clvi

Theme for the remainder of the month: Alphabet Soup

coluber, colubri

Definition: snake, serpent

Sententia: Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 9.73-74, the story of Hercules and Achelous

Hanc ego ramosam natis e caede colubris

crescentemque malo domui domitamque reclusi.

I conquered this branchy one full of branches with the snakes born from the killing and increasing in bad and I revealed her having been conquered.

In this story, Achelous, a river god, relates to guests how he fought Hercules for the hand of Deianeira. Though he was thoroughly trounced, he was willing to admit this defeat because of the superhuman strength of his opponent. The transformation, inevitable as one of the Metamorphoses, comes when Achelous, a human, changes into a snake, then a bull. This sentence comes as Hercules is scoffing at Achelous' snake form, since when he was a baby he defeated serpents, and his second task was to defeat the Hydra (described here), a much more difficult foe. I rather liked this story, found at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:abo:phi,0959,006:9:73&vers=original&word=co^lu^ber#word1.

"Coluber" is used in the Aeneid in Book 2 in the Pyrrhus section, and 3 other times off syllabus. It's also used relatively frequently (5 times) in Ovid's Metamorphoses. These are 9 of only 35 instances of the word. Etymologically, it is related to "celer," swift.