The Tale of Philemon and Baucis
At a Glance
- Central figures: Philemon and Baucis, an elderly couple from Phrygia; Zeus and Hermes, who arrive at their door disguised as poor travelers.
- Setting: The region of Phrygia, in a small village where the gods have come down to test the hospitality of mortals. The story is preserved most fully in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
- The turn: Every household in the village turns the strangers away. Philemon and Baucis, the poorest of all, open their door and share everything they have.
- The outcome: The village is flooded as punishment for its cruelty; the cottage of Philemon and Baucis is transformed into a temple, and the couple serve as its priests until, at their deaths, they are changed into two intertwined trees.
- The legacy: The two trees - an oak and a linden - standing rooted together at the temple entrance, regarded by later generations as a monument to xenia and to a love that outlasted the bodies that held it.
Zeus and Hermes came down from Olympus wearing the faces of men who had walked too far and eaten too little. They had no pack animals. No escort. They knocked on door after door along the road through Phrygia, and every door was shut in their faces - sometimes with a curse, sometimes in silence, which was worse.
They came at last to the edge of the village, where the track narrowed and the houses gave way to a small cottage, low-roofed and old, its walls reeded and thatched. Philemon stood in the doorway. He was an old man, and his wife Baucis was older still, or perhaps only looked it. They had been poor for as long as anyone in the village could remember, and in all that time they had never stopped keeping the customs of xenia - the sacred bond between host and stranger that the gods themselves had set down.
The Door That Opened
Philemon saw two men on the path and called out to them before they had raised a hand to knock. He brought them inside, helped them to the bench near the fire, and began heating water for their feet. Baucis had the hearthfire going already, feeding it dry bark and split wood until the small logs caught. She pulled down the hanging leg of salt pork they had been saving and cut into it without hesitation.
What they had was not much. Olives. Eggs. Radishes and endives from the garden. A clay pot of cheese. Some field herbs. A honeycomb still in its wax. They set out everything, moving around each other the way two people move when they have shared a small space for fifty years. Philemon steadied the uneven table leg with a piece of broken pottery. Baucis wiped the board with fresh mint.
They poured wine from the one jug they kept for guests.
The Jug That Would Not Empty
It was Philemon who noticed first. He had poured full cups twice over and the jug weighed the same in his hand as when he had first lifted it. He poured again. The wine did not run shallow. He looked at Baucis across the table. She had gone still, watching the jug, her hand at her lips.
They had hosted enough travelers to know what an empty vessel felt like. This one stayed full.
The couple stepped back from the table. Whatever fear moved through them, it did not make them run - it made them kneel. They asked forgiveness for the smallness of the meal, for the cracked earthenware, for the smoke-stained walls. Their guests, they now understood, were something other than men on a road.
Zeus told them to stand. He told them to come with him, and to bring nothing.
The Flood
The three of them - four, counting Hermes - walked out into the late evening air and up toward the ridge above the village. Philemon and Baucis climbed slowly. When they turned at the top and looked back, the village was already half under water. Not a storm flood. A still, spreading darkness, moving door to door through every house that had turned strangers away. The rooftops dropped below the surface one by one.
Only their cottage stood untouched on its small rise. As they watched, it changed. The thatched roof lifted. The clay walls brightened to white stone, then marble. Columns grew where the old doorposts had been. The broken table was gone. In its place stood an altar, and hanging lamps, and the carved threshold of a proper temple.
They had never owned anything worth keeping. Now they stood at the entrance to a temple of Zeus.
The One Wish
Zeus asked them to name what they wanted.
Philemon and Baucis took a moment. They spoke quietly to each other - not the way people deliberate over a great choice, but the way they had always spoken, heads close together, voices low. When they turned back to the god their answer was ready.
They wanted to serve the temple for the rest of their lives.
And they wanted to die together. They had never lived a day without each other, and they could not imagine the surviving one - whichever of them that turned out to be - learning to do it. Let them go at the same hour, they said. Let neither have to bury the other.
The wish was granted.
The Oak and the Linden
They lived on in the temple for many years, tending the altar, keeping the lamps filled, greeting travelers with the same ease they had always shown. Then one afternoon, standing on the temple steps in the long light, each one saw the other begin to change. Bark moved up from the ground like rising water. Philemon watched Baucis’s face a moment before the leaves covered it. She, watching him, managed to say his name.
Their branches grew toward each other as the wood closed over them. By the time the transformation was complete, the two trees stood at the temple steps with their roots wound together underground and their canopies touching overhead - an oak on one side, a linden on the other.
For a long time afterward, people brought garlands to hang in those branches. They came from considerable distances to do it, and they stood for a while at the base of the trees before moving on, looking up at where the two canopies joined.