The story of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses needs a new translation for the #MeToo era

We would like to thank Alison Habens for the contribution to this article.

The story of Apollo and Daphne was written around the year zero by Roman poet Ovid in the Metamorphoses . Ovid was a trainee lawyer and student of rhetoric. In the story, a woman named Daphne becomes a laurel tree to escape the unwanted advances of the sun god, Apollo.

It’s part of a collection of his stories in which humans transform into plants and animals (and vice-versa) amid the mountains and woodlands of early Greece. But I believe it must be reviewed in the era of #MeToo – a period marked by widespread awareness, activism and accountability around sexual harassment and assault.

The first literary celebrity, Ovid, was “cancelled” in his own day. There’s no record of an actual crime he committed, but he wa