Metamorphoses: The New, Annotated Edition

by Ovid

Such is the nature of coral, that it hardens, Exposed to air, a vine below the surface.

I had never heard this before - very neat!

The Fighting of Perseus*

The fight scene in this is bloody, epic, straight out of a modern movie, gory, and truly exciting. Choreographed.

By Lycabas, who loved him, very dearly, As one boy loves another,

Those beautiful gays of yore.

“Sing that song in Hell,*

Ha! That’s so funny. This really is an action movie.

And found his hand pierced by a spear and pinned Fast to the wood, and Abas* ran him through, But could not make him fall, and so he hung there, Nailed by one hand.

Like an action movie. Whenever we complain about violence in media, we should remember it’s an old trope.

Mischief is hard, it seems, to put an end to.

This sentiment is similar to what the Red Queen says in Lewis Carroll: “When you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.” Once mischief is in the world, it’s hard to clean it out again; it’s fixed.

She looked for Famine And found her, in a stony field, her nails Digging the scanty grass, and her teeth gnawing The tundra moss. Her hair hung down all matted, Her face was ghastly pale, her eyes were hollow, Lips without color, the throat rough and scaly, The skin so tight the entrails could be seen, The hip-bones bulging at the loins, the belly Concave, only the place for a belly, really, And the breasts seemed to dangle, held up, barely, By a spine like a stick-figure’s; and her thinness Made all her joints seem large; the knees were swollen Balloons, almost, the ankles lumpy tubers.

This description of Famine is so good.

The more he wolves, The more he wants, insatiable as ocean, Insatiable as fire.

This could describe so many people in power

The Fates rule you, so you had better like it; They rule me too;

The Fates are stronger than the gods. Something I should have known but never thought about.

So Iris, in her thousand-colored mantle, A rainbow through the sky, sought out the palace Under the cloud, the royal home of Sleep.

This description of Sleep’s abode is great.

I’ve never heard this myth before. Dew is the dawn’s tears for her slain son.

Watching that face, still smeared with blood, the eye With no sight in it, the cruel hands, the limbs, The beard, matted with human blood. Death stood there, The least of all my troubles. I imagined He would catch me any minute, take my flesh Into his own, and I could see the time When he snatched up two friends of mine together And smashed them on the ground, and lay across them Like a lion on his prey, gauming and crunching

Creepy! To stare blankly into space while chomping on the bones

Watching that face, still smeared with blood, the eye With no sight in it, the cruel hands, the limbs, The beard, matted with human blood. Death stood there, The least of all my troubles. I imagined He would catch me any minute, take my flesh Into his own, and I could see the time When he snatched up two friends of mine together And smashed them on the ground, and lay across them Like a lion on his prey, gauming and crunching

Horror

the limbs with life stil...

Eaten alive