"At Celaenae, if we can trust tradition, the piper Marysas, hanging in his cave, had a soul for harmony even in death; for it is said that at the sound of his native Phrigian melodies the skin of the dead satyr used to thrill, but that if the musician struck up an air in praise of Apollo it remained deaf and motionless." (The Golden Bough, 411)

The novelist/philosopher Iris Murdock loved Titian's painting of the flaying of Marsyas, who was punished this way because he played the flute better than Apollo. Similarly, Arachne was turned into a spider by Athena because she could weave better. The gods tend to be sore losers in mythology. But it is the mortal's hubris(excessive pride, especially in defiance of the gods) that draws their wrath.

The sentence assignment has been altered slightly; five stories from each individual book of The Metamorphoses. Unless of course your Dustin, then you've already blown everyone out of the water, including me.

Name confusion was addressed in class, mainly Roman versus Greek names for divine beings. It all comes down to the same thing really, because the Romans stole everything from the Greeks. I did not know that Zeus comes from a rootword meaning "light" or "sunlight".

We are also to find the story from Ovid that we cannot do without, and to read Norman O'Brown's Daphne or Metamorphosis, which shows that Apollo and Daphne was the story he couldn't live without.