Myths that we think we definitely know could appear in differing versions in the ancient world. One example is the marriage of Venus, Goddess of love, to Vulcan, the lame craftsman-God who forged Jupiter’s thunderbolts for him. Interestingly, they are shown as married to one another in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad, a small but interesting snippet of potential evidence in the debate over whether the two poems were created by the same author. Anyway, by the time of Ovid and Augustus, and in Vigil’s Aeneid, the two were firmly spliced. Hear Ovid’s account of an adulterous affair between Venus and Mars, the glamorous war-God, here. (Could the trouble that Ovid got into with Augustus, leading to his exile to the back of beyond, have had something to do with the fact that the Emperor was campaigning against the looseness of morals in Rome, and that he claimed Venus as his many-times-great-Grandmother?)
The latest post from Pantheon Poets is the story of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s version, Apollo’s overwhelming love for the reluctant nymph is caused by Cupid as revenge when Apollo has poked fun at his bow, but the consequences for Daphne could not be more serious.
Hear Ovid’s Latin in the original and follow in English here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
The archer-God Apollo, flushed with his victory over Python, the monstrous serpent, has poked fun at Cupid’s bow, suggesting that such weapons are best left to the grown-ups. Cupid takes his revenge by inducing Daphne, a huntress-nymph, to renounce love altogether, and then making Apollo fall for her, head over heels.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
But wishes she hadn’t Hear the Latin, which contains probably the most succinct summary of the Gods’ sexual misbehaviour, here and follow in English.
Erysichthon has offended the Goddess of plenty: now Ceres chooses as the instrument of her terrible revenge her antithesis, Fames, who personifies famine and hunger.
Hear Ovid’s chilling description of her in Latin and follow in English here.
Today’s new poem is the story as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses of Daedalus the legendary craftsman and his son Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun