Metamorphoses

by Ovid

who holds, and will hold me, I pray, forever,

  nor will I violate my marriage vows

  to Canens, daughter of immortal Janus,

  as long as fate allows her to be mine.”

  540

  “‘And when the Titan’s daughter realized

  that her oft-repeated pleas had come to naught,

  she said, “You will not stroll away from here,

  returning to your Canens: no, you will learn

  just what a woman scorned in love can do,

  for Circe is a loving woman, scorned!”

  “‘Then, after turning three times to the west

  and three times to the east, she cast three spells

  and struck the young man three times with her wand;

  he fled, but was amazed to find himself

  550

  running more swiftly now than usual;

  he saw the feathers on his body, and, enraged

  to find himself so suddenly transformed

  into this new, unprecedented kind

  of bird in his own woods of Latium,

  he pecked at the rough oaks with his hard beak,

  and angrily left wounds on their long limbs;

  his wings took on the scarlet of his tunic,

  the golden clasp he wore upon it changed

  into bright feathers; a band of yellow gold

  560

  encircled his neck; and now, but for his name,

  nothing remained of Picus from before.

  “‘Meanwhile, his comrades, who, with hue and cry

  had searched the fields and not discovered him,

  came upon Circe (for she’d cleared the air

  and let the sun and winds disperse the clouds)

  and rightly they accused her of her crime

  against the king, demanding his return,

  and making preparations to attack her

  with their fierce weapons.

  “‘Instead, she sprinkled them

  570

  with noxious drugs and poisonous concoctions,

  and summoning up Night and all his gods,

  that dwell below in Erebus and Chaos,

  she called upon the goddess Hecate

  with long-drawn ululations.

  “‘Astonishing

  to say it, but the woods leapt from their place,

  the earth shuddered, the nearby trees turned white,

  and clumps of grass were stained with drops of blood;

  stones seemed to bellow and wild dogs to bay,

  the earth appeared to writhe with poison serpents,

  580

  and ghostly forms to flutter all around.

  “‘Astounded by these monstrous apparitions,

  his comrades turned into a fearful mob;

  she touched their faces—trembling, terrified—

  with the magic wand by which these youths were changed

  into a great variety of beasts;

  and not a one of them kept his old shape.

  “‘Phoebus, descending, had already bathed

  the Spanish coast beyond the Western Gates,

  and the spouse that Canens sought with eyes and heart

  590

  was nowhere to be found: slaves and subjects

  hastened through the forest, bearing torches;

  nor did it seem sufficient to the nymph

  to weep and tear her hair and beat her breast

  (though she did all of these), but she herself

  rushed off and wandered madly through the woods.

  “‘Six days and nights observed her wandering

  through hills and valleys just as Chance proposed,

  without food or sleep; the Tiber was the last

  to see her, worn by grief and wandering,

  600

  laying her body down on its long bank;

  and there she poured her heart out in her grief,

  words mixed with tears in ever-fainter tones,

  as when it happens that the swan will sing

  his elegy himself before he dies.

  “‘At last, attenuated so by grief

  that in her bones the marrow turned to water,

  she melted down and vanished on the breezes;

  the place has kept alive her legend’s fame,

  however, bearing even now the name

  610

  of the nymph Canens, given by the Muses.’

  “Many such things I saw and heard about

  during that long year’s time, in which we grew

  accustomed to our inactivity:

  once more we were commanded to set sail;

  Circe warned us of all that lay ahead:

  a long journey on an uncertain path

  and danger everywhere on that cruel sea.

  I must confess that I was terrified,

  and when we reached this shore, I stayed behind.”

  620

  Acmon transformed

  So Macareus ended his account,

  and the ashes of the wet nurse of Aeneas,

  sealed in a marble urn, were then interred

  in a grave with these brief verses on the stone:

  WITHIN, THE ASHES OF CAIËTA LIE:

  MY FOSTER CHILD, KNOWN FOR HIS PIETY,

  SNATCHED ME FROM GREEK FLAMES, THEN CREMATED ME WITH FITTING RITES AND GREAT PROPRIETY

  The lines that bound them to the grassy shore

  were loosed, and treachery left far behind

  in the abode of that disreputable goddess:

  they sought the wooded grove where gloomy Tiber

  sends his sand-laden waters to the sea;

  he won the throne and daughter of the king

  of Latium, though not without a struggle,

  for Turnus, raging, battled for the bride

  he had been previously promised, and

  war with a fierce race was undertaken,

  as Etruria united against Latium,

  and for a long time a hard victory

  640

  was sought in the anxiety of arms.

  Both sides increased the size of their own forces

  with help from foreigners, and many men

  guarded the Rutulian and Trojan camps.

