Erysichthon, the blasphemer, begins Ovid’s horror-story about crime and punishment in his metamorphoses. The oak-tree in the picture, the Fredville Oak, has a roughly similar circumference to Ceres’s sacred tree, which Erysichthon is about to profane.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Erysichthon’s terrible hunger, the punishment inflicted on him by the Goddess Ceres, drives him to sell his own daughter: she finds a way to escape her new master, but there is no way for Erysichthon to escape a terrible death.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English translation here.
Hear Ovid’s version of the abduction of the beautiful Europa by Jupiter disguised as a bull here.
On a mission to find Aeneas, the lovers Euryalus and Nisus pause to take the enemy unawares in their camp. Success will be short-lived: hear their tragic end in Latin and follow in English here. the 16th century enamelled illustration is by the Master of the Aeneid Legend.
Our last post was the poem that some commentators think was the first that Catullus wrote to Lesbia. Now we present the poem that may mark the end of the affair in bitterness and insult, written in a metre (Sapphics, developed on Lesbos more than five hundred years earlier by the poetess Sappho) that Catullus uses nowhere except in these two pieces. Perhaps as a final insult, perhaps because they are good and very tolerant friends, his messengers are two men who are used to some pretty gross treatment at his hands.
Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.