As he ended Book 13 of his Metamorphoses with Scylla running off from the advances of Glaucus, Ovid starts Book 14 with Glaucus trying to use sorcery to make Scylla love him. For this, he turns to Circe.

The Story

Rejected by the scared Scylla, Glaucus travels from Sicily to visit the sorceress Circe. He implores her to use her dark arts to force Scylla to return his love. But Circe refuses, telling Glaucus to woo another: as she, Circe, is in love with him, in spurning Scylla, Glaucus could love Circe instead.

Glaucus rejects her advice and her proposition, saying that nothing will change his love for Scylla.

This annoys Circe, who cannot harm Glaucus because of her love for him, so she turns her anger on Scylla instead. Circe prepares a magical potion from herbs, weaving her spells into it. Dressed in a deep blue robe, the sorceress then goes to a small bay where Scylla likes to bathe, and pours her potion into the water there:
Scylla came there and waded in waist deep,
then saw her loins defiled with barking shapes.
Believing they could be no part of her,
she ran and tried to drive them back and feared
the boisterous canine jaws. But what she fled
she carried with her. And, feeling for her thighs,
her legs, and feet, she found Cerberian jaws
instead. She rises from a rage of dogs,
and shaggy backs encircle her shortened loins.
The lover Glaucus wept. He fled the embrace
of Circe and her hostile power of herbs
and magic spells. But Scylla did not leave
the place of her disaster; and, as soon
as she had opportunity, for hate
of Circe, she robbed Ulysses of his men.
She would have wrecked the Trojan ships, if she
had not been changed beforehand to a rock
which to this day reveals a craggy rim.
And even the rock awakes the sailors’ dread.

With Scylla’s lower half transformed into a pack of dogs, she takes some of Ulysses’ crew as they try to pass, but lets Aeneas through. She is finally transformed into a rock, and becomes a famous hazard to navigation.

The Paintings

With the story of Scylla and Glaucus already popular, and Circe well-known in art from her earlier encounter with Odysseus during a previous section in Homer’s Odyssey, this short conclusion to the tale of the couple has also been quite a popular basis for paintings.

John William Waterhouse chose to portray the figure of Circe the sorceress in his Circe Invidiosa (1892). Despite its narrative limitations, this offers a marvellous insight into the character of Circe, as she pours her brilliant emerald green potion into the water, ready for Circe to come and bathe.

John Melhuish Strudwick also chooses a moment early in Ovid’s story, which makes his painting of Circë and Scylla (1886) narratively rather thin. Circe, dressed in brown rather than blue, is sprinkling her potion into the water from within a small cave, as Scylla, at the left, walks down to bathe.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Scylla Changed by Circe’s Spell (1606) for an illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses is faithful to the text. With the horrified Glaucus in the distance, Scylla is surrounded by half a dozen wild dogs as she bathes in the sea.

By far the most complete visual account is Eglon van der Neer’s Circe Punishes Glaucus by Turning Scylla into a Monster (1695). Circe takes the limelight, as she casts her potion from a flaming silver salver held in her right hand. Dripping onto that is the wax from a large candle, held in her left hand.

In the water below, Scylla has already been transformed into a gorgonesque figure, with snakes for hair, and the grotesque Glaucus watches from behind. Above and to the right of Circe is a small dragon perched on a rock ledge.

A few artists preferred to paint the end of this story, with Scylla turned to a rock and paired with Charybdis, threatening Odysseus’ ships and menacing passing mariners.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) shows Charybdis the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks of Scylla at the right.

This fragment of fresco by Alessandro Allori shows Odysseus’ ship passing Charybdis, depicted as a huge head vomiting forth the rough waters of the whirlpool at the right, and the dogs’ heads of Scylla, which have captured three of Odysseus’ crew.

Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis (1794-96) is another vivid depiction of Odysseus passing the twin dangers. He stands on the fo’c’sle of his ship, holding his shield up in defence as the oarsmen down below him struggle to propel the craft through the Straits of Messina.

Of course Odysseus did make it past Sicily, and Aeneas and his crew do so too, to move on to further adventure in the next story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Following the transformation of Scylla into a rock, Aeneas is rowed through the Straits of Messina, forward in his epic voyage. Unlike his earlier rival Virgil, Ovid again skips through those adventures in outline.

The Story

Heading north-west from the Straits of Messina, Aeneas and his crew encounter a fierce northerly storm which blows them south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid breezes through what takes Virgil almost a whole book in the Aeneid:
And then Sidonian Dido, who was doomed
not calmly to endure the loss of her
loved Phrygian husband, graciously received
Aeneas to her home and her regard:
and on a pyre, erected with pretense
of holy rites, she fell upon the sword.
Deceived herself, she there deceived them all.

They speed on, through a close call with the Sirens, until they eventually reach the land of the Cercopes, whom Jupiter transformed:
The father of the gods abhorred the frauds
and perjuries of the Cercopians
and for the crimes of that bad treacherous race,
transformed its men to ugly animals,
appearing unlike men, although like men.
He had contracted and had bent their limbs,
and flattened out their noses, bent back towards
their foreheads; he had furrowed every face
with wrinkles of old age, and made them live
in that spot, after he had covered all
their bodies with long yellow ugly hair.
Besides all that, he took away from them
the use of language and control of tongues,
so long inclined to dreadful perjury;
and left them always to complain of life
and their ill conduct in harsh jabbering.

Once again trending north-west along the coast of Italy, they pass Naples, and on to the next story.

The Paintings

The story of Dido and Aeneas, as told by Virgil, has been a major inspiration for every form of art from opera to sculpture. I here select some of the more interesting depictions which retain narrative strength.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815, is probably the standard work showing the beginnings of the romance. Unfortunately it doesn’t give any clues – such as the presence of Aeneas’ ships – to its tragic outcome.

The diminutive beauty being embraced by Dido is probably not intended to be human, and unlikely to be Juno or Venus who acted together to make the love affair happen. Jeanne Huet was apparently Guérin’s model for Dido: she may have been the older sister of painter Paul Huet, later one of Guérin’s pupils.

You may be surprised to see an early watercolour sketch by Cézanne in this series. In about 1875, when he was still experimenting with narrative genres, Cézanne first drew a compositional study, then painted Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage.

Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Aeneas’ wife, Creusa, who was abandoned by Aeneas as the family fled the burning city of Troy. This refers quite faithfully to Virgil’s account, as Aeneas describes searching for Creusa in his series of misfortunes. However, Ovid omits any mention of her disappearance or death.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it is surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

My favourite painting of Dido’s spectacular death is probably the only conventional history painting ever made by Henry Fuseli, known simply as Dido (1781). Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which this story is told in full detail, was the first work of classical literature which I studied as a set book, so I have a particular affection for Fuseli’s meticulously faithful account, which shows the scene around line 666.

Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on a sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which will confirm visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

Ovid’s interest in the origins of apes, from transformation of the Cercopes, has not been reflected in the arts.

It has been shown only by those like Antonio Tempesta who engraved for illustrated editions of the Metamorphoses. Tempesta’s Jupiter Changing the Cercopians into Monkeys from around 1600 shows Jupiter at the right, accompanied as ever by his huge eagle, with the transformed monkeys.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

In Book 14 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aeneas is at last making his way up the coast of Italy towards his destiny, leading to the foundation of the city and empire of Rome.

The Story

Having cleared the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, and seen the Cercopes who had been transformed into apes, Aeneas and his crew pass the city of Naples, and land at Cumae to visit the Sibyl there in her cave. Aeneas needs to do this in order to go to the underworld to speak to the ghost of his father Anchises.

The Sibyl reassures Aeneas that he will achieve his goals, and to that end she takes him to Proserpine’s sacred glade. Finding a golden bough there, she tells Aeneas to break that from the tree. Bearing that bough, the two of them travel to the underworld, make contact with the ghost of Anchises, and return safely.

During their walk back, Aeneas thanks the Sibyl for her help and guidance, and offers to build a temple to her, assuming that she is a goddess. The Sibyl points out that she is no goddess, and explains how she had once been offered immortality if she were to let the god Apollo take her virginity:
And, while he hoped for this and in desire
offered to bribe me for my virtue, first
with gifts, he said, ‘Maiden of Cumae choose
whatever you may wish, and you shall gain
all that you wish.’ I pointed to a heap
of dust collected there, and foolishly
replied, ‘As many birthdays must be given
to me as there are particles of sand.’
“For I forgot to wish them days of changeless youth.
He gave long life and offered youth besides,
if I would grant his wish. This I refused,
I live unwedded still. My happier time
has fled away, now comes with tottering step
infirm old age, which I shall long endure.
You find me ending seven long centuries,
and there remain for me, before my years
equal the number of those grains of sand,
three hundred harvests, three hundred vintages!
The time will come, when long increase of days
will so contract me from my present size
and so far waste away my limbs with age
that I shall dwindle to a trifling weight,
so trifling, it will never be believed
I once was loved and even pleased a god.
Perhaps, even Phoebus will not recognize me,
or will deny he ever bore me love.
But, though I change till eye would never know me,
my voice shall live, the fates will leave my voice.”

Aeneas and the Sibyl then reach Cumae, and he moves on to his next adventure.

The Paintings

The two interlinked stories of Apollo and the Sibyl of Cumae, and Aeneas and the Sibyl, have both attracted the attention of several Masters. Indeed one, JMW Turner, cut his mythological teeth on them, and during the rest of his career painted at least three more works showing the Sibyl.

I start with one of Claude Lorrain’s most wonderful coastal landscapes, his Coast View with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl from about 1645-49. Although their figures are small, Apollo on the left is holding his lyre in his left arm, trying to persuade the seated Sibyl, to the right, to let him take her virginity.

Around them are the ruins of classical buildings and a stand of tall trees, as the land drops away to an idealised view of the coast of Italy. I suspect that the island on the horizon is based on Capri. In the small bay immediately below them are some ships, which may be a reference to Aeneas’ future visit to the Sibyl, although that would have been centuries later according to the Sibyl’s account of her age.

JMW Turner didn’t tackle this first part of the story until 1823, when he painted The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl. His view appears to have been loosely based on Claude’s, with common elements, but has been recast at Baiae, in the Bay of Naples. Apollo is again on the left, with his lyre, but the dark-haired Sibyl has adopted an odd kneeling position. She is holding some sand in the palm of her right hand, asking Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there are grains.

Opposite the couple, on the other side of the path, under the trees, is a white rabbit.

When Claude was painting his coastal view, François Perrier was painting a more conventional figurative account of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c 1646). Aeneas, stood to the left of the incense burner, appears to be offering to burn incense in honour of the Sibyl, who stands at the right in front of her cave, and is just about to tell him her life-story.

Behind Aeneas is a queue of people, including a king, bearing gifts and waiting to consult with the Sibyl. At the top left corner is a temple, and in the clouds above it the god Apollo, I believe.

JMW Turner’s first version of this scene is thought to have been his first mythological painting, back in his early career, in about 1798. This second version, Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil, dates from 1814 or 1815, and is both an improvement on the original and in better condition.

True to the spirit of Claude’s landscape, this too is a mythological landscape showing the beautiful setting of Lake Avernus, near Pozzuoli, to the west of the city of Naples. In the distance is Baiae and the cliffs of Cape Miseno.

The Sibyl, who does not show her years, holds aloft a golden sprig rather than a bough, and Aeneas stands with his back to the viewer, as if he too is enjoying the view.

Turner’s last account is The Golden Bough, which he exhibited in 1834. It shows well how much his style had changed, although it retains compositional features from his earlier paintings.

The Sibyl stands on the left, radiant in white light, and holding aloft a more substantial golden branch than Turner showed previously. Her right hand holds a golden sickle used to cut that branch. Down towards Lake Avernus are the Fates, dancing around another white glow. A couple of female companions of the Sibyl rest under the tree, but Aeneas is nowhere to be seen (he might be in the middle of the Fates, perhaps). In the right foreground is a snake, a symbol of the underworld.

Of the straight paintings of the Sibyl, hardly any show her as the seven hundred year-old woman of Ovid’s (and Virgil’s) accounts.

The painting which comes closest is probably Elihu Vedder’s The Cumean Sibyl of 1876. However, rather than show the Sibyl in the context of Aeneas’ story, he prefers to depict her in her other main role, going to sell the Sibylline books of prophecies to the last king of Rome. She strides out clutching these scrolls under her arm.

There are also many fine paintings of Aeneas and the Sibyl visiting the underworld, which I will examine on another occasion.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Over the last two millenia, it must have been the most famous extra-marital affair, and one of the best-known suicides – that of Dido Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Trojan refugee and patriarch of the Roman Empire. First told in explicit detail in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, it has inspired at least a dozen operas, is referred to in seven of Shakespeare’s plays, and even pops up in two of the Civilization games.

Its outline is simple, and a prototype for uncountable literary works: girl meets boy on a mission; boy cannot deviate from mission; boy leaves girl; girl heartbroken. Ovid’s summary in his Metamorphoses is little longer than than, but far more eloquent and poetic. Ovid also wrote a second and fuller version in his collection of fictional letters by famous women, Heroides, and it is that which concerns me here.

Dido and her brother Pygmalion (not the better-known Pygmalion who made and fell in love with a statue) were of royal blood, probably being the children and heirs of the King of Tyre. Dido married Sychaeus, but Pygmalion wanted their riches too, so had her husband murdered when he was at the altar in their own home.

Dido took her riches and fled to North Africa, seeking sanctuary on a plot of land which she acquired from the Berber king Iarbas, whom she rejected as a suitor. He gave her as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide, so Dido ingeniously cut the oxhide up into thin strips, which she fastened end-to-end to enable her to circumscribe an entire hill.

There, Dido built the city of Carthage, into which she drew those who had fled with her, local Berbers and many others. The city grew to be wealthy and powerful, and she remained its queen.

JMW Turner depicts this in one of his works inspired by Claude Lorrain: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Dido is seen on the left bank, dressed in blue. On the opposite bank is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.

Although a simple reading of this painting follows its title, it could equally show Aeneas as the man to the left of Dido, in which case the masts behind them would be those of Aeneas’ ship(s), and the painting would show their first meeting.

Aeneas was a refugee from the city of Troy, who fled the city with his father Anchises, wife Creusa, and son Ascanius, as the city was burning and being sacked by the Greeks. Together with other refugees, Aeneas, his father and son had sailed away, then undertook a protracted journey across the Mediterranean in search of his destiny.

