This way the gods pass to the palaces and halls of the mighty Thunderer. To right and left are the houses of the greater gods, doors open and crowded. The lesser gods live elsewhere. Here the powerful and distinguished have made their home. When the gods had taken their seats in the marble council chamber their king, sitting high above them, leaning on his ivory sceptre, shook his formidable mane three times and then a fourth, disturbing the earth, sea and stars.
Then he opened his lips in indignation and spoke. Though they were fierce enemies, still their attack came in one body and from one source. Now I must destroy the human race, wherever Nereus sounds, throughout the world. I swear it by the infernal streams, that glide below the earth through the Stygian groves.
All means should first be tried, but the incurable flesh must be excised by the knife, so that the healthy part is not infected. Mine are the demigods, the wild spirits, nymphs , fauns and satyrs , and sylvan deities of the hills.
Since we have not yet thought them worth a place in heaven let us at least allow them to live in safety in the lands we have given them. Perhaps you gods believe they will be safe, even when Lycaon , known for his savagery, plays tricks against me, who holds the thunderbolt, and reigns over you. All the gods murmured aloud and, zealously and eagerly, demanded punishment of the man who committed such actions.
After he had checked their murmuring with voice and gesture, they were all silent. News of these evil times had reached my ears. It would take too long to tell what wickedness I found everywhere. Those rumours were even milder than the truth. Then, as the last shadows gave way to night, I entered the inhospitable house of the Arcadian king.
I gave them signs that a god had come, and the people began to worship me. The truth will not be in doubt.
That is how he resolved to prove the truth. Not satisfied with this he took a hostage sent by the Molossi , opened his throat with a knife, and made some of the still warm limbs tender in seething water, roasting others in the fire. No sooner were these placed on the table than I brought the roof down on the household gods, with my avenging flames, those gods worthy of such a master.
He himself ran in terror, and reaching the silent fields howled aloud, frustrated of speech. Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing, he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood.
His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs. He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape. There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image. One house has fallen, but others deserve to also. Wherever the earth extends the avenging furies rule. You would think men were sworn to crime!
Let them all pay the penalty they deserve, and quickly. That is my intent. They were all saddened though at this destruction of the human species, and questioned what the future of the world would be free of humanity. Who would honour their altars with incense? Did he mean to surrender the world to the ravages of wild creatures? In answer the king of the gods calmed their anxiety, the rest would be his concern, and he promised them a people different from the first, of a marvellous creation.
Now he was ready to hurl his lightning-bolts at the whole world but feared that the sacred heavens might burst into flame from the fires below, and burn to the furthest pole: and he remembered that a time was fated to come when sea and land, and the untouched courts of the skies would ignite, and the troubled mass of the world be besieged by fire. So he set aside the weapons the Cyclopes forged, and resolved on a different punishment, to send down rain from the whole sky and drown humanity beneath the waves.
His beard is heavy with rain, water streams from his grey hair, mists wreathe his forehead, and his feathers and the folds of his robes distil the dew. When he crushes the hanging clouds in his outstretched hand there is a crash, and the dense vapours pour down rain from heaven. Exert all your strength. That is what is needed. Throw open your doors, drain the dams, and loose the reins of all your streams! Neptune himself strikes the ground with his trident, so that it trembles, and with that blow opens up channels for the waters.
Overflowing, the rivers rush across the open plains, sweeping away at the same time not just orchards, flocks, houses and human beings, but sacred temples and their contents. Any building that has stood firm, surviving the great disaster undamaged, still has its roof drowned by the highest waves, and its towers buried below the flood. And now the land and sea are not distinct, all is the sea, the sea without a shore.
There one man escapes to a hilltop, while another seated in his rowing boat pulls the oars over places where lately he was ploughing. One man sails over his cornfields or over the roof of his drowned farmhouse, while another man fishes in the topmost branches of an elm. Sometimes, by chance, an anchor embeds itself in a green meadow, or the curved boats graze the tops of vineyards.
Where lately lean goats browsed shapeless seals play. The Nereids are astonished to see woodlands, houses and whole towns under the water. There are dolphins in the trees: disturbing the upper branches and stirring the oak-trees as they brush against them. Wolves swim among the sheep, and the waves carry tigers and tawny lions. The boar has no use for his powerful tusks, the deer for its quick legs, both are swept away together, and the circling bird, after a long search for a place to land, falls on tired wings into the water.
The sea in unchecked freedom has buried the hills, and fresh waves beat against the mountaintops. The waters wash away most living things, and those the sea spares, lacking food, are defeated by slow starvation.