  Aeneas sued successfully for aid

  from King Evander, although Venulus

  was disappointed on his mission to the city

  of the exiled Diomedes: he had founded

  a great-walled city in Apulia,

  the realm of Daunus, and he held the lands

  650

  his bride had brought him as her dowry.

  But after Venulus, at the behest of Turnus,

  had gone to him and asked him for his help,

  Diomedes answered that he lacked the troops,

  and was unwilling to commit himself

  or the forces of his father-in-law, either;

  nor did he have a nation of his own

  that he could mobilize: “Lest you should think

  that my excuses to you are fictitious,

  I will recount my bitter woes again,

  660

  though each recital must renew my grief.

  “When Ilium’s high towers had been burned,

  and Troy had toppled into the Greek flames,

  and after Ajax (who alone deserved

  the punishment that all of us received

  because he took a virgin from a virgin)

  had sinned against Minerva, we poor Greeks

  were taken by the winds and strewn all over

  the hostile sea, whose wrath (and heaven’s too)

  we bore in the forms of rainstorm, darkness, lightnings,

  670

  till finally, the blow to end all blows:

  the promontory at Caphereus!

  “I will not long delay you, setting out

  our woes in the order they occurred:

  just say that even Priam would have wept

  to see how Greece was faring at that time!
<
br />   “Warlike Minerva kept me safe, however,

  and delivered me from the tumultuous waves

  into another sorrow, even worse:

  I was expelled from my ancestral fields

  680

  as kindly Venus settled an old score

  with fresh new pain; and so oppressive were

  the toils at sea and wars on land I bore

  that often I would call men fortunate

  who had been drowned in the storm we all endured

  or had been shipwrecked on Caphereus,

  and wished myself to have been one of them.

  My comrades had endured the very worst

  that wars and storms could offer, and they begged

  that our wandering should have an end;

  690

  but Acmon, an excitable young man,

  made even more so by these trials, said,

  “‘Is there still something you have not endured,’

  he asked, ‘some grief you might decline to bear?

  What is there that is left for her to do,

  if she should wish to do more than she has?

  As long as we fear something worse may come,

  prayer has its place—but when the short straw’s drawn,

  we put our fears behind us and below,

  and hopelessness releases us from care.

  700

  “‘So let her hear me saying this—so what?

  So what if she despises, as she does,

  all of the men who serve with Diomedes,

  since all of us despise her attitude:

  her high-and-mightiness seems scarcely high,

  as far as we’re concerned!’

  “Provocative,

  those words of Acmon, and they angered Venus,

  and brought her old anger back to life again.

  “His bitter words pleased very few of us,

  and the majority rebuked Acmon,

  710

  who learned, when he attempted to reply,

  that his throat and voice were both attenuated,

  his hair had changed to feathers, and new plumage

  concealed his recently remodeled neck;

  his arms accepted even larger feathers,

  and his sharp elbows turned gracefully to wings;

  his feet were given over to webbed digits,

  and his face hardened to inexpressive horn

  that ended in a sharply pointed beak.

  “Lycus, Idas, Rhexenor, Nycteus,

  720

  and Abas, too, all stared at him in wonder,

  and while they wondered, took on the same shape;

  the greater part of them were changed to birds

  and flew up all together as one flock,

  encircling the oarsmen on flapping wings:

  and if you wish to know what kind of bird

  they had so swiftly been transformed into,

  I’d have to say that though they weren’t swans,

  they much resembled them, though these were white.

  “And now that I am the son-in-law of Daunus,

  730

  I hold—just barely—this new-founded town

  and these dry fields with what few men are left.”

  Here Diomedes finished his account.

  The wild olive tree

  Venulus left the realm of Calydon,

  the realm of Peucetia and the fields

  of Messapia, where he saw a cave

  hidden in the forest dense and misty,

  a screen of waving reeds that grew before it.

  Goat-footed Pan now holds it as his own,

  but at one time it was the lair of nymphs

  740

  who had been driven off in terror by

  the unexpected apparition of

  an Apulian shepherd. But soon after,

  the nymphs regained their lost composure, and,

  with nothing but contempt for their pursuer,

  they went back once again to nimble-footed

  choral dancing.

  Still the shepherd mocked them

  with boorish imitations of their dancing,

  and barnyard insults, and obscene expressions;

  nor would he close his mouth until a tree

  750

  sprang from his throat and covered up his face;

  indeed, he is a tree now: by his fruits

  you may know what kind, for the sour berries

  of the wild olive show his language plain,

  whose bitterness has entered into them.