Pompeo Batoni’s Aeneas Fleeing from Troy (1753) shows the family as they leave the burning city behind them. Creusa is starting to fall slightly behind, and becoming distressed.

Aeneas’ mother was Venus, making him a brother to Cupid. Also interested in Aeneas was Juno, the senior goddess, who wanted to thwart his reaching Italy, and her husband Jupiter, who wanted Aeneas to reach his destination, where his descendents Romulus and Remus would ultimately found Rome.

When Aeneas and his men left the island of Sicily heading north towards the Italian mainland, Juno intervened by bringing a northerly gale which drove them south to the coast of North Africa, and the city of Carthage.

Once ashore in Carthage, Aeneas met Dido, as shown in Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815. He told her the story of his escape from the ruins of Troy, and of his guilty secret: his wife Creusa had become separated from the rest of the family. Aeneas claimed that he had gone back to look for her, and she appeared to him in ghostly form, telling him to leave without her, which he did.

It is Cézanne, in his watercolour sketch of Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, painted in about 1875, who expresses this situation most clearly. Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Creusa.

Dido had sworn to her late husband that she would love no other, but as she and Aeneas got to know one another, both Juno and Venus (through her other son, Cupid) conspired to grow that into love. Venus wanted Dido to provide her son with a safe haven, and Juno wanted to halt his progress. This came to a head when the couple went out with a hunting party, and took shelter from a torrential rainstorm, brought by Juno, in a cave. Both Virgil and Ovid make it quite explicit that they made love in that cave.

As so often happens, Dido and Aeneas made love under different assumptions. For Dido, given her commitment to her husband, she consented on the basis that this was also the act of union in marriage. For Aeneas, who had made no such commitment to his wife, who had disappeared in dubious circumstances anyway, there was no such agreement, and he remained free to pursue his destiny.

The next external influence on the couple’s relationship then came into play: Jupiter, wanting to chivvy Aeneas on his journey to start the founding of Rome and to appease Dido’s rejected suitor, sent Mercury his messenger to tell Aeneas that he must not tarry with Dido, but must prepare to sail, leaving the queen behind. Aeneas instructed his crew to get their ship ready to resume its journey – but in complete secrecy. He then went to Dido to break the news to her, only to find that she already knew of his intention to desert her and abandon her as he had previously abandoned Creusa.

Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Dido and Aeneas (1747) draws on ambiguity in an ingenious way. It could be read as showing the couple after their lovemaking in the cave, with Dido still partly undressed, and Aeneas adjusting his clothes.

However, the presence of Aeneas’ ship in the left background implies that this is the moment that Aeneas has returned to break the news to Dido that he must sail shortly. More puzzling, perhaps, is the figure of a naked woman on board the ship, which indicates Aeneas’ intended lack of faithfulness to Dido in any case.

Behind the couple is Dido’s sister Anna. In Virgil’s account, she goes to Aeneas to plead Dido’s case before the queen’s suicide; in Ovid’s version in his Heroides, Anna takes Aeneas the letter written for her by Ovid.

Dido’s letter, as supposed by Ovid, is a tour de force, and truly elegiac. It expresses her side of the story and her view of their relationship brilliantly. She points out that she could well be pregnant with a brother for Aeneas’ son Ascanius. She appeals to the emotions in a calculating and crafted way. And most of all, she raises questions about Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa, which should have had greatest impact on his heart. No matter what Mercury might say, how could Aeneas abandon a second wife too?

But Mercury intervened again, and Aeneas was driven to sail forthwith. When Dido saw this, her only option was to fall on her sword, taking her own life.

Here I show two of the most vivid paintings of the climax of this story. In Joseph Stallaert’s The Death of Dido (1872), the queen has fallen on the sword given by Aeneas, and now lies dying on the couch on which the couple had previously made love, pointing at his ship leaving harbour by the light of the early dawn.

Resting her hand on Dido’s chest wound, her sister Anna comforts the queen in her dying moments, as the queen’s nurse and a maidservant are in attendance. There is no sign of a funeral pyre, but suggestive smoke is made by the small altar at the extreme left.

Henry Fuseli’s Dido (1781) has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which will confirm visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and history moves to the founding of Rome.

Was it Dido? Aeneas? Or the pair of them? Ovid implies – but dares not state – that it was all down to the play of the gods. Given the conflicting interests of Venus, Juno, and Jupiter, this relationship was surely doomed from the start.

In Ovid’s retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Metamorphoses, Aeneas has just returned from the Underworld with the Sibyl of Cumae as his guide. Ovid then uses two of Ulysses’ men to narrate episodes from Homer’s Odyssey in flashback. The first is Achaemenides, who survived their encounter with Polyphemus.

The Story

Aeneas sailed on from Cumae and reached the coast midway between Naples and Rome, at Caieta (Gaeta). There he went ashore, and Achaemenides, whom Aeneas had rescued from Sicily, happened across Macareus, another survivor of Ulysses’ crew who returned from the Trojan War.

The meeting of these two veterans prompts Achaemenides to give a short account of the encounter between the Cyclops Polyphemus and Ulysses (Odysseus) and his men.

The full story is not given here, but was familiar from the Odyssey.

Polyphemus, a savage one-eyed man-eating giant, spent his days tending his flock of sheep. Polyphemus held Ulysses and his crew captive, then devoured several of them, so Ulysses got the Cyclops drunk in order to engineer their escape. Polyphemus asked Ulysses his name, and the latter replied Οὖτις (Outis, Greek for nobody). Once the giant had fallen into a stupor, Ulysses drove a hardened stake into the Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him.

The following morning, Ulysses and his men tied themselves to the undersides of the sheep in Polyphemus’ flock so that he couldn’t feel them escaping. Recognising that he has lost his captives, Polyphemus called out for help from the other Cyclops, telling them that ‘Nobody’ had hurt him. The other Cyclops therefore didn’t come to his aid.

Achaemenides became separated from the main group, who made their way down to the ship and sailed off into the dawn, deriding the blind Polyphemus as they went. Achaemenides was thus able to see Polyphemus fly into a rage, and hurl huge rocks at Ulysses in his ship:
The shoutings of Ulysses nearly caused
destruction of your ship and there I saw
the Cyclops, when he tore a crag away
and hurled the huge rock in the whirling waves;
I saw him also throw tremendous stones
with his gigantic arms. They flew afar,
as if impelled by catapults of war,
I was struck dumb with terror lest
the waves or stones might overwhelm the ship,
forgetting that I still was on the shore!

The Cyclops then strode the slopes of Mount Etna in his rage, cursing the Greeks in general and Ulysses in particular. Achaemenides felt certain that Polyphemus would discover him, and that he would suffer the same fate as his colleagues who had been eaten alive. He hid:
Most carefully concealed for many days,
trembling at every sound and fearing death,
although desiring death; I fed myself
on grass and acorns, mixed with leaves; alone
and destitute, despondent unto death,
awaiting my destruction I lost hope.
In that condition a long while, at last
I saw a ship not far off, and by signs
prayed for deliverance, as I ran in haste,
down to the shore. My prayers prevailed on them.
A Trojan ship took in and saved a Greek!

This prompted Macareus to tell the story of his survival.

The Paintings

One of the best-known episodes from Homer’s Odyssey, there are some superb paintings telling the story of Ulysses/Odysseus and Polyphemus, but none which makes any reference to Achaemenides, who may just be a narrative device created by Virgil to link his Aeneid with the Odyssey.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s Ulysses Fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus (1812) shows Ulysses about to make his way out of the Cyclops’ cave, as his captor strokes one of his sheep. With Polyphemus’ face turned away from the viewer, it is difficult to confirm that he has been blinded at this stage, though, making this painting quite hard to read.

Jacob Jordaens pictures the crew fastening themselves to the underside of the sheep as they prepare to escape, in his Odysseus in the Cave of Polyphemus, which was probably painted in about 1650. Again, the Cyclops is facing away from the viewer, and it is hard to be sure that this is taking place after his blinding.

Given the difficulties in depicting the moment of escape from their captivity, most artists have opted to show Polyphemus hurling chunks of mountain at Ulysses and his crew.

Guido Reni’s account in his Polyphemus from 1639-40 is far clearer. The Cyclopean eye socket is now empty, where Ulysses had poked its single eye out. In the distance, Ulysses and his crew are making their way out to their ships in two smaller boats, in their haste to depart. In Reni’s simplicity comes great narrative strength.

Arnold Böcklin’s Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) shows Ulysses’ crew rowing frantically out to sea, through large waves, as Polyphemus prepares to hurl a huge rock at them from the shore. The detailed realism and tight composition make this one of Böcklin’s most dramatic and active paintings, and a vivid account.

JMW Turner’s magnificent Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is probably his finest narrative painting, and the product of a long gestation. He seems to have started work on rough sketches for this in a sketchbook which is believed to date to 1807, and this finished painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy over twenty years later, in 1829.

The massive figure of Polyphemus is wreathed in cloud above the wooded coast towards the upper left, as the rays of the rising sun light the whole scene from Apollo’s chariot.

The entire crew is dressing the masts and rigging, and Ulysses brandishes two large flags, to deride the blinded giant. The orange flag on the mainmast bears the Greek letters Οὖτις (Outis), the name that Ulysses told Polyphemus was his. Below it is another flag showing the wooden horse of Troy, a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid. In front of the bows of the ship are ghostly white Nereids and sea creatures, presumably a reference to Neptune, Polyphemus’ father, whose curse results from this incident.

Annibale Carracci’s fresco of The Cyclops Polyphemus (1595-1605) in Rome’s Palazzo Farnese has sometimes been mistaken for showing this episode from the Odyssey. It actually shows, quite unambiguously, the earlier story in Metamorphoses, in which Polyphemus kills Galatea’s lover Acis. There is no evidence that the Cyclopean eye has been blinded, and closer examination of the fleeing figures shows that the more distant is a woman, Galatea.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is retelling episodes from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the hero Aeneas has reached the coast midway between Naples and Rome, at Caieta (Gaeta). There he went ashore, and two of the survivors of Ulysses’ crew meet to tell stories from Homer’s Odyssey. In the previous article, Achaemenides gave an account of Ulysses’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus; next, Macareus tells his story of transformation by the sorceress Circe.

The Story

Following Achaemenides’ account of the encounter with Polyphemus, he hands over narration to Macareus, who provides some details from later parts of the Odyssey.

Macareus first tells of Aeolus, and the bag of winds which he gave to Ulysses/Odysseus. For nine days, Ulysses and his crew experienced favourable winds, but on the tenth day the crew opened the bag, in search of riches. They released the winds, which promptly blew the ship back to Aeolus.

Then there were the cannibal Laestrygonians, who ate one of the three crew sent to meet them. Their chieftain led a party in pursuit of Ulysses, bombarding his ships with trees and rocks and sinking two of the three. That allowed just one ship, containing Ulysses, Macareus and others, to escape to safety.

They then sailed to Circe’s island, where given their recent experiences the surviving crew refused to go beyond its beach. Lots were drawn to form a group to go to Circe’s palace, and they set off. On the way they came across enchanted animals, lions, bears and wolves, which rushed at them but did not attack.

Macareus and his party were taken in to see Circe sat on her throne. She was busy making a herbal concoction, and arranged for Ulysses’ men to be served with a barley drink, into which she poured her concoction:
We took the cups presented to us by
her sacred right hand; and, as soon as we,
so thirsty, quaffed them with our parching mouths,
that ruthless goddess with her outstretched wand
touched lightly the topmost hair upon our heads.
(Although I am ashamed, I tell you this)
stiff bristles quickly grew out over me,
and I could speak no more. Instead of words
I uttered hoarse murmurs and towards the ground
began to bend and gaze with all my face.
I felt my mouth take on a hardened skin
with a long crooked snout, and my neck swell
with muscles. With the very member which
a moment earlier had received the cup
I now made tracks in sand of the palace court.
Then with my friends, who suffered a like change
(charms have such power!) I was prisoned in a stye.

Only one, Eurylochus, had refused to drink and remained in human form instead of being transformed into a pig. He warned Ulysses, who came to Circe bearing a flower which he had been given by Mercury. Circe took Ulysses into her hall, where she tried to lure him to drink her concoction. He drew his sword, and forced her to back off.

Circe and Ulysses then married, and she took him off to her bed. As a wedding gift to him, she transformed his crew back into human form, to their great relief and gratitude. Ulysses and his crew stayed on Circe’s island for a whole year before resuming their journey.

The Paintings

Circe has been painted extensively since the Renaissance, right up to modern times, and a fair proportion of those works have shown the transformation of Ulysses’ men into pigs, and Ulysses’ meeting with Circe. Here is my selection of the best.

Jan van Bijlert’s Ulysses and Circe from around 1640 shows the couple at the banquet, looking intently at one another. Circe holds her wand, and between them is the goblet containing her magic concoction.

At the right, one of the serving maids looks directly at the viewer. At her heels are Ulysses’ crew, in the form of pigs.

Salomon de Bray makes this a more intimate meeting, in his slightly later Odysseus and Circe (1650-55). Here it is Ulysses who is seated, clutching a krater-like goblet into which a maid is pouring clear liquid from a bottle. The hero looks quite haggard, and decidedly unimpressed by Circe. Below Ulysses’ left arm, two pigs are drinking more of Circe’s concoction.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani, the father and teacher of the great Elisabetta Sirani, painted his account of Ulysses and Circe at about the same time as de Bray, and advances the story a few moments to the point where Ulysses is about to draw his sword. Here Circe is still holding the glass which she is trying to get him to drink from, with her wand in the other hand.

The crew are seen in the background, in the form of pigs. Another woman holding a wand is with them: this could represent their transformation into pigs, or back into humans, which would form multiplex narrative.

The last of the paintings from this period of popularity is Matthijs Naiveu’s Circe and Odysseus from 1702. This is set in a grand banquet inside Circe’s palace, with some peculiar clusters of figures which allude to Circe’s role as a sorceress. For example, there is a table just to the left of the couple at which a satyr and a demon are engaged in conversation.

Circe has moved forward from her throne to embrace Ulysses, whose sword is pointing at her body to force her back. The goblet from which she has been trying to get him to drink is held by a maid at the far right. A couple of boars are feeding from fruit laid on the marble floor.

The story then seems to have lost its popularity with painters, until the end of the nineteenth century. Although Gustave Moreau painted one work which shows Circe, it was John William Waterhouse who developed a sophisticated account.

Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus from 1891 is perhaps the most complex work showing this story. Circe sits on her throne, holding up the krater for Ulysses to drink, and her wand in the other hand. The viewer is Ulysses, seen in the large circular mirror behind the sorceress, preparing to draw his sword.

On the left side of the mirror is Ulysses’ ship, and scattered on the ground at Circe’s feet are the herbs and berries which she used to prepare the concoction with which she transformed the crew. To the right, one of those pigs lies on the ground, behind a small incense burner.

Waterhouse has not only told the story using the ingenious confluence of objects, but encourages the viewer to consider their role in his painting, and more profoundly about the action of looking, and the image.

Briton Rivière’s rather simpler painting of Circe and her Swine (before 1896) has been used as an illustration for several versions of the Odyssey, and unusually casts Circe as a magic swineherd, her wand resting behind her.

Finally, Alice Pike Barney’s very painterly portrait of Circe from about 1915 was most probably made in pastels. Her streaming golden hair almost fills the painting, and wraps the head of a large boar which she is embracing. I apologise for the poor image quality here, which is the best that I have been able to locate.

Although not apparently tackled by many of the Masters of narrative painting, this fascinating myth from the Odyssey has been well-told, and Waterhouse’s account stands out as a major work of the nineteenth century.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

There can be no more hapless lovers than Hero and Leander. It’s bad enough that his parents would have disapproved, so the relationship has to be kept secret. But when the couple are separated by one of the world’s treacherous stretches of water, the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), that left Leander only one option: to swim.

The legendary crossings which Leander made of the Hellespont were about a mile as the crow flies. Given the strong and often conflicting currents which rip through the strait, and its surprisingly cold water, they might seem almost suicidal.

So on 3 May 1810, the twenty-two year-old British poet and writer Lord Byron tried it for himself: it took him seventy minutes, during which he reckoned that he swam further than the direct mile, as he was drawn to zig-zag by the currents. Now swimming the strait has become an annual event, entered by those who have swum the Channel or accomplished similar demanding feats, and is held on 30 August each year.

Legend tells us that Leander, a young man living in Abydos on the south-eastern (Asia Minor) bank of the Hellespont, and Hero, a beautiful young woman living in Sestos on the north-western (European, Thracian Chersonese) bank of the Hellespont, fell deeply in love. But in fear of Leander’s parental disapproval, they had to meet in secret, so he took to swimming that hazardous mile each evening that he visited Hero, and later its return.

Their relationship developed, and was consummated, and they appear to have established a reliable routine. Leander navigated his way across not using the stars, but by the light which Hero provided on top of the tower in which she lived – an ancient lighthouse.

Edward Burne-Jones shows her bent over, placing small kindling on a fire, in his Hero Lighting the Beacon for Leander (1875-77). Three little flowers suggest that this is at ground level rather than on top of a tower, though.

A decade later, Evelyn De Morgan’s Hero Holding the Beacon for Leander (c 1885) places Hero down on the shore, holding a small torch aloft, looking out for her lover as he makes his way through the choppy water. Interestingly, there is a red thread, wool perhaps, which runs from her clothing, under her left hand, which may be a reference to the thread of life, or that of time.

William Etty painted two works based on this legend. The first, The Parting of Hero and Leander (1827), shows the two lovers embraced, at the moment that Leander is about to start his swim back over the Hellespont to Abydos, one night.

Ovid devotes a pair of letters in his Heroides (Heroines) to this tragedy.

The first is written by Leander to Hero, after a week of stormy weather had prevented him from swimming over to her. He explains the situation, tells her that he set off three times, only to be beaten back by the waves, and how he yearns for calm weather so that they can be together again. In its last lines he asks that Hero keeps her light constant, where he can see it – ominous words.

Hero’s reply is hardly reassuring: she can’t bear their being apart, her passion burns, and if he doesn’t get there soon, she writes that she will surely die. In its later lines she urges him to be cautious, and to wait for better conditions, but the damage has already been done.

Soon after receiving her letter, Leander gives it another go, although the storm has hardly abated. As he is in the middle of the Hellespont, the wind and rain extinguish Hero’s beacon.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Last Watch of Hero (1880) shows Hero watching anxiously for Leander to complete the crossing.

JMW Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander (1837) is a dramatic and complex work with elements of both the precursor to the climax, and the climax itself. Sestos is on the left, with a couple of towers visible on the coast, neither of which contains Hero’s light. Leander is seen swimming across the narrow straight (its width shown far smaller than in reality), from right to left, to join Hero. Behind him on the bank at Abydos are spirits emerging, indicating his imminent death.

Turner shows Hero holding up a lantern, conflicting with accounts of the legend which place the beacon at the top of Hero’s tower, and ignoring the important detail of the beacon being extinguished by the storm, so leading to Leander’s death.

Turner exhibited this painting in 1837, providing his own verse to tell the story, which was most probably based on Lord Byron’s account in his Written After Swimming From Sestos To Abydos.

The legend continues that, deprived of the guidance of Hero’s beacon, Leander couldn’t reach Sestos, and drowned. Hero saw her lover’s lifeless body, so threw herself from the top of her tower to join her lover in death. This is the climactic scene which has been most favoured in art.

Peter Paul Rubens quite youthful account in his Hero and Leander of about 1604 is big on storm and drama, but difficult to read clearly. Leander’s body is being brought through the huge waves by a team of Naiads, as Hero, wearing a brilliant red gown, plunges to her death at the right.

My favourite painting of the climax is Domenico Fetti’s slightly later Hero Mourning the Dead Leander (1621-22), despite its curiously calm waters. A more modest group of Naiads in the centre are tending to Leander’s corpse, as a winged Cupid cries over them. At the right, Hero falls head-first from her tower to inevitable death.

On the left, Fetti provides a couple of evil-looking sea monsters, and Venus making her way onto her large clam shell.

William Etty’s second painting of the story, Hero, Having Thrown herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies on his Body (1829), also shows the ending: Leander has already drowned, Hero already thrown herself from the tower, and is now in the (rather unconvincing) throes of death, just about to join her lover in the afterlife.

The legend has also given rise to some sparklingly terse summaries. In Shakespeare’s play As You Like It (Act IV, Scene I), the character Rosalind summarises the tale with extreme cynicism:
“Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was ‘Hero of Sestos.’ But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

The most succinct, though, is John Donne’s epigram:
“Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.”

When passions burn fiercely, we all too often follow the impetuousness of the heart.

Macareus, one of the survivors of the Odyssey, has been telling his account of the sojourn of Ulysses and his men on Circe’s island. Having told of their arrival and transformation into pigs, he completes his story with a cautionary tale of what happens to those who don’t submit to Circe’s desires.

The Story

One of Circe’s assistants showed Macareus a marble statue of a youth with a woodpecker on his head. When Macareus asked why that was in the shrine, the assistant explained that it all came about as a result of Circe’s magic powers.

Picus had been the king of Latium, and drew admiring glances from nymphs wherever he went. He fell in love with a beautiful young woman who sang so wonderfully that she was named Canens (Latin for singing), and they lived in wedded bliss. One day, Picus was out hunting on his horse when Circe caught sight of him from the undergrowth. Her desire for him was immediate and intense, so she worked her magic to lure Picus into a thicket, in pursuit of a phantom boar which she had conjured up.

Circe confronted him, and told of her desire for him, but he refused her in fathfulness to Canens. Despite Circe repeatedly pleading with him, Picus stood firm and refused her time and again. The sorceress became angry, warning him that he would pay for his obstinacy, and would never return to his bride:
Then twice she turned herself to face the west
and twice to face the East; and three times then
she touched the young man with her wand,
and sang three incantations. Picus fled,
but, marvelling at his unaccustomed speed,
he saw new wings, that spread on either side
and bore him onward. Angry at the thought
of transformation — all so suddenly
added a strange bird to the Latian woods,
he struck the wild oaks with his hard new beak,
and in his rage inflicted many wounds
on the long waving branches his wings took
the purple of his robe. The piece of gold
which he had used so nicely in his robe
was changed to golden feathers, and his neck
was rich as yellow gold. Nothing remained
of Picus as he was except the name.

With Picus turned into a woodpecker, his courtiers were out searching for him. Stumbling across Circe instead, they accused her of being responsible for his disappearance. She promptly worked her spells upon them too:
The men all quaked appalled. With magic rod
she touched their faces, pale and all amazed,
and at her touch the youths took on strange forms
of wild animals. None kept his proper shape.

Picus’ wife Canens was beside herself with worry, and roamed the countryside looking for her husband:
Distracted she rushed forth and wandered through
the Latin fields. Six nights, six brightening dawns
found her quite unrefreshed with food or sleep
wandering at random over hill and dale.
The Tiber saw her last, with grief and toil
wearied and lying on his widespread bank.
In tears she poured out words with a faint voice,
lamenting her sad woe, as when the swan
about to die sings a funereal dirge.
Melting with grief at last she pined away;
her flesh, her bones, her marrow liquified
and vanished by degrees as formless air
and yet the story lingers near that place,
fitly named Canens by old-time Camenae.

With the King of Latium transformed into a woodpecker, his courtiers into sundry wild animals, and his wife vanished into thin air, Ulysses and his men finally left Circe’s island, and Macareus finished his stories.

The Paintings

The story of Picus, Canens, and Circe with its multiple transformations would appear to be ideal for the visual artist. Ovid’s account is quite vivid, and the story appears in both Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. Oddly, it has remained little-known, and seldom-painted.

The only dedicated account available is Luca Giordano’s Picus and Circe, probably painted around 1670. This shows Circe trying to seduce Picus, and the king resisting her advances. By their expressions, she has just told him that he will pay for his refusal, and is working her magic to transform him into a woodpecker. Already he has grown feathery wings, and at the upper right there is the silhouette of a woodpecker as an ominous reminder of the fate that awaits him at any moment.

There are more paintings, though, which show Circe in the company of various enchanted birds and animals, including the former King Picus. Two of the more remarkable examples are both by Dosso Dossi, one painted in about 1515, the second probably fifteen years later.

Dossi’s Circe and her Lovers in a Landscape (c 1514-16) is a remarkably early and realistic mythological landscape, with deep rustic lanes, trees, and a distant farmhouse.

Circe leans, naked, at the foot of a tree going through spells on a large tablet, with a book of magic open at her feet. Around her are some of the men who she took a fancy to and transformed into wild creatures. There’s a spoonbill, a small deer, a couple of dogs, a stag, and up in the trees an owl and what could well be a woodpecker, in the upper right corner.

Dossi’s later painting of Melissa (Circe) (c 1518-1531) is also set in a richly detailed landscape. Circe sits inside a magic circle, around which are inscribed cabalistic words. In the upper left corner are small homunculi apparently growing on a tree. On the left is a large dog, and perched on top of a suit of armour is a bird, most probably a woodpecker.

Disappointingly, although Circe inspired paintings by several of the Pre-Raphaelites, none came close to the story of Picus and Canens, or of her bad habit of collecting in animal form those men who refused her desires.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

After the Virgin Mary, Helen is probably the most famous and most frequently-painted woman. She is also one over whom there has been no consensus: was she abducted, seduced, or seducer? Victim or whore?

Ovid’s contribution to the debate comes in a pair of imaginary letters, the first from Paris to Helen, the second her reply, in his Heroides (Heroines). They are among his wittiest and most entertaining works, and skilfully leave it to the reader to decide the virtues and vices of the two figures, a solution which is much more difficult for the visual artist.

Both Helen and Paris had – even for legend – very peculiar origins.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises Helen’s unique birth. The outcome of the union of Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, with Jupiter, in the form of a swan, Helen did not have a human birth, but hatched from an egg laid by her human mother. Some accounts claim that Leda had intercourse with both the swan and her husband Tyndareus on the same night, and produced one or two eggs containing Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux, as shown here.

When pregnant with him, Paris’s mother, Hecuba queen of Troy, dreamed that she gave birth to a flaming torch. This was interpreted as revealing that her child would be responsible for the destruction of Troy by fire, so he was abandoned on Mount Ida to die. He was rescued and raised by country folk, and was eventually welcomed back into the royal household.

When still under age (according to most accounts), the beautiful Helen was abducted by Theseus (the ‘hero’ who abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos). Helen’s brothers were not happy with that, so paid Theseus a visit and persuaded him to return the girl. Léon Cogniet’s Helen Delivered by Castor and Pollux (1817), which secured the artist the Prix de Rome, shows her rescue.

In return for her son’s offence, Aethra, mother of Theseus, was made a slave of Helen, and was not freed until after the fall of Troy many years later. During that time, Helen’s beauty only grew, and her hand was sought by many suitors in a contest organised by her brothers Castor and Pollux. Among those suitors were many prominent figures, including Odysseus.

Helen’s father, King Tyndareus, feared that in choosing between her suitors he would offend and cause trouble. The suitors therefore agreed to swear an oath, under which they would all defend the successful suitor in the event that anyone should quarrel with them – this was the crucial Oath of Tyndareus. Under that, Menelaus, king of Sparta, was chosen as Helen’s husband, and the couple later had a daughter, Hermione, and possibly sons too.

Paris’s nemesis came with the Judgement of Paris, the beauty contest which resulted from the Apple of Discord being put between Juno (Hera), Minerva (Athena), and Venus (Aphrodite). Venus successfully bribed Paris with the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world (Helen, still married to Menelaus), and was awarded the apple. Paris then had to claim his prize, and suffer the wrath of Juno and Minerva.

Given its importance to subsequent events (the Trojan War) and the whole story, you might have expected clarity over how Helen and Paris became partners. Instead, there are multiple and conflicting accounts which leave everything in doubt.

Most of the early paintings, such as Primaticcio’s The Rape of Helen from about 1530-39, show Paris abducting Helen against her will. Here, a youthful Paris is carrying her from the city of Sparta into one of his ships, ready to sail off to Troy with his prize.

Maerten van Heemskerck’s magnificent Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the Ancient World (1535) puts the same story into a world-view panorama which includes classical ‘wonders’ such as the Colossus of Rhodes. Helen is here part of a small raid on Sparta in which various other prizes are also being taken.

For Tintoretto, The Rape of Helen (1580) was nothing short of war. As an archer is about to shoot his arrow, and another Trojan fends off attackers with a pike, Helen, dressed in her finery, is manhandled onto Paris’s ship like a stolen statue.

