The Latest Breaking News from Ovid

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.

A strange, humorous, mysterious window out of trauma is both desolate and decorative

Two new surveys confirm that women who take on children from an earlier marriage will almost always be seen as witches

Howard Burton’s scholarly look at the companion painting to The Birth of Venus provides a calm and instructive commentary

A cast recording for the souped-up train musical is released, Michael Sheen plays the NHS hero at the National and David Hare delivers his Covid memoir

In the beginning, there was just one, unnamed, muse. The blind bard Homer (a poet born around around 850BC) invoked her with the words “Sing, daughter of Zeus” in the first lines of his epic poem, the Odyssey.

From immortalised classical epics to lesser-known myths

"If we can't trust ourselves as a culture to accommodate ideas we don't like," the novelist said at the Library of Congress, "then our ideas lose their value as well, because they become authoritarian."

You might be forgiven for thinking of abortion as a particularly modern phenomenon. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that abortion has been a constant feature of social life for thousands of years. The history of abortion is often told as a legal one, yet abortion has continued regardless…