I loved you in vain!’ Then he said, ‘Farewell.’ ‘Farewell,’ said Echo.

He rested his weary head in the fresh green grass, till Death’s hand

gently closed his eyes still rapt with their master’s beauty.

Even then, as he crossed the Styx to ghostly Hades,

he gazed at himself in the river. At once his sister naiads

beat their breasts and cut their tresses in mourning tribute;

the dryads wailed their lament; and Echo re-echoed their wailing.

A pyre was raised, the bier made ready, the funeral torches

brandished on high. The body, however, was not to be found –

only a flower with a trumpet of gold and pale white petals.

DIANA & ACTAEON

Metamorphoses, Book III

Ovid

Translated by David Raeburn, 2004

Actaeon, a grandson of King Cadmus of Thebes, has enjoyed a day’s hunting when he stumbles upon an unexpected sight. What happens to him next, Ovid assures us, is not his fault: ‘…you’ll find that chance/ was the culprit./ No crime was committed. Why punish a man for a pure/ mistake?’ The artist Titian transformed Ovid’s story into a pair of exquisite narrative paintings for King Philip II of Spain in the mid-sixteenth century.

Picture a mountain stained with the carnage of hounded beasts.

It was now midday, the hour when the shadows draw to their shortest;

the sun god’s chariot was halfway over from east to west.

A band of huntsmen was strolling along through the pathless glades,

when their leader, the young Actaeon, calmly made an announcement:

‘Comrades, our nets are soaked, our spears are drenched in our quarry’s

blood. Our luck is enough for today. When the goddess Aurora

appears tomorrow and shows the gleam of her rosy wheels,

let us all return to the chase. Now Phoebus is halfway over

from east to west and cutting the fields with his burning rays.

Leave off what you’re doing and stow your knotted nets for the moment.’

The men did just as he told them and took a break from their hunting.

Now picture a valley, dense with pine and tapering cypress,

called Gargáphië, sacred haunt of the huntress Diana;

there, in a secret corner, a cave surrounded by woodland,

owing nothing to human artifice. Nature had used

her talent to imitate art: she had moulded the living rock

of porous tufa to form the shape of a rugged arch.

To the right, a babbling spring with a thin translucent rivulet

widening into a pool ringed round by a grassy clearing.

Here the goddess who guards the woods, when weary with hunting,

would come to bathe her virginal limbs in the clear, clean water.

On this occasion she made her entrance and handed her javelin,

quiver and slackened bow to the chosen nymph who carried

her weapons. Another put out her arms to receive her dress

as she stripped it off. Two more were removing her boots, while Crócale,