Invidia

Q: Who was Invidia?

Invidia, Latin for “envy”, is the personification of envy in Roman literature. She has no known myth of her own apart from a famous scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Minerva visits her house to have her poison a girl with jealousy.

Invidia, Latin for “envy”, is the personification of envy in Roman literature. She has no known myth of her own apart from a famous scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Minerva visits her house to have her poison a girl with jealousy. Invidia is not Nemesis: the Greek goddess Nemesis stands for retribution, while Invidia stands for the grudging, wasting feeling of begrudging other people their good fortune.

Invidia in Ovid

Her House

Ovid describes Invidia’s house as hidden in the deepest valleys, without sun, closed to every wind, full of sluggish cold, always without fire and always thick with gloom. The warlike Minerva stops in front of the house, because it is not lawful for her to go in, and strikes the doorposts with the tip of her spear. When the doors open she sees Invidia inside, eating the flesh of vipers, which feeds her own vices (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.760–770).

Her Appearance

Invidia gets up slowly, leaving the half-eaten snakes, and walks with a sluggish step. When she sees the goddess, beautiful in her armour, she groans. Ovid’s portrait follows: pallor sits on her face, leanness is on her whole body, her gaze is never straight, her teeth are dark with rust, her breast is green with gall and her tongue is wet with poison. She never smiles unless someone else’s pain amuses her, and does not enjoy sleep, being kept awake by her cares. She looks at other people’s successes and wastes away as she looks, “both gnawing and being gnawed, and she is her own punishment” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.770–782).

Aglauros

Minerva, who dislikes Invidia but must speak to her, tells her briefly to infect one of the daughters of Cecrops with her disease, Aglauros, and leaves, pushing off from the earth with her spear. Invidia mutters, grudging Minerva her success, takes a staff wound about with thorns and, wrapped in black clouds, goes on her way, withering the fields and grass and poisoning peoples, cities and houses with her breath. Arriving in Athens, which is flourishing in wealth and peace, she can hardly keep from weeping because she sees nothing to weep over. She enters the girl’s room, touches her chest with a hand stained with rust, fills her heart with thorns and breathes poison into her. To make the cause of the evil clearer, she sets before the girl’s eyes her sister Herse and Herse’s happy union with a god. Aglauros wastes away, burning with envy, and when Mercury comes to visit Herse she tries to bar his way. He turns her to stone, and Ovid says that the stone was not white, because her own mind had stained it (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.783–832).

Parentage and Other Writers

Cicero reports that the old genealogists listed Invidentia (Envy) among the children of Erebus and Night, together with Fate, Old Age, Death, Darkness, Misery, Fraud and others (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.44). Virgil mentions Invidia as unlucky or “unhappy” and says that in the underworld she will fear the Furies, the grim river of Cocytus, the twisted snakes and huge wheel of Ixion, and the stone that cannot be overcome (Virgil, Georgics 3.37–39).

The Greeks had no figure named Invidia. In the Works and Days Hesiod says that in the Iron Age jealousy (Zelos) will go with all wretched men, ill-sounding, delighting in evil, with a hateful face (Hesiod, Works and Days 195–196). Nemesis, whom Hesiod calls a child of Night and a bane to mortals, is a separate goddess (Hesiod, Theogony 223).