Poul Anderson
Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career in the 1940s and continued to write into the 21st century. Anderson authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, short stories, his awards include seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards. Poul Anderson was born on November 1926, in Bristol, Pennsylvania, of Scandinavian parents. Shortly after his birth, his father, Anton Anderson, an engineer, moved the family to Texas, where they lived for over ten years. Following Anton Anderson's death, his widow took her children to Denmark; the family returned to the United States after the outbreak of World War II, settling on a Minnesota farm. The frame story of his novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, before the fantasy part begins, is set in the Denmark which the young Anderson experienced. While he was an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, Anderson's first stories were published by John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction: "Tomorrow's Children" by Anderson and F. N. Waldrop in March 1947 and a sequel, "Chain of Logic" by Anderson alone, in July.
He earned his B. A. in physics with honors but made no serious attempt to work as a physicist. While finding no purely academic application, Andeson's knowledge of physics is evident in the great care given to details of the scientific background - one of the defining characteristics of his writing style. Anderson moved with her to the San Francisco Bay area, their daughter Astrid was born in 1954. They made their home in California. Over the years Poul gave many readings at The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkeley, his wife donated his typewriter and desk to the store. In 1965 Algis Budrys said that Anderson "has for some time been science fiction's best storyteller", he was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism in 1966 and of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America in the mid-1960s. The latter was a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors led by Lin Carter eight in number, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972.
Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy; the Science Fiction Writers of America made Anderson its 16th SFWA Grand Master in 1998 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2000, its fifth class of two deceased and two living writers. He died of cancer on July 2001, after a month in the hospital. A few of his novels were first published posthumously. Anderson is best known for adventure stories in which larger-than-life characters succeed gleefully or fail heroically, his characters were nonetheless thoughtful introspective, well developed. His plot lines involved the application of social and political issues in a speculative manner appropriate to the science fiction genre, he wrote some quieter works of shorter length, which appeared more during the latter part of his career. Much of his science fiction is grounded in science. A specialty was imagining scientifically plausible non-Earthlike planets.
The best known was the planet of The Man Who Counts. In many stories, Anderson commented on society and politics. Whatever other vicissitudes his views went through, he retained his belief in the direct and inextricable connection between human liberty and expansion into space, for which reason he cried out against any idea of space exploration being "a waste of money" or "unnecessary luxury"; the connection between space flight and freedom is an extension of the nineteenth-century American concept of the Frontier, where malcontents can advance further and claim some new land, pioneers either bring life to barren asteroids or settle on Earth-like planets teeming with life, but not intelligent forms. As he expressed in his nonfiction essays, Anderson held that going into space was not an unnecessary luxury but an existential need, that abandoning space would doom humanity to "a society of brigands ruling over peasants"; this is graphically expressed in the chilling short story "Welcome". In it, humanity has abandoned space and is left with an overcrowded Earth where a small elite not only treats all the rest as chattel slaves, but regularly practices cannibalism, their chefs preparing "roast suckling coolie" for their banquets.
Conversely, in the bleak Orwellian world of "The High Ones" where the Soviets have won the Third World War and gained control of the whole of Earth, the dissidents still have some hope because space flight has not been abandoned. By the end of the story, rebels have established themselves at another stellar system—where their descendants, the reader is told, would build a liberating fleet and set out back to Earth. While horrified by the prospect of the Soviets winning complete rule over the Earth, Anderson was not enthusiastic about having Americans in that role either. Several storie
Cerberus
In Greek mythology, Cerberus called the "hound of Hades", is a multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld to prevent the dead from leaving. Cerberus was the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhon, is described as having three heads, a serpent for a tail, snakes protruding from parts of his body. Cerberus is known for his capture by Heracles, one of Heracles' twelve labours. Descriptions of Cerberus vary, including the number of his heads. Cerberus was three-headed, though not always. Cerberus had several multi-headed relatives, his father was the multi snake-headed Typhon, Cerberus was the brother of three other multi-headed monsters, the multi-snake-headed Lernaean Hydra. And, like these close relatives, Cerberus was, with only the rare iconographic exception, multi-headed. In the earliest description of Cerberus, Hesiod's Theogony, Cerberus has fifty heads, while Pindar gave him one hundred heads; however writers universally give Cerberus three heads. An exception is the Latin poet Horace's Cerberus which has a single dog head, one hundred snake heads.
