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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' is a seminal work of Latin literature that encompasses a collection of myths and legends from Greek and Roman antiquity. Written in dactylic hexameter, this epic poem consists of fifteen books exploring themes such as transformation, love, tragedy, and the power of the gods. Ovid's unparalleled storytelling ability and vivid imagery bring these ancient tales to life, making 'Metamorphoses' a captivating read for lovers of classical literature. This work is considered a cornerstone of Western literature and continues to influence writers and artists to this day. Ovid, a Roman poet, was known for his innovative approach to mythology and his skillful manipulation of poetic forms. Fueled by his exile from Rome in 8 AD, Ovid crafted 'Metamorphoses' as a way to preserve and reinvent these timeless stories, ensuring their enduring legacy. His keen understanding of human nature and his masterful storytelling make 'Metamorphoses' a work of art that transcends time and culture. I highly recommend 'Metamorphoses' to readers who appreciate classical mythology, poetic craftsmanship, and timeless themes that resonate across generations. Ovid's masterpiece is a testament to the enduring power of storytelling and the enduring impact of the ancient world on our modern consciousness. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Metamorphoses
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Table of Contents
Introduction
In a universe where nothing holds its shape for long, the poem unfurls a panorama of transformations in which gods, humans, landscapes, and even stories slip their boundaries, revealing change as the most durable law and desire as its most volatile energy, while the teller’s art keeps pace with motion, catching each new form at the instant of becoming and letting it flow forward into another, so that creation and narration feel like twin currents in the same river, glittering, dangerous, and inexhaustibly alluring.
Metamorphoses is a long narrative poem by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), written in Latin during the reign of Augustus in the early first century CE and known to have been in circulation around 8 CE. Cast in fifteen books of epic meter, it gathers an extensive sequence of mythic and legendary tales whose common thread is transformation. The poem moves from the world’s beginnings toward Ovid’s own cultural moment, shaping a loose chronology while allowing variety in voice, mood, and scale. Its premise is expansive yet simple: to explore change as a narrative engine and a human reality.
Its classic status rests first on sheer ambition. Ovid fuses dozens of independent narratives into a continuous design without sacrificing the freshness of each episode. The artistry of transitions—shifts of speaker, scene, and tone—creates momentum that feels both inevitable and surprising. The language balances precision with play, pathos with wit, and grandeur with intimacy. In scope and execution, the work honors epic precedent while revising it from within, making metamorphosis not merely a theme but a structural principle. This compositional daring, coupled with memorable storytelling, secures its enduring place in the literary tradition.
The poem’s influence has been deep and long-lasting. Medieval and Renaissance writers drew on its stories and techniques, and its imagination helped shape European literature. Dante engages with Ovidian transformations in his own epic architecture; Geoffrey Chaucer adapts Ovidian material to explore love and misfortune; William Shakespeare frequently reworks Ovidian images and plots, aided by English translations that spread the poem’s reach. Visual artists, too, found in it a treasury of subjects and emotions. Across centuries, it has served as a toolkit for narrative invention, a lexicon of myth, and a model of poetic agility.
Metamorphoses endures because it treats change not as a thematic ornament but as a lens for fundamental questions. What remains of a person when the body alters? How do desire and power transform or deform justice? Is memory a refuge or another shifting surface? Ovid’s gods display recognizable human impulses; his mortals encounter forces that magnify ordinary hopes and fears. Love, ambition, creativity, jealousy, and grief appear in continually recomposed forms. The poem’s moral world resists blunt verdicts: transformations can punish, preserve, liberate, or complicate, and often do several of these at once.
The connective tissue of the poem is as remarkable as its episodes. Ovid relishes embedded storytelling, where one tale flowers inside another, and narrators within the poem interpret, misread, or reshape events. These layered perspectives invite readers to notice how stories themselves mutate with each retelling. Moments of vividly crafted description, rhetorical flourish, and sudden tonal shift show a poet attentive to pacing and texture. The result is a fabric of narratives whose seams are artfully visible, encouraging reflection on the means by which literature orders time, motive, and consequence.
Ovid wrote during a period of political consolidation and cultural display under Augustus. The poem participates in Rome’s fascination with origins, genealogy, and the making of order, yet it also dwells on instability and surprise. In 8 CE Ovid was exiled by imperial order to Tomis on the Black Sea, a biographical fact that sharpened later readers’ interest in the relationship between art and authority. Without reducing the poem to commentary, this context illuminates its tension between grand design and restless flux, and its subtle awareness of how power shapes both bodies and narratives.
Formally, the work inhabits epic meter while absorbing and transforming other genres: elegy’s intimacy, tragedy’s severity, pastoral’s calm, and didactic poetry’s appetite for explanation. This mixture expands what an epic can hold. Ovid’s tone is flexible—grave in one moment, playful or ironic in the next—mirroring the instability that the poem thematizes. The organizing principle of metamorphosis lets varied modes coexist without chaos, since change provides a rationale for movement across emotional registers, settings, and scales. The poem becomes a museum and a laboratory of forms, each exhibit already in motion.
Among its abiding concerns is the power of art to rival or repair nature. The poem repeatedly stages acts of making—songs, sculptures, woven images, verbal portraits—and considers how representation can preserve what time alters. Storytelling becomes a stay against disappearance, giving shape to loss and letting love or grief survive in crafted form. In this way, Metamorphoses meditates on its own medium: words turn to figures, figures turn to memory, and memory returns as narrative. The transformations it records double as metaphors for the reader’s experience of interpretation and reimagining.
The poem’s reach in later languages owes much to translation. In English, Arthur Golding’s 1567 version helped transmit Ovid’s stories and stylistic verve to Renaissance audiences, exerting particular influence on the imagery and plotting of Elizabethan drama. Since then, many translators have reinterpreted the poem for new eras, revealing its adaptability to changing tastes and idioms. Each version underscores a different facet—rapidity, elegance, irony, tenderness—confirming that the work’s liveliness is not confined to its original Latin but travels across time and speech communities.
For first-time readers, the best approach is to follow the flow and let patterns accumulate. Names and episodes will echo and reconfigure; moral judgments may tilt as perspectives shift. Ovid’s narrative generosity gives room to sympathize, recoil, reconsider, and admire. The poem rewards both continuous reading and selective revisiting, since motifs—voices silenced or released, loves pursued or redirected, boundaries crossed or remade—gain force through repetition in altered forms. Without requiring specialized knowledge, it invites curiosity about myth, language, and the ways stories shape how we imagine ourselves and others.
