The last we see of Troy is the weeping of those who witness Hecuba turned into a feral dog, and the tears of Aurora for Memnon, which re...

In his celebrated essay entitled The Storyteller , Walter Benjamin tells us that one of the functions of fairy tales was to enable us to d...

Sophocles' Philoctotes offers the confrontation of two modes of getting things done - (via Parada's entry on Neoptolemus): Ne...

It's difficult to get past Ulysses in Metamorphoses 13 -- for Ovid as for us, he's the consummate Greek -- wily, a man of multiple ...

After the debate of Ulysses and Ajax and the suicide of the latter in Book 13, Ovid moves to the story of Hecuba and Polymestor. But before...

After Ajax has scornfully cast Ulysses as the son of Sisyphus (which was a rumor ), that is, a sneaky cowardly fellow who can't be trus...

The shield of Achilles gets a couple of hundred lines of description from Homer, and has provoked thousands of pages of commentary. O...

The Ringling is about to open an exhibit of Paolo Veronese's works, among them, a few depictions of scenes from the Metamorphoses . Mo...

As is his wont, Ovid spends half book 13 on Troy and the aftermath of its fall before moving on to seemingly unrelated tales. His account o...

The old saying goes: "To the victor belong the spoils," but what if there are two victors? After the battle of weapons comes the...