Trying to reconcile these competing traditions, Apollodorus's Cerberus has three dog heads and the heads of "all sorts of snakes" along his back, while the Byzantine poet John Tzetzes gives Cerberus fifty heads, three of which were dog heads, the rest being the "heads of other beasts of all sorts". In art Cerberus is most depicted with two dog heads, never more than three, but with only one. On one of the two earliest depictions, a Corinthian cup from Argos, now lost, Cerberus is shown as a normal single-headed dog; the first appearance of a three-headed Cerberus occurs on a mid-sixth-century BC Laconian cup. Horace's many snake-headed Cerberus followed a long tradition of Cerberus being part snake; this is already implied as early as in Hesiod's Theogony, where Cerberus' mother is the half-snake Echidna, his father the snake-headed Typhon. In art Cerberus is shown as being part snake, for example the lost Corinthian cup shows snakes protruding from Cerberus' body, while the mid sixth-century BC Laconian cup gives Cerberus a snake for a tail.
In the literary record, the first certain indication of Cerberus' serpentine nature comes from the rationalized account of Hecataeus of Miletus, who makes Cerberus a large poisonous snake. Plato refers to Cerberus' composite nature, Euphorion of Chalcis describes Cerberus as having multiple snake tails, in connection to his serpentine nature, associates Cerberus with the creation of the poisonous aconite plant. Virgil has snakes writhe around Cerberus' neck, Ovid's Cerberus has a venomous mouth, necks "vile with snakes", "hair inwoven with the threatening snake", while Seneca gives Cerberus a mane consisting of snakes, a single snake tail. Cerberus was given various other traits. According to Euripides, Cerberus not only had three heads but three bodies, according to Virgil he had multiple backs. Cerberus ate raw flesh, had eyes which flashed fire, a three-tongued mouth, acute hearing. Cerberus' only mythology concerns his capture by Heracles; as early as Homer we learn that Heracles was sent by Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns, to bring back Cerberus from Hades the king of the underworld.
According to Apollodorus, this was the final labour imposed on Heracles. In a fragment from a lost play Pirithous, Heracles says that, although Eurystheus commanded him to bring back Cerberus, it was not from any desire to see Cerberus, but only because Eurystheus thought that the task was impossible. Heracles was aided in his mission by his being an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Euripides has his initiation being "lucky" for Heracles in capturing Cerberus, and both Diodorus Siculus and Apollodorus say that Heracles was initiated into the Mysteries, in preparation for his descent into the underworld. According to Diodorus, Heracles went to Athens, where Musaeus, the son of Orpheus, was in charge of the initiation rites, while according to Apollodorus, he went to Eumolpus at Eleusis. Heracles had the help of Hermes, the usual guide of the underworld, as well as Athena. In the Odyssey, Homer has Athena as his guides, and Hermes and Athena are shown with Heracles on vase paintings depicting Cerberus' capture.
By most accounts, Heracles made his descent into the underworld through an entrance at Tainaron, the most famous of the various Greek entrances to the underworld. The place is first mentioned in connection with the Cerberus story in the rationalized account of Hecataeus of Miletus, Euripides and Apolodorus, all have Heracles descend into the underworld there; however Xenophon reports that Heracles was said to have descended at the Acherusian Chersonese near Heraclea Pontica, on the Black Sea, a place more associated with Heracles' exit from the underworld. Heraclea, founded c. 560 BC took its name from the association of its site with Heracles' Cerberian exploit. While in the underworld, Heracles met the heroes Theseus and Pirithous, where the two companions were being held prisoner by Hades for attempting to carry off Hades' wife Persephone. Along with bringing back Cerberus, Heracles managed to rescue Theseus, in some versions Pirithous as well. Accordi
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery stated that he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies the rules and logic of Surrealism."Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, the other half thought incomprehensible".
Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Helen, a biology teacher, Chester Frederick Ashbery, a farmer. He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario. Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy, an all-boys school, where he read such poets as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas and began writing poetry. Two of his poems were published in Poetry magazine by a classmate who had submitted them under his own name, without Ashbery's knowledge or permission. Ashbery published a piece of short fiction and a handful of poems—including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student—in the school newspaper, the Deerfield Scroll, his first ambition was to be a painter: from the age of 11 until he was 15, Ashbery took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester. Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A. B. cum laude, from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, the Signet Society. He wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W. H. Auden. At Harvard he befriended fellow writers Kenneth Koch, Barbara Epstein, V. R. Lang, Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey, was a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Peter Davison.
