#ovid metamorphoses

[sun-splotches]

Perseus fighting Cetus

[polypharmakoss]

I’ve been interested in the Phaeacians and the possibility of locating them in the Balearic Islands, so I was looking for information about them and how they might have settled there, and I found two references in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The references are to the ‘Balearic slings’, not to the Balearic people themselves 😄:

Ceto is coming to eat Andromeda: Ovid Metamorphoses book IV:

As a great ship with steady prow speeds on; forced forwards by the sweating arms of youth it plows the deep; so, breasting the great waves, the monster moved, until to reach the rock no further space remained than might the whirl of Balearic string encompass, through the middle skies, with plummet-mold of lead.

According to some calculations I found in a book by the Argentine Anthropological Society, it would be about 200 metres with a 3-centimetre lead projectile.

I love guessing distances and measurements from things like this, because I get really annoyed when measurements contain translation errors, taking Alcinoo’s garden, for example: depending on which measurement the translator uses, the garden is 1, 1.5 or 2.5 hectares lol.

And the second reference is literally Hermes heating up like a lead bullet when he sees Herse.

Ovid Metamorphoses book I:

The Son of Jove, astonished, while he wheeled on balanced pinions through the yielding air, burned hot; as oft from Balearic sling the leaden missile, hurled with sudden force, burns in a glowing heat beneath the clouds.

The Balearic Islands are my beloved, and when I heard there was speculation that it might be Scheria, I incorporated that into my hc💝 Also these slings take their name from the Balearic slingers, who were mercenaries in the ranks of both the Carthaginians and the Romans, and their activity is thought to have taken place between 600 and 123 BC. The name must have become part of Roman popular culture, which is why Ovid uses it as a term.

A reconstructed Balearic slinger by Johnny Shumate:

And a demonstration:

I love this kind of videos😄

[hermesmoly]

Ovid establishing Oceanus as a girl dad Hera can complain to and with Tethys very useful parents who can defy a verdict of the King of the Gods in the account that a constellation offends their foster daughter is kinda very found family

[palamedestragedy]

he was [a] king, he was still a father.....

[neoclassicalblobphilosopher]

Nobody gets them like I do

[homericnerd]

[lunavaleth]

The Manciple's Tale by William Russell Flint.

The Manciple, or steward, tells a story about the origin of the crow, based on the myth of Apollo and Coronis as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Phebus (Phoebus) kept a snow-white crow that could mimic any human voice. The bird witnesses Phebus’s wife with her lover and informs his keeper. Phebus kills his wife in a jealous rage. Later, feeling remorseful, he blames the crow for his madness, plucks out its feathers, turns the bird black, and commends it to the devil.

[echomourns]

echo

Listen, Muse, as I sing of deception.

The queen of the gods, stupefied by my winged words and tangled in an inescapable web of conversation, waited dumbly while her husband betrayed her over and over with nymph and mortal alike.

My wit always drew envy and ire. Troublesome. I knew her vengeance would find me. One should always return with equal duty that which they had received; such were the laws of men and of the gods. 

The goddess stole my words, ripped them from my throat, tied down my tongue, pierced through my jaw with divine power that even the divine feared. In her anger, she restricted my speech so the only sounds I could make were those thrown out before me, by anyone except myself.  She made me into a borrower. Poet no longer, she believed it would silence me.

Yet my voice prevailed. I was unsilenced. I chose when I spoke, which words to capture and reform with my mouth - I chewed and swallowed them, then spat them back. I stored them away fervently, but no matter how I hid them - behind my teeth, under my tongue - they would vanish, replaced with the next words uttered in my earshot. I became an injured hunter, a pair of elusive lovers, a nightingale or a chattering cicada.

He appeared in the wake of the naiads' beautiful songs, sung as they lounged by a crystal-clear spring. I trapped their words, plucked them from the air, and carefully laid them out on my tongue. But as I let them fly, his melodic voice cut through the dense trees I hid amongst and wrenched them from me. 