By the seventeenth century, the story shown in paintings was starting to change. Guido Reni’s The Rape of Helen, from about 1626-29, shows Paris leading Helen away with her maids and courtiers in attendance. She doesn’t look at all happy, and is far from willing, and Cupid stands with a finger raised as if to say that he will be using his bow very shortly.

Juan de la Corte’s The Rape of Helen (c 1620-50) is also a bit more ambiguous. Helen is being grasped around her waist by one of the Trojans, but seems to have resigned herself to her fate.

By 1776, when Benjamin West painted Helen Brought to Paris, this has started to look very consensual, if still a seduction by Paris. As Paris kneels before her in supplication, Venus and her son Cupid draw the figure of Helen towards him. Note how Helen is wearing predominantly white clothing, and unlike Venus shows but a modest amount of flesh.

A few years later, Angelica Kauffman pursues a very similar line in her Venus Persuading Helen to Fall in Love with Paris (1790). So maybe Paris didn’t have to abduct Helen after all, but Venus and Cupid had to persuade the queen to allow herself to be seduced.

For Jacques-Louis David, it was all about The Love of Helen and Paris (1788). The couple pose in front of their bed with its rumpled sheets. He is naked and playing his lyre, his cheeks flushed. She wears diaphanous clothing which has slipped off her right shoulder, and her cheeks are distinctly flushed too. Watching over them is a small statue of Venus.

In the late nineteenth century, fewer paintings showed Helen and Paris together, and Helen became the more popular subject for portraits.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Helen of Troy (1863) shows her against an almost suppressed background of Troy burning. Both her hands grasp a pendant at her neck, of a firebrand, which can only be a reference to Paris and his symbolism in his mother’s dream.

In contrast, Gaston Bussière’s Helen of Troy (1895) poses against a backdrop of Troy before its fall, modelled after the great ancient cities of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. She wears an elaborate headdress with a band of peacock feathers, and her abundant jewellery is flashy rather than regal, more typical of a courtesan than the head of court.

Evelyn de Morgan’s Helen of Troy (1898) admires herself in a mirror, the back of which bears the image of Venus. Around her are white and red roses for love, and five white doves, two of which are ‘courting’. In the distance are the lofty towers of the fortified city of Troy.

Ovid portrays Paris as naïve and inept, desparate to impress Helen despite the fact that Venus has already promised her to him. She comes across as far more experienced, and obviously duplicitous. At this stage, with her husband away visiting Crete, she has already let her dress slip to show Paris her breasts. In her reply to Paris, she reveals that she is in love with him and prepared to have a clandestine affair. However, she portrays herself as a virtuous wife who is inexperienced at adultery, and skilfully leads Paris to his death, and the destruction of Troy.

Cogniet painted Helen in the margins of his Oenone Refuses to Rescue Paris at the Siege of Troy (1816), his first and unsuccessful entry for the Prix de Rome. Oenone had been Paris’s first wife, who seems to have been overlooked in many of the accounts of Helen and Paris. As he lies dying from his wound from Philoctetes’ poisoned arrow during the Trojan War, Paris looks imploringly towards Oenone.

She, though, has refused to try to heal him with her herbal arts, has turned her back on him, and walks away, leaving him to the care of Helen, who stands at the right edge wearing her golden crown.

Myth and legend are similarly undecided as to Helen’s ultimate fate, following the fall of Troy. Homer has her return to Menelaus in Sparta, and resume her former role as queen and mother, almost as if nothing had happened. Perhaps Euripides was closer to the truth in his Trojan Women, where she is shunned by the other women who survived the fall of Troy, and is eventually taken back to Greece to face a death penalty for her actions.

Gustave Moreau’s Helen at the Scaean Gate (c 1880) shows her faceless, and standing amid the smoking ruins and rubble, which is perhaps the best place to leave her.

Reference

Wikipedia’s lengthy and well-referenced article about Helen.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Achaemenides and Macareus have been telling stories from the Odyssey. With those complete, Aeneas (hero of Virgil’s Aeneid) moves on to found Alba, the precursor to Rome itself.

The Story

When Macareus had completed his narrative, Aeneas’ nurse was buried there in a marble sepulchre. Aeneas and his crew then set sail on the final leg of their journey from Troy to Latium.

Once they had arrived, Aeneas and his former Trojans had to fight Turnus, king of the Rutuli, for Latinus’ throne and the hand of Lavinia in marriage. This proved a long and bitter struggle, in which Aeneas was aided by others. Among those who refused to assist him was Diomede, in Apulia.

In defending his refusal to aid Aeneas, Diomede told the story of his return from the Trojan War, which had proved a desparate journey. His colleague Acmon had rashly speculated what more Venus could have done to harm them, and taunted her:
With language of this kind Pleuronian Acmon,
Provoking Venus further than before,
revived her former anger. His fierce words
were then approved of by a few, while we
the greater number of his real friends,
rebuked the words of Acmon: and while he
prepared to answer us, his voice, and even
the passage of his voice, were both at once
diminished, his hair changed to feathers, while
his neck took a new form. His breast and back
covered themselves with down, and both his arms
grew longer feathers, and his elbows curved
into light wings, much of each foot was changed
to long toes, and his mouth grew still and hard
with pointed horn.
Amazed at his swift change
were Lycus, Abas, Nycteus and Rhexenor.
And, while they stared, they took his feathered shape.
The larger portion of my company
flew from their boat, resounding all around
our oars with flapping of new-fashioned wings.
If you should ask the form of these strange birds
they were like snowy swans, though not the same.

Acmon and his friends were thus transformed into white seabirds. Aeneas’ envoy to Diomede, Venulus, also saw a grotto where a shepherd had offended Pan, and been turned into an oleaster tree.

During the war with Turnus, enemy forces had been sent to set alight to Aeneas’ fleet of ships. Built with pinewood frames, they burned well. But Juno intervened:
When the holy mother of the gods, recalling
how those same pines were felled on Ida’s crest,
filled the wind with a sound of cymbals clashed
and trill of boxwood flutes. Borne through light air
by her famed lion yoke, she came and said,
“In vain you cast the fire with impious hand,
Turnus, for I will save this burning fleet.
I will not let the greedy flame consume
trees that were part and members of my grove.”
It thundered while she spoke, and heavy clouds,
following the thunder, brought a storm
of bounding hail. The Astraean brothers filled
both air and swollen waters with their rage
and rushed to battle. With the aid of one
of them the kindly mother broke the ropes
which held the Phrygian ships, and, drawing all
prow foremost, plunged them underneath the wave.
Softening quickly in the waters quiet depth,
their wood was changed to flesh, the curving prows
were metamorphosed into human heads,
blades of the oars made feet, the looms were changed
to swimming legs, the sides turned human flanks,
each keel below the middle of a ship
transformed became a spine, the cordage changed
to soft hair, and the sail yards changed to arms.
The azure color of the ships remained.
As sea-nymphs in the water they began
to agitate with virgin sports the waves,
which they had always dreaded. Natives of
the rugged mountains they are now so changed,
they swim and dwell in the soft flowing sea,
with every influence of birth forgot.

That was a reverse of the normal type of transformation, with inanimate ships being changed to sea-nymphs.

When Turnus was killed by Aeneas, so the city of Ardea fell, and from its ashes and ruins arose a bird, the heron.

With the end of Aeneas’ life in sight, his mother Venus campaigned among the gods and goddesses for him to be transformed into a god when he died:
The gods assented, and the queen of Jove
nodded consent with calm, approving face.
The father said, “You well deserve the gift,
both you who ask it, and the one for whom
you ask it: what you most desire is yours,
my daughter.” He decreed, and she rejoiced
and thanked her parent. Borne by harnessed doves
over and through the light air, she arrived
safe on Laurentine shores: Numicius there
winds through his tall reeds to the neighboring sea
the waters of his stream: and there she willed
Numicius should wash perfectly away
from her Aeneas every part that might
be subject unto death; and bear it far
with quiet current into Neptune’s realm.
The horned Numicius satisfied the will
of Venus; and with flowing waters washed
from her Aeneas every mortal part,
and sprinkled him, so that the essential part
of immortality remained alone,
and she anointed him, thus purified,
with heavenly essence, and she touched his face
with sweetest nectar and ambrosia mixt,
thereby transforming him into a god.
The throng of the Quirini later named
the new god Indiges, and honored him.

Ovid then lists the successor rulers of Latium and Alba, which had been founded by Aeneas, up to the reign of King Proca, in which his next story is set.

The Paintings

Whether viewed from the final books of Virgil’s Aeneid or Ovid’s retelling at the end of his Metamorphoses, the adventures of Aeneas in Italy have been painted very seldom indeed, although his apotheosis to a god has been more popular.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Acmon and his Friends Changed into Birds by Venus from about 1600 is the only pictorial representation which I have been able to find of that story told by Diomede, and for its period it tells it well.

The single illustration that I have been able to find of the transformation of the burning Trojan ships into nymphs comes from one of the most precious documents featured in this series: the Vergilius Vaticanus manuscript of Virgil’s works dating back to about 400 CE. Three ships are seen already transformed into the head, arm, and body of nymphs at the far right, although there is no sign of any fire or hailstorm. The left and centre show Aeneas fighting Turnus.

The Vergilius Vaticanus is very special, as one of the oldest surviving sources for the text of the Aeneid, and one of only three ancient illustrated manuscripts containing classical literary works. At one time, it belonged to Pietro Bembo, an Italian scholar who is commemorated in the font name.

Luca Giordano’s Aeneas and Turnus from the late 1600s is one of the few paintings showing the battle between Aeneas and Turnus. The Trojan hero here has Turnus on the ground, under his right foot. At the lower left is one of Aeneas’ ships, which has not been transformed into a nymph. Venus, Aeneas’ mother, and Cupid, his half-brother, are at the upper left, and the goddess at the upper right is either Minerva (with her owl), or Juno – as losers in the Judgement of Paris, both bore a grudge against the Trojans.

Of the more numerous paintings of the apotheosis of Aeneas, I have chosen two.

Peter Candid’s Aeneas Taken to Olympus by Venus from around 1600 shows Venus at the right, in her chariot with Cupid, anointing Aeneas, on the left, with nectar and ambrosia. Above them is the pantheon, arrayed in an imposing semicircle, and above them Jupiter himself, clutching his thunderbolts and ready to receive the new god.

Tiepolo’s sketch for a fresco ceiling in the Royal Palace in Madrid, The Apotheosis of Aeneas from about 1765, is another impressive account. The artist made this a little more elaborate by combining the apotheosis with the presentation of arms to Aeneas by his mother Venus.

Aeneas is to the left of centre, dressed in prominent and earthly red. Above and to the right of him is his mother, Venus, dressed in white, ready to present the arms which have been forged for him by Vulcan, her partner, who is shown below supervising their fabrication. Aeneas’ destination is the Temple of Immortality, glimpsed above and to the left of him, through a break in the divine clouds.

With Aeneas turned into the Roman god Indiges, Ovid moves on with the story of the foundation of the city of Rome.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

The little that we know of Sappho is, like the little that remains of her poetry, scant and fragmentary. She was arguably the greatest classical Greek lyrical poet, a lesbian of renown, but was alleged to have thrown herself from a cliff when a male lover left her.

Dearth of information about her, and its apparent inconsistency, has not stopped a wealth of writing about her, and her appearance in a great many paintings, few of which are consistent with her sexuality. Here I will consider one text, the fictional letter written for her by Ovid in his Heroides (Heroines), and a selection of the many paintings of her.

Born around 630 BCE into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Lesbos, legend has associated her romantically with two men: a contemporary poet, Alcaeus, and Phaon a local ferryman. Her own name and that of her island have been associated with her sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and Ovid makes it clear that her love of women was well-known among Romans in his time.

Since around 300 BCE, there has been a legend that tells of her love for Phaon the ferryman, who plied the waters between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland. Almost certainly illiterate and hardly a good audience for Sappho’s verse, Phaon’s redeeming feature was apparently the gift of great physical beauty. He was given this one day when he carried Venus/Aphrodite in his boat; the goddess was travelling in disguise as an old woman, Phaon did not charge her for the crossing, so she returned the favour by transforming Phaon’s physical appearance.

Ovid’s description of Sappho’s affair with Phaon leaves little to the imagination, even down to their lovemaking.

Among those who seem to have accepted the truth of this legend was Jacques-Louis David, in this painting of Sappho and Phaon from 1809. David was necessarily not as explicit as Ovid, showing the couple fawning over one another with their recently-occupied bed behind them, and a post-orgasmic gaze on Sappho’s face. In case you haven’t got the message, Cupid holds her lyre, and two doves peck affectionately on the window sill.

A little deeper into Victorian prudery, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho (1881) shows Sappho resting on a lectern and staring intently at Alcaeus, who is playing a lyre. She is supported by her ‘school of girls’, one of whom rests her arm on Sappho’s back. The artist’s hints at a lesbian interpretation are necessarily subtle: the marble benches bear the names of some of her (female) lovers.

Yet nearly twenty years earlier, Simeon Solomon was far more open in his watercolour of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). Sappho is shown on the right, her dark hair and complexion in accordance with Ovid’s description. Although Erinna, another woman poet of the time, might have joined Sappho in her community of young women on Lesbos, she is now thought to have lived on the island of Telos, slightly later too.

Solomon’s career was all but destroyed by his own sexuality: a brave pioneer of homosexual themes in his painting, he was arrested for homosexual offences in 1873, and was shunned thereafter.

Ovid’s fictional letter from Sappho to Phaon was written after the legendary ferryman moved to Sicily. It is unusual among the Heroides for depicting a real, historical figure, albeit in this legendary story.

The letter can be read in at least two ways. It could, in spite of its multiple clear references to Sappho’s lesbian lifestyle, be just another male denial of female homosexuality. This seems unlikely for many reasons, not least of which is the gross implausibility of everything about the letter. This has led some to doubt that Ovid even wrote it – an issue which remains hotly debated.

Ovid shows profound and progressive insights into human sexuality; if this letter was written by him, it comes over as an excellent debunking of the legend of Phaon, and a witty and irreverent commentary on the life and loves of another great poet.

The story of Sappho and Phaon has, however, stuck. Its climax, in which the broken-hearted Sappho throws herself from the top of the Leucadian Cliff, became an extremely popular motif in nineteenth century painting.

Pierre-Narcisse Guérin paints a portrait of Sappho looking in sad reflection, her head resting on a symbolic lyre. There is little to indicate that she is on the top of cliffs, apart from the title, and no narrative references.

