The Thessalian King Erysichthon holds the Gods in contempt. He has not only cut down Ceres’s sacred oak and killed the Dryad within, but boasted that he would do the same for Ceres herself, given the opportunity. We have already met the agent that Ceres has chosen to revenge herself on him: Fames, the personification of Hunger. Now, having received her orders, she slips down to the Earth to carry them out …
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Today we publish a new selection of poems by Latin authors to hear in Latin and follow in English. See the selection here.
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid retells the story of love and loss with his usual grace and charm hear the passage in the original Latin and follow in English here. Later, he will deal with the violent end of Orpheus, who renounces the love of women in his sadness and is torn to pieces by angry women in a Bacchanalian fury. In the illustration, by John William Waterhouse, nymphs find his head and his lyre, which have floated to the island of Lesbos.
This is the first of a new series of Pantheon Poets Latin medleys – a selection of Latin poems which share a common theme. The first is love, and specifically Continue Reading
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is often a sharp contrast between the elegance and charm of his style and the grim stories he tells. Book six, for example, has a sequence of episodes showing that it is unwise to cross either the Goddess Latona or Apollo and Artemis, her twin children by Jupiter. For performing flawlessly in a weaving contest against Artemis, Arachne has been turned into a spider. For belittling Latona’s divinity and her prowess as a mother, Niobe has been turned to stone by grief, having seen her fourteen children killed by Apollo and Artemis, and her husband, Amphion, die by suicide. In a grimly comic touch, an onlooker then tells the story of a group of peasants who were turned into frogs by Latona for denying her water. Now another recalls, almost in passing, the forfeit paid by the satyr and master aulos-player Marsyas for losing a musical contest: Apollo, the winner, skinned him alive.
‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit;
‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti!’
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat …
“Why are you pulling me apart?” he cries, “Aaah! I wish I hadn’t done it! Aaah! No flute is worth as much as this!” he yelled. And as he did so, his skin was ripped off past the ends of his limbs and he was nothing but one big wound, and everywhere the blood flows … ”
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Recent additions to the Latin poetry pages include the first of what will be quite a few extracts from the works of Ovid, the last of the Big Four – the others being Horace, Virgil and Catullus – to feature. If you want to know more about them, there is information and the Augustan age in which the last three wrote on the “About the Poets” page. The piece – “Ovid’s broad-minded advice to his mistress” – is from his Amores and exemplifies his enthusiasm for good, old-fashioned sex. Continue reading “Ovid and Horace’s different takes on love”