Metamorphoses, Book 4

Book 4 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hexameter poem of transformations he had completed by AD 8, continues the stories of Thebes begun in Book 3 and then moves to the adventures of the hero Perseus.

The daughters of Minyas refuse to join the rites of Bacchus and stay at home weaving, telling one another stories as they work. One tells how the Sun fell in love with Leucothoe, whose father buried her alive when the jealous Clytie betrayed her; Leucothoe becomes the frankincense tree and Clytie a flower that turns always towards the sun. Another tells how the nymph Salmacis clung to the boy Hermaphroditus in her pool until their two bodies merged into one. Bacchus punishes the sisters by turning them into bats. Juno, angered by the honours paid to Bacchus, goes down to the underworld and sends the Fury Tisiphone to madden Athamas and Ino, who leaps into the sea with her son and becomes a sea goddess. Cadmus and his wife Harmonia, leaving Thebes in grief, are turned into snakes in Illyria. Perseus, flying home with the head of Medusa, turns Atlas into a mountain, kills the sea monster that threatens Andromeda, and tells at the wedding feast how he won the Gorgon's head.

Ovid's use of stories within stories is at its most playful here, and the Salmacis episode was much imitated in later poetry. The Latin is fluent and colourful.