We welcomed Leonard Muellner, Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University, who helped us to start thinking about Latin texts and Roman authors with a focus on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The discussion was recorded.
You can watch the recording in the embedded frame below, or our YouTube channel.
You may like to read the following focus passages on Perseus.
Here are two selections from Stanley Lombardo’s translation:
Apollo & Daphne, Book 1, lines 527–538:
(Apollo speaking to the fleeing Daphne)
“Nymph of Peneus, I beg you, stop! I am not
Pursuing you as an enemy. Please, nymph, stop!
This is how a lamb runs away from a wolf,
A deer from a lion, a trembling dove from an eagle,
Each from her enemy, but Love makes me pursue you.
Ah, I am afraid you will fall, afraid that brambles
Will scratch your shins and that I, oh so wretched,
Will be the cause of your pain. This is rough terrain
You are running through. Run a little slower,
Please, and I’ll slow down, too, Or stop and ask
Who your lover is — no hillbilly or shepherd —
I don’t mind the herds here, like some shaggy oaf…The Four Ages, Book 1, lines 115–126
After Saturn was consigned to Tartarus’ gloom
The world was under Jove, and the Silver race came in.
Cheaper than gold but more precious than bronze.
Jupiter curtailed the old season of spring
And by adding cold and heat and autumn’s changes
To a brief spring, made the year turn through four seasons.
For the first time the air, parched and feverish,
Began to burn, and icicles now hung frozen in the wind.
People now took shelter; their houses were caves,
Dense thickets, and branches bound together with bar.
Cereal seeds now lay buried, sown in long furrows,
And for the first time oxen groaned under the yoke.
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