read: Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (Signet Classics, Horace Gregory translation)...

I picked up The Metamorphoses at a small book shop adjacent to the Hong Kong Citygate Outlet this past Monday.  Reading through it this afternoon, Ovid (via Horace Gregory) has a crisp cadence with his prose and brings the lives of Gods and Man to life.  Ovid also made particular care in telling the story of the Earth from beginning to end.  He was keen on the constant change of God and Man - their transformations from one form to another, may it be reward, punishment or dumb luck.

What strikes me, having read so many mythology books over time, is that the Gods of the Ancients were not fixed characters, but change according to each individual, and Ovid no different.

With the creation of Man, how poetic it sounds here, and how parallel to the Judeo-Christian ethic:

"As God divided regions of this world
Into their separate parts, then all the stars
Long lost in ancient dark began to light
Pale fires throughout the sky.  And as each part
Of universal being came to life,
Each filled with images of its own kind....

Yet world was not complete:
It lacked a creature that had hints of heaven
And hopes to rule the earth.  So man was made....

Then careless things took shape, change followed change
And with it unknown species of mankind." - Book I, page 5

Then it was not much later, in Book III (72), is the story of Narcissus, that it reminded me of the Beiber.

"....Enchanted by the charms which were his own.
Himself the worshipped and the worshipper,
He sought himself and was pursued, wooed, fired
By his own heat of love, Again, again...."