Jupiter threw his arms round his wife’s neck and pleaded for an end to vengeance, saying ‘Do not fear, in future she will never be a source of pain’ and he called the Stygian waters to witness his words. With the second he transfixed Peneus’s daughter, but with the first he wounded Apollo piercing him to the marrow of his bones. Bk I:177-198 Jupiter threatens to destroy humankind. Shame urges him to it, Amor urges not. On the other hand, anybody can see there’s some real poetry in a few of those lines. Unfortunately Hughes rendered only twenty-four of the passages. the twentieth century. Let them all pay the penalty they deserve, and quickly. She often lay on the bare ground, and the poor thing drank water from muddy streams. Rash girl, you do not know, you cannot realise, who you run from, and so you run. Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon, who is the closest thing this putative mock-epic has to a hero. morality tale, or a series of morality tales. And quite dull. He lifted the hollow shell that coils from its base in broad spirals, that shell that filled with his breath in mid-ocean makes the eastern and the western shores sound. With illustrations by Hendrik Goltzius (The Netherlands, 1558-1617) courtesy of LACMA and the Rijksmuseum. Others o’er chimney tops and turrets row, with weary wings descend into the main. [83], Influential mythological narrative poem by Roman poet Ovid, This article is about the poem by Ovid. “Browse” is tasty. I swear it by the infernal streams, that glide below the earth through the Stygian groves. In 1717 Samuel Garth compiled a Even so she is deceptive. amongst the sheep. every species of literature",[16] ranging from epic and elegy to tragedy and pastoral. Now he was ready to hurl his lightning-bolts at the whole world but feared that the sacred heavens might burst into flame from the fires below, and burn to the furthest pole: and he remembered that a time was fated to come when sea and land, and the untouched courts of the skies would ignite, and the troubled mass of the world be besieged by fire. It too Segal, C. P. Landscape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Wiesbaden, 1969) 45, Solodow, J. Translators seem to love working on Ovid. Those rumours were even milder than the truth. So now we look at Exhibit 1, Arthur Golding, 1567. Sandys wrote part of his version in what is now the State of Virginia. Sandys provides notes (and supplementary essays) like a Victorian eccentric. [35][48] Some of the most well-known paintings by Titian depict scenes from the poem, including Diana and Callisto,[49] Diana and Actaeon,[50] and Death of Actaeon. No sooner were these placed on the table than I brought the roof down on the household gods, with my avenging flames, those gods worthy of such a master. Just for shits and giggles, here’s an image of the above passage as it appears in a facsimile of the 1518 annotated Latin version. That’s why I’m quoting it, though. Into the stuff of life. Either the creator god, source of a better world, seeded it from the divine, or the newborn earth just drawn from the highest heavens still contained fragments related to the skies, so that Prometheus, blending them with streams of rain, moulded them into an image of the all-controlling gods. ‘Pity me!’ said her father Inachus, clinging to the groaning heifer’s horns and snow-white neck, ‘Pity me!’ he sighed; ‘Are you really my daughter I searched the wide world for? There are dolphins in the trees: disturbing the upper branches and stirring the oak-trees as they brush against them. Straight away he shut up the north winds in Aeolus’s caves, with the gales that disperse the gathering clouds, and let loose the south wind, he who flies with dripping wings, his terrible aspect shrouded in pitch-black darkness. Pan, whose head is crowned with a wreath of sharp pine shoots, saw her, coming from Mount Lycaeus, and spoke to her.’ Now Mercury still had to relate what Pan said, and how the nymph, despising his entreaties, ran through the wilds till she came to the calm waters of sandy Ladon; and how when the river stopped her flight she begged her sisters of the stream to change her; and how Pan, when he thought he now had Syrinx, found that instead of the nymph’s body he only held reeds from the marsh; and, while he sighed there, the wind in the reeds, moving, gave out a clear, plaintive sound.