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

The story of Apollo and Daphne was written around the year zero by the 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 was exiled to a settlement on the Black Sea for something he calle