Metamorphoses

by Ovid

  a milder maturing, a time between younger and older,

  when the thinning hair begins to go grey at the temples;

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  then Winter’s old age approaches us, lame and trembling,

  and whatever hair it still happens to have has been whitened!

  “Our bodies, too, are always incessantly changing,

  and what we were, or are, is not what we will be,

  tomorrow: once we were seeds, the hope of our fathers,

  and lay concealed in the womb of our first mother;

  creative Nature willed otherwise: took us in hand, and

  out of the narrow confines of mother’s expanded

  viscera, sent us forth into the open air, homeless!

  The infant lay powerless, blinking his eyes at the light, and

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  shortly began to walk like a beast on all fours,

  and then learned to stand, although still weak-kneed and trembling,

  and needing to grasp at whatever could aid its endeavor;

  this changes into the swift and powerful stage of first youth,

  and then middle age, which, when its service is ended,

  glides down the path of decline that leads us to old age,

  which undermines and demolishes all of the strength of

  those earlier stages: contemplating the shoulders

  and arms that once, with their masses of muscle, resembled

  those of great Hercules, Milon, the heavyweight champion,

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  now weeps to see them hanging so useless and flabby;

  Helen too weeps at the wrinkles seen in her mirror

  and asks herself why she was—twice!—seized by a lover.

  “Devouring Time! Envious Age! Working together,

  you bring all to ruin: in your unhurried consumption,

  the world is ground down, and everything perishes slowly.

  Even what we call the elements do not endure, and

  if you pay heed, I will show you the changes they go through.

  “Four genitive substances make up the eternal cosmos;

  two of them, which we call earth and water, are heavy,

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  and of their own weight will sink right down to the bottom;

  but the other two, air and fire (purer than air is),

  are weightless and will rise up if nothing suppresses them.

  Though they are spatially distant, each element rises

  out of another, and into that other, collapses;

  when earth is unbound, for example, it changes to water,

  then, as it loses its moisture, it once again changes,

  this time to wind and air, and, as it grows thinner,

  bursts into flame and rises through heaven as fire;

  from there the way is reversed, and in the same order;

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  fire, condensing, turns into air, which turns into water,

  and fluid water, changing to earth, becomes solid.

  “Nothing persists without changing its outward appearance,

  for Nature is always engaged in acts of renewal,

  creating new forms everywhere out of the old ones;

  nothing in all of the cosmos can perish, believe me,

  but takes on a different shape; and what we call birth is

  when something first changes out of its former condition,

  and what we call death is when its identity ceases;

  things may perhaps be translated hither and thither;

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  nevertheless, they stay constant in their sum total.

  “I truly believe that nothing may keep the same image

  for a long time; the age of gold yields to iron,

  and often places will know a reversal of fortune.

  For with my own eyes, I have seen land that once was quite solid

  change into water, and I have seen land made from ocean;

  seashells have been discovered far from the seashore,

  and rusty anchors right on the summits of mountains;

  a former plain was converted into a valley

  by rushing waters, whose force has leveled great mountains;

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  and a onetime marshland has been turned into a desert,

  while thirsty sands have been transformed into marshland.

  “Here Nature allows a new spring of water to surface,

  there closes one off; and shaken by underground tremors,

  rivers leap out of the earth, or shrink and are swallowed.

  So then, when Lycus sinks in the ground through a fissure,

  he comes up from under again, far away, totally altered;

  now the Erasinus, swallowed, glides underground, hidden

  till it emerges and flows through the fields of Argolis;

  they say that Mysus regrets his former existence,

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  and, having chosen a different course, is the Caïcus;

  and the Amenanus flows through the Sicilian desert,

  sometimes disappearing, whenever its sources dry up.

  Once the Anygras was potable; now no one will touch it,

  not since the centaurs, riddled by Hercules’ arrows,

  bathed there to clean out their wounds—or else the poets

  who tell us this story are truly not to be trusted.

  Haven’t the formerly sweet waters of the Hypanis,

  sourced in the Scythian mountains, turned bitter and brackish?

  “Antissa, Pharos, and Tyre once were surrounded

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  by water, but none of those cities now is an island;

  folks around Leucas say it was once part of the mainland,

  but now it’s encircled as well; and they say that Messana

  was joined to Italy, until the ocean’s waves shattered

  their borders, and left them completely divided by water.