Théodore Chassériau’s watercolour of Sappho Leaping into the Sea from the Leucadian Promontory (c 1840) shows her clutching her lyre, her arms braced across her chest, as she steps off the edge of the Leucadian Cliff.

Sappho’s suicide became something of an obsession for Gustave Moreau, who painted her repeatedly between about 1870 and 1893.

Moreau’s Death of Sappho was probably in progress when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and was not completed until after order was restored to Paris the following year. It shows the poet moments after she had thrown herself from the Leucadian cliffs, her body lying in peaceful repose, her lyre beside her, and a seagull in mourning. The contrast between the elaborate decoration of her body, clothing, and lyre and the stark rocks and gloomy sea and sky could not be greater.

Sappho (1871-72) was Moreau’s second painting of her, this time a richly-detailed watercolour. Here she is swooning over her lover shortly before she flung herself to her doom. Her lyre is slung over her shoulder, and to emphasise her status as a great poet, Apollo’s gryphon is shown on a column behind her. Her elaborately-decorated clothing and pose were taken from a Japanese woodcut, Genji taking the air in summer on the Sumida by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), which Moreau had bought in Paris.

Moreau returned to his consideration of the suicide of Sappho in this watercolour of Sappho at the Leucadian Cliff (c 1885), showing her clinging to her lyre as she falls to her death on the rocks below. This is lit by one of Moreau’s saturnine suns.

In Moreau’s late oil painting of Sappho from about 1893, she is seen stepping off the cliff, with the sun setting behind her.

During this period, those influenced by Moreau also painted the poet. Jules-Élie Delaunay’s undated Sappho Embracing her Lyre shows her at the top of the cliff holding her lyre close, as if it were her lover.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 appears influenced by Moreau’s paintings. Sappho reclines amid a fantastic and deep layer of vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge. This appears to be underwater, after she had jumped from the cliff.

Renan’s later painting shows her just as she has stepped off the top of the cliff, and is about to plunge to her death. She holds her lyre aloft in her left hand, as a surprised seagull flies past.

Ovid’s letter, written two millenia ago, shows with wit how absurd the legend of Sappho and Phaon is. Yet so many artists since have continued to depict it in paint, perpetuating its naïve denial.

With Aeneas transformed into the god Indiges, Ovid lists a succession of rulers of Latium and Alba, which had been founded by Aeneas, until he reaches King Proca, who prompts his next stories of transformation.

The Story

Pomona lived during the reign of King Proca. She was a devoted and very capable gardener, who cared for her plants with passion. However, she shunned male company, and had no interest at all in the many men who sought her love. One, Vertumnus, the god of seasons, gardens, and plant growth, loved Pomona more than any other, but was no more successful in attracting her.

Vertumnus was able to shape-shift at will, and in his quest for Pomona’s love he had posed as a reaper, a hedger, and in various other gardening roles. Through these, he had been able to gain entry into her garden, but had made no progress in winning her hand.

One day, Vertumnus came up with a new disguise, as an old crone with a bonnet over her white hair, and leaning on her walking stick. This too got him into the garden, and he was able to engage the beautiful Pomona in conversation. Vertumnus almost gave himself away when he kissed her overenthusiastically, but managed to control himself and tried to give Pomona some womanly advice about marriage:
But you, if you are wise, and wish to make
a good match, listen patiently to me,
an old, old woman (I love you much more
than all of them, more than you dream or think).
Despise all common persons, and choose now
Vertumnus as the partner of your couch,
and you may take me as a surety for him.
He is not better known even to himself,
than he is known to me. And he is not
now wandering everywhere, from here to there
throughout the world. He always will frequent
the places near here; and he does not, like
so many of your wooers, fall in love
with her he happens to have seen the last.
You are his first and last love, and to you
alone will he devote his life. Besides
all — he is young and has a natural gift
of grace, so that he can most readily
transform himself to any wanted shape,
and will become whatever you may wish —
even though you ask him things unseen before.

Having cunningly promoted his own cause, Vertumnus told Pomona the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete to press his case.

Iphis was a young man of humble origins, and unfortunately fell in love with the high-born Anaxarete. Knowing the hopelessness of his love for her, Iphis told her nurse, and persuaded her maids to take notes and flowers for her.

Anaxarete’s response was iron-hearted and cruel: she laughed at him, and shut him out. Iphis was broken by this, and after a brief soliloquy, he hung himself from her door. Her servants cut his body down, but it was too late, he was dead. They carried his body to his widowed mother, who led it in funeral procession to the pyre.

Anaxarete watched:
And she ascended to an upper room,
provided with wide windows. Scarcely had
she looked at Iphis, laid out on the bier,
when her eyes stiffened, and she turned all white,
as warm blood left her body. She tried then
to turn back from the window, but she stood
transfixed there. She then tried to turn her face
away from that sad sight, but could not move;
and by degrees the stone, which always had
existed, petrified in her cold breast,
and took possession of her heart and limbs.

Having tried trickery and his cautionary tale, Vertumnus was getting nowhere with Pomona. So he transformed himself back into his own form, as a young man, which finally won her heart.

The Paintings

There is a marked contrast between the depiction in visual art of these two short stories: the outer and truly Latin legend of Vertumnus and Pomona has proved enormously popular in painting, but the embedded account of Iphis and Anaxarete has been almost completely ignored. I will tell them in the sequence used by Ovid.

The Roman god Vertumnus was most famously painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his idiosyncratic portrait of Rudolf II of Hamburg from 1590. Given the nature of the god, Arcimboldo’s choice of fruit and flowers couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Most paintings of this story show Vertumnus in his disguise as an old crone, chatting up a beautiful, and quite fleshly, Pomona.

Francesco Melzi’s Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1518-28) follows Ovid’s account very carefully, giving Vertumnus quite masculine looks to ensure the viewer gets the message. In the background is a wonderful Renaissance fantasy landscape with heaped-up hills similar to those seen in ancient Chinese landscapes.

Hendrik Goltzius gets close up in his Vertumnus and Pomona from 1613, and arms Pomona with a vicious-looking pruning knife. There is a wonderful contrast between the two women’s faces and hands here, which makes this a fine study of the effects of ageing.

Abraham Bloemaert’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1620) uses gaze to great effect: while the persuasive Vertumnus looks up at Pomona, her eyes are cast down, almost closing their lids.

Anthony van Dyck and Jan Roos collaborated in painting Vertumnus and Pomona in about 1625, which is remarkable for its rich symbolism and visual devices. Pomona has her left arm around Vertumnus, but in her right hand holds a silver sickle. She gazes wistfully into the distance, as if in a dream.

Vertumnus is again looking up, pleading his case with the young woman, and his left hand (on a very muscular and masculine arm) is behind Pomona’s left knee, between her legs. At the right, Cupid grimaces at the deception, his back turned, pointing at what is going on with apparent disapproval. Then at the lower left corner is a melon cut open to reveal its symbolic form, with its juice and seeds inside – which seems a fairly overt anatomical allusion.

Adriaen van de Velde’s fine Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670 has been marred by the fading of the yellow which he used to mix some of his greens, turning some of its foliage blue. He avoids any dangerous allusions, and returns to a more distant view of the pair talking together.

Jean Ranc’s startlingly contemporary Vertumnus and Pomona (c 1710-22) clothes the pair in the fashion of the day, but loses all reference to Pomona as a passionate gardener. At least Vertumnus’ hands are those of a man.

Seemingly influenced by the earlier painting of van Dyck and Roos, François Boucher puts the pair into an embrace in his Earth: Vertumnus and Pomona (1749), and Cupid’s mask play alludes to the deception.

Moving on to the second story of Iphis and Anaxarete, I am only able to show two illustrations from very old editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A third, an interesting watercolour painted by Sir John Everett Millais, is kept in Oxford’s Ashmolean, but is not available as a usable image here, I am afraid.

Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Anaxarete Seeing the Dead Iphis (1606) condenses the story into a single image, in which Iphis hangs dead, and Anaxarete has just been transformed into stone in front of him, in what is really a form of multiplex narrative.

Virgil Solis adheres more rigorously to Ovid’s account, in his Iphis and Anaxarete, which must have been engraved before Solis’ death in 1562. His multiplex narrative incorporates two separate scenes: in the left foreground, the body of Iphis has been discovered hanging outside the door to Anaxarete’s house.

In the right distance, Iphis’ corpse is carried to his funeral pyre, with his mother in close attendance, as Anaxarete looks on from her balcony, and is turned to stone.

What is a little strange and puzzling about the wealth of paintings of the story of Vertumnus and Pomona is how few pay any attention to the outcome of that story, and Ovid’s obvious moral that, in love, deception and threat get you nowhere, and it is honesty – being who you really are – which will prevail.

It is that outcome which Peter Paul Rubens hints at in his late oil sketch of Vertumnus and Pomona of 1636. There is now no pretence that Vertumnus is a woman: he lacks breasts, and even has heavy beard stubble. However, the embrace of his right arm still brings Pomona to push him away with her left arm.

For me, the outstanding depiction of this wonderful story is Rubens’ earlier and finished Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes.

Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

As Ovid reaches the end of Book 14 of his Metamorphoses, he has to sweep quickly through the early history of Rome. With King Proca dead, the storyline moves on to Romulus.

The Story

Ovid tells us that the walls of the city of Rome were founded on the feast day of Pales, 21 April, then mentions war with the Sabines led by Tatius, and the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia’s infamous betrayal of the citadel itself. The intruders entered through a gate unlocked by Juno, which Venus could not secure because gods are not allowed to undo what other gods have done.

Naiads living next to the shrine of Janus tried to block the intrusion by flooding their spring, but the torrent of water sent down to the open gate didn’t help. So they put sulphur under the spring, and turned it into a river of smoking, molten tar, which held the intruders back until Romulus was able to attack them. After a bloody battle, Romans and Sabines agreed peace, but their king Tatius died (in a riot at Lavinium) and Romulus therefore came to rule over both peoples.

The time came for Romulus to hand on the new Roman state to his successor; Mars therefore called a council of the gods, and proposed that the founder of Rome should be transformed into a god, which Jupiter approved:
The god all-powerful nodded his assent,
and he obscured the air with heavy clouds
and on a trembling world he sent below
harsh thunder and bright lightning. Mars at once
perceived it was a signal plainly given
for promised change — so, leaning on a spear,
he mounted boldly into his chariot,
and over bloodstained yoke and eager steeds
he swung and cracked the loud-resounding lash.
Descending through steep air, he halted on
the wooded summit of the Palatine
and there, while Ilia’s son was giving laws —
needing no pomp and circumstance of kings,
Mars caught him up. His mortal flesh dissolved
into thin air, as when a ball of lead
shot up from a broad sling melts all away
and soon is lost in heaven. A nobler shape
was given him, one more fitted to adorn
rich couches in high heaven, the shape divine
of Quirinus clad in the trabea.

(The trabea being the robe of state.)

With Romulus now the Roman god Quirinus, Hersilia, his queen, mourned his loss. Juno therefore instructed Iris to descend and invite Hersilia to join Romulus/Quirinus on Olympus:
Iris obeyed her will, and, gliding down
to earth along her tinted bow, conveyed
the message to Hersilia; who replied,
with modest look and hardly lifted eye,
“Goddess (although it is not in my power
to say your name, I am quite certain you
must be a goddess), lead me, O lead me
until you show to me the hallowed form
of my beloved husband. If the Fates
will but permit me once again to see
his features, I will say I have won heaven.”
At once Hersilia and the virgin child
of Thaumas, went together up the hill
of Romulus. Descending through thin air
there came a star, and then Hersilia
her tresses glowing fiery in the light,
rose with that star, as it returned through air.
And her the founder of the Roman state
received with dear, familiar hands. He changed
her old time form and with the form her name.
He called her Hora and let her become
a goddess, now the mate of Quirinus.

Ovid has now set the stage for the opening of the last book of his Metamorphoses, which concludes the history of Rome the city, state, and empire.

The Paintings

The most popular subjects from this phase of the legendary history of Rome are the early years of Romulus and his brother Remus, and the rape of the Sabine women – subjects which were controversial even in Ovid’s time, and carefully avoided. Fortunately the apotheoses of Romulus and the role of Hersilia have not been completely ignored in European painting.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of the episode of the Sabine women in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women which brought the conflict about.

After the overwhelmingly male population of the nascent city of Rome had seized the wives and daughters of their neighbours the Sabines, the two groups of men proceeded to fight. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle in front of the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace.

Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown. Named in dishonour of the treacherous Tarpeia, she wasn’t its first victim: she was crushed to death by the shields of the Sabines she had let into the citadel, and is reputed to have been buried in the rock.

Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.

David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.

Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.

Only Jean-Baptiste Nattier painted the apotheosis of the founder of Rome, in his Romulus being taken up to Olympus by Mars from about 1700. Mars is embracing Romulus, with the standard of Rome being borne at the lower left, and the divine chariot ready to take Romulus up to the upper right corner, where the rest of the gods await him.

So we move on to the fifteenth and final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which completes the history of Rome up to the time of Augustus.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Ovid opens the fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses by continuing his account of the early rulers of Rome. With the apotheosis of Romulus, the next is his successor Numa, whom he uses as narrator for an overview of the Metamorphoses in Pythagorean philosophical terms.

The Story

Fame nominates Numa as successor to Romulus as the ruler of Rome. Numa had left Cures, the town of his birth, to travel to Crotona (Crotone), in the far south of the Italian peninsula, where he visited Croton, its ruler.

This is Ovid’s cue for a story about Myscelus, who founded Crotona. Hercules appeared to him in a dream, and told him to travel to the river Aesar, despite his being forbidden from leaving his native land of Argos. Driven by dreams of Hercules, Myscelus tried to leave but was accused of treason, and appealed to Hercules to save him from the mandatory death penalty.

At that time, trial juries voted by casting black or white pebbles into an urn; being undoubtedly guilty, all those cast in Myscelus’ case were black when they were placed in the urn:
It was an ancient custom of that land
to vote with chosen pebbles, white and black.
The white absolved, the black condemned the man.
And so that day the fateful votes were given:
all cast into the cruel urn were black!
Soon as that urn inverted poured forth all
the pebbles to be counted, every one
was changed completely from its black to white,
and so the vote adjudged him innocent.
By that most fortunate aid of Hercules
he was exempted from the country’s law.

Myscelus was therefore able to sail to found Crotona on the River Aesar.