Today, Metamorphoses remains compelling because it addresses experiences that feel urgent: the instability of identity, the dynamics of consent and authority, the persistence of memory, and the inventiveness of art under constraint. In an age attentive to transformation—technological, ecological, social—the poem offers a capacious mirror for reflecting on change’s costs and possibilities. Its humane curiosity, structural daring, and stylistic brilliance continue to invite readers into an ancient work that feels alive to the present, securing its place as a classic not by age alone but by inexhaustible relevance.
Synopsis
Metamorphoses, a 15-book Latin narrative poem by Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), composed in the early first century CE under Augustus, offers a continuous sequence of myths linked by the theme of transformation. Ovid arranges episodes from the world’s beginnings to his Roman present, moving fluidly across gods, heroes, and mortals. Each scene pivots on a change of form—divine, human, animal, plant, stone, or star—prompted by desire, wrath, pity, or chance. The poem blends high epic with delicate miniatures, set speeches, and framed tales, using transitions and embedded narrators to maintain momentum. Its neutral throughline is change itself, ceaseless, inventive, and morally ambiguous.
Opening with a cosmogony, Ovid moves from primal chaos to an ordered universe governed by divinities who shape earth, sea, and sky. He sketches the successive ages of humanity, tracing a decline from simplicity to violence, before a divine flood resets the world. Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulate humankind in a manner suited to the poem’s guiding motif. Early stories establish patterns of pursuit and reprieve, punishment and escape: Apollo’s sudden infatuation ends in a protective change, while Io’s suffering under vigilant surveillance draws in Mercury’s craft. Throughout, alterations of body register shifts in power and the precarious terms of safety.
In the next movement, Phaethon’s attempt to steer his father’s chariot threatens the cosmos, generating a chain of transformations that radiate grief and warning. Tales of love and abduction follow, including Europa’s transport across the sea and Callisto’s loss of place among companions, each resolved in altered forms that both protect and stigmatize. The scene shifts to Thebes, founded by Cadmus, where Actaeon’s fatal gaze and Semele’s imperiled trust illustrate the danger of seeing or not seeing the divine. With Tiresias as arbiter between gods, Ovid explores perception and judgment; soon after, Echo and Narcissus dramatize obsession and self-knowledge.
Ovid frames a suite of stories within the spinning of the Minyad sisters, whose refusal to honor Bacchus prompts consequences. Their tales range from the clandestine devotion of Pyramus and Thisbe to the entanglement of lovers whose union produces a single androgynous body, tracking how passion reconfigures identity. As Bacchus exacts recognition, the narrative widens to Perseus: the hero’s encounter with Medusa becomes origin story and armory, while his rescue of Andromeda sets a banquet hall spiraling into instantaneous petrifications. Across these episodes, storytelling itself is shown as a force that binds community, contests authority, and transforms reputations.
With Perseus’s exploits concluded, the Muses narrate their contest with the Pierides, a rivalry of song that dramatizes art’s power and its risks. The abduction of Proserpina leads to Ceres’ search, famine’s approach, and a negotiated rhythm for seasons, anchored by change and return. In Book 6, Minerva and Arachne compete at the loom, setting divine prestige against human skill; the outcome affirms the cost of challenging power while preserving the truth-content of art. Subsequent tales—Niobe’s boast and sorrow, Marsyas’s musical hubris, and the harrowing sequence of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela—probe speech, silence, and the remaking of bodies.
Medea’s appearance intensifies the poem’s focus on agency and craft. She aids Jason, manipulates age and time, and entangles loyalty with revenge, her pharmaka rendering transformation deliberate rather than accidental. Minos’s campaign prompts Scylla’s betrayal at a city’s walls, raising questions about filial duty and desire. Daedalus and Icarus mark the limits of invention and instruction, while the Calydonian boar hunt assembles heroes to test reputation and kinship. Meleager and Atalanta’s intertwined stories, the hospitality of Baucis and Philemon, and Erysichthon’s insatiable appetite align moral choice with metamorphosis, sketching a world where generosity stabilizes and greed unravels human form.
Hercules’ labors appear episodically, culminating in a change of status that repositions the boundary between mortal suffering and divine recognition. Further domestic and erotic tales ensue: Byblis’s forbidden longing and a prayer that alters a life; the union of Iphis and Ianthe made possible by a timely transformation. Orpheus descends for Eurydice, and his story widens into a concert of myths sung to an attentive wilderness. His repertory includes sculpted desire that comes alive, love punished by its own intensity, and a hunter whose beauty invites peril. These narratives test how art persuades matter and consoles irreparable loss.
After the consequences of Orpheus’s charisma, Ovid turns to Midas, a parable of wish and correction that shifts into satire on musical judgment. The poem then moves through maritime and nuptial perils—Ceyx and Alcyone’s ordeal—and toward Thessalian and Trojan sequences. Peleus and Thetis’ union prefaces episodes surrounding the war: Achilles’ early encounters, the invulnerability of Cycnus, and the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs, where bodies and weapons turn space into a sculptor’s studio. The debate between Ajax and Ulysses over a fallen hero’s arms showcases rhetoric’s transformative edge, as eloquence remolds value, ancestry, and claims to glory.
The closing books trace Aeneas’s travels in Italy, where hospitality, foundation myths, and local metamorphoses braid Roman origins to Greek precedent. Circe’s island and Picus’s fate, the fidelity of Pomona and the disguises of Vertumnus, and the transformations surrounding early Rome culminate in apotheoses that align civic order with divine favor. A long discourse attributed to Pythagoras theorizes universal change, dietary ethics, and the circulation of souls, offering a philosophical capstone to the poem’s practice. With the deification of Julius Caesar and praise of Augustus, Ovid links mythic mutability to imperial time, asserting art’s capacity to preserve forms in flux.
Historical Context
Metamorphoses emerged in early imperial Rome, largely composed in the first decade BCE to the first decade CE and circulated by 8 CE, when its author, Publius Ovidius Naso, was exiled. The setting is the city of Rome and its Mediterranean world under Augustus, whose principate, established in 27 BCE, reorganized political life after civil war. Dominant institutions included the Senate, law courts, priestly colleges, and the household as a moral and legal unit, all now overshadowed by the authority of the princeps. Ovid’s epic, written in Latin hexameters, frames mythic change within this political order, culminating in Rome’s present and imperial self-understanding.
The poem must be read against the long twilight of the Republic. After Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, alliances and civil wars ended with Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE. In 27 BCE the Senate conferred powers on Octavian as “Augustus,” inaugurating the Principate. A rhetoric of restored order and peace, the Pax Romana, followed. Metamorphoses, opening with primal chaos organized into a cosmos, resonates with this Augustan narrative of bringing order to disorder, even as its ceaseless transformations subtly question whether order can ever be permanent.