Ashbery went on to study at New York University before receiving an M. A. from Columbia University in 1951. After working as a copywriter in New York from 1951 to 1955, from the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship, through 1965, Ashbery lived in France, he was an editor of the 12 issues of Art and Literature and the New Poetry issue of Harry Mathews' Locus Solus. To make ends meet he translated French murder mysteries, served as the art editor for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and was an art critic for Art International and a Paris correspondent for ARTnews, when Thomas Hess took over as editor. During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory, whose books Every Question but One, The Landscape is behind the Door and The Landscapist he translated, as he did Arthur Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, many titles by Raymond Roussel. After returning to the United States, he continued his career as an art critic for New York and Newsweek magazines while serving on the editorial board of ARTnews until 1972.
Several years he began a stint as an editor at Partisan Review, serving from 1976 to 1980. During the fall of 1963, Ashbery became acquainted with Andy Warhol at a scheduled poetry reading at the Literary Theatre in New York, he had written favorable reviews of Warhol's art. That same year he reviewed Warhol's Flowers exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, describing Warhol's visit to Paris as "the biggest transatlantic fuss since Oscar Wilde brought culture to Buffalo in the nineties". Ashbery returned to New York near the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large party at the Factory, he became close friends with poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had an important influence as a poet. In 1967 his poem Europe was used as the central text in Eric Salzman's Foxes and Hedgehogs as part of the New Image of Sound series at Hunter College, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies; when the poet sent Salzman Three Madrigals in 1968, the composer featured them in the seminal Nude Paper Sermon, released by Nonesuch Records in 1989.
In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. In the 1980s, he moved to Bard College, where he was Jr.. Professor of Languages and Literature, until 2008, when he retired but continued to win awards, present readings, work with graduate and undergraduates at many other institutions, he was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. In 2008 Ashbery was named the first poet laureate of MtvU, a division of MTV broadcast to U. S. college campuses, with excerpts from his poems featured in 18 promotional spots and the works in their entirety on the broadcaster's website. Ashbery was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University in 2010, participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series, he was a founding member of The Raymond Roussel Society, with Miquel Barceló, Joan Bofill-Amargós, Michel Butor, Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.
Ashbery lived in New York, with his husband, David Kermani. He died of natural caus
Hymen (god)
Hymen, Hymenaios or Hymenaeus, in Hellenistic religion, is a god of marriage ceremonies, inspiring feasts and song. Related to the god's name, a hymenaios is a genre of Greek lyric poetry sung during the procession of the bride to the groom's house in which the god is addressed, in contrast to the Epithalamium, sung at the nuptial threshold, he is one of Erotes. Hymen is one of the muses, Clio or Calliope or Urania or Terpsichore. Hymen is supposed to attend every wedding. If he did not the marriage would prove disastrous, so the Greeks would run about calling his name aloud, he presided over many of the weddings for all the deities and their children. Hymen is celebrated in the ancient marriage song of unknown origin Hymen o Hymenae, Hymen delivered by G. Valerius Catullus. At least since the Italian Renaissance, Hymen was represented in art as a young man wearing a garland of flowers and holding a burning torch in one hand. Hymen was mentioned in Euripides's The Trojan Women, where Cassandra says: Bring the light and show its flame!
I am doing the god's service, see! I making his shrine to glow with tapers bright. O Hymen, king of marriage! Blest is the bridegroom. Hail Hymen, king of marriage! Hymen is mentioned in Virgil's Aeneid and in seven plays by William Shakespeare: Hamlet, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, Prince of Tyre, Timon of Athens, As You Like It, where he joins the couples at the end — Tis Hymen peoples every town. Honour, high honour, renown,To Hymen, god of every town! There is a song to Hymen in the comic opera H. M. S. Pinafore by W. S. Gilbert & A. Sullivan. Hymen appears in the work of the 7th- to 6th-century BCE Greek poet Sappho: High must be the chamber –Hymenaeum! Make it high, you builders! A bridegroom's coming –Hymenaeum! Like the War-god himself, the tallest of the tall! Hymen is the son of Aphrodite. Other stories give Hymen a legendary origin. In one of the surviving fragments of the Megalai Ehoiai attributed to Hesiod, it's told that Magnes "had a son of remarkable beauty, Hymenaeus.