Phocis , a fertile country when it was still land, separates Aonia from Oeta , though at that time it was part of the sea, a wide expanse of suddenly created water. There Mount Parnassus lifts its twin steep summits to the stars, its peaks above the clouds. When Deucalion and his wife landed here in their small boat, everywhere else being drowned by the waters, they worshipped the Corycian nymphs, the mountain gods, and the goddess of the oracles, prophetic Themis.
No one was more virtuous or fonder of justice than he was, and no woman showed greater reverence for the gods. When Jupiter saw the earth covered with the clear waters, and that only one man was left of all those thousands of men, only one woman left of all those thousands of women, both innocent and both worshippers of the gods, he scattered the clouds and mist, with the north wind, and revealed the heavens to the earth and the earth to the sky.
It was no longer an angry sea, since the king of the oceans putting aside his three-pronged spear calmed the waves, and called sea-dark Triton , showing from the depths his shoulders thick with shells, to blow into his echoing conch and give the rivers and streams the signal to return. He lifted the hollow shell that coils from its base in broad spirals, that shell that filled with his breath in mid-ocean makes the eastern and the western shores sound.
Now the sea has shorelines, the brimming rivers keep to their channels, the floods subside, and hills appear. Earth rises, the soil increasing as the water ebbs, and finally the trees show their naked tops, the slime still clinging to their leaves.
The world was restored. But when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha , through welling tears. Even now our lives are not guaranteed with certainty: the storm clouds still terrify my mind. How would you feel now, poor soul, if the fates had willed you to be saved, but not me? How could you endure your fear alone? Who would comfort your tears? Believe me, dear wife, if the sea had you, I would follow you, and the sea would have me too. The human race remains in us.
The gods willed it that we are the only examples of mankind left behind. Immediately they went side by side to the springs of Cephisus that, though still unclear, flowed in its usual course. When they had sprinkled their heads and clothing with its watery libations, they traced their steps to the temple of the sacred goddess, whose pediments were green with disfiguring moss, her altars without fire. Meanwhile they reconsider the dark words the oracle gave, and their uncertain meaning, turning them over and over in their minds.
It is these we are told to throw behind us. They descended the steps, covered their heads and loosened their clothes, and threw the stones needed behind them. The stones, and who would believe it if it were not for ancient tradition, began to lose their rigidity and hardness, and after a while softened, and once softened acquired new form.
Then after growing, and ripening in nature, a certain likeness to a human shape could be vaguely seen, like marble statues at first inexact and roughly carved. The earthy part, however, wet with moisture, turned to flesh; what was solid and inflexible mutated to bone; the veins stayed veins; and quickly, through the power of the gods, stones the man threw took on the shapes of men, and women were remade from those thrown by the woman.
So the toughness of our race, our ability to endure hard labour, and the proof we give of the source from which we are sprung. Earth spontaneously created other diverse forms of animal life. So, when the seven-mouthed Nile retreats from the drowned fields and returns to its former bed, and the fresh mud boils in the sun, farmers find many creatures as they turn the lumps of earth.
Amongst them they see some just spawned, on the edge of life, some with incomplete bodies and number of limbs, and often in the same matter one part is alive and the other is raw earth. In fact when heat and moisture are mixed they conceive, and from these two things the whole of life originates.
And though fire and water fight each other, heat and moisture create everything, and this discordant union is suitable for growth. So when the earth muddied from the recent flood glowed again heated by the deep heaven-sent light of the sun she produced innumerable species, partly remaking previous forms, partly creating new monsters.
Indeed, though she would not have desired to, she then gave birth to you, great Python , covering so great an area of the mountain slopes, a snake not known before, a terror to the new race of men.
The archer god, with lethal shafts that he had only used before on fleeing red deer and roe deer, with a thousand arrows, almost emptying his quiver, destroyed the creature, the venom running out from its black wounds. Then he founded the sacred Pythian games, celebrated by contests, named from the serpent he had conquered. There the young winners in boxing, in foot and chariot racing, were honoured with oak wreaths. There was no laurel as yet, so Phoebus crowned his temples, his handsome curling hair, with leaves of any tree.
That one is suited to my shoulders, since I can hit wild beasts of a certainty, and wound my enemies, and not long ago destroyed with countless arrows the swollen Python that covered many acres with its plague-ridden belly. You should be intent on stirring the concealed fires of love with your burning brand, not laying claim to my glories!
The one that kindles is golden with a sharp glistening point, the one that dispels is blunt with lead beneath its shaft. Many courted her, but she, averse to being wooed, free from men and unable to endure them, roamed the pathless woods, careless of Hymen or Amor , or whatever marriage might be. Phoebus loves her at first sight, and desires to wed her, and hopes for what he desires, but his own oracular powers fail him.