  The transformation of Aeneas’ ships

  When the ambassadors returned with word

  that the Aetolians refused to fight,

  the Rutulians waged war without their help,

  as they had planned, and both sides shed much blood.

  But look! Where Turnus flings his greedy torches

  760

  at hulls of pine, and ships spared by the waves

  are terrified by fire! Vulcan now

  burns pitch and wax and other foods for flames,

  which leap from mast to mast, and the wooden thwarts

  in the curved hulls are wreathed in acrid smoke!

  Then the Holy Mother of the Gods recalled

  that these pines had been felled upon the summit

  of Mount Ida, and at once she filled the air

  with the tintinnabulation of her cymbals

  and the shrill ululation of her boxwood flutes;

  770

  and lightly carried through the parting air

  in a chariot drawn by her familiar lions,

  the goddess cried, “Your sacrilegious hand

  flings torches at these ships to no avail,

  Turnus, for I will rescue them from danger:

  I will not let your hungry flames devour

  limbs that were mine, that grew in my own groves!”

  The goddess was still speaking when it thundered,

  and the thunder was immediately followed

  by dancing hailstones mixed with falling rain;

  780

  and the winds, like brothers in a civil war,

  brought tumult and confusion to the air

  and to the waves, so suddenly increased.

  Cybele then selected one of these

  to break the ropes that held the Trojan fleet,

  then plunged their burning hulls deep underwater:

  the wood lost firmness and turned into flesh;

  the curved prows changed to heads; oars turned to toes

  and swimming legs; what had been sides still were,

  and keels remained, though they were changed to spines;

  790

  lines softened into locks, sail yards to arms,

  and the ships’ cerulean color stayed the same;

  vessels that once were frightened by the waves

  are naiads now and gambol in the water;

  despite their hard beginnings on a mountain,

  they now frequent the waves, untroubled by

  old memories of their peak experience.

  They do remember, though, their lives as ships,

  and the dangers they so often faced at sea;

  on which account, they often lend a hand

  800

  to guide the keels of storm-tossed ships—unless

  those ships should happen to belong to Greeks;

  still mindful of the fall of Troy, they hate

  that race entire, and rejoiced to see

  the floating wreckage of Ulysses’ ship,

  as they rejoiced to see the wooden vessel

  of Alcinoüs transformed into stone.

  The Heron

  There was a hope that when the fleet had been

  endowed with life as water nymphs, this wonder

  would have inspired fear in the Rutulians,

  810

  and make them end the war; but war continued,

  since both sides each had gods supporting th
em,

  and courage, which is just as good as gods;

  they went on fighting not for a dowered kingdom,

  not for the scepter in your father’s hand,

  nor for you, even, fair Lavinia:

  they fought to win and to avoid the shame

  of having to surrender; finally,

  Venus saw that the arms which she’d provided

  brought her son victory; now Turnus fell,

  820

  and with him fell the city of Ardea,

  called powerful while he lived to protect it,

  but when the fire of barbarians

  reduced it to a heap of tepid ashes,

  there flew out from the middle of that mass

  a swift-winged bird not previously known,

  flapping its wings above the cinder heap;

  its cry, its scrawniness, its sickly pallor

  were fitting for a city that is captured,

  and it has even kept the city’s name:

  830

  [ardea is the Latin name for heron]

  Ardea mourns itself with beating wings.

  The deification of Aeneas

  The manly excellence Aeneas showed

  compelled the gods, including even Juno,

  to put an end to their old enmity;

  and now with Julus well set up and rising,

  it was the proper time for our hero

  to enter heaven; Venus had approached

  the deities, soliciting approval,

  and threw her arms about her father’s neck:

  840

  “Father,” she said, “you’ve always been most kind;

  now I beseech you to be even more so,

  and for the sake of my own flesh and blood,

  your grandson too, grant him divinity;

  however small a portion does not matter,

  as long as you give something! It is enough

  that he has once seen the Unlovely Realm,

  that he has once traversed the river Styx!”

  The gods gave their assent, and even she,

  Jove’s consort, now appeased, beamed her approval.

  850

  The father of the gods said, “Both of you,

  the seeker and the one for whom it is sought,

  deserve the gift of immortality,

  and so, my daughter, take what you would have.”

  Venus thanked him and then was carried off

  on the light breezes in a chariot

  drawn by her team of yoked and harnessed doves

  to the Laurentian coast, where the Numicius

  weaves its way through a curtain of tall reeds,

  then spills its waters in the nearby sea.

  860

  She bade the river god to take Aeneas

  under the surface of his silent stream

  and cleanse him of all mortal deficits;

  he did as she commanded, bathing him,

  and having purged him of his mortal dross,

  restored his best, immortal part to him.