And when Apollo saw the boy, he was seized with love for him, wouldn't leave the house of Magnes". Aristophanes' Peace ends with Trygaeus and the Chorus singing the wedding song, with the repeated phrase "Oh Hymen! Oh Hymenaeus!", a typical refrain for a wedding song. Hymen is mentioned in chapter 20 of Vanity Fair by William Makepiece Thackeray. Hymen is an early book of poetry by the American modernist poet H. D; the eponymous long poem of the collection imagines an ancient Greek women's ritual for a bride. According to a romance, Hymen was an Athenian youth of great beauty but low birth who fell in love with the daughter of one of the city's wealthiest women. Since he couldn't speak to her or court her, due to his social standing, he instead followed her wherever she went. Hymen disguised himself as a woman in order to join one of these processions, a religious rite at Eleusis where only women went; the assemblage was captured by pirates, Hymen included. He encouraged the women and plotted strategy with them, together they killed their captors.
He agreed with the women to go back to Athens and win their freedom, if he were allowed to marry one of them. He thus succeeded in both the mission and the marriage, his marriage was so happy that Athenians instituted festivals in his honour and he came to be associated with marriage. Hymen was killed by Nicaea. Leonhard Schmitz, "HYMEN." A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, William Smith, editor.. P. Maas, "Hymenaios" REF 9 pp. 130–34. Ovid. Medea and Metamorphoses, 12. Virgil. Aeneid, 1 Catullus, Poem 62
Pluto (mythology)
Pluto was the ruler of the underworld in classical mythology. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was conflated with Ploutos, a god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest; the name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as a stern ruler but the loving husband of Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife, are invoked together in religious inscriptions. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone. Pluto and Hades differ in character. In Greek cosmogony, the god received the rule of the underworld in a three-way division of sovereignty over the world, with his brother Zeus ruling the Sky and his other brother Poseidon sovereign over the Sea.
His central narrative is the abduction of Persephone to be the queen of his realm. Plouton as the name of the ruler of the underworld first appears in Greek literature of the Classical period, in the works of the Athenian playwrights and of the philosopher Plato, the major Greek source on its significance. Under the name Pluto, the god appears in other myths in a secondary role as the possessor of a quest-object, in the descent of Orpheus or other heroes to the underworld. Plūtō is the Latinized form of the Greek Plouton. Pluto's Roman equivalent is Dis Pater, whose name is most taken to mean "Rich Father" and is a direct translation of Plouton. Pluto was identified with the obscure Roman Orcus, like Hades the name of both a god of the underworld and the underworld as a place; the borrowed Greek name Pluto is sometimes used for the ruler of the dead in Latin literature, leading some mythology handbooks to assert misleadingly that Pluto was the Roman counterpart of Hades. Pluto becomes the most common name for the classical ruler of the underworld in subsequent Western literature and other art forms.
The name Plouton does not appear in Greek literature of the Archaic period. In Hesiod's Theogony, the six children of Cronus and Rhea are Zeus, Poseidon, Hades and Hestia; the male children divide the world into three realms. Hades takes Persephone with the consent of Zeus. Ploutos, "Wealth," appears in the Theogony as the child of Demeter and Iasion: "fine Plutus, who goes upon the whole earth and the broad back of the sea, whoever meets him and comes into his hands, that man he makes rich, he bestows much wealth upon him." The union of Demeter and Iasion, described in the Odyssey, took place in a fallow field, ploughed three times, in what seems to be a reference to a ritual copulation or sympathetic magic to ensure the earth's fertility. "The resemblance of the name Ploutos to Plouton..." it has been noted, "cannot be accidental. Plouton is lord of the dead, but as Persephone's husband he has serious claims to the powers of fertility." Demeter's son Plutus merges in the narrative tradition with her son-in-law Pluto, redefining the implacable chariot-driver Hades whose horses trample the flowering earth.
That the underworld god was associated early on with success in agricultural activity is evident in Hesiod's Works and Days, line 465-469: "Pray to Zeus of the Earth and to pure Demeter to make Demeter's holy grain sound and heavy, when first you begin ploughing, when you hold in your hand the end of the plough-tail and bring down your stick on the backs of the oxen as they draw on the pole-bar by the yoke-straps." Plouton was one of several euphemistic names for Hades, described in the Iliad as the god most hateful to mortals. Plato says that people prefer the name Plouton, "giver of wealth," because the name of Hades is fear-provoking; the name was understood as referring to "the boundless riches of the earth, both the crops on its surface—he was a god of the land—and the mines hidden within it." What is sometimes taken as "confusion" of the two gods Plouton and Ploutos held or acquired a theological significance in antiquity. As a lord of abundance or riches, Pluto expresses the aspect of the underworld god, positive, symbolized in art by the "horn of plenty", by means of which Plouton is distinguished from the gloomier Hades.