Augustan social policy sought to stabilize elite families and public morals. The Lex Iulia laws of 18 BCE and the Lex Papia Poppaea of 9 CE regulated marriage, penalized adultery, and incentivized childbirth among citizens. These measures, together with sumptuary and inheritance rules, aligned private life with public aims. Ovid’s earlier love poetry hardly fit that project, and although Metamorphoses is not a handbook of seduction, its recurrent focus on desire, consent, and the consequences of transgression shows a poet attentive to the tensions between law, custom, and human impulse in the age of moral reform.
Religious renewal was central to Augustan rule. Temples were restored, priesthoods reorganized, and new monuments like the Ara Pacis (consecrated 9 BCE) linked piety to imperial peace. The imperial cult developed as Julius Caesar was posthumously deified in 42 BCE, with Augustus fashioned as his heir. Metamorphoses incorporates this religious politics in its apotheosis of Caesar and praise of Augustus, embedding contemporary ideology within a mythic continuum. While honoring the official narrative, Ovid’s irreverent portrayals of gods and their volatile passions complicate the aura of solemn reform with wit and ambiguity.
A brilliant literary culture flourished under Augustus. Patronage networks, including those associated with Maecenas, fostered poets like Virgil and Horace, whose works helped articulate Rome’s destiny. Ovid belonged to a slightly younger generation, inheriting and reworking their achievements. Where the Aeneid offered a national epic of foundation and duty, Metamorphoses unfolds a transhistorical epic of stories and change. By juxtaposing civic grandeur with playful erudition and tragic caprice, Ovid positions himself within the Augustan project while maintaining a distinctive, often skeptical, poetic stance.
Ovid’s education in rhetoric and law, typical for a Roman of equestrian status, shaped his style. The culture of declamation trained speakers to argue either side of a case with ingenuity, a habit visible in the poem’s shifting viewpoints and artful speech. His technique also owes much to Hellenistic scholarship from Alexandria, with its preference for learned allusion, miniature epic scenes, and catalogues. Metamorphoses synthesizes Greek and Roman sources, adapting tragedy, epic, and learned mythography, and displays an urbane mastery prized in elite Roman salons and recitation halls.
The circulation of literature depended on a vibrant book trade. Poets gave public readings, then released texts through scribal shops that copied papyrus rolls for sale. Public libraries expanded under Augustus, notably the Palatine Library, while private collections flourished among the elite. Ovid later lamented in Tristia that Metamorphoses had gone out without the final corrections he desired, yet the poem clearly found readers. Rome’s roads, sea routes, and administrative networks sustained communication across the empire, allowing a sophisticated metropolitan text to travel from the capital to provincial audiences.
Urban transformation under Augustus formed the poem’s backdrop. The Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Mars Ultor (dedicated 2 BCE) symbolized restored justice and vengeance for Caesar. Theaters, porticoes, and baths provided venues for display and sociability. Aqueducts and road repairs improved daily life. Mythological scenes adorned domestic wall painting in the late Second and Third Styles, and pantomime dance dramatized myths on stage. Ovid’s repertoire of stories would have felt immediately familiar, echoing the imagery, rituals, and spectacles that surrounded Roman viewers in houses, forums, and festival calendars.
Roman society was hierarchical, with senators and equites at the top and enslaved people providing essential labor in households, agriculture, and crafts. Ovid, born in 43 BCE in Sulmo, belonged to the equestrian order, moving within circles that valued wit, eloquence, and literary polish. Metamorphoses ranges widely across social strata and settings—palace, forest, workshop—though always through a mythic lens. Its interest in artisans, shepherds, and nymphs alongside kings and gods mirrors the complexity of the Roman world, where legal status and patronage relations governed opportunity, protection, and vulnerability.
Augustan control over family life had public consequences. Scandals, such as the punishment of Augustus’ daughter Julia in 2 BCE for adultery, dramatized the regime’s resolve. Ovid’s exile by relegatio to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 CE, which he famously attributed to “a poem and a mistake” (carmen et error), shows the era’s sensitivity to moral and political propriety. Although the precise cause remains unknown, the climate of vigilance helps explain Metamorphoses’ tactful balancing act: it includes gestures of praise to the ruling house while repeatedly staging the unruly power of desire and the fragility of human arrangements.
The promise of internal peace did not eliminate frontier conflict. Augustan legions campaigned in Spain, the Balkans, and along the Rhine and Danube. The disastrous defeat of Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE revealed the limits of Roman control. Ovid’s relegation to Tomis, a Greek-founded city on the western Black Sea, placed him at the empire’s rough edge, far from Rome’s cultural center. Although Metamorphoses was largely complete by his departure, the poet’s subsequent reflections underscore how distance, instability, and imperial geography formed a lived counterpoint to the capital’s ideals of order and security.
Myth functioned in Rome as cultural memory, moral exemplum, and political genealogy. The Julio-Claudians traced their lineage to Venus through Aeneas, and public art and ritual rehearsed such claims. Metamorphoses collects transformations that explain constellations, flowers, and place-names, weaving etiologies into a grand temporal arc. This aligns with Augustan efforts to root the present in antiquity while also multiplying perspectives. Ovid’s habit of layering contradictory versions—tragic, comic, and learned—challenges singular readings, inviting audiences to see how narratives sustain power yet remain open to reinterpretation.
Philosophical discourse informed the poem’s cosmology. The opening account of creation draws on Greco-Roman speculation about the elements and world-order found in Stoic and Epicurean traditions, as well as earlier didactic poetry. Ovid refrains from doctrinal commitment, instead dramatizing competing models of nature and fate through stories of change. This intellectual eclecticism matched Rome’s environment, where multiple schools operated, public lectures were common, and educated readers relished the interplay between poetic form, scientific curiosity, and moral reflection without demanding strict system-building from verse.
The Roman appropriation of Greek culture shaped Ovid’s project. Myths from Homer, Hesiod, and Hellenistic poets were naturalized in Latin and relocated to Rome’s moral and political landscape. The empire’s governance of Greek-speaking provinces meant that Greek art, scholarship, and performance circulated widely. Metamorphoses performs a cultural translation: it orders a sprawling Greek mythic archive and culminates in Roman destiny. The move is not triumphalist alone; by foregrounding flux, chance, and vulnerability, Ovid both joins the Roman effort to anchor identity in antiquity and exposes the provisional nature of such anchoring.
Imperial punishment practices provide further context. Exile could take forms from outright banishment to the milder relegatio that Ovid experienced, typically without loss of property but under movement restrictions. Such penalties, executed by imperial decision, signaled the concentration of power in the princeps. Writers navigated these realities with caution. Metamorphoses’ tyrannical kings, capricious gods, and petitioning victims can read as reflections on authority and appeal within hierarchical systems, where justice depends on the disposition of those who command and the precarious eloquence of those who plead.
