Cossío’s classic panoptic survey of 1952, Fábulas mitológicas en España, bears witness to the quantity of long Ovidian myths, alias fábulas, which were produced in the Spanish Golden Age. It also shows how many such poems were retellings of the Metamorphoses rather than new stories in imitation of Ovid: a rough count yielded some 367 imitations as against thirteen ‘Fábulas originales’, some of which are post-1700. Here, I think, lies the significance of the Fábula de Genil of Pedro Espinosa. Espinosa (born Antequera 1578, died Sanlúcar 1650) is best known as one of Góngora’s earliest followers, and as the editor of the Flores de poetas ilustres de España (Valladolid: Luis Sánchez, 1605), an anthology of avant-garde poets, many of them Andalusian, including Góngora. Arthur Terry writes of Espinosa’s ‘taste for the new’. The Andalusian element in his life and his work is strong: he wrote a prose Panegírico a la nobilísima, leal, augusta, felice ciudad Antequera (Jerez: Fernando Rey, 1626) and was chaplain to the Conde de Niebla, later the Duke of Medina Sidonia, to whom Góngora dedicated the Soledades. Critics such as Carreira (p. 169) make no bones that he is a poet of the second rank, and it is not my intention to dispute this: the focus of this chapter is Espinosa’s appropriation of Ovidian motifs in a rare attempt to create a new myth.

The 240 lines in thirty octavas reales that make up the poem, first printed in the Flores de poetas ilustres of 1605 (fols 107v–12v), may be summarized as follows. Genil is a river god who falls in love with the water-nymph Cínaris. He presses his suit in a speech in which he praises his lineage (he is Neptune’s grandson) and the riches of the meadows that he irrigates. But she is obdurate, throwing her golden embroidery frame in his face. His mood rapidly changes from supplication to threat: ‘por fuerza has de quererme, aunque no quieras’ (88). He takes his case to the god Betis, whose ‘alcázar’ is described at length. Betis summons an assembly of the water folk of the known classical world, and before them Betis dictates that Cínaris must be Genil’s. Her discomfiture divides the assembly, but finally the cry goes up: ‘¡Himeneo, Himeneo!’ (236). Cínaris though is distraught, and literally dissolves into tears.