As the light stubble of an empty cornfield blazes; as sparks fire a hedge when a traveller, by mischance, lets them get too close, or forgets them in the morning; so the god was altered by the flames, and all his heart burned, feeding his useless desire with hope. He gazes on her lips, where mere gazing does not satisfy. He praises her wrists and hands and fingers, and her arms bare to the shoulder: whatever is hidden, he imagines more beautiful. But she flees swifter than the lightest breath of air, and resists his words calling her back again.
I who am chasing you am not your enemy. Nymph, Wait! This is the way a sheep runs from the wolf, a deer from the mountain lion, and a dove with fluttering wings flies from the eagle: everything flies from its foes, but it is love that is driving me to follow you! Pity me! I am afraid you might fall headlong or thorns undeservedly scar your legs and I be a cause of grief to you!
These are rough places you run through. Slow down, I ask you, check your flight, and I too will slow. At least enquire whom it is you have charmed. I am no mountain man, no shepherd, no rough guardian of the herds and flocks. Rash girl, you do not know, you cannot realise, who you run from, and so you run. Jupiter is my father. Through me what was, what is, and what will be, are revealed. Through me strings sound in harmony, to song. My aim is certain, but an arrow truer than mine, has wounded my free heart!
The whole world calls me the bringer of aid; medicine is my invention; my power is in herbs. But love cannot be healed by any herb, nor can the arts that cure others cure their lord! The winds bared her body, the opposing breezes in her way fluttered her clothes, and the light airs threw her streaming hair behind her, her beauty enhanced by flight. But the young god could no longer waste time on further blandishments, urged on by Amor , he ran on at full speed.
Like a hound of Gaul starting a hare in an empty field, that heads for its prey, she for safety: he, seeming about to clutch her, thinks now, or now, he has her fast, grazing her heels with his outstretched jaws, while she uncertain whether she is already caught, escaping his bite, spurts from the muzzle touching her.
So the virgin and the god: he driven by desire, she by fear. He ran faster, Amor giving him wings, and allowed her no rest, hung on her fleeing shoulders, breathed on the hair flying round her neck.
If your streams have divine powers change me, destroy this beauty that pleases too well! Only her shining beauty was left. Even like this Phoebus loved her and, placing his hand against the trunk, he felt her heart still quivering under the new bark. He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed, with you my lyre, with you my quiver. You will go with the Roman generals when joyful voices acclaim their triumph, and the Capitol witnesses their long processions.
And just as my head with its un-cropped hair is always young, so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves. There is a grove in Haemonia , closed in on every side by wooded cliffs. They call it Tempe. Through it the river Peneus rolls, with foaming waters, out of the roots of Pindus , and in its violent fall gathers clouds, driving the smoking mists along, raining down spray onto the tree tops, and deafening remoter places with its roar.
Here is the house, the home, the innermost sanctuary of the great river. Seated here, in a rocky cavern, he laid down the law to the waters and the nymphs who lived in his streams. Only Inachus is missing, but hidden in the deepest cave he swells his stream with tears, and in utter misery laments his lost daughter, Io , not knowing if she is alive or among the shades.
Since he cannot find her anywhere, he imagines her nowhere, and his heart fears worse than death. Do not fly from me! Meanwhile Juno looked down into the heart of Argos , surprised that rapid mists had created night in shining daylight. She knew they were not vapours from the river, or breath from the damp earth.
She looked around to see where her husband was, knowing by now the intrigues of a spouse so often caught in the act. Even in that form she was beautiful. Jupiter, to stop all inquiry, lied, saying she had been born from the earth. Then Saturnia claimed her as a gift. What could he do? The god of the sun.
A great archer, he is oftentimes hotheaded and lustful. The goddess of love. Venus is the daughter of Jupiter and Dione and the mother of Cupid and Aeneas. The god of love. Cupid is the son of Venus and Mars. He often causes mischief. The god of wine. Bacchus is the son of Jupiter and Semele. As an adult, he takes vengeance on Pentheus and the daughters of Minyas.
A virgin warrior and the patron of Athens. Minerva is the daughter of Jupiter. She competes with Arachne in a weaving contest. The queen of the underworld. Proserpina is the daughter of Jupiter and Ceres and the wife of Dis, who rapes her and takes her to the underworld.
The goddess of agriculture. She searches for Proserpina after Dis steals her. The god of healing. Aesculapius is the son of Apollo and Coronis. He rids Rome of its plague in Book XV. The god of the underworld. Dis is the son of Saturn, the brother of Jupiter and Neptune, and the husband of Proserpina, whom he forces into his kingdom.