  If you seek Buris and Helice, those Achaean cities,

  you will discover them both underwater, and even

  today the sailors still point out their wavering towers

  and overwhelmed walls; near Troezen, ruled by Pittheus,

  there is a steep and treeless hillock, which once was level

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  but now is rounded; for—it’s a terrible story—

  the bestial force of the winds, sealed up in their cavern,

  seeking to exhale and vainly striving for freedom—

  and since there was not the slightest crack in their prison

  through which their breath could break out, they made the earth bulge,

  as when one exhales one’s own breath into a bladder

  or blows up a goatskin; that was a permanent groundswell,

  now like a hillock, which, over the years, has grown harder.

  “I will refer to a few of the many such instances

  that I have heard of or witnessed—why, isn’t water

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  itself subjected to taking and giving new shapes?

  At midday, your waters, O spring of Ammon, are frigid,

  but warm in the morning and evening. They say the Boeotians

  can set wood on fire by dumping it into the water

  when the moon is in its last phase, and the Thracian Cicones

  have a river which, if you drink from it, turns your intestines

  to stone and changes whatever it touches to marble;

  closer to home, those neighboring rivers, the Crathis

  and the Subaris, turn hair into gold or silver;

  even more strange are those streams that not only alter

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  the body, but have an effect upon the mind too;

  who hasn’t heard of the indecent pool of Salmacis,

  or of the Ethiopian lakes? Any who swallow

  their waters either go mad or go into a coma;

  whoever quenches his thirst at the spring of Clitorius

  will give up wine in favor of
its purer fluid,

  whether there is some intrinsic strength in the water

  which counters the heat of the wine, or, as legend would have it,

  the son of Amythaon, after relieving the frenzied

  daughters of Proetus with potent herbs and enchantments,

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  cast the means of purgation into the river,

  making the hatred of wine a part of its nature.

  The Lyncestrian river acts in the opposite manner,

  for whoever drinks even a tiny amount of it

  staggers as though he had swallowed his wine undiluted.

  There is a place in Arcadia formerly known as

  Pheneus, whose inconsistent stream is mistrusted:

  don’t drink it at night, for that is when it is harmful,

  while it is harmless if it is drunk in the daytime;

  so streams or lakes will have, at one time or another,

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  these or some other effects.

  “There was a time when Ortygia

  moved about on the ocean, but now she stays still;

  when the Argonauts sailed, they found the Symplegades fearful,

  twin rocks exploding with spray when they crashed together,

  but now, fixed in place, they form a motionless windbreak.

  “Nor will Mount Etna, her sulphurous ovens now blazing,

  always be fiery, nor was she fiery always.

  For if the earth is animal-like in its nature,

  then it lives and it has many places that fire exhales from,

  and the earth changes those places with every eruption,

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  sealing some caverns off as she opens up others.

  “Or if the winds that are penned up deep inside caverns

  fling rocks against other rocks or at matter containing

  the seeds of fire, a blaze will be started from friction,

  but the caves will cool down when the winds are no longer blowing;

  and if the fire is caused by the nature of asphalt

  and yellow sulphur that burns with a very thin flame,

  when the earth no longer furnishes food for that fire

  and cannot sustain it, and it has been worn out for ages,

  then Nature herself must suffer a want of nutrition

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  and will not be able to endure such a great famine;

  abandoned herself, she will abandon her fires.

  “In Macedonia, there are supposed to be men whose

  bodies get covered completely with delicate feathers

  when they have plunged nine times in the pool of Minerva.

  I find that hard to believe, but among the Scythians,

  women are said to achieve results much the same by

  sprinkling a magical potion all over their bodies.

  “Nevertheless, if trust in such strange situations

  may be adduced from examples already proven,

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  do you not see that when corpses decay from the heat or

  from length of time, they turn into wee tiny beasties?

  Here is a common experiment: bury some bullocks

  slain by the priests, and from their decaying intestines,

  the flower-culling bees will be born: rural in nature,

  as are their parents, inclined to hard labor and prudent.

  Buried in earth, the bellicose horse breeds out hornets;

  if you remove a crab’s curved claws from its body

  and bury them in the earth, from the interred portion

  a scorpion emerges to menace you with its bent tail;

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  we know that worms which quite commonly (ask any farmer)

  cover green leaves with their white threads will change to

  butterflies, emblems of spirit departing from body.

  “Mud contains seeds which generate frogs, at first legless,

  though soon they develop limbs that equip them for swimming,

  and so that these same limbs can be used for long-distance leaping,

  their hind legs are always much greater in length than their forelegs.

  Nor is the bear cub, when newly brought forth by the she-bear,

  other than bear-pulp: by her own purposeful licking,

  the mother bear shapes it and forms it in her own image.

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  Do you not see how the larva of bees, makers of honey,

  so well protected within their hexagonal chambers

  of wax, are born without any limbs on their bodies,

  and only later develop legs and the wings used for flying?