After he had fled Samos, Ovid tells us that Pythagoras lived in exile at Crotona, and this leads to a long discourse on his doctrines and philosophy. Having assured us of Pythagoras’ diligent observation of the world around him and careful analysis of what he saw, Ovid starts with an exhortation to vegetarianism.

Within this discourse, Ovid makes reference to preceding sections and themes of Metamorphoses. Pythagoras’ words hark back to the Golden Age, which was covered in Book 1. Pythagoras lays claim to reincarnation too, saying that in a previous life he had been Euphorbus, who had been killed by Menelaus in the Trojan War. This leads Pythagoras on to discussing change and transformation, the central theme of these fifteen books.

Pythagoras sees change in the waves of the sea, in the sequence of day and night, in the four seasons, in the ageing of humans, and in the transformation of the elements (earth, air, water, and fire):
Nothing retains the form that seems its own,
and Nature, the renewer of all things,
continually changes every form
into some other shape. Believe my word,
in all this universe of vast extent,
not one thing ever perished. All have changed
appearance. Men say a certain thing is born,
if it takes a different form from what it had;
and yet they say, that certain thing has died,
if it no longer keeps the self same shape.
Though distant things move near, and near things far,
always the sum of all things is unchanged.
For my part, I cannot believe a thing
remains long under the same form unchanged.
Look at the change of times from gold to iron,
look at the change in places. I have seen
what had been solid earth become salt waves,
and I have seen dry land made from the deep;
and, far away from ocean, sea-shells strewn,
and on the mountain-tops old anchors found.
Water has made that which was once a plain
into a valley, and the mountain has
been levelled by the floods down to a plain.
A former marshland is now parched dry sand,
and places which endured severest drought
are wet with standing pools. Here Nature has
opened fresh springs, but there has shut them up;
rivers aroused by ancient earthquakes have
rushed out or vanished, as they lost their depth.

Pythagoras then illustrates this constant change with a long list of places whose geography had changed in recorded history, and of locations which cause change in those who visit them. After those, he returns to the theme of change in animals, telling the legend of the Phoenix which is reborn from the ashes of its parent. This leads on to consideration of some great cities which have fallen, and the chance to point out that Troy never fell completely, as it reached its destiny of founding the city and empire of Rome.

Finally, Pythagoras returns to the subject of vegetarianism:
Away with cruel nets and springs and snares
and fraudulent contrivances: deceive
not birds with bird-limed twigs: do not deceive
the trusting deer with dreaded feather foils:
do not conceal barbed hooks with treacherous bait:
if any beast is harmful, take his life,
but, even so, let killing be enough.
Taste not his flesh, but look for harmless food!

The Paintings

Sadly, coverage of the opening of this book in visual art has been essentially absent, but Pythagoras has inspired some great paintings, and is my focus here.

A great many prints and other representations of Pythagoras recall the first image that I have been able to find, by Raphael.

In his magnificant fresco in the Palazzo Apostolico, The School of Athens painted in about 1509-11, Raphael includes Pythagoras at the lower left corner.

This detail shows Pythagoras writing in a large book, with a chalk drawing on a small blackboard in front of his left foot. Others are looking over his shoulder and studying what he is doing.

Despite the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses over the centuries, very little seems to have been written or painted about its lengthy advocacy of a vegetarian diet and lifestyle. It did, though, inspire one exceptional painting.

Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Frans Snyders to paint Pythagoras Advocating Vegetarianism in about 1618-20. The mathematician and philosopher sits to the left of centre, with a group of followers further to the left. The painting is dominated by its extensive display of fruit and vegetables, which is being augmented by three nymphs and two satyrs. One of the latter seems less interested in the food than he is in one of the nymphs.

Today, Pythagoras is best known for his geometric discoveries, rather than the doctrines detailed by Ovid. Fyodor Bronnikov’s painting of Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise from 1869 is perhaps more in keeping with the Classical perception. These followers are decidedly musical, holding between them four lyres, a harp, and a flute, and worshipping the rising sun.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

In the final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, King Numa, successor to Romulus the founder of Rome, had travelled to Crotona to learn the doctrines of Pythagoras.

The Story

After Numa had learned the doctrines of Pythagoras (an historical impossibility, as Numa lived between about 753-673 BCE, and Pythagoras between about 570-495 BCE and lived in Croton from about 530 BCE), he returned to Rome and established its early laws and institutions.

Numa’s success depended on his wife, the nymph Egeria. Although Ovid is not explicit here, other sources make the couple’s meeting a key step in the development of Rome, as Egeria was said to have dictated the first set of laws of Rome to Numa.

Inevitably, Numa grew old and then died. His wife Egeria was heartbroken: she left the city of Rome, and went deep into the forest, where her moaning disturbed those at the nearby shrine to Diana which had been built by Orestes. Sister nymphs tried to comfort her, but could not help. They told Egeria the tragic tale of Phaedra and Hippolytus – which I have examined in detail here – but this did not ease her grief either:
The grief of others could not ease the woe
of sad Egeria, and she laid herself
down at a mountain’s foot, dissolved in tears,
till moved by pity for her faithful sorrow,
Diana changed her body to a spring,
her limbs into a clear continual stream.

The Paintings

I have already shown and discussed paintings depicting the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Those showing Numa and Egeria are not plentiful, nor are they particularly straightforward.

Nicolas Poussin’s Numa Pompilius and the Nymph Egeria from 1631-33 is thought to have been painted for his long-term friend and patron Cassiano Dal Pozzo (1588-1657), a scholar and patron of the arts, who was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

It shows the meeting of King Numa, at the right, with Egeria, at the left, as she was being entertained by a young man with a lute, who may signify the Muses who apparently inspired Egeria to provide the laws of Rome. However, Numa hasn’t come equipped with any means of recording them, suggesting that this wasn’t the occasion on which Egeria dictated those laws.

Felice Giani’s much later painting of Numa Pompilius Receiving from the Nymph Egeria the Laws of Rome (1806) shows that process of dictation in full swing, with Numa working through scrolls, which are then transcribed onto the tablets of stone seen at the left. The nymph is the one sat on a throne, and is clearly in command, wagging her index finger at the King of Rome.

Ulpiano Checa’s The Nymph Egeria Dictating to Numa Pompilius the Laws of Rome (c 1886) offers a similar account, with King Numa sat writing down the laws on scrolls of paper using a reed pen. Egeria is quite different, though, and appears a simple and very naked nymph.

The only accessible painting which shows Egeria’s grief following the death of Numa is Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with the Nymph Egeria Weeping Over Numa from 1669.

Unfortunately, great confusion has arisen over the true nature of this painting, as two images of details have been published on the internet purporting to be quite different and complete paintings. Claude’s painting itself is something of a puzzle too, and the result is that many of the images shown online of this work make no sense at all.

The full painting, shown above, shows a group of people and dogs in the left foreground, set in an idealised classical landscape on the coast.

The detail, shown below, reveals the five women in that group. Second from left is most probably the figure of Egeria, although there is nothing to show her profuse weeping or grief. One of the three women to the right of Egeria is Diana, with her spear, bow, arrows, and hunting dogs. It is unclear whether she is on bended knee, or stood behind holding the leash of one of the dogs.

More puzzling is the gesture of the woman (Diana or nymph) who is kneeling on one knee. Her left hand points towards Egeria, and her right is pointing away, towards the buildings down by the water. Her meaning is obscure in the context of the story of Egeria.

Whether this painting by Claude shows the story of Egeria and her grief over the death of Numa must surely be in doubt, and the evidence bears careful re-examination.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

As Ovid nears the end of the last book of his Metamorphoses, he has just told of the transformation of King Numa’s inconsolable widow Egeria into a spring. He still has some key moments in Roman history to cover before reaching Julius Caesar.

The Story

We next are taken through a short series of strange events which occurred during the early history of the city of Rome. First, an Etruscan was ploughing his fields when one of the clods was transformed into a prophet named Tages. Ovid then mentions the spear of Romulus, which was transformed into a tree on the top of the Palatine hill in Rome.

He moves on to the great early Roman general Cipus, who one day discovered that he had grown horns on his head. He was invited to become the King of Rome, but used a ploy to have himself banned from even entering the city. The Senate then gave him a plot of land outside the walls, commemorating his actions in a carving on the city’s nearby gate.

Ovid then gives his account of the bringing of the god Aesculapius (Asclepius) to the city, which at the time was suffering an epidemic of a fatal disease:
A dire contagion had infested long
the Latin air, and men’s pale bodies were
deformed by a consumption that dried up
the blood. When, frightened by so many deaths,
they found all mortal efforts could avail
them nothing, and physicians’ skill had no
effect, they sought the aid of heaven. They sent
envoys to Delphi center of the world,
and they entreated Phoebus to give aid
in their distress, and by response renew
their wasting lives and end a city’s woe.
While ground, and laurels and the quivers which
the god hung there all shook, the tripod gave
this answer from the deep recesses hid
within the shrine, and stirred with trembling their
astonished hearts —
“What you are seeking here,
O Romans, you should seek for nearer you.
Then seek it nearer, for you do not need
Apollo to relieve your wasting plague,
you need Apollo’s son. Go then to him
with a good omen and invite his aid.”

The Senate despatched a party to the port of Epidaurus in quest of Aesculapius, a son of Apollo. The envoy leading that mission had a dream one night, in which he saw Aesculapius beside his bed, holding a staff around which a snake was entwined. The god told the envoy that he would change into a larger snake, for the Romans to find and take back with them.

The following morning, the Romans gathered at the god’s temple, where they saw a large golden snake, which the priest told them was the god Aesculapius. The snake promptly slithered down to the port, where the Roman ships were berthed. It boarded one of them, so the Roman party set sail to take it back to Rome with them.

Ovid provides a long illustrated list of the places that they sailed past in their return journey, including a stop at Antium during bad weather. The ships finally sailed up the River Tiber to the city of Rome, where they were greeted by great crowds:
The serpent-deity has entered Rome,
the world’s new capital and, lifting up
his head above the summit of the mast,
looked far and near for a congenial home.
The river there, dividing, flows about
a place known as the Island, on both sides
an equal stream glides past dry middle ground.
And here the serpent child of Phoebus left
the Roman ship, took his own heavenly form,
and brought the mourning city health once more.

So Aesculapius the god ended the epidemic which had been killing so many of the citizens of Rome.

The Paintings

The short stories of strange happenings, including the transformation of Tages from a clod of earth, the turning of Romulus’ staff into a tree, and the horns of Cipus, seem to have escaped the attention of major painters, but the bringing of Aesculapius to Rome has been part of several intriguing paintings.

I have previously looked at depictions of Aesculapius more generally, from which I bring these, showing Ovid’s story.

When I first looked at Sebastiano Ricci’s The Dream of Aesculapius (c 1718), I couldn’t identify its literary reference. In the light of Ovid’s account here, it clearly shows Aesculapius, clutching his staff with snake in his right hand, appearing in the dream of the Roman envoy at Epidaurus.

Although Jules-Élie Delaunay’s The Plague of Rome (1869) is based on the account in Jacques de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, that refers in turn to the story told by Ovid here. A pair of angels were claimed to have appeared, one good, the other bad. The good angel then gave the commands for people to die of the plague, and the bad angel carried the commands out. At the upper right edge of the canvas, the anachronistic white statue shows Aesculapius, who was to be the city’s salvation.

A drawing attributed to Jacques-Charles Bordier du Bignon, Aesculapius Routing Death (1822), also appears to have its roots in Rome’s plight. Aesculapius has two staffs, with which he is despatching the ‘grim reaper’ of Death. The woman to the right of Aesculapius has been thought to be Ceres, as she is pouring out her breast milk to feed the starving, something not mentioned in Ovid’s account.

There are also general representations of the god with his trademark serpentine staff, such as Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s drawing of Aesculapius Holding a Staff Encircled by a Snake, completed before the artist’s death in 1785.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

Once the god Aesculapius is ensconced in Rome, Ovid is ready to round off his Metamorphoses with salient points from the life of Julius Caesar, and links to the contemporary emperor, Augustus. These are politically charged topics, though, and require very careful coverage and language.

The Story

Ovid provides a whirlwind summary of some of Julius Caesar’s achievements, but writes that it was Augustus who was the greatest of them:
Of all the achievements of great Julius Caesar
not one is more ennobling to his fame
than being father of his glorious son.
In fact, Augustus was not Julius Caesar’s biological son, but his designated heir. Moreover, it was the undoubted divinity of Augustus which makes Julius Caesar similarly divine, hence elevated to the gods on his death.

Having flattered his emperor, Ovid tackles the thorny issue of the assassination of Julius Caesar:
But portents of the gods could not avert
the plots of men and stay approaching fate.
Into a temple naked swords were brought —
into the Senate House. No other place
in all our city was considered fit
for perpetrating such a dreadful crime!

Venus pleads Caesar’s case, and elicits Jupiter’s response:
“Venus, the man on whose behalf you are
so anxious, already has completed his
alloted time. The years are ended which
he owed to life on earth. You with his son,
who now as heir to his estate must bear
the burden of that government, will cause
him, as a deity, to reach the heavens,
and to be worshipped in the temples here.”

Jupiter hardly had pronounced these words,
when kindly Venus, although seen by none,
stood in the middle of the Senate-house,
and caught from the dying limbs and trunk
of her own Caesar his departing soul.
She did not give it time so that it could
dissolve in air, but bore it quickly up,
toward all the stars of heaven; and on the way,
she saw it gleam and blaze and set it free.
Above the moon it mounted into heaven,
leaving behind a long and fiery trail,
and as a star it glittered in the sky.

Julius Caesar therefore underwent transformation into a star (catasterisation) as his apotheosis, on his assassination. This is perhaps the best compromise, likely to offend least, and leaves Ovid the task of saying a few words about Augustus before concluding in his epilogue.

The Paintings

Visual artists have been surprisingly reticent over the depiction of any of the well-known events in the life of Julius Caesar, given their familiarity. A high proportion of visual art about him is also derived not from classical accounts, but through William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (c 1599).

The most popular single event in the dictator’s life was inevitably the end of it, with his assassination on the Ides (15th) of March, 44 BCE. Apart from a few rather clumsy depictions of the assassination itself, the better paintings don’t agree on the most appropriate moment which should be shown. I will here show them in sequence to cover much of the story.

Caesar’s assassins were senators of Rome, a group of more than thirty led by three conspirators including Caesar’s former friend and ally, Marcus Junius Brutus. Several of Caesar’s closest aides had warned him not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, and he had to be fetched by one of the conspirators. As he arrived at the Senate, Caesar was presented with a petition, and the conspirators crowded around him.

