowl, Ovid notes drily, is chased from the same silver, meaning it is clay too. The cups are beechwood with yellow wax rubbed into the hollows. For a second course there are nuts, figs, wrinkled dates, plums, apples in wide baskets, grapes, and a white honeycomb in the middle. Over all of it, he says, went willing faces.

The wine bowl empties and fills again by itself.

That is the moment the old people work out who is at their table, and their reaction is not awe. It is embarrassment. They lift their hands and start apologising for the meal. Then they decide the guests need better than this and go after the one goose on the smallholding, the bird that guards the yard, and the goose beats them. It outruns two people in their eighties, wears them out, and finally takes shelter behind the gods themselves, who forbid it to be killed. As far as the poem ever tells anyone, the goose lives.

The gods say plainly who they are, and that the neighbourhood is going to pay for what it is. Leave the house, they say, and come up the mountain with us. The two obey, propped on sticks, and when they are about a bowshot from the top they look back. Everything below is water. Only their own roof is still standing, and while they are staring at it, weeping for people who had shut their doors, the cottage changes: the forked props under the eaves become columns, the thatch turns yellow into gold, the doors are carved and the floor is marble.

Jupiter offers them anything. Philemon confers briefly with his wife and gives their joint answer, and it is the strangest wish in the *Metamorphoses* because it asks for a job and for an arrangement about dying. Let us be your priests and keep your shrine, he says. And since we have spent our years in agreement, let one hour take us both, so that I never see my wife’s grave and she never has to bury me.

They got it. They kept the temple as long as they had life, and then, very old, standing on the sacred steps telling visitors what had happened there, Baucis saw Philemon putting out leaves and Philemon saw Baucis putting out leaves. Bark climbed over their faces. They said goodbye to each other while they still had mouths to say it with.

Ovid never says which of them became the linden and which the oak. He tells us at the start of the episode that an oak and a linden stand together on the Phrygian hills inside a low wall, and at the end that the local inhabitant will still show you the two trunks grown out of the one twin body, and between those two sentences he simply declines to assign them. Later retellings pick, usually giving Baucis the linden. The poem does not.

Almost nothing else about them is recorded either. No parents, no children, no birthplace, no names before Ovid, no cult, no festival, no temple anywhere that claimed to be theirs. The whole surviving ancient account of Baucis and Philemon is one passage of one poem, *Metamorphoses* 8.611 to 724, written by Ovid around the year 8, and it is put in the mouth of a minor character called Lelex at a dinner party, specifically to shut up a guest who has just said the gods are not powerful enough to change shapes. Lelex claims to have been there and seen the place. Everything anyone has said about the couple since is a retelling of those hundred and thirteen lines.

There is no power in the story that belongs to the couple. Every force in it is either divine or economic. What they have instead is the only thing the tale needs them to have, which is a door they were willing to open when a thousand of their neighbours would not, and the limits on them are absolute: they are old, they are poor, they cannot save anybody else, and they are not asked whether they want the flood. Nobody else in the district survived. They are given exactly what they request and they request very little, which is why the wish is quoted more often than the miracle, and why the two trees are still the part people remember.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were Baucis and Philemon?

Baucis and Philemon were an elderly, poor married couple in Phrygia who gave food and shelter to Jupiter and Mercury when the gods were travelling disguised as ordinary men. Every other household in the district had turned the strangers away. They appear in one ancient source, Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, Book 8.

What happened to Baucis and Philemon at the end of the story?

They were turned into two trees, a linden and an oak, growing side by side from a single pair of trunks. They had asked the gods to let one hour take them both so that neither would have to bury the other, and the transformation happened while they were standing on the steps of their temple in extreme old age, each watching the other put out leaves.

What did Baucis and Philemon ask the gods for?

They asked for two things: to serve as priests and guardians of the temple, and to die in the same hour. Philemon speaks the request after a short private conference with Baucis, giving his reason plainly, that he does not want to see his wife’s grave or be buried by her.

Was the goose killed in the story of Baucis and Philemon?

No. The couple tried to catch their single goose to serve it to their guests, but the bird outran them and took refuge with the gods, who forbade it to be killed. Ovid never mentions it again, so as far as the poem goes the goose survives the story.

Which tree was Baucis and which was Philemon?

Ovid does not say. He names an oak and a linden standing together and says the two trunks grew from one twin body, but he never assigns one tree to one person. The common modern pairing, with Baucis as the linden, comes from later retellings rather than from the poem.