Metamorphoses, Book 14

Book 14 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hexameter poem of transformations he had completed by AD 8, follows Aeneas from Sicily to Italy, retelling and recasting Vergil's Aeneid, and carries the story on to the early kings of Alba and Rome.

Glaucus asks Circe for a potion to win Scylla; Circe, who wants him for herself, poisons Scylla's pool and turns her into a monster. Aeneas sails from Carthage after Dido's death, visits the Sibyl at Cumae, who tells how she asked Apollo for long life but not for youth, and meets Achaemenides, the Greek rescued from Polyphemus. Ulysses' companion Macareus tells of Circe's island, of men turned into pigs, and of Picus, who rejected Circe and became a woodpecker, while his wife Canens wasted away in grief. In Italy, the Greek Diomedes refuses to help Turnus, whose men burn the Trojan fleet; the ships turn into sea-nymphs. After the war Aeneas is made a god. Ovid then runs through the kings of Alba and tells how the god Vertumnus, in the disguise of an old woman, wins the garden nymph Pomona, using the cautionary tale of Iphis, who hanged himself for love of Anaxarete, and of Anaxarete, turned to stone. The book ends with the deification of Romulus and his wife Hersilia.

This book shows how freely Ovid could treat Vergil's material, and the Pomona and Vertumnus episode is one of his most charming. The Latin is smooth and witty.