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.
Philemon and Baucis’s goose has a narrow escape, as Ovid tells the story of the old couple who became legendary for their generosity and proverbial for love between wife and husband.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and listen in English here.
Photo by VladoubidoOo, licence details at photo credits.
Philemon and Baucis are the poorest of the poor, but when the immortals arrive in disguise and ask for hospitality, their response is immediate and their generosity boundless. Ovid in the Metamorphoses sometimes plays the rather rickety old gentleman and his kindly wife for laughs, but their open-handedness and the warmth of their welcome are heartwarming nevertheless. The next post will tell the end of their story.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
In a charming poem tinged with darker themes and written in elegant Alcaic metre, Horace reflects on the destructive power of anger, and promises a lovely mother and her even lovelier daughter that he will never return to writing iambics – a metre famed among the Greeks and Romans for personal attacks and lampoons. In the illustration by the Japanese woodblock print designer Utamaro, a lovely mother teaches her even lovelier daughter the art of calligraphy.
Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.
Cynthia is away, probably at the luxurious seaside resort of Baiae, with its entertainments, attractions and temptations. What is she up to? Propertius is afraid that the separation has broken the bond between them, and that a great love may be dead or dying. Not for the first or last time, his imagination is torturing him. Nevertheless he asserts – in the face of some of the evidence – that he is a one-woman man. Cynthia was the first, he says, and she will be his last.
Hear Propertius’s Latin and follow in English here.
Phaethon’s ride in the chariot of his father, the Sun, has brought catastrophe as he sets the world ablaze. Now Jupiter intervenes to fell him with a thunderbolt before the damage goes from bad to worse.
The illustration by Giovanni Bernardi shows his fall, his sisters, who are turned to poplar trees on his burial mound, and his friend Cycnus, who will be transformed in to a swan.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
In the illustration by Karl Bryullov, Apollo himself demonstrates how it should be done.
Ovid vividly tells the tragic story of Phaethon, the son of the Sun God, Phoebus Apollo, who unwisely dared to try to drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here, as Phaethon sets out on his doomed adventure.
To be continued …
Many Roman writers, including Propertius, were all but forgotten for much of the two thousand years that separates them from the present day. Westbrook wrote a sonnet about the process, part labour-of-love by a few dedicated scholars, part pure luck, through which Propertius’s work has survived: read it here.