The economic and technological matrix of the era also mattered. A reformed monetary system, expanded trade across the Mediterranean, and secure sea lanes underpinned urban affluence. Papyrus from Egypt supplied the book trade; skilled copyists and booksellers met elite demand. Augustus’ administrative organization, including more regularized couriers on official business, supported information flow. Such conditions favored a long, intricately crafted poem whose episodes reward rereading. The Metamorphoses could circulate, be excerpted in performances, and enter schoolroom exercises, embedding its myths within the rhythms of Roman education and sociability.
In sum, Metamorphoses is both mirror and critique of its time. It affirms Augustan narratives of cosmic and civic order by culminating in Roman apotheosis, yet insists that order arises from, and remains vulnerable to, change. It showcases a culture of learning, performance, and visual splendor while dramatizing the costs of power, the volatility of desire, and the ambivalence of divine and human law. Written amid moral legislation, religious renovation, and political centralization, Ovid’s epic transforms inherited stories into a commentary on an empire remade—brilliant, confident, and, like all forms, perpetually in flux.
Author Biography
Introduction
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, was a Roman poet born in 43 BCE at Sulmo, east of Rome, and died in exile around 17/18 CE at Tomis on the Black Sea. He is a central voice of the Augustan age, celebrated for his virtuosity in elegiac couplets and for the epic Metamorphoses, a vast compendium of transformation myths. His other securely attributed works include the Amores, Heroides, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Fasti, Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, Ibis, and the now-lost tragedy Medea. Ovid’s poetry shaped the transmission of classical myth and deeply influenced European literature and art.
Writing with wit, irony, and dazzling narrative agility, Ovid moved confidently across genres: love elegy, didactic, calendar poetry, invective, and epic. He excelled at reworking inherited stories into psychologically vivid, rhetorically polished scenes. Exiled by Augustus in 8 CE for reasons he termed a poem and a mistake, he continued to compose from the periphery of the empire. Metamorphoses became a foundational source for later mythography, while the Fasti offered a poet’s guide to Roman festivals and rituals. Through medieval moralizations and Renaissance imitation, Ovid’s inventiveness remained a touchstone for poets, dramatists, and painters seeking classical authority and imaginative freedom.
Education and Literary Influences
Ovid grew up in an equestrian family at Sulmo and was educated at Rome, where elite schooling emphasized rhetoric. Ancient testimony, notably from Seneca the Elder, situates him among the declamatory schools that trained future advocates. He held minor public posts customary for a young man of his rank but soon renounced a public career in favor of poetry. He traveled to Greece—Athens is specifically mentioned in his own account—and encountered the Hellenic literary heritage that permeates his verse. This blend of Roman rhetorical drill and Greek cultural immersion furnished him with the stylistic finesse and intertextual breadth that mark his mature work.
His acknowledged and evident influences include the Alexandrian-Hellenistic tradition (especially Callimachus), Roman love elegists (Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus), and the wider Latin canon, with Catullus and Virgil as important precursors. Ovid’s elegy refines the urbane poetics of his predecessors while flaunting rhetorical color learned from declamation. He also adapts didactic and epic models to playful or subversive ends, filtering philosophical and mythic materials through an artful, often ironic voice. The result is a distinctive synthesis: learned yet light-footed, capable of sustaining intricate narrative webs while foregrounding artistry, self-consciousness, and the volatility of emotion and form.
Literary Career
Ovid’s earliest major collection, the Amores, refashioned Latin love elegy with a lighter, theatrically self-aware touch. Its speaker courts a fictional beloved commonly called Corinna, treating romantic entanglement as an arena for wit and role-play. Around the same period he composed the single-epistle Heroides, dramatic letters in elegiac couplets voiced by heroines of myth, and the playful Medicamina Faciei Femineae, a short poem on cosmetics. The Remedia Amoris, a companion to love instruction, offers strategies for ending affairs. He also wrote a tragedy, Medea, now lost save for fragments, which antiquity singled out for special praise.
The Ars Amatoria, a didactic elegy in three books on the techniques of seduction and sustaining affairs, cemented Ovid’s fame and notoriety. Its urbane, theatrical pedagogy turns social spaces—games, theatres, porticoes—into stages for amor. The work’s tone and subject matter were widely perceived as clashing with the moral legislation and public virtues promoted during Augustus’s reign. Ovid later connected his fate to a poem and an error, and ancient as well as modern readers have often associated the Ars with that formulation. Whatever the precise cause, the Ars became inseparable from debates about literary freedom, morality, and imperial authority.
With the Metamorphoses Ovid recast epic into a continuous fifteen-book sequence of transformations, spanning cosmogony, gods, heroes, and Rome’s ascent. Hexameter narration and a mosaic architecture allow stories to nest, echo, and refract. Psychological interiority, rhetorical flourish, and sharp shifts of tone bind disparate myths into a meditation on change—bodily, emotional, and cultural. The poem draws on Greek and Roman sources yet stamps them with Ovidian invention, producing a mythological encyclopedia that long served as the West’s principal myth treasury. Ovid later claimed the work lacked final polish when exile intervened, but its artistry ensured enduring prominence.
The Fasti, an elegiac poem arranged by the Roman calendar, explores festivals, rites, and aetiologies month by month. Its surviving six books (January through June) weave antiquarian lore, mythic narratives, etymologies, and vignettes of cult practice into an inquiry into Roman time and identity. The extant version addresses Germanicus, and Ovid states that exile hindered completion of the full twelve months. The Fasti’s blend of religious learning and poetic play makes it a unique record of Roman ritual imagination, complementing the mythic expansiveness of the Metamorphoses with local, calendrical focus and an elegiac voice tuned to commemoration and inquiry.
Exile transformed Ovid’s production but not his industry. In Tomis he composed the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, elegiac letters that narrate hardship, petition powerful figures at Rome, and defend his poetic life. These collections offer glimpses of frontier existence—linguistic isolation, climate, and fear—framed by a poet’s continuous effort to negotiate favor. He also wrote the Ibis, a learned invective steeped in mythological allusion. Across these works he revisits earlier genres while adopting a plaintive, supplicatory stance, testifying to both the resilience of his craft and the practical constraints imposed by distance from Rome’s cultural center.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Ovid did not present a coherent philosophical program, and explicit political advocacy is not a feature of his writing. His poetry champions artistry, performance, and the ambiguities of desire, often treating love and myth as arenas for play as well as reflection. He includes philosophical elements—most notably a Pythagorean discourse on change and the natural world in the Metamorphoses—but without authorial endorsement stated. Ovid sometimes pays homage to the ruling house, especially in exilic poems seeking mercy. Later readers have seen tensions between his erotic didacticism and Augustan moral policy, yet his engagement with public norms is primarily literary, indirect, and stylistically mediated.