A river god and shape-shifter. Achelous fights Hercules for the hand of Deianira. Hercules overpowers him and breaks his horn. Latona takes revenge on Niobe. A sea nymph.
Thetis is the daughter of Nereus and Doris, the wife of Peleus, and the mother of Achilles. Another character named Scylla, this one is the daughter of Nisus, She falls in love with Minos and betrays her father and people. A nymph. Juno punishes Echo, making her unable to speak except to repeat the words of others.
Echo loves Narcissus. A famous bard and poet. Orpheus is the son of Apollo and Calliope and the husband of Eurydice. He sings in Books X and XI. He tells some of the most memorable stories in the poem, such as the tale of Pygmalion. He loses his wife twice but rejoins her in the underworld. A famed warrior. Theseus is the son of Aegeus, the husband of Phaedra, and the father of Hippolytus. He destroys the Minotaur. The son of Agenor, the husband of Harmonia, and the founder of Thebes.
He slays a serpent to establish Thebes, and at the end of his life he is turned into a serpent. The grandson of Cadmus and the son of Autonoe. Diana turns Actaeon into a deer as a punishment for seeing her naked. Arachne is the daughter of Idmon. Minerva transforms Arachne into a spider.
The King of Thebes. Pentheus is the son of Echion and Agave. He is a vocal opponent of the worship of Bacchus. Perseus is the son of Jupiter and Danae and the husband of Andromeda. Perseus slays Medusa and the sea monster. The Muse of poetry. Calliope is the mother of Orpheus. She sings in a contest against the Pierides in Book V. A follower of Diana.
Callisto is the daughter of Lycaon and the mother of Arcas. After Jupiter rapes Callisto, Juno transforms her into a bear. Finally, Jupiter makes her into a constellation. A powerful magician. Medea is the daughter of Aeetes and the wife of Jason.
The son of Cephisus, a river god, and Liriope, a nymph. Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection and dies. The daughter of Cepheus and Cassiope.
Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster and marries her. The daughter of Pandion, the sister of Philomela, the wife of the tyrant Tereus, and the mother of Itys. The son of Clymene and the Sun. A great inventor. Daedalus is the father of Icarus. He creates the labyrinth and wings to flee from Crete.
The greatest Greek hero, and the first person to be deified in the Metamorphoses. Hercules is the son of Jupiter and Alcmena and the husband of Deianira and Hebe. One of the two survivors of the flood. Pyrrha is the daughter of Epimetheus and the wife of Deucalion. The King of Latium. Picus is the son of Saturn and the husband of Canens.
Circe transforms him into a woodpecker after he spurns her love. Nine daughters of Pierus. The Pierides challenge the Muses to a poetry contest. The Pierides lose, and the Muses turn them into magpies for their arrogance. The daughter of Aeolus and the beloved wife of Ceyx.
Alcyone is changed into a bird with her husband. The King of Trachin. Ceyx is the husband of Alcyone. He dies in a storm and is changed into a bird with his wife. The daughter of Cadmus, the mother of Actaeon, and the aunt of Pentheus. The daughter of Miletus and Cyanee and the twin sister of Caunis. Byblis falls in love with her twin brother, Caunis. The daughter of Phorcys and Keto. Neptune rapes Medusa, and Athena turns her into a monster.
The Phrygian king. Midas has a golden touch, and he is a poor literary critic. Apollo punishes him by giving him donkey ears. The daughter of Cinyras. Myrrha falls in love with her father and manages to sleep with him. He is transformed into a Myrrh tree. The son of Theseus and an Amazon woman. He appears in a resuscitated form in Book XV. A famously clever Greek soldier. Ulysses is the son of Laertes and the husband of Penelope. He defeats Ajax in a verbal contest for the arms of Achilles.
A Trojan hero and the founder of Rome. Aeneas is the son of Anchises and Venus and the father of Ascanius. Aeneas is the second person in the Metamorphoses to be deified. A great Greek warrior. Ajax is the son of Telamon. He commits suicide and turns into a flower. The greatest Greek warrior in the Trojan War. Achilles is the son of Peleus and Thetis. He kills Hector in hand-to-hand combat. A Roman statesman and general.
Julius Caesar is assassinated in 44 b. His nephew, Augustus, is the first emperor of Rome. The first emperor of Rome. Augustus is the nephew of Julius Caesar. He may be equated with Jupiter in Book XV. The champion of Troy. Hector is the son of Priam. Achilles bests him in battle in the Trojan War. The son of Mars and Ilia and the brother of Remus. Romulus is the third person to be deified in the Metamorphoses. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Important Quotes Explained. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics.
Characters Character List. Immortals Jupiter The king of the gods.
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