New Beginnings: Contemplating Change

My Penguin Classics copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an unnerving affair. People turn into plants and animals, they sprout leaves and grow scales. Things don’t end well: in one gruesome passage, which I perhaps read at too tender an age, an avid hunter is turned into a deer and torn apart by his own dogs. The cause is, invariably, divine whim. Not so much the hubris of Ancient Greece, but the random accident of the American horror film. The heroes cross a line they never knew was there. For a Roman such as Ovid, the moral was clear: change is for the worst.