“Anyone here?” he called, searching. I did not wish to call back, but my voice had already spread its wings, and before I could stop, I had already responded, “Here.”

Spurned by my resounding voice, he entered the clearing where the naiads had lounged. The sun caught in his hair, shining golden threads, beauty incarnated. I thought he must be the son of some god for no mortal could glow in such a way. 

Perhaps I loved him at first glance. Fine limbs statuesque in their beauty, skin flawless like sleek marble, eyes like stars wrenched down from the night sky. Enviable. Fleeting. 

Or perhaps I did not love him but his words. Poetic and unceasing, they gave themselves to me and I gleefully stole them, winding them around myself and sending them back. The cadence of his voice was like a lyre, and when I returned the words he spouted, they became imbued with some power, a persuasion I did not realise I had given up. I manipulated his words to fit my voice and drew him in closer - he followed without hesitation, enthralled. He hung on every note of my voice. In that moment, I became something of my past, one with cunning words that not even the queen of the gods could resist. 

I reached out to touch him. Too rash. My movements were clumsy where my words were calculated and the shock of it made me fumble. 

“Take your hands off!” he screeched, like strings wound too tight. “I’ll die before I let you have me!”

“Have me!” I shouted back, out of control. The words I had claimed as my own betrayed me, embarrassed me, and after suffering such rejection, my pride burnt and crumbled. 

I retreated to the steep mountains, in a narrow cave. Over and over, I repeated those final words - they bounced off the walls and back into me, an unending loop. Gradually, I melded into them. 

My body disappeared. My flesh grew thin and my bones brittle, until they dried and became dust. All that remained of me was a voice and words that were not my own, infinitely repeating.  

Now formless, nothing limited my scope, the places I could go, things I could see, sounds I could hear. I listened to everything. No longer did I have a tongue to be bound by singular words that reached my ears. I heard all, could speak all, and all could hear me in the wake of each utterance. 

I sought him out and found him trapped in the glassy surface of the same spring at which we had parted. 

I watched him melt. This love drained the life from him. And I observed as my lingering voice haunted him like his beauty and his cruelty haunted me. He mourned himself, beating his chest with delicate hands. I relayed his laments to himself, taking his voice as well as his words and once again becoming the trickster. The reflection of beauty that enraptured him gained speech, and never could he bring himself to part with such that returned his affections. The object of his desire meant nothing to me. He loved an image; I was naught but sound. Both hollow. A shade of desperate imagination, a whisper in the wind.  

His death was slow. His body collapsed into itself, starved, feasting on his own flesh as he stared into the glassy water at himself. Even as his beauty drained from him, escaping into the earth, he did not look away, did not stop whispering sweet nothings. For as long as the words escaped him, I took them and spoke them back to him. My resounding voice kept him there - they held him tenderly, but they were shackles. Cold iron warmed by the heat of his desire for what lay reflected in the ripples.  

His lifeless form slumped forward and rolled into the spring, disturbing the water’s calm façade.  

Although his mortal body vanished, his beauty nourished the earth, and where he once sprawled across the grass, small flowers sprouted and bloomed. Pure white petals crowded around a golden centre that caught the sun and reflected it back. The sight called back to grey bones bleached white by the sun and the golden skin that had been blanched of life, melting from the skeleton. Though beautiful in life, his death was the same gore as any other. The flowers, planted by the pity of some god, were a false consolation, for they too will die just the same. They will wither and their petals will fall and their stems will collapse and be sealed underground until the earth warms over and their beauty will emerge again. Thus began an unending cycle of life and death, beauty and its withering. 

Sound cannot die; I remain long after they are forgotten, infinitely resounding.  

No voice is impervious to an echo. Even the goddess that cursed me and the god king that watched it happen, thankless, are not immune to my claim of their words. I stand in the shadow of every utterance, carve my place inside each word. My voice, once stolen, now becomes all.  

END.