Final Years & Legacy
In 8 CE Augustus ordered Ovid to leave Rome for Tomis, a remote port on the Black Sea. Ovid explains the penalty as arising from a poem and an error, declining to specify the latter. He remained at Tomis for the rest of his life, petitioning for mitigation and cultivating local ties as best he could. The exilic verse records harsh winters, insecurity at the frontier, and the strain of composing far from patrons and peers. He continued to revise and circulate his work from afar. Ovid died at Tomis, probably in 17 or 18 CE; the circumstances of his burial are not recorded.
Ovid’s legacy is immense. Medieval readers preserved his poems in numerous manuscripts, often moralizing or allegorizing the myths to fit Christian frameworks, which extended his reach in schools and sermons. Renaissance humanists and artists rediscovered the stylistic brilliance and narrative plenitude of the Metamorphoses and Fasti, drawing on them for poetry, drama, painting, and iconography. Writers such as Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare mined his stories and techniques, and later European literature repeatedly revisited his figures and themes. Modern scholarship continues to debate his art, self-fashioning, and exile, while translations keep his voice active in the global literary imagination.
Metamorphoses
INTRODUCTION.
P. Ovidius Naso—commonly known as Ovid—was born at Sulmo, about, ninety miles from Rome, in the year 43 B.C. His father belonged to an old equestrian family, and at an early age brought his son to Rome, where he was educated under the most distinguished masters. Very little is known of the poetís life, except that which is gathered from his own writings. After finishing his education at home he visited Athens, in company with the poet Macer, for the purpose of completing his studies, and before returning visited the magnificent cities of Asia Minor and spent nearly a year in Sicily.
Although as a young man Ovid showed a natural taste and inclination for poetical composition, he was by no means encouraged to indulge in this pursuit. His father thought that the profession of law was much more apt to lead to distinction and political eminence than the vocation of a poet. He therefore dissuaded his son from writing poetry and urged him to devote himself to the legal profession. Compliance with his father’s wishes led him to spend much time in the forum, and for a while poetry was abandoned. Upon attaining his majority, he held several minor offices of state; but neither his health nor his inclinations would permit him to perform the duties of public life. Poetry was his love, and in spite of the strong objections of his father, he resolved to abandon the law courts and devote himself to a more congenial occupation. He sought the society of the most distinguished poets of the day, and his admiration for them amounted almost to reverence. He numbered among his intimate friends the poets Macer, Propertius, Ponticus and Bassus, while Æmilius Macer, Virgil’s contemporary, used to read his compositions to him, and even the fastidious Horace, it is said, occasionally delighted the young man’s ear with the charm of his verse.
Ovid was married three times. His first wife he married when little more than a boy, and the union does not seem to have been a happy one, though it was probably due to no fault of the wife. His second wife seems also to have been of blameless character, but his love for her was of short duration. His third wife was a lady of the great Fabian house and a friend of the Empress Livia. She appears to have been a woman in every way worthy of the great and lasting love which the poet lavished upon her to the day of his death.
Up to the age of fifty Ovid had lived a life of prosperity and happiness. Though not a wealthy man, his means were such as to permit him to indulge in the luxuries of refined life, and his attainments as a poet had surrounded him with a circle of most desirable friends and admirers. He had even obtained the favor and patronage of the royal family. About the year 8 A.D. he, however, incurred the great displeasure of Augustus, and was ordered by him to withdraw from Rome and dwell in the colony of Tomi[1], on the shore of the Euxine sea[2]. Leaving behind him a wife to whom he was devotedly attached he obeyed the edict of his emperor and entered upon an exile from which he was destined never to return. He died in banishment at Tomi in the year 18 A.D.
The exact reason for Ovid’s banishment has never been clear, though there have been many conjectures as to the cause. About two years previous to his exile Ovid had published a composition which had greatly displeased Augustus, on account of its immoral tendency. Almost coincident with this publication was the discovery of the scandal relating to Julia, daughter of the emperor. It is probable that the proximity of these two events tended to intensify the imperial displeasure, and when some time later there was made public the intrigue of the emperor’s granddaughter, the indignation of Augustus gave itself vent in the banishment of Ovid.
The writings of Ovid consist of the Amores in three books; the Heroic Epistles, twenty-one in number; the Ars Amatoria; the Remedia Amoris; the Metamorphoses, in fifteen books; the Fasti, in six books; the Tristia, in five books; the Epistles, in four books, and a few minor poems. In the following pages will be found a translation of the Metamorphoses.
The Metamorphoses of Ovid are a compendium of the Mythological narratives of ancient Greece and Rome, so ingeniously framed, as to embrace a large amount of information upon almost every subject connected with the learning, traditions, manners, and customs of antiquity, and have afforded a fertile field of investigation to the learned of the civilized world. To present to the public a faithful translation of a work, universally esteemed, not only for its varied information, but as being the masterpiece of one of the greatest Poets of ancient Rome, is the object of the present volume.
To render the work, which, from its nature and design, must, of necessity, be replete with matter of obscure meaning, more inviting to the scholar, and more intelligible to those who are unversed in Classical literature, the translation is accompanied with Notes and Explanations, which, it is believed, will be found to throw considerable light upon the origin and meaning of some of the traditions of heathen Mythology.
In the translation, the text of the Delphin edition[3] has been generally adopted; and no deviation has been made from it, except in a few instances, where the reason for such a step is stated in the notes; at the same time, the texts of Burmann and Gierig have throughout been carefully consulted. The several editions vary materially in respect to punctuation; the Translator has consequently used his own discretion in adopting that which seemed to him the most fully to convey in each passage the intended meaning of the writer.
