This selection of stories from Ovid's Metamorphōsēs is designed for those who have completed a beginners' course in Latin. Its purpose is restricted and unsophisticated: to help such users, who will have read little or no Ovid, to enjoy the story-telling, character-drawing and language of one of the world's most delightful and influential poets. Assistance given with vocabulary and grammar is based on two widely used beginners' courses, Reading Latin and Wheelock's Latin (for details, see Vocabulary, grammar and notes below).

My general principle is to supply help on a need-to-know basis for the story in hand. The Vocabulary, grammar and notes and Learning vocabularies accompanying the text speak for themselves. The Comment at the end of each passage is an occasionally embellished paraphrase whose main purpose is to point up important detail and show how the logic of each story unfolds. I make no apology for this. With the minimal amount of time today's students have for learning the language, the demands of translation alone can be so heavy that it is all too easy to miss the wood for the trees and hamper the whole purpose of the exercise – pleasure, one of the most useful things in the world. The Study sections offer ways of thinking further about the passage.

My debt to W. S. Anderson's excellent Ovid's Metamorphoses Books 1–5 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) and Ovid's Metamorphoses Books 6–10 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972) will be obvious.

Background

So distraught were the daughters of the Sun, the Heliades, at Phaethon's death that they were turned into trees around his tomb and their tears into amber; while Cycnus (a grieving relative of Phaethon) was turned into a swan (Greek kuknos). The Sun was finally persuaded to return to his daily task, and Jupiter surveyed the damage to the world. While doing so, he had his way with the huntress Callisto, whom a furious Juno turned into a bear, but Jupiter re-transformed into a constellation. Various stories about gods' affairs, some told by a crow and a raven, ensue, and Book 2 ends with Jupiter, disguised as a bull, riding off with Europa.

Book 3 opens with Europa's father Agenor, who came from Phoenicia (Lebanon), ordering his son Cadmus to find Europa or go into exile. Cadmus chose the latter and consulted Apollo at Delphi, who told him to found a city (Thebes) in Greece, in Boeotia. Defeating a terrifying serpent there (which had killed all his companions), Cadmus was told by Athena/Minerva to sow its teeth in the ground. From these sprang armed warriors, who fought among themselves until the last five still standing agreed to stop and join Cadmus in founding the city. Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Mars and Venus, and all seemed set fair for him. But Ovid goes on ‘Yet a man should await his final day, and no one be called happy until he dies and his last rites are paid.’

As Schwyzer pointed out in his article on expressions of the agent, the Attic tragedians provide many examples of non-standard agent markers (1943: 20–8). In fact, ὑπό is so rare in comparison to other prepositions, that, were these plays our only source of Ancient Greek, we would not at first glance be able to pinpoint it as the default agent marker. In iambic passages of the Oresteia, for instance, ὑπό only occurs in three PACs, as against seven with πρός+G, two with ἐκ, and one with παρά. Does this variety of agent marking mirror that in prose of the period, or is it simply a feature of poetic diction, conditioned by the meter? In order to answer this question, I will look at prepositional PACs in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. To impose some uniformity on the data, I will only consider PACs in iambic passages. Because this limitation reduces the number of PACs under consideration, I will extend the study to those constructions where agent expressions occur with intransitive verbs, such as πάσχω or ἀποθνῄσκω, that act as suppletive passives to transitive counterparts like ποιέω and ἀποκτείνω. Such constructions are quite common in tragedy because of the frequent description of suffering in the genre.

In general, the pattern in prose whereby certain agent markers are associated with certain verbs does not hold true in poetry.

The analysis of PACs in Homer will be quite different from that of those found in later authors. To begin with, there are very few PACs in the Homeric corpus, as seen in the table on p. 40. The independent passive voice was a relatively recent development at that time, and Homer preferred to keep the verb voice in the active, even at the expense of having to change the sentence subject frequently. Additionally, the metrical, formulaic nature of the oral poetry skews the data: the apparent frequency of some PACs might simply result from their metrical utility or occurrence in a formula. Nevertheless, some agent markers can be singled out which seem to have been perceived as characteristic of Homer, to judge from their use in the late epic poets who imitated Homer’s language.

The PACs in Homer can, for convenience’s sake, be split into two groups: those in which the agent is marked solely by a case, and those in which a preposition marks the agent. Although the former category is said by some to include a genitive of agent, it is argued here that the only case in Homer that by itself can mark the agent is the dative. The PACs with prepositions as agent markers themselves break down into two types.

Most passive verbs in Greek express their agent by means of the preposition ὑπό with the genitive. The most common exception to this rule is that passive verbs in the perfect generally construe with an agent in the dative case:

Because of this anomaly, many scholars have denied that the dative found with perfect passives is an agent at all. Instead, they would describe this usage as a dative of interest. What is less clear, however, is the reason why the perfect is distinguished from the other aspects of the Greek verb in this way. The answer seems to lie in the stative nature of the perfect: if no dynamic action is being described, what place is there for an agent? Furthermore, while it is quite plain that the usage of the Greek perfect changed significantly over the period from Homer to Koine, the effects that this change had on the expression of the agent with the perfect passive have not been fully examined. As early as Herodotus, some perfect verbs have ὑπό+G rather than the dative marking the agent, notably when the subject (that is, patient) of the verb was animate. This use of the perfect passive with an animate patient becomes more frequent by the time of Polybius.