Peter D’Epiro, Robert Dulgarian, Marina Warner, Amy Knight, Sophie Pinkham, Josephine Hayes Dean, Jonathan Rée, Betsy Hulick, Ruth Mandel and Rachel Lehr, Edward Osowski, and John Banville

To the Editors:

In her lively, wide-ranging, and learned review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople: A

Human History [NYR, March 25], Marina Warner states that “Proteus, whom Homer calls the Old Man of the Sea, savagely rapes Thetis, the sea goddess; the child of this union is Achilles.” She identifies her source for this unusual paternity accusation as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, leading one to wonder whether Ovid had the revisionist daring to nullify Homer’s oft-repeated epithet for Achilles—“son of Peleus”—in both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It turns out he didn’t, though the relevant episode from the Metamorphoses (11.217– 265) does subvert the protean aspects of Proteus in book 4 of the Odyssey by ascribing to a sea goddess—the Nereid Thetis— the shape-shifting transformations that had been the Homeric Proteus’s stock-in-trade whenever he didn’t want to prophesy to someone (such as Menelaus). According to Ovid, Proteus had urged the virgin Thetis to conceive a child because she was destined to bear a son mightier than his father. This was the only reason Jove had decided to leave Thetis unmolested and instead urged his mortal grandson Peleus to pursue the lovely Nereid.

Peleus attempts to do Jove’s bidding by stalking Thetis, who was in the habit of riding a bridled dolphin in the nude to a certain grotto where she would dismount and take a nap. But when he entwines his arms around the sleeping goddess’s neck, he’s startled to see her change into a bird, then a stout tree, and finally a tigress. That’s when he backs off. Stymied, Peleus prays and sacrifices to the gods of the sea. The obliging Proteus rises up through the waves and advises him to gently but firmly tie Thetis down the next time she sleeps in her grotto—and then let her go through all the changes she wants while holding on to her tightly. And so, after a number of unspecified metamorphoses, Thetis succumbs to the inevitable, reverts to her own form, and yields to Peleus, intuiting he must be the protégé of some god. Thus, according to Ovid, Peleus begets the great Achilles, as Homeric scripture had ordained, but the wizard Proteus insinuates his slippery self into the process, despite getting his thunder stolen by Thetis’s uncanonical transformations.

Peter D’Epiro Ridgewood, New Jersey