Metamorphoses, Book 8

Book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hexameter poem of transformations he had completed by AD 8, moves between Crete, Athens and Calydon, tied together by the figures of Minos, Theseus and the river-god Achelous. The stories of Daedalus and Icarus and of Baucis and Philemon, both in this book, are in the course.

Scylla, daughter of King Nisus of Megara, falls in love with Minos as he besieges the city, cuts off her father's magic purple lock and gives it to him; Minos rejects her in disgust, and she is turned into a sea-bird. In Crete Minos shuts the Minotaur in Daedalus' labyrinth, where Theseus kills it with Ariadne's help. Ovid tells how Daedalus, jealous of his inventive nephew Perdix, threw him from the Acropolis, and Minerva turned him into a partridge. The longest episode is the hunt of the Calydonian boar, in which the heroes of Greece gather and Meleager gives the prize to the huntress Atalanta; when his uncles object, he kills them, and his mother Althaea, torn between sister and mother, burns the log on which his life depends. Theseus, returning, is the guest of Achelous, and Achelous' story of Proteus' changes leads to Erysichthon, who cut down Ceres' sacred oak, was cursed with insatiable hunger, sold his shape-changing daughter again and again, and at last devoured himself.

The book is varied in tone, from the epic boar hunt to the grotesque comedy of Erysichthon. Althaea's dilemma and Scylla's speeches are fine examples of Ovid's rhetoric.