The Metamorphoses of Ovid have been frequently translated into the English language. On referring to Mr. Bohn’s excellent Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Classics and their Translations, we find that the whole of the work has been twice translated into English Prose, while five translations in Verse are there enumerated. A prose version of the Metamorphoses was published by Joseph Davidson, about the middle of the last century, which professes to be “as near the original as the different idioms of the Latin and English will allow;” and to be “printed for the use of schools, as well as of private gentlemen.” A few moments’ perusal of this work will satisfy the reader that it has not the slightest pretension to be considered a literal translation, while, by its departure from the strict letter of the author, it has gained nothing in elegance of diction. It is accompanied by “critical, historical, geographical, and classical notes in English, from the best Commentators, both ancient and modern, beside a great number of notes, entirely new;” but notwithstanding this announcement, these annotations will be found to be but few in number, and, with some exceptions in the early part of the volume, to throw very little light on the obscurities of the text. A fifth edition of this translation was published so recently as 1822, but without any improvement, beyond the furbishing up of the old-fashioned language of the original preface. A far more literal translation of the Metamorphoses is that by John Clarke, which was first published about the year 1735, and had attained to a seventh edition in 1779. Although this version may be pronounced very nearly to fulfil the promise set forth in its title page, of being “as literal as possible,” still, from the singular inelegance of its style, and the fact of its being couched in the conversational language of the early part of the last century, and being unaccompanied by any attempt at explanation, it may safely be pronounced to be ill adapted to the requirements of the present age. Indeed, it would not, perhaps, be too much to assert, that, although the translator may, in his own words, “have done an acceptable service to such gentlemen as are desirous of regaining or improving the skill they acquired at school,” he has, in many instances, burlesqued rather than translated his author. Some of the curiosities of his version will be found set forth in the notes; but, for the purpose of the more readily justifying this assertion, a few of them are adduced: the word “nitidus” is always rendered “neat,” whether applied to a fish, a cow, a chariot, a laurel, the steps of a temple, or the art of wrestling. He renders “horridus,” “in a rude pickle;” “virgo” is generally translated “the young lady;” “vir” is “a gentleman;” “senex” and “senior” are indifferently “the old blade,” “the old fellow,” or “the old gentleman;” while “summa arx” is “the very tip-top.” “Misera” is “poor soul;” “exsilio” means “to bounce forth;” “pellex” is “a miss;” “lumina” are “the peepers;” “turbatum fugere” is “to scower off in a mighty bustle;” “confundor” is “to be jumbled;” and “squalidus” is “in a sorry pickle.” “Importuna” is “a plaguy baggage;” “adulterium” is rendered “her pranks;” “ambages” becomes either “a long rabble of words,” “a long-winded detail,” or “a tale of a tub;” “miserabile carmen” is “a dismal ditty;” “increpare hos” is “to rattle these blades;” “penetralia” means “the parlour;” while “accingere,” more literally than elegantly, is translated “buckle to.” “Situs” is “nasty stuff;” “oscula jungere” is “to tip him a kiss;” “pingue ingenium” is a circumlocution for “a blockhead;” “anilia instrumenta” are “his old woman’s accoutrements;” and “repetito munere Bacchi” is conveyed to the sense of the reader as, “they return again to their bottle, and take the other glass.” These are but a specimen of the blemishes which disfigure the most literal of the English translations of the Metamorphoses.
In the year 1656, a little volume was published, by J[ohn] B[ulloker,] entitled “Ovid’s Metamorphosis, translated grammatically, and, according to the propriety of our English tongue, so far as grammar and the verse will bear, written chiefly for the use of schools, to be used according to the directions in the preface to the painfull schoolmaster, and more fully in the book called, ‘Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar school, chap. 8.’” Notwithstanding a title so pretentious, it contains a translation of no more than the first 567 lines of the first Book, executed in a fanciful and pedantic manner; and its rarity is now the only merit of the volume. A literal interlinear translation of the first Book “on the plan recommended by Mr. Locke,” was published in 1839, which had been already preceded by “a selection from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, adapted to the Hamiltonian system, by a literal and interlineal translation,” published by James Hamilton, the author of the Hamiltonian system. This work contains selections only from the first six books, and consequently embraces but a very small portion of the entire work.
For the better elucidation of the different fabulous narratives and allusions, explanations have been added, which are principally derived from the writings of Herodotus, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Dio Cassius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Strabo, Hyginus, Nonnus, and others of the historians, philosophers, and mythologists of antiquity. A great number of these illustrations are collected in the elaborate edition of Ovid, published by the Abbé Banier, one of the most learned scholars of the last century; who has, therein, and in his “Explanations of the Fables of Antiquity,” with indefatigable labour and research, culled from the works of ancient authors, all such information as he considered likely to throw any light upon the Mythology and history of Greece and Rome.
This course has been adopted, because it was considered that a statement of the opinions of contemporary authors would be the most likely to enable the reader to form his own ideas upon the various subjects presented to his notice. Indeed, except in two or three instances, space has been found too limited to allow of more than an occasional reference to the opinions of modern scholars. Such being the object of the explanations, the reader will not be surprised at the absence of critical and lengthened discussions on many of those moot points of Mythology and early history which have occupied, with no very positive result, the attention of Niebuhr, Lobeck, Müller, Buttmann, and many other scholars of profound learning.
A SYNOPTICAL VIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL TRANSFORMATIONS MENTIONED IN THE METAMORPHOSES.
BOOK I.
Chaos is divided by the Deity into four Elements: to these their respective inhabitants are assigned, and man is created from earth and water. The four Ages follow, and in the last of these the Giants aspire to the sovereignty of the heavens; being slain by Jupiter, a new race of men springs up from their blood. These becoming noted for their impiety, Jupiter not only transforms Lycaon into a wolf, but destroys the whole race of men and animals by a Deluge, with the exception of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who, when the waters have abated, renew the human race, by throwing stones behind them. Other animated beings are produced by heat and moisture: and, among them, the serpent Python. Phœbus slays him, and institutes the Pythian games as a memorial of the event, in which the conquerors are crowned with beech; for as yet the laurel does not exist, into which Daphne is changed soon after, while flying from Phœbus. On this taking place, the other rivers repair to her father Peneus, either to congratulate or to console him; but Inachus is not there, as he is grieving for his daughter Io, whom Jupiter, having first ravished her, has changed into a cow. She is entrusted by Juno to the care of Argus; Mercury having first related to him the transformation of the Nymph Syrinx into reeds, slays him, on which his eyes are placed by Juno in the tail of the peacock. Io, having recovered human shape, becomes the mother of Epaphus.
BOOK II.
Epaphus, having accused Phaëton of falsely asserting that Phœbus is his father, Phaëton requests Phœbus, as a proof of his affection towards his child, to allow him the guidance of the chariot of the Sun for one day. This being granted, the whole earth is set on fire by him, and the Æthiopians are turned black by the heat. Jupiter strikes Phaëton with a thunderbolt, and while his sisters and his kinsman Cyenus are lamenting him, the former are changed into trees, and Cyenus into a swan. On visiting the earth, that he may repair the damage caused by the conflagration, Jupiter sees Calisto, and, assuming the form of Diana, he debauches her. Juno, being enraged, changes Calisto into a bear; and her own son Arcas being about to pierce her with an arrow, Jupiter places them both among the Constellations. Juno having complained of this to Oceanus, is borne back to the heavens by her peacocks, who have so lately changed their colour; a thing which has also happened to the raven, which has been lately changed from white to black, he having refused to listen to the warnings of the crow (who relates the story of its own transformation, and of that of Nyctimene into an owl), and having persisted in informing Phœbus of the intrigues of Coronis. Her son Æsculapius being cut out of the womb of Coronis and carried to the cave of Chiron the Centaur, Ocyrrhoë, the daughter of Chiron, is changed into a mare, while she is prophesying. Her father in vain invokes the assistance of Apollo, for he, in the guise of a shepherd, is tending his oxen in the country of Elis. He neglecting his herd, Mercury takes the opportunity of stealing it; after which he changes Battus into a touchstone, for betraying him. Flying thence, Mercury beholds Herse, the daughter of Cecrops, and debauches her. Her sister Aglauros, being envious of her, is changed into a rock. Mercury returns to heaven, on which Jupiter orders him to drive the herds of Agenor towards the shore; and then, assuming the form of a bull, he carries Europa over the sea to the isle of Crete.