Karl von Piloty’s The Murder of Caesar from 1865 shows this moment, with Julius Caesar sat on a throne in the portico of the Senate. Immediately behind him, one of the conspirators has raised his dagger above his head, ready to strike the first blow.

Casca, one of the conspirators, produced his dagger and struck the dictator a glancing wound in his neck. The whole group closed in and stabbed Caesar repeatedly.

This is the stage shown by Vincenzo Camuccini in The Assassination of Julius Caesar from 1804-05, although this is not taking place on the steps in the portico, and Caesar has already moved forward from his seat.

Blinded by his blood, Caesar then tripped over and fell, and was stabbed further on the lower steps of the portico of the Senate. The conspirators made off, leaving Caesar dead where he lay, with around 23 stab wounds.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor, as his assassins make their way out of the Senate, brandishing their daggers above their heads.

None of those paintings shows Venus or Caesar’s apotheosis, though.

It is Virgil Solis’s engraving of The Deification of Julius Caesar (before 1562) which shows simultaneously the assassination of the dictator at the left, and Venus taking him up to the gods, above, where Jupiter is addressing the other gods (upper right).

Shakespeare’s play develops subsequent events in more detail, and contains the two most memorable lines: Et tu Brutus? (“you too, Brutus?”), said when Brutus stabs Caesar, and Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears as the opening words of Brutus’ oration over Caesar’s corpse.

Later, as Brutus and Cassius prepare to wage war against a triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius and Lepidus, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus to warn of his imminent defeat. This scene from the play has also inspired visual artists, including the great William Blake.

This engraving of Richard Westall’s painting Brutus and the Ghost of Caesar, from about 1802, shows Brutus in his role of general, sat at a writing desk, as Caesar’s ghost fills the upper left of the painting, warning Brutus of his imminent death with the words Thou shalt see me at Philippi.

William Blake painted a very similar scene in his Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost from 1806, for an extra-illustrated folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. This series of illustrations for this play are not well-known among Blake’s work, and were made quite early in his career.

In the next and final installment, I will look at paintings covering the reign of Augustus, in the context of the closing lines of the Metamorphoses.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

With Julius Caesar transformed into a star following his assassination, Ovid ends the fifteenth and final book of his Metamorphoses with some remarks in praise of his current emperor, Augustus, and his own aspirations to immortality.

The Story

Before the transformation of Julius Caesar into a star, Jupiter foretells some of the accomplishments of his adopted heir, Augustus, then still known as Octavius or Octavian:
“The valiant son will plan revenge on those
who killed his father and will have our aid
in all his battles. The defeated walls
of scarred Mutina, which he will besiege,
shall sue for peace. Pharsalia’s plain will dread
his power and Macedonian Philippi
be drenched with blood a second time, the name
of one acclaimed as ‘Great’ shall be subdued
in the Sicilian waves. Then Egypt’s queen,
wife of the Roman general, Antony,
shall fall, while vainly trusting in his word,
while vainly threatening that our Capitol
must be submissive to Canopus’ power.
Why should I mention all the barbarous lands
and nations east and west by ocean’s rim?
Whatever habitable earth contains
shall bow to him, the sea shall serve his will!
With peace established over all the lands,
he then will turn his mind to civil rule
and as a prudent legislator will
enact wise laws. And he will regulate
the manners of his people by his own
example. Looking forward to the days
of future time and of posterity,
he will command the offspring born of his
devoted wife, to assume the imperial name
and the burden of his cares. Nor till his age
shall equal Nestor’s years will he ascend
to heavenly dwellings and his kindred stars.”

Ovid then looks ahead to Augustus’ own future apotheosis:
far be that day — postponed beyond our time,
when great Augustus shall foresake the earth
which he now governs, and mount up to heaven,
from that far height to hear his people’s prayers!

In a brief epilogue to the fifteen books and many transformations, Ovid considers his own fate, and hopes for everlasting fame:
Wherever Roman power extends her sway
over the conquered lands, I shall be read
by lips of men. If Poets’ prophecies
have any truth, through all the coming years
of future ages, I shall live in fame.

The Paintings

The emperor Augustus seems to have preferred to see himself in statues and on coins, and more recent visual art has tended to respect that. A few fine paintings have, though, shown episodes from his reign, from 27 BCE to 14 CE.

Cleopatra’s legendary beauty has been expressed in paint by several artists, among them Louis Gauffier, whose Cleopatra and Octavian of 1787 shows the young Augustus and Queen Cleopatra conversing under the watchful eye of Julius Caesar’s bust. Cleopatra allied herself with Antony, and was eventually defeated at the Battle of Actium, which ended years of civil war in Rome. Antony fell on his sword, and Cleopatra is reputed to have killed herself with the bite of an asp.

It is Jean-Léon Gérôme who reminds us of the great events which were taking place at the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the reign of Augustus, in The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c 1852-54). The emperor sits on his throne, overseeing a huge gathering of people from all over the Roman Empire. Grouped in the foreground in a quotation from a traditional nativity is the Holy Family, whose infant son was to transform the empire in the centuries to come.

Sadly for Ovid, and even Virgil, Gérôme’s throng doesn’t appear to include distinguished poets from the Augustan age.

Several painters have, though, shown Augustus’ favourite Virgil at the emperor’s court. Jean-Joseph Taillasson’s Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia from 1787 shows the poet, at the left holding a copy of his Aeneid, reading a passage to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia. Augustus has been moved to tears by the passage praising Octavia’s dead son Marcellus, and his sister has swooned in her emotional response.

Ovid was in no position to commit Augustus’ eventual death and apotheosis to verse, but this is shown in an exquisite sardonyx cameo known as The Great Cameo of France from the first century CE. Augustus is here being brought up to the gods at the top of the scene.

Although a fan of Virgil and a minor author in his own right, Augustus was not a strong patron of the arts. Until 8 BCE, his friend Gaius Maecenas acted as cultural advisor to Augustus, and was a major patron of Virgil. Tiepolo’s Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus from 1743 shows Maecenas at the left introducing an anachronistic woman painter and other artists to the emperor.

Ovid’s major patron was Marcus Valerius Messalia Corvinus, and is thought to have been friends with poets in the circle of Maecenas. But all this became irrelevant when he offended Augustus, and in 8 CE was banished to Tomis, on the western coast of the Black Sea, at the north-eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

It is perhaps JMW Turner who has best epitomised this in his Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, which he exhibited in 1838. In a dusk scene more characteristic of Claude Lorrain’s contre-jour riverscapes, Turner gives a thoroughly romantic view of Ovid’s departure by boat from the bank of the Tiber.

Ovid died in Tomis in 17 or 18 CE, and by a quirk of fate his banishment from the city of Rome was not formally revoked until 2017.

But Ovid saw his road to immortality not by apotheosis, rather through his work being read, and living on in the minds of those countless readers. In that, he undoubtedly succeeded: his Metamorphoses and other poems continue to be read, both in their original Latin and in translation into many languages.

I hope that this series has shown how his Metamorphoses also inspired visual artists over a period of two millenia to depict the stories which he told – and how Ovid’s poetry has itself been transformed into a vast gallery of paintings.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.

For the last seven months, I have worked through each of the stories in the second half of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, summarising their verbal narrative and showing some of the best paintings which tell those stories.

As I did at the halfway point, I have selected for this and the next article a dozen of the very best stories and finest paintings.

The full listing of articles and an index of all the characters involved is provided here. If you want to look back at the best of the first half, this article covers from Daphne to Echo and Narcissus, and
this from Pyramus and Thisbe to the Calydonian boar hunt.

Nessus, Deianira, and Hercules (Book 9)

Hercules married the beautiful Deianira, and was returning to his native city with her. The couple reached the River Euenus, which was still in spate after the rains of the previous winter. Hercules feared for his bride trying to cross the river, and the centaur Nessus came up and offered to carry her across for him.

Hercules had already thrown his club and bow to the other bank and had swum across the river when he heard Deianira’s voice calling. He suspected that Nessus was trying to abduct her, so he shouted warning to Nessus before loosing a poisoned arrow at the centaur’s back. Nessus tore the arrow which had impaled him through, and the blood running from his wounds mixed with the poison which Hercules had taken from the Lernaean hydra.

As he was dying, Nessus gave his blood-soaked tunic to Deianira, saying that he would not die unavenged, and instructing her to keep the tunic to use when she needed to strengthen waning love.

Years passed after Nessus’ death, and Hercules was away in Oechalia, intending to pay his respects to Jupiter at Cenaeum. Word reached Deianira that her husband had fallen in love there with Iole. At first she was upset, but recalling Nessus’ dying words, she devised a strategy to address his rumoured unfaithfulness. She therefore impregnated a shirt with the centaur’s blood, and gave that to Lichas, Hercules’ servant, to take to her husband.

Hercules donned the shirt as he was about to pray to Jupiter. He felt warmth spreading throughout his limbs, which quickly grew into intense pain. As that pain became unbearable, he cried out so loud that he could be heard for miles. When he managed to rip a little of the shirt from him, it tore his skin, even muscles, away with it. The searing heat penetrated deep into his bones, where it dissolved their very marrow.

Hercules wandered through Oeta like a wounded beast, still trying to tear the shirt from his body. He came across Lichas, and accused him of being his murderer. His servant tried to protest his innocence, but Hercules picked him up, swung him around, and flung him out to sea. As Lichas flew through the air, he was transformed into flint, and became a rock in the Euboean Sea.

Hercules cut down trees and built himself a funeral pyre. Ordering this to be lit, he climbed on top, and lay back on his lionskin. Jupiter came to his aid, calling on the gods to consent to Hercules being transformed into a god; they agreed, and Hercules’ immortal form was carried away on a chariot drawn by four horses, into the stars above.

This marvellous painting was probably made by Rubens’ workshop around the time of the Master’s death in 1640. It views events from the bank on which Hercules is poised to shoot his arrow into Nessus. This has the centaur running across the width of the canvas, his face and chest well exposed for Hercules’ arrow to enter his chest, rather than his back.

To make clear Nessus’ intentions, a winged Cupid has been added, and Deianeira’s facial expression is marvellously clear in intent. An additional couple, in the right foreground, might be intended to be a ferryman and his friend, who improve compositional balance.

Link to the full account.

Orpheus and Eurydice (Book 10)

The wedding of Eurydice to the outstanding musician and bard Orpheus was marred by tragedy: after the ceremony, as Eurydice was wandering in joy with Naiads in a meadow, she was bitten by a snake on the heel, and died.

Orpheus was heart-broken, and mourned her so badly that he descended through the gate of Tartarus to Hades to try to get her released from death. He reached Persephone and her husband Hades, and pleaded his case before them. He said that, if he was unable to return with her to life on earth, then he would rather stay in the Underworld with her.

He then played his lyre, music so beautiful that those bound to eternal chores were forced to stop and listen: Tantalus, Ixion, the Danaids, even Sisyphus paused and sat on the rock which he normally tried to push uphill. The Fates themselves wept with emotion.

Persephone summoned Eurydice, and let Orpheus take her back, on the strict understanding that at no time until he reached the earth above must he look back, or she would be taken back into the Underworld for ever.

The couple trekked up through the gloom, and were just reaching the brighter edge of the Underworld when Orpheus could resist no longer, and looked back to make sure that his wife was still coping with the journey. The moment that he did, she faded away, back into Hades’ realm. As he tried to grasp her, his hands clutched at the empty air. She was gone.

Orpheus tried to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the River Styx into the Underworld, but was refused. For a week he sat there in his grief. He then spent three years avoiding women, in spite of their attraction to him.

Ary Scheffer’s moving painting of Orpheus Mourning the Death of Eurydice was one of his early works made in about 1814. The snake is still visible at the far left, and Orpheus cradles the limp body of his new bride, and breaks down in grief. Scheffer’s handling of complex limb positions is masterful, with the symmetry of their right forearms, and the parallel of her left arm with his left leg. Orpheus’ lyre rests symbolically on the ground behind his left foot.

Link to the full account.

Pygmalion and his statue (Book 10)

Pygmalion had seen the Propoetides, who were turned into prostitutes by Venus because they had denied her divinity, and was so revolted that he became celibate. He still wanted married love, though, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing.

When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to indicate her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered. He went to his statue and kissed it repeatedly, which seemed to impart some warmth to its cold ivory.

He continued to kiss the statue, whose surface softened like beeswax in the sun. He was amazed by this, stood back, and touched the statue again. It felt like flesh, and its skin was perfused with blood. Pygmalion praised and thanked Venus for answering his prayer.

His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was both a realist painter and a sculptor, and in a series of paintings explored the relationships between the sculptor, their model, and their sculpture. Among these were his first studies for the most brilliantly narrative depiction of this myth.

This study for Pygmalion and Galatea from 1890 was an early attempt at the composition, in which Pygmalion’s future bride is still a marble statue at her feet, but very much flesh and blood from the waist up. That visual device was perfect, but Gérôme recognised that his painting would be shunned because of its full-frontal nudity, so reversed the view.

Gérôme’s finished Pygmalion and Galatea (c 1890) extends the marble effect a little higher, and by showing Galatea’s buttocks and back and concealing the kiss, it stayed on the right side of what in the day was deemed decent. His attention to detail is, as always, delightful, with two masks against the wall at the right, Cupid ready with his bow and arrow, an Aegis bearing the head of Medusa, and a couple of statues about looking and seeing.

Link to the full account.

Hippomenes’ race with Atalanta (Book 10)

When Cupid was kissing his mother Venus, one of his arrows grazed her breast, and set her heart on fire for the beautiful young Adonis. Venus shunned her place with the gods, preferring to spend her time on earth with Adonis. She warned her lover to keep clear of wild beasts, in order to remain safe. When he questioned that, Venus told him the story of the race between Hippomenes and Atalanta.

As a girl, Atalanta had always outrun the boys. But she had been told by an oracle that she should not marry; she had to refuse every suitor’s kisses, or she would be deprived of her self. She therefore lived alone, and issued the challenge that she would only marry the man who could beat her in a running race.

Hippomenes was the great-grandson of Neptune, a fast runner, and when he saw Atalanta’s lithe body, fancied he might be able to beat her, so winning her hand in marriage. When he saw her run, though, he realised just how fast, and beautiful, she was.

