Week 3, Reading Diary A: Ovid's Metamorphosis III

Ovid's Metamorphosis III

Not as interesting as Ovid I. I didn't find any of the stories in the first half inspiring, but here are a few of the more interesting ones:

Philemon and Baucis
This story, and the following one, are the two best out of the whole half. In this story, Jupiter and Mercury visited a village where they were met with locked doors, which kind of reminded me of of Mary and Joseph in the "no room at the inn" story. Finally, they were let in by a married couple, Baucis and Philemon, who were poor. Even though they did not have furniture or food worth of gods, they still provided them somewhere to sit and something to eat. 

(Philemon and Baucis with Jupiter and Mercury by Orest Kiprenskii. Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Transformation of Philemon and Baucis
In this part of the story, we continue to hear about Philemon and Baucis' trying to prepare and scrounge up some stuff for the gods. As they are eating, they notice that the mixing bowl and wine, when empty, were refilling themselves. They were going to kill their one and only guard goose to cook, but Jupiter and Mercury told them not to bother. The gods stood up and told them to follow them because they were fixing to level the neighborhood for being jerks. The only thing that was left when they looked back was their hovel. Their house then turned into a temple and the couple requested to be keepers of the temple. In their old age, they were turned into trees to forever watch over the temple.

The Famine
This story was not that interesting until the end. Long story short, this guy cut down a tree that was really a nymph. The nymph's sisters decided to get revenge by asking Famine to visit the man. The man would sell his daughter over and over to get food, since he was never satisfied. In the end, the guy ended up eating himself! That was the coolest :)
One thing that caught my eye was in this story. In parenthesis, it was said that Fate does not allow for Famine and Ceres to meet and now I want to know why. If I can't find anything or if nothing else catches my eye in the second half of Ovid's Metamorphosis III, I will probably write about this.