Metamorphoses
by Ovid · first published 1479
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The Metamorphoses is a narrative poem penned by the Roman poet Ovid. Widely considered to be his ultimate work, comprising fifteen books and over 250 myths. The poem portrays a history of the world from creation up to the deification of Julius Caesar. Metamorphoses is viewed as one of the most influential works in Western culture, inspiring authors such as Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. It has also inspired countless works of art from various artists throughout the centuries.
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…to summon the muses, as it were. I typically need diverse reading to get that need to express something in text. It doesn't have to be at all similar to what I'm writing, it just has to be good. Ovid's Metamorphoses has helped me blog posts about the philosophy of science.
on “Riding the Writing Wave” ↗Homer and Ovid are pretty good for starter. Metamorphoses is really nice book with lot of stories woven together. My favorite quote: > Yet world was not complete. > It lacked a creature that had hints of heaven > And hopes to rule the earth. So man was made.…
on “First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo CS student” ↗The Hollywood versions of Greco-Roman mythology aren't the same as what you get in Ovid's Metamorphoses. References to Ovid's Metamorphoses can be found on almost every page of Shakespeare, and if you haven't read Ovid (and really, how many people nowadays have?) a lot of Shakespeare's references can be…
on “Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read” ↗I'd add that I had a great time reading the Metamorphoses by Ovid.
on “First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo CS student” ↗…where boys were required to memorize long passages of ancient Greek and Latin texts. In fact, tech companies would probably get the same hiring results by replacing Cracking the Code Interview with Ovid's Metamorphoses, and asking about Phaethon's fall instead of binary trees -- the substance doesn't really matter. (The non-whiteboard parts of the process would do the same job as they currently do of ensuring some degree…
on “Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process” ↗…understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation Sail Power Kon Tiki Shogun Art of the Sailor Business Adventures Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka) Guns, Germs, Steel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - this book had so many rave reviews. it has a tremendous hook and style for the first 50 pages, but overall I thought…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?” ↗Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories…
on “Life Is “Triggering.” the Best Literature Should Be, Too” ↗…seen. I took an overview of western literature class in college which included Obie’s Metamorphosis, and it’s had a severe negative impact on my ability to name services. Edit: I obviously meant Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but autocorrect got me. I’m leaving it, because that’s hilarious.
on “We at $Famous_company switched to $Hyped_technology” ↗…got censored (and links therein) linked by the parent comment, the following things: 1. works of Edward Said 2. works of Mark Twain 3. works of Upton Sinclar 4. works of Maureen Tkacik 5. Ovid's Metamorphoses 6. The movie Avengers 7. Debates about abortion 8. Some "Afrobeat" band that had too many white people in it 9. Some male professor who was "creepy" at a conference 10. Asking harassment victims…
on “The Yale Problem Begins in High School” ↗> "Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses that when Orpheus went down to the underworld to find his love, Eurydice, “all the places that he’d seen before / He recognized again.” He passed through these horrors to find her and began to lead her…
on “Hell Breaks Loose” ↗It's attributed to Pythagoras through Ovid but I couldn't find exactly where. It doesn't seem to be in the Metamorphoses.
on “Extremism Researchers Confront The Unseen Toll Of Their Work” ↗…would suggest that the mykes figured in Mycenaean religion. There was a tradition that at the neighboring city of Corinth, the original inhabitants were mushrooms that Sisyphus converted into men (Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.392-3; cf. Apollodorus 1. 9. 3).”
on “The sea people: Alexander the Great trod in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks” ↗Metamorphoses by Ovid: a bunch of Roman/Greek myths, many are common references in all kinds of stories Probability by Pitman: its embarrassing I never took this course in college. This is the book used for intro…
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?” ↗But I think an important difference is that in classical literature and in Shakespeare the author does a lot to put his own spin on the story, including often substantially changing the plot (Ovid's Metamorphoses is notable for doing this... which also happens to mean we're not sure what the "real" version of myths that we only have in Ovid now are). Does every new Spider-Man film really have something new to…
on “A Mass of Copyrighted Works Will Soon Enter the Public Domain” ↗You are probably thinking of Metamorphoses by Ovid. The original title of The Golden Ass is also Metamorphoses.
on “Why Has No One Heard of the World's First Poet? (2017)” ↗