The Roman poet Ennius, the leading figure in the Hellenization of Latin literature, considered Pluto a Greek god to be explained in terms of the Roman equivalents Dis Pater and Orcus. It is unclear; some scholars think that rituals and beliefs pertaining to Pluto entered Roman culture with the establishment of the Saecular Games in 249 BC, that Dis pater was only a translation of Plouton. In the mid-1st century BC, Cicero identifies Pluto with Dis, explaining that "The earth in all its power and plenty is sacred to Father Dis, a name, the same as Dives,'The Wealthy One,' as is the Greek Plouton; this is because everything is born of the earth and returns to it again."During the Roman Imperial era, the Greek geographer Strabo makes a distinction between Pluto and Hades. In writing of the mineral wealth of ancient Iberia, he says that among the Turdetani, it is "Pluto, not Hades, who inhabits the region down belo
Orfeo ed Euridice
Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck, based on the myth of Orpheus and set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, meaning an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing; the piece was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 5 October 1762, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa. Orfeo ed Euridice is the first of Gluck's "reform" operas, in which he attempted to replace the abstruse plots and overly complex music of opera seria with a "noble simplicity" in both the music and the drama; the opera is the most popular of Gluck's works, was one of the most influential on subsequent German operas. Variations on its plot—the underground rescue-mission in which the hero must control, or conceal, his emotions—can be found in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio, Wagner's Das Rheingold. Though set to an Italian libretto, Orfeo ed Euridice owes much to the genre of French opera in its use of accompanied recitative and a general absence of vocal virtuosity.
Indeed, twelve years after the 1762 premiere, Gluck re-adapted the opera to suit the tastes of a Parisian audience at the Académie Royale de Musique with a libretto by Pierre-Louis Moline. This reworking was given the title Orphée et Eurydice, several alterations were made in vocal casting and orchestration to suit French tastes. Francesco Algarotti's Essay on the Opera was a major influence in the development of Gluck's reformist ideology. Algarotti proposed a simplified model of opera seria, with the drama pre-eminent, instead of the music or ballet or staging; the drama itself should "delight the eyes and ears, to rouse up and to affect the hearts of an audience, without the risk of sinning against reason or common sense". Algarotti's ideas influenced his librettist, Calzabigi. Calzabigi was himself a prominent advocate of reform, he stated: "If Mr Gluck was the creator of dramatic music, he did not create it from nothing. I provided him with the chaos, if you like. We therefore share the honour of that creation."Other influences included the composer Niccolò Jommelli and his maître de ballet at Stuttgart, Jean-Georges Noverre.
Noverre's Lettres sur la danse called for dramatic effect over acrobatic ostentation. The considerable quantity of ballet in Orfeo ed Euridice is thought to be due to his influence. Jommelli himself was noted for his blending of all aspects of the production: ballet and audience; the first lines of arias, etc. are given in Italian and French. A chorus of nymphs and shepherds join Orfeo around the tomb of his wife Euridice in a solemn chorus of mourning. Orfeo sends the others away and sings of his grief in the aria "Chiamo il mio ben"/"Objet de mon amour", the three verses of which are preceded by expressive recitatives; this technique was radical at the time and indeed proved overly so for those who came after Gluck: Mozart chose to retain the unity of the aria. Amore appears, telling Orfeo that he may go to the Underworld and return with his wife on the condition that he not look at her until they are back on earth; as encouragement, Amore informs Orfeo that his present suffering shall be short-lived with the aria "Gli sguardi trattieni"/"Soumis au silence".
Orfeo resolves to take on the quest. In the 1774 version only he delivers an ariette in the older, Italian style composed for an occasional entertainment, Il Parnaso confuso, subsequently re-used in another one, Le feste d'Apollo. In a rocky landscape, the Furies refuse to admit Orfeo to the Underworld, sing of Cerberus, its canine guardian; when Orfeo, accompanied by his lyre, begs for pity in the aria "Deh placatevi con me"/"Laissez-vous toucher", he is at first interrupted by cries of "No!"/"Non!" from the Furies, but they are softened by the sweetness of his singing in the arias "Mille pene"/"Ah! La flamme" and "Men tiranne"/"La tendresse", let him in. In the 1774 version, the scene ends with the "Dance of the Furies"; the second scene opens in Elysium. The brief ballet of 1762 became the four-movement "Dance of the Blessed Spirits" in 1774; this is followed by a solo which celebrates happiness in eternal bliss, sung by either an unnamed Spirit or Euridice, repeated by the chorus. Orfeo marvels at the purity of the air in an arioso.
