According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, while in labour, Alcmene was having difficulty giving birth to such a large child.

Ovid's Metamorphoses collects more transformation stories in its 14th book.

The Countess of Oxford was the half-sister of Arthur Golding, the scholar who translated Ovid's Metamorphoses into English.

In Hyginus ' report, Cephalus accidentally killed Procris some time later after he mistook her for an animal while hunting ; in Ovid's Metamorphoses vii, Procris, a jealous wife, was spying on him and heard him singing to the wind, but thought he was serenading his ex-lover Eos.

According to the urbane retelling of myth in Ovid's Metamorphoses, for a long time, a nymph named Echo had the job of distracting Hera from Zeus ' affairs by leading her away and flattering her.

This is described in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book IX.

Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Ovid's greatest work, the Metamorphoses weaves various myths into a fast-paced, fascinating story.

The word has also been linked to Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was turned into a ravenous wolf in retribution for attempting to serve human flesh ( his own son ) to visiting Zeus in an attempt to disprove the god's divinity.

The Niobe narrative appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses, ( Book VI ) where Latona ( Leto ) has demanded the women of Thebes to go to her temple and burn incense.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses Theseus fights against and kills Eurytus, the " fiercest of all the fierce centaurs " at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia.

The word has also been linked to the original werewolf of classical mythology, Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was turned into a ravenous wolf in retribution for attempting to serve his own son to visiting Zeus in an attempt to disprove the god's divinity.

Thrace is also mentioned in Ovid's Metamorphoses in the episode of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus.

In 1564 / 1567 Arthur Golding dedicated his popular translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses to the Earl.

Shakespeare also borrowed heavily from a speech by Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses in writing Prospero's renunciative speech ; nevertheless, the combination of these elements in the character of Prospero created a new interpretation of the sage magician as that of a carefully plotting hero, quite distinct from the wizard-as-advisor archetype of Merlin or Gandalf.

The primary source for the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, as well as Titus ' subsequent revenge, is Ovid's Metamorphoses ( c. AD 8 ), which is featured in the play itself when Lavinia uses it to help explain to Titus and Marcus what happened to her during the attack.

Marino employed him on illustrations to his poem Adone ( untraced ) and on a series of illustrations for a projected edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, took him into his household, and in 1624 enabled Poussin ( who had been detained by commissions in Lyon and Paris ) to rejoin him at Rome.

Achelous relates the bitter episode afterwards to Theseus in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

According to Ovid's pretty myth-making in the same Metamorphoses episode, the Echinades Islands were once five nymphs.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, King Pentheus is warned by the blind seer Tiresias to welcome Bacchus or else " Your blood be poured out over your mother and sisters ..." Pentheus dismisses Tiresias and ignores his warnings.

The most detailed and literary version of the story of Adonis is a late one, in Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The more widely accepted version, recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses, is that Aphrodite compelled Myrrha ( or Smyrna ) to commit incest with her father Theias, the king of Assyria.

An etiological myth of their origins, expanding upon their etymology — the name in Classical Greek was interpreted as " ant-people ", from μυρμηδών ( murmedon ) " ant's nest " and that from μύρμηξ ( murmex ) " ant " — was first mentioned by Ovid, in Metamorphoses: in Ovid's telling, King Aeacus of Aegina, father of Peleus, pleaded with Zeus to populate his country after a terrible plague.

An engraving by Bernard Picart depicting a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which Alpheus attempts to capture the nymph Arethusa ( mythology ) | Arethusa.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a raven also begins as white before Apollo punishes it by turning it black for delivering a message of a lover's unfaithfulness.

His brothers, nymphs, gods and goddesses mourned his death, and their tears, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, were the source of the river Marsyas in Phrygia, which joins the Meander near Celaenae, where Herodotus reported that the flayed skin of Marsyas was still to be seen, and Ptolemy Hephaestion recorded a " festival of Apollo, where the skins of all those victims one has flayed are offered to the god.

Ovid's Cyparissus is so grief-stricken at accidentally killing his pet that he asks Apollo to let his tears fall forever.

The pursuit of a local nymph by an Olympian god, part of the archaic adjustment of religious cult in Greece, was given an arch anecdotal turn in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the god's infatuation was caused by an arrow from Eros, who wanted to make Apollo pay for making fun of his archery skills and to demonstrate the power of love's arrow.

The geography of Tmolus and the contest between Pan and Apollo are mentioned in Ovid's Metamorphoses, XI. 168.

A 1581 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by Giovanni Andrea dell ' Anguillara, printed in Venice in quarto form transforms the fatal discus game between Apollo and Hyacinth into a fatal game of real tennis, or " racchetta.

According to Ovid's account, the tears of Apollo stained the newly formed flower's petals with ai, ai, the sign of his grief.

The librettist and priest, Rufinus Widl, modified Ovid's story ( in which Apollo, Zephyrus, and Hyacinth clearly constituted a homosexual love triangle ) to make it conform to the ethic, by changing the sexually desired character from Ovid's Hyacinth to Melia, his sister.

According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, in classical Greek mythology, when the crow told the god Apollo that his lover Coronis was cheating on him with a mortal, he became very angry, and part of that anger was directed at the crow, whose feathers he turned from white to black.

The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is love — be it personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor ( Cupid ).

These accounts seek a higher moral meaning from the munus, but Ovid's very detailed ( though satirical ) instructions for seduction in the amphitheatre suggest that the spectacles could generate a potent and dangerously sexual atmosphere.

In Ovid's interpolation, when Hera learned of Argus ' death, she took his eyes and placed them in the plumage of the peacock, accounting for the eye pattern in its tail.

Ovid's self-conscious and urbane report appears to be suggesting in his uncharacteristic depiction of Polyphemus that it is possible for the way that readers view a character to drastically change over time.

Sexual manuals have existed since antiquity, such as Ovid's Ars Amatoria, the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, the Ananga Ranga and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation.

This is supported by records of an inscription from Ovid's Ars Amatoria, which was on the now-lost original frame of the Arnolfini Portrait, and by the many Latin inscriptions in van Eyck paintings, using the Roman alphabet, then reserved for educated men.

Ovid's treatment in Fasti identifies for the first time as the location the Isthmus without literally naming it:

Ovid's description of the cave of Achelous provided some specific inspiration to patrons in France as well as Italy for the Mannerist garden grotto, with its cool dampness, tuff vaulting and shellwork walls.

The banquet served by Ovid's Achelous offered a prototype for Italian midday feasts in the fountain-cooled shade of garden grottoes.

In Ovid's later account, the goddess of the dawn, Eos ( Aurora to the Romans ) seizes Cephalus while he is hunting, but Cephalus begins to pine for Procris.

* In Ovid's Heroides, an apocryphal letter from Briseis to Achilles makes up the third entry, in which she reproaches him for both giving her up too easily to Agamemnon, and being tardy in gaining her return.

Engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses

The transformation of Myrrha in Ovid's version has been interpreted as a punishment for her breaking the social rules through her incestuous relationship with her father.

In her essay " What Nature Allows the Jealous Laws Forbid " literary critic Mary Aswell Doll compares the love between the two male protagonists of Annie Proulx ' book Brokeback Mountain ( 1997 ) with the love Myrrha has for her father in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

quote in " Ovid's version "); third, he has Orpheus congratulate Rome, Ovid's home town, for its being far away from the land where this story took place ( Cyprus ).

cannot be escaped entirely-especially since Ovid's story of Myrrha's incest poses a potential reciprocal to the nightmare Byron invents for Sardanapalus, of sympathy with the son who is the object of his mother's ' incest '.