94 pages • 3 hours read
OvidMetamorphoses
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 8A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Book 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 9 Summary: “Achelous and Hercules”
Achelous and Hercules fight for the same girl, Deianira. At first Achelous evades Hercules by transforming into a slippery snake, but Hercules eventually tears off his horn and defeats him.
Book 9 Summary: “Hercules, Nessus, and Deianira”
The centaur Nessus also loved Deianira. Nessus offers to help Hercules and Deianira cross a stream, but when Hercules thinks Nessus is kidnapping Deianira, he kills Nessus. In return, Nessus “gave / his shirt soaked in warm gore to Deianira, / a talisman, he said, to kindle love” (203). Later, when Deianira is insecure about Hercules’ loving another woman named Iole, she gives him the shirt, poisoning him with the centaur’s blood.
Book 9 Summary: “The Death and Apotheosis of Hercules”
Book 9 Summary: “The Birth of Hercules”
Book 9 Summary: “Dryope”
Iole tells the tale of her sister Dryope, who had been assaulted by Apollo before marrying Andraemon. Once, Iole and Dryope pick flowers by a lake, but Iole sees Dryope’s flowers dripping with blood. Dryope slowly turns into a tree, but before she transforms completely, she entrusts her son to Andraemon.
Book 9 Summary: “Iolaus and the Sons of Callirhoe”
Iolaus, former squire of Hercules, interrupts Alcmena and Iole. Hebe, Hercules’ divine wife, had restored his youth, but she swears to never do this again. Afterward, Jupiter restores the children of Callirhoe, daughter of Achelous, to youth, but the other gods are jealous. He insists that regaining youth is a matter of Fate, which even he must obey.
Book 9 Summary: “Byblis”
The mortal Byblis falls in love with her twin brother Caunus. She eventually reveals this love to him in a letter, but he becomes enraged and flees his sister. She wanders in grief, crying, trying to find him, before she turns into a spring.
Book 9 Summary: “Iphis and Ianthe”
The mortals Ligdus and Telethusa are expecting a child, and Ligdus prays for a boy. When Telethusa gives birth to a girl, she gives them a gender-neutral name, Iphis, and raises them as a boy.
Ligdus later betroths Iphis to the girl Ianthe. Iphis desperately prays to become a boy, and the goddess Isis grants their wish.
Book 9 Analysis
Ovid’s take on one of the most prolific Greek heroes, Hercules, is colored by his larger thematic approaches to the Metamorphoses. Ovid skips to the end of Hercules’ life when he begins to tell his Hercules tales, focusing on the lead up to Hercules’ death and mostly ignoring Hercules’ earlier wife and famous twelve labors. By starting with Deianira, Hercules’ last wife and the one who kills him, Ovid emphasizes the part of Hercules’ life that fits the theme of transformation best—his death and apotheosis. An apotheosis is a special kind of transformation, one in which the person becomes not just another terrestrial being or thing, but a god whom people in antiquity worship. After detailing Hercules’ slow poisoning and pyre building, Ovid writes, “meanwhile whatever parts the flames could ravage / Mulciber had removed; of Hercules / no shape remained that might be recognized, / nothing his mother gave him, traces now / only of Jove” (207). Just as Ovid relishes in the aesthetics of people transforming into plants and animals, so too does he here slowly relish in the evolution of Hercules’ body from mortal to immortal.
Ovid focuses on another transformation as a form of death in the story of Byblis. After she offends her brother and he flees, and she is unable to find him, she collapses in tears from exhaustion. Ovid writes, “wasting by her weeping all away, / Byblis became a spring” (219). This concludes Byblis’ life, although the spring continues to bear her name. Unlike in some of Ovid’s other myths, no god or anyone else uses this transformation to specifically punish or kill Byblis. Still though, the moment of transformation certainly concludes her life as a human, particularly since there are no indications of any remaining humanity (as in the case of Io or Calliope), and she certainly never returns to human form.
Related Titles
By Ovid