  The peacock of Juno, with stars in its feathery tail, or

  the arms-bearing eagle of Jove, the doves dear to Venus,

  or any others within the entire bird kingdom:

  who could believe that such wonders emerged out of eggshells,

  unless he already knew how they came into being?

  And there are those who believe that when men have been buried

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  and their spines decay, the marrow turns into a serpent.

  “Each of these lives is brought forth out of another,

  but there is one bird which can renew its own being;

  Assyrians call it the Phoenix; it lives not on grasses

  and grains but on incense and on the essence of balsam.

  As soon as five hundred years of his life are completed,

  employing his talons and unsullied beak, the old Phoenix

  builds his own nest in the top of a tremulous palm tree.

  Once it is covered completely with sweet-smelling branches

  of nard and mezereon, myrrh and pieces of cinnamon,

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  he lies down upon it, expiring over the odors.

  Out of the corpse of his father, there springs a young Phoenix

  (or so people say) destined to live the same life span.

  When age gives him strength to carry such weighty burdens,

  he lightens that of the palm tree by taking his nest down

  and bearing his cradle, along with the tomb of his father,

  through the light air until he comes to the city

  of Hyperion and piously places his burden

  before the sacred doors of Hyperion’s temple.

  “Should you think this is at all surprising or novel,

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  you’ll find the hyena a marvel for changing her gender:

  females, when they are mounted, turn into males, and

  there’s also a creature, nourished on air and light breezes,

  that takes on the color of whatever substance it touches.

  “Defeated India offered wine-bringing Bacchus

  a tribute of lynxes, and it is said that their urine

  turns into stones which the air instantly hardens.

  So too with coral, which waves like a grass underwater,

  but being exposed to the air turns instantly rigid.

  “Day will be ended with Phoebus bathing his weary

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  horses at sunset in the deep ocean, before I

  manage to put into words how everything changes

  into new forms: we can even see the times changing,

  as one nation gains in strength while another collapses:

  once Troy was great, rich in its wealth and its heroes,

  and able to go on bleeding both for ten years;

  now brought to earth, she has nothing to show but her ruins,

  no wealth besides that which lies in her burial chambers.

  “Sparta was famous, mighty Mycenae once flourished,

  even as Athens, even as Thebes of the Towers;

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  Sparta is worthless now, lofty Mycenae has toppled,

  what but the name remains of the Thebes of Oedipus?

  What but the name remains of Pandion’s Athens?

  “Fame now informs us that Dardanian Rome is rising,


  even now building a deep and enormous foundation

  close to the Tiber that flows from the Apennine mountains:

  therefore, she changes her form by increasing, and shortly

  will be the boundless world’s capital! So say the prophets,

  so say the oracles also. Indeed, I remember

  Helenus, the son of Priam, telling Aeneas,

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  bitterly weeping and doubtful about his survival,

  back when the matter of Troy was beginning to crumble,

  ‘O goddess-born, if you will pay careful attention

  to my foretelling, while you live, Troy will not perish!

  Fire and iron will give way as you carry your city

  forth from the ruins, until, together, you come to

  a more hospitable, even though foreign, site than your homeland.

  “‘I now see the city destined for Priam’s descendants:

  never has there ever been one as great, or one greater

  than this one is, never will there be one in the future!

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  Princes besides him will maintain her power for ages,

  but he, the offspring of Julius, will make her the mistress

  of all creation! And when he is no longer useful

  on earth, the powers above will rejoice in his presence,

  for heaven will be his reward and his destination.’

  “Helenus foretold all of this to Aeneas, encumbered

  by his household gods, and I recall it quite clearly,

  and I rejoice in the walls of my relatives rising,

  a welcome result of the conquest of Troy by the Argives!

  “However, lest I should wander far off in digression,

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  and my forgetful steeds stray from their course on the racetrack,

  heaven and everything under it will take on new forms,

  as will the earth too, and everything here upon it,

  as even we will, for we are a part of it also,

  not merely bodies, but wingèd spirits, and able

  to shelter in beasts, to lodge in the breasts of cattle;

  bodies which once may have given refuge to parents

  or brothers, or any joined to us by obligation,

  or men like ourselves, to be sure, should be safe and respected,

  not crammed into our guts like a Thyestean banquet!

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  “What a slippery slope he descends, who slits a calf’s throat

  able to listen unmoved to its piteous mooing,

  for he prepares himself to murder a human!

  Or who can butcher a kid, whose terrified bleating

  so resembles the cries of our children! Or eat a chicken,

  whom we have fed from our hand? Is this less than a murder?

  How does it differ? What is the end that it leads to?