Metamorphoses, Book 9

Book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hexameter epic of transformations completed by AD 8, follows the last days and deification of Hercules and then turns to a series of stories about forbidden or unusual love.

The river-god Achelous tells how he wrestled Hercules for Deianira, changing into a snake and a bull, and lost one of his horns. Later the centaur Nessus tries to carry off Deianira, and dying from Hercules' arrow gives her his blood-soaked robe as a love charm. When she hears that Hercules loves Iole, she sends it to him; the poison burns him, he throws the messenger Lichas into the sea, builds his own pyre on Mount Oeta, and is taken up among the gods. His mother Alcmena tells how Juno delayed his birth and how the servant Galanthis tricked the goddess of childbirth and was turned into a weasel. Iole tells of her sister Dryope, turned into a lotus tree, and Hercules' companion Iolaus is made young again. Byblis falls in love with her brother Caunus, writes him a letter confessing it, and when he flees wanders until she dissolves into a spring. Finally, in Crete, Iphis, a girl raised as a boy, is betrothed to Ianthe, and the goddess Isis answers her mother Telethusa's prayer by changing Iphis into a man.

The death of Hercules is a grand piece of epic narrative, while Byblis and Iphis show Ovid's sympathetic interest in the inner lives of his characters. The Latin is lucid and often witty.