![]() ![]() One of the brothers, Cadmus, founds a new city (later to be known as Thebes), and miraculously creates a new people by sewing the ground with the teeth of a serpent or dragon he had killed. ![]() Europa’s brothers go in search of her, but cannot discover her whereabouts. Jove falls in love with the princess Europa and carries her off, disguised as a beautiful white bull. Mercury then falls in love with the beautiful Herse, which results in Herse’s sister, Aglauros, being turned to stone for her envy. Finally, when her son is fifteen, he almost kills her, and Jove transforms them both into constellations, much to Juno’s annoyance.Ī few shorter tales follow, about how the Raven became black due to the evils of gossip, how Ocyrhoe the prophetess is transformed into stone, and how Mercury turns a shepherd into stone for betraying a secret. When Diana discovers her handmaid’s impurity, Callisto is banished, and when she gives birth she is transformed by Juno into a bear. Jove spots the beautiful nymph Callisto, one of Diana’s handmaids, and rapes her. Phaeton’s sisters are so distraught, they are transformed into trees, and his friend Cycnus, who repeatedly dived into the river in an attempt to retrieve Phaeton’s body, is transformed into a swan in his grief. Io and Jove’s son, Epaphus, becomes friends with a boy named Phaeton, the son of Apollo, but when Epaphus does not believe that Phaeton is really the son of Apollo, he tries to prove it by borrowing his father’s chariot of the sun, but he cannot control it and is killed. Jove sends Mercury to kill Argus, Io’s guard, and Io is forced to flee Juno’s wrath until Jove forces Juno to pardon her. Io, a daughter of the river god Inachus, is raped by Jove, who then transforms Io into a cow to protect her from the jealous Juno. The story is told of how Apollo’s unrequited love for Daphne results in her transformation into a laurel tree. This couple repopulates the earth by obeying the commands of the gods and throwing rocks behind them, which are transformed into a new, hearty breed of man. This is followed by an attempt by the giants to seize the heavens, at which the wrathful Jove (Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus) sends a great flood which destroys all living things except one pious couple, Deucalion and Pyrrha. He then begins his tale of transformations by describing how the earth, the heavens and everything else is created out of chaos, and how mankind progresses (or rather degenerates) from the Gold Age to the Silver Age to the Age of Iron (the “Ages of Man”). ![]() Ovid begins by addressing the gods and asking them to bless his undertaking. It has remained one of the most popular works of mythology, and was perhaps the classical work best known to medieval writers and strongly influenced medieval and Renaissance poetry. It is an epic (or “mock-epic”) poem describing the creation and history of the world, incorporating many of the best known and loved stories from Greek mythology, although centring more on mortal characters than on heroes or the gods.Įach story contains some sort of transformation (or metamorphosis) as the link that ties them all together. “ Metamorophoses” ( “ Transformations”) is a narrative poem in fifteen books by the Roman poet Ovid, completed in 8 CE. Introduction | Synopsis | Analysis | Resources Introduction – When was Metamorphoses written ![]()
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