He challenged her. When she had looked him over, she was no longer sure that she wanted to win, thinking whether she might marry him. But she was mindful of the prophecy, and left in a quandary. Hippomenes prayed anxiously to Venus, seeking her help in his challenge. She gave him three golden apples from a tree in Cyprus, and instructed him how to use them to gain the advantage over Atalanta.

The race started with the sound of trumpets, and the two shot off at an astonishing pace. Atalanta slowed every now and again, to drop back and look at Hippomenes, then reminded of the prophecy she accelerated ahead. Hippomenes threw the first of the golden apples, which Atalanta stopped to pick up. This allowed Hippomenes to pass her, but she soon caught him up and went back into the lead.

He repeated this with the second golden apple, and again Atalanta stopped to retrieve it, lost her lead, and caught him back up. On the last lap, he threw the third apple far away. Venus intervened and forced Atalanta to chase the apple still further this time, and made it even heavier so to impede her progress. This allowed Hippomenes to win the race, and claim Atalanta as his prize.

Hippomenes failed to give thanks to Venus for her intervention. This angered the goddess, and when the couple were travelling back a few days later, Venus filled Hippomenes with desire for Atalanta. They were passing by a temple to Venus, next to which was an old shrine in a grotto. There Hippomenes made love to Atalanta, so defiling the shrine, and offending the goddess.

For their desecration of a holy place, Atalanta and Hippomenes were transformed into the lions which now draw Venus’ chariot. The goddess completed her story by telling Adonis that this is the reason to beware of lions and other savage beasts.

Noël Hallé’s The Race between Hippomenes and Atalanta (1762-65) shows a race of almost epic proportions, spread across a panoramic canvas. At the right are the local dignitaries, and a winged Cupid as a statue, watching on. Atalanta is picking up the second golden apple, with Hippomenes holding the third behind him, in his right hand, as if he is ready to drop it.

Link to the full account.

Orpheus battered to death by Bacchantes (Book 11)

Almost all the stories told in Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses were sung by Orpheus, following his loss of Eurydice to the Underworld. His song was then interrupted as he was attacked by a mob of frenzied Thracian women – Maenads, or Bacchantes. They accused Orpheus of scorning them, as indeed he had.

The first of the Bacchantes threw her thyrsus at him, but it only bruised his face. She then fell to the ground, enchanted by his voice and lyre. His music was quickly overwhelmed by the mob, with their drums and deafening screams. The women first killed the birds which Orpheus had charmed, then the snakes around him, before turning on the bard.

A nearby group of farmworkers had run away, abandoning their tools in the field. The Bacchantes seized those, and used them as weapons to bludgeon the body of Orpheus. He made one last plea for his life before they killed him, and tore his body limb from limb.

The mortal remains of Orpheus were then dispersed into the rivers: his head and lyre ended up in the river Hebrus, where they still made sorrowful sounds, as they made their way downstream and over the sea to the shores of Lesbos. Orpheus’ soul descended to the Underworld, where he was at last reunited with his wife Eurydice.

The god Bacchus couldn’t let this crime pass, so transformed those Bacchantes into an oak wood.

Émile Lévy’s Death of Orpheus (1866) shows the moment just before the first wound is inflicted: Orpheus, remarkably young-looking, has been knocked to the ground, and looks stunned. Two Bacchantes kneel by his side, one clasping his neck almost as if feeling for a carotid pulse, the other about to bring the vicious blade of her ceremonial sickle down to cleave his neck open.

Another wields her thyrsus like a club while pulling at the man’s left hand. Their priestess, her head thrown back to emphasise her extraordinary mane of hair, is entwined with serpents, and officiates at the sacrifice. In the shadows at the top left stands the figure of Bacchus, looking away from the scene below as a naked celebrant cavorts behind him.

Link to the full account.

The Greeks attack Troy (Book 12)

The thousand ships of the massed Greek fleet gathered at Aulis in Boeotia, where its leaders made sacrifices to Jupiter in preparation for their departure. During these, they observed the omen of an azure snake which ate eight chicks and their mother bird in a tree. This was interpreted by Calchas as indicating that the Greeks would eventually conquer Troy, but only after nine years of war.

In spite of attempts to propitiate the gods, the seas remained stormy, and the fleet unable to sail. Some claimed this was because Neptune had helped build the walls of Troy, but Calchas said that it would require the sacrifice of a virgin to satisfy Diana whom Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, had offended.

Agamemnon had to put his duties as a king over those of a father, and sacrifice his virgin daughter Iphigenia to placate Diana. The goddess took pity on them, though, and shrouded the sacrificial ceremony in mist. Some said that she went further, in substituting a hind for the victim, and carrying Iphigenia away with her; Ovid is careful to leave this possibility open.

This sacrifice finally brought the favourable winds needed by the fleet to sail against Troy.

Tiepolo’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia from 1770 shows Iphigenia sitting almost spotlit with her pale flesh, as the priest, perhaps Agamemnon himself, looks up to the heavens, the knife poised in his right hand. In a direct line with that hand comes Diana in her characteristic divine cloud, ready with the deer. Below is a group of women, already holding the sacred bowl up to catch the sacrifical victim’s blood, and in the left distance are some of the thousand ships of the Greek fleet, waiting to sail.

Link to the full account.

This is the second of two articles summarising the very best stories and finest paintings from the second half of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The first, covering Nessus, Deianira and Hercules through to the Greeks attacking Troy, is here.

The Lapiths and the Centaurs (Book 12)

When Pirithous married Hippodame, the couple invited centaurs to the feast. Unfortunately, passions of the centaur Eurytus became inflamed by drink and lust for the bride, and he carried off Hippodame by her hair. The other centaurs followed suit by each seizing a woman of their choice, turning the wedding feast into utter chaos, like a city being sacked.

Theseus castigated Eurytus and rescued the bride, so the centaur attacked him. Theseus responded by throwing a huge wine krater at his attacker, killing him. The centaurs then started throwing goblets and crockery, and the battle escalated from there.

Nestor, as the narrator of this story, gives a succession of grisly accounts of Lapiths and Centaurs killed. Gryneus the centaur ripped up the altar and crushed two Lapiths with its weight, only to have his eyballs gouged out by a Lapith using some antlers. Not content with using the objects around them as weapons, they started using their own lances and swords.

When the centaur Petraeus was trying to uproot a whole oak tree, Pirithous, the groom, pinned the centaur to the tree-trunk with his lance. Nestor tells of the centaur couple, Cyllarus and Hylonome: Cyllarus was struck by a javelin at the base of his neck, and died in Hylonome’s arms from his wound.

Nestor also tells of the success of Caeneus, formerly Caenis, in killing five centaurs. The centaur Latreus taunted Caeneus, so the latter wounded the centaur with his spear. Latreus thrust his lance in Caeneus’ face, but was unable to hurt him, so he tried with his sword, which broke against the invulnerable Caeneus, leaving him to finish the centaur off with thrusts of his own sword.

The centaurs then united to try to overwhelm Caeneus by crushing him under their combined weight, but Caeneus was transformed into a bird with golden wings. The survivors finally dispersed, and the Lapiths had won the day.

Towards the end of his life, in about 1637-38, Peter Paul Rubens painted a brilliant oil sketch which was turned into this finished painting, The Rape of Hippodame (Lapiths and Centaurs) (1636-38). At the right, Eurytus is trying to carry off Hippodame, the bride, with Theseus just about to rescue her from the centaur’s back. At the left, Lapiths are attacking with their weapons, and behind them another centaur is trying to abduct a woman.

Link to the full account.

Galatea’s lover crushed by jealousy (Book 13)

When Aeneas landed on Sicily, he found Scylla combing the hair of Galatea, as the latter lamented her tragic love-life. Wiping tears from her eyes, Galatea told her story.

When he was only sixteen, Galatea had fallen in love with Acis, the son of the river nymph Symaethis, but the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her. The latter did his best to smarten his appearance for her, though he remained deeply and murderously jealous of Acis.

Telemus, a seer, visited Sicily and warned Polphemus that Ulysses would blind his single eye. This inevitably upset the Cyclops, who climbed a coastal hill and sat there, playing his reed pipes. Meanwhile, Galatea was lying in the arms of her lover Acis, hidden behind a rock on the beach.

Polyphemus then launched into a long soliloquy imploring Galatea to come to him and spurn Acis. When he spied the two lovers together, Polyphemus grew angry, and shouted loudly at them that that would be their last embrace. Galatea dived into the sea, but the fleeing Acis couldn’t escape so easily. Polyphemus flung a huge rock which he had torn from the mountain at the young man, burying him completely.

With the purple blood of Acis flowing from under the rock, the latter was split into two, and Acis transformed into a river-god, ending Galatea’s sorrowful tale.

Pompeo Batoni’s Acis and Galatea from 1761 shows the Cyclops, his reed pipes at his feet, hurling the boulder at Acis, making clear his tragic fate. From behind the legs of her lover, Galatea looks up at Polyphemus in fear.

Link to the full account.

Dido and Aeneas (Book 14)

Heading north-west from the Straits of Messina, Aeneas and his crew encountered a fierce northerly storm which blew them south to the city of Carthage, on the Libyan coast. Ovid summarises the disastrous love affair between Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage – which fills a whole book of Virgil’s Aeneid – in a few pithy lines:
And then Sidonian Dido, who was doomed
not calmly to endure the loss of her
loved Phrygian husband, graciously received
Aeneas to her home and her regard:
and on a pyre, erected with pretense
of holy rites, she fell upon the sword.
Deceived herself, she there deceived them all.

My favourite painting of Dido’s spectacular death is probably the only conventional history painting ever made by Henry Fuseli, and is known simply as Dido (1781). Dido has just been abandoned by Aeneas, has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then falls on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests covered with her blood beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast.

Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which confirms visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he sails away from Carthage.

Link to the full account.

The Wrath of Polyphemus (Book 14)

After killing Acis, Polyphemus, the savage one-eyed man-eating giant, spent his days alone, tending his flock of sheep.

When Ulysses arrived on Sicily, Polyphemus held him and his crew captive, then devoured several of them, so Ulysses got the Cyclops drunk in order to engineer their escape. Polyphemus asked Ulysses his name, and the latter replied Οὖτις (Outis, Greek for nobody). Once the giant had fallen into a stupor, Ulysses drove a hardened stake into the Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him.

The following morning, Ulysses and his men tied themselves to the undersides of the sheep in Polyphemus’ flock so that he couldn’t feel them escaping. Recognising that he has lost his captives, Polyphemus called out for help from the other Cyclops, telling them that ‘Nobody’ had hurt him. The other Cyclops therefore didn’t come to his aid.

Ulysses and his men made their way back to their ship and sailed off into the dawn, deriding the blind Polyphemus as they went. Polyphemus flew into a rage, and hurled huge rocks at Ulysses in his ship.

JMW Turner’s magnificent Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is probably his finest narrative painting, and the product of a long gestation. He seems to have started work on rough sketches for this in a sketchbook which is believed to date to 1807, and this finished painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy over twenty years later, in 1829.

The massive figure of Polyphemus is wreathed in cloud above the wooded coast towards the upper left, as the rays of the rising sun light the whole scene from Apollo’s chariot.

The entire crew is dressing the masts and rigging, and Ulysses brandishes two large flags, to deride the blinded giant. The orange flag on the mainmast bears the Greek letters Οὖτις (Outis), the name that Ulysses told Polyphemus was his. Below it is another flag showing the wooden horse of Troy, a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid. In front of the bows of the ship are ghostly white Nereids and sea creatures, presumably a reference to Neptune, Polyphemus’ father, whose curse results from this incident.

Link to the full account.

Pomona Seduced (Book 14)

Pomona was a devoted and very capable gardener, who cared for her plants with passion. However, she shunned male company, and had no interest at all in the many men who sought her love. One, Vertumnus, the god of seasons, gardens, and plant growth, loved Pomona more than any other, but had no success in attracting her.

Vertumnus was able to shape-shift at will, and in his quest for Pomona’s love he had posed as a reaper, a hedger, and in various other gardening roles. Through these, he had been able to gain entry into her garden, but had made no progress in winning her hand.

One day, Vertumnus came up with a new disguise, as an old crone with a bonnet over her white hair, and leaning on her walking stick. This too got him into the garden, and he was able to engage the beautiful Pomona in conversation. Vertumnus almost gave himself away when he kissed her overenthusiastically, but managed to control himself and tried to give Pomona some womanly advice about marriage.

Dropping subtle hints as to his true identity and desire for her, the old woman commended Vertumnus as a husband, and told Pomona the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete to press his case. Vertumnus was still getting nowhere with Pomona, though, so transformed himself back into his own form, as a young man, which finally won her heart.

The outstanding depiction of this wonderful story is Rubens’ Vertumnus and Pomona from 1617-19. Vertumnus has assumed his real form, that of a handsome young man. Pomona looks back, her sickle still in her right hand, and her rejection of his advances is melting away in front of our eyes.

Rubens even offers us a couple of rudely symbolic melons, and provides distant hints at Vertumnus doing the work in the garden while Pomona directs him, at the upper left.

Link to the full account.

The death of Julius Caesar (Book 15)

The closing story of the final book of his Metamorphoses must have been the most challenging to Ovid. Here, he had to tell of the assassination of Julius Caesar, whose adopted heir Augustus was the current emperor of Rome. Doing so without causing offence required all of Ovid’s poetic skills.

Ovid accomplishes this by using the story to praise Augustus. He writes that it was the unquestioned divinity of Augustus which made Julius Caesar similarly divine, although Augustus wasn’t actually the son of Caesar. His handling of Caesar’s assassination is similarly finely balanced.

Ovid casts the murder of Julius Caesar by a pact of Roman senators in the Senate itself as an inevitable consequence of the plots against him, which even the gods could not avert: it was fated. When Venus pleads the case for Julius Caesar to be transformed into a god, Jupiter confirms that Caesar had reached his alloted time, that his years of life on earth were at an end, and that his “son” Augustus was the cause for Caesar to be elevated to the gods.

With that, the dying Julius Caesar was transformed into a god and star by the process of catasterisation.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar from 1859-67, Caesar’s corpse lies abandoned on the floor below the steps of the portico, as his joint assassins make their way out, brandishing their daggers above their heads in unity and triumph.

Link to the full account.

The English translation of Ovid above is taken from Ovid. Metamorphoses. Tr. Brookes More. Boston. Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922, at Perseus. I am very grateful to Perseus at Tufts for this.