Word: ovide
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...feted with a lavish lobster dinner. The historian who had earlier retraced Columbus' path to the New World was off on another, more dangerous mission, applying his philosophy of writing history once more, a philosophy that told him to relive history in order to write it. He borrowed from Ovid to express his method: "Dream dreams, then write them. Aye! But live them...
...Lord Rutherford did not like the erotic bits. She and Miles live it up at meetings of the Holborn Labour Party, and their sex life is described in the fiat and dogged style of Dr. Kinsey, but without the rich subject matter. It is certainly short of Ovid. Novelist Snow's introduction suggests that he put in the erotic bits to disprove the notion that scientists are "unemotional, naive, asexual." Data inconclusive...
...decorate the 25 rooms of the hunting lodge, Rubens picked most of his themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, including the famed story of the weaving match between Pallas Athena and Arachne. Bested in the contest, the goddess Athena was doubly angry because mortal Arachne dared to weave scenes of the scandalous loves of the gods (Rubens' sketch shows a scene from the Rape of Europa). Athena ripped the design to shreds, turned on Arachne, who was trying to hang herself in despair, and metamorphosed her into a spider (thus giving spiders their zoological classification: Arachnida...
Some of the sources of Orsini's inspiration can be guessed at. The ogre seems borrowed from the Mouth of Hell leading to Pluto's cave, as illustrated in medieval manuscripts on Ovid. The curious words ringing the ogre's mouth-Lasciate Ogni Pensiero Voi Que Entrate (Abandon all thought, ye who enter)-refer to the cup of forgetfulness ancient Greeks thought was drunk before crossing the river Lethe. The dragon-fighting lions (probably an oblique reference to political feuds) derived from a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The elephant with castle was a symbol used...
...prison of Vac near Budapest, prisoners formed a remarkable literary cooperative. For writing paper, they stole toilet paper. They fashioned pens out of metal fragments and mixed blood and coffee grounds for ink. By pooling their memories, they produced portions of Ovid, Catullus, Vergil, Shakespeare and Whitman in the original Latin and English, then translated them into Hungarian. In the end, the Vac prisoners produced a handwritten, hand-bound, four-volume anthology of prose and verse...