BOOK III.
Agenor commands his son Cadmus to seek his sister Europa. While he is doing this, he slays a dragon in Bœotia; and having sowed its teeth in the earth, men are produced, with whose assistance he builds the walls of Thebes. His first cause of grief is the fate of his grandson Actæon, who, being changed into a stag, is torn to pieces by his own hounds. This, however, gives pleasure to Juno, who hates not only Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, and the favourite of Jupiter, but all the house of Agenor as well. Assuming the form of Beroë, she contrives the destruction of Semele by the lightnings of Jupiter; while Bacchus, being saved alive from his mother’s womb, is brought up on the earth. Jupiter has a discussion with Juno on the relative pleasures of the sexes, and they agree to refer the question to Tiresias, who has been of both sexes. He gives his decision in favour of Jupiter, on which Juno deprives him of sight; and, by way of recompense, Jupiter bestows on him the gift of prophesy. His first prediction is fulfilled in the case of Narcissus, who, despising the advances of all females (in whose number is Echo, who has been transformed into a sound), at last pines away with love for himself, and is changed into a flower which bears his name. Pentheus, however, derides the prophet; who predicts his fate, and his predictions are soon verified; for, on the celebration of the orgies, Bacchus having assumed a disguise, is brought before him; and having related to Pentheus the story of the transformation of the Etrurian sailors into dolphins, he is thrown into prison. On this, Pentheus is torn in pieces by the Bacchanals, and great respect is afterwards paid to the rites of Bacchus.
BOOK IV.
Still Alcithoë and her sisters, neglecting the rites, attend to their spinning, during the festivities, and pass the time in telling stories; and, among others, that of Pyramus and Thisbe, by whose blood the mulberry is turned from white to black, and that of the discovery of the intrigues of Mars and Venus, on the information of the Sun. They also tell how the Sun assumed the form of Eurynome, that he might enjoy her daughter Leucothoë; how Clytie, becoming jealous of her sister, was transformed into a sun-flower; and how Salmacis and Hermaphroditus had become united into one body. After this, through the agency of Bacchus, the sisters are transformed into bats, and their webs are changed into vines. Ino rejoicing at this, Juno, in her hatred and indignation, sends one of the Furies to her, who causes her to be struck with insanity, on which she leaps into the sea, with her son Melicerta in her arms; but by the intercession of Venus, they become sea Deities, and their Sidonian attendants, who are bewailing them as dead, are changed into rocks. Cadmus, afflicted at this fresh calamity, retires from Thebes, and flies to Illyria, together with his wife, where they are both transformed into serpents. Of those who despise Bacchus, Acrisius alone remains, the grandfather of Perseus, who, having cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa, serpents are produced by her blood. Perseus turns Atlas into a mountain, and having liberated Andromeda, he changes sea-weed into coral, and afterwards marries her.
BOOK V.
A tumult arising during the celebration of the nuptials, Phineus claims Andromeda, who has been betrothed to him; and together with Prœtus, he and Polydectes are turned into stone. Pallas, who has aided Perseus, now leaves him, and goes to Helicon, to see the fountain of Hippocrene. The Muses tell her the story of Pyreneus and the Pierides, who were transformed into magpies after they had repeated various songs on the subjects of the transformation of the Deities into various forms of animals; the rape of Proserpine, the wanderings of Ceres, the change of Cyane into a fountain, of a boy into a lizard, of Ascalaphus into an owl, of the Sirens into birds in part, of Arethusa into a spring, of Lyncus into a lynx, and of the invention of agriculture by Triptolemus.
BOOK VI.
Influenced by the example of the Muses, Pallas determines on the destruction of Arachne. She enters with her into a contest for the superiority in the art of weaving. Each represents various transformations on her web, and then Arachne is changed into a spider. Niobe, however, is not deterred thereby from preferring her own lot to that of Latona; on account of which, all her children are slain by Apollo and Diana, and she is changed into a rock. On learning this, while one person relates the transformation by Latona of the Lycian rustics into frogs, another calls to mind how Marsyas was flayed by Apollo. Niobe is lamented by Pelops, whose shoulder is of ivory. To console the Thebans in their afflictions, ambassadors come from the adjacent cities. The Athenians alone are absent, as they are attacked by hordes of barbarians, who are routed by Tereus, who marries Progne, the daughter of Pandion. Tereus coming a second time to Athens, takes back with him to his kingdom Philomela, his wife’s sister; and having committed violence on her, with other enormities, he is transformed into a hoopoe, while Philomela is changed into a nightingale, and Progne becomes a swallow. Pandion, hearing of these wondrous events dies of grief. Erectheus succeeds him, whose daughter, Orithyia, is ravished by Boreas, and by him is the mother of Calais and Zethes, who are of the number of the Argonauts on the following occasion.
BOOK VII.
Jason, by the aid of Medea, having conquered the bulls that breathe forth flames, having sowed the teeth of a serpent, from which armed men are produced, and having lulled the dragon to sleep, recovers the Golden Fleece. Medea, accompanying Jason to Greece, restores Æson to youth by the aid of drugs; and promising the same to Pelias, having first, as a specimen, changed a ram into a lamb, by stratagem she kills him. Passing through many places made remarkable by various transformations, and having slain her children, she marries Ægeus, when Theseus returns home, and narrowly escapes being poisoned by her magic potions. Minos interrupts the joy of Ægeus on the return of his son, and wages war against him; having collected troops from all parts, even from Paros, where Arne has been changed into a jackdaw. Minos endeavours to gain the alliance of Æacus, who, however, refuses it, and sends the Myrmidons, (who have been changed into ants from men after a severe pestilence), under the command of Cephalus to assist Ægeus. Cephalus relates to Phocus, the son of Æacus, how, being carried off by Aurora and assuming another shape, he had induced his wife Procris to prove faithless; and how he had received from her a dog and a javelin, the former of which, together with a fox, was changed into stone; while the latter, by inadvertence, caused the death of his wife.