But he finds no solace in the beauty of the surroundings. He implores the spirits to bring her to him. On the way out of Hades, Euridice is delighted to be returning to earth, but Orfeo, remembering the condition related by Amore in act 1, lets go of her hand and refusing to look at her, does not explain anything to her, she does not understand his action and reproaches him. Euridice takes this to be a sign that he no longer loves her, refuses to continue, concluding that death would be preferable, she sings of her grief at Orfeo's supposed infidelity in the aria "Che fiero momento"/"Fortune ennemie" (in 1774, there is a br
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature; the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. He enjoyed enormous popularity, but, in one of the mysteries of literary history, was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, "a poem and a mistake", but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars; the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, Ovid is today best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, influenced Western art and literature.
The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. Ovid talks more about his own life than most other Roman poets. Information about his biography is drawn from his poetry Tristia 4.10, which gives a long autobiographical account of his life. Other sources include Seneca the Quintilian. Ovid was born in Sulmo, in an Apennine valley east of Rome, to an important equestrian family, on 20 March, 43 BC; that was a significant year in Roman politics. He was educated in rhetoric in Rome under the teachers Arellius Fuscus and Porcius Latro with his brother who excelled at oratory, his father wanted him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling to Athens, Asia Minor, Sicily, he held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales, as a member of the Centumviral court and as one of the decemviri litibus iudicandis, but resigned to pursue poetry around 29–25 BC, a decision his father disapproved of.
Ovid's first recitation has been dated to around 25 BC. He was part of the circle centered on the patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, seems to have been a friend of poets in the circle of Maecenas. In Trist. 4.10.41–54, Ovid mentions friendships with Macer, Horace and Bassus. He married three times and divorced twice by the time he was thirty years old, he had one daughter, who bore him grandchildren. His last wife was connected in some way to the influential gens Fabia and would help him during his exile in Tomis; the first 25 years of Ovid's literary career were spent writing poetry in elegiac meter with erotic themes. The chronology of these early works is not secure, his earliest extant work is thought to be the Heroides, letters of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, which may have been published in 19 BC, although the date is uncertain as it depends on a notice in Am. 2.18.19–26 that seems to describe the collection as an early published work. The authenticity of some of these poems has been challenged, but this first edition contained the first 14 poems of the collection.
The first five-book collection of the Amores, a series of erotic poems addressed to a lover, Corinna, is thought to have been published in 16–15 BC. 8–3 BC. Between the publications of the two editions of the Amores can be dated the premiere of his tragedy Medea, admired in antiquity but is no longer extant. Ovid's next poem, the Medicamina Faciei, a fragmentary work on women's beauty treatments, preceded the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Love, a parody of didactic poetry and a three-book manual about seduction and intrigue, dated to AD 2. Ovid may identify this work in his exile poetry as the carmen, or song, one cause of his banishment; the Ars Amatoria was followed by the Remedia Amoris in the same year. This corpus of elegiac, erotic poetry earned Ovid a place among the chief Roman elegists Gallus and Propertius, of whom he saw himself as the fourth member. By AD 8, he had completed his most ambitious work, the Metamorphoses, a hexameter epic poem in 15 books; the work encyclopedically catalogues transformations in Greek and Roman mythology, from the emergence of the cosmos to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar.
The stories follow each other in the telling of human beings transformed to new bodies: trees, animals, constellations etc. At the same time, he worked on the Fasti, a six-book poem in elegiac couplets on the theme of the calendar of Roman festivals and astronomy; the composition of this poem was interrupted by Ovid's exile, it is thought that Ovid abandoned work on the piece in Tomis. It is in this period, if they are indeed by Ovid, that the double letters in the Heroides were composed. In AD 8, Ovid was banished to Tomis, on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, without any participation of the Senate or of any Roman judge; this event shaped all his following poetry. Ovid wrote that the reason for his exile was carmen et error – "a poem and a mistake", claiming that his crime was
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