BOOK VIII.
In the mean time Minos besieges Megara. Scylla, becoming enamoured of him, betrays her country, the safety of which depends upon the purple lock of her father Nisu. Being afterwards rejected by Minos, she clings to his ship, and is changed into a bird, while her father becomes a sea eagle. Minos returns to Crete, and having erected the Labyrinth with the assistance of Dædalus, he there encloses the Minotaur, the disgrace of his family, and feeds it with his Athenian captives. Theseus being one of these, slays the monster: and having escaped from the Labyrinth by the aid of Ariadne, he takes her with him, but deserts her in the isle of Dia, where Bacchus meets with her, and places her crown among the Constellations. Dædalus being unable to escape from the island of Crete, invents wings and flies away; while Icarus, accompanying his father, is drowned. The partridge beholds the father celebrating his funeral rites, and testifies his joy: Perdix, or Talus, who had been envied by Minos for his ingenuity, and had been thrown by him from the temple of Minerva, having been transformed into that bird. Theseus, having now become celebrated, is invited to the chase of the Calydonian boar, which Atalanta is the first to wound. Meleager slays the monster; and his death is accelerated by his mother Althæa, who places in the fire the fatal billet. Returning from the expedition, Theseus comes to Acheloüs, and sees the islands called the Echinades, into which the Naiads have been transformed. Pirithoüs denies the possibility of this; but Lelex quotes, as an example, the case of Baucis and Philemon, who were changed into trees, while their house became a temple, and the neighbouring country a pool of water. Acheloüs then tells the story of the transformations of Proteus and of Metra, xii and how Metra supported her father Erisicthon, while afflicted with violent hunger.
BOOK IX.
Acheloüs then relates his own transformations, when he was contending with Hercules for the hand of Deïanira. Hercules wins her, and Nessus attempts to carry her off: on which Hercules pierces him with one of his arrows that has been dipped in the blood of the Hydra. In revenge, Nessus, as he is dying, gives to Deïanira his garment stained with his blood. She, distrusting her husband’s affection, sends him the garment; he puts it on, and his vitals are consumed by the venom. As he is dying, he hurls his attendant Lychas into the sea, where he becomes a rock. Hercules is conveyed to heaven, and is enrolled in the number of the Deities. Alcmena, his mother, goes to her daughter-in-law Iole, and tells her how Galanthis was changed into a weasel; while she, in her turn, tells the story of the transformation of her sister Dryope into the lotus. In the meantime Iolaüs comes, whose youth has been restored by Hebe. Jupiter shows, by the example of his sons Æacus and Minos, that all are not so blessed. Miletus, flying from Minos, arrives in Asia, and becomes the father of Byblis and Caunus. Byblis falls in love with her brother, and is transformed into a fountain. This would have appeared more surprising to all, if Iphis had not a short time before, on the day of her nuptials, been changed into a man.
BOOK X.
Hymenæus attends these nuptials, and then goes to those of Orpheus; but with a bad omen, as Eurydice dies soon after, and cannot be brought to life. In his sorrow, Orpheus repairs to the solitudes of the mountains, where the trees flock around him at the sound of his lyre; and, among others, the pine, into which Atys has been changed; and the cypress, produced from the transformation of Cyparissus. Orpheus sings of the rape of Ganymede; of the change of Hyacinthus, who was beloved and slain by Apollo, into a flower; of the transformation of the Cerastæ into bulls; of the Propœtides, who were changed into stones; and of the statue of Pygmalion, which was changed into a living woman, who became the mother of Paphos. He then sings, how Myrrha, for her incestuous intercourse with her father, was changed into the myrrh tree; and how Adonis (to whom Venus relates the transformation of Hippomenes and Atalanta into lions) was transformed into an anemone.
BOOK XI.
Orpheus is torn to pieces by the Thracian women; on which, a serpent, which attacks his face, is changed into stone. The xiii women are transformed into trees by Bacchus, who deserts Thrace, and betakes himself to Phrygia; where Midas, for his care of Silenus, receives the power of making gold. He loathes this gift; and bathing in the river Pactolus, its sands become golden. For his stupidity, his ears are changed by Apollo into those of an ass. After this, that God goes to Troy, and aids Laomedon in building its walls. Hercules rescues his daughter Hesione, when fastened to a rock, and his companion Telamon receives her as his wife; while his brother Peleus marries the sea Goddess, Thetis. Going to visit Ceyx, he learns how Dædalion has been changed into a hawk, and sees a wolf changed into a rock. Ceyx goes to consult the oracle of Claros, and perishes by shipwreck. On this, Morpheus appears to Halcyone, in the form of her husband, and she is changed into a kingfisher; into which bird Ceyx is also transformed. Persons who observe them, as they fly, call to mind how Æsacus, the son of Priam, was changed into a sea bird, called the didapper.
BOOK XII.
Priam performs the obsequies for Æsacus, believing him to be dead. The children of Priam attend, with the exception of Paris, who, having gone to Greece, carries off Helen, the wife of Menelaüs. The Greeks pursue Paris, but are detained at Aulis, where they see a serpent changed into stone, and prepare to sacrifice Iphigenia to Diana; but a hind is substituted for her. The Trojans hearing of the approach of the Greeks, in arms await their arrival. At the first onset, Cygnus, dashed by Achilles against a stone, is changed by Neptune into the swan, a bird of the same name, he having been vulnerable by no weapon. At the banquet of the chiefs, Nestor calls to mind Cæneus, who was also invulnerable; and who having been changed from a woman into a man, on being buried under a heap of trees, was transformed into a bird. This Cæneus was one of the Lapithæ, at the battle of whom with the Centaurs, Nestor was present. Nestor also tells how his brother, Periclymenus, was changed into an eagle. Meanwhile, Neptune laments the death of Cygnus, and entreats Apollo to direct the arrow of Paris against the heel of Achilles, which is done, and that hero is slain.
BOOK XIII.
Ajax Telamon and Ulysses contend for the arms of Achilles. Ihe former slays himself, on which a hyacinth springs up from his blood. Troy being taken, Hecuba is carried to Thrace, where she tears out the eyes of Polymnestor, and is afterwards changed into a bitch. While the Gods deplore her misfortunes, Aurora is occupied with grief for the death of her xiv son Memnon, from whose ashes the birds called Memnonides arise. Æneas flying from Troy, visits Anius, whose daughters have been changed into doves; and after touching at other places, remarkable for various transformations, he arrives in Sicily, where is the maiden Scylla, to whom Galatea relates how Polyphemus courted her, and how he slew Acis. On this, Glaucus, who has been changed into a sea Deity, makes his appearance.
