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Book 14: Macareus’ Story: Picus, Canens and Circe
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Metamorphoses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Metamorphosis
Humanity vs. Nature
Love and Destruction
Gods and Humans
Time, Fate, and Poetry
Summary
Analysis
After hearing Macareus’s story, the Trojans bury Aeneas’s recently deceased nurse on the island. In the inscription they place on her tomb, they credit her with nursing a hero. The Trojans then sail away, steering clear of Circe’s island, and land on an Italian shore. Aeneas wins the right to stay and to marry the king Latinus’s daughter, Lavinia, but not before warring with the native tribes led by Turnus, a man who was promised Lavinia previously.
The stories that Macareus tells of Ulysses and his crew help Aeneas and his crew avoid dangers in the Mediterranean. In this way, Aeneas uses his rival to benefit his own journey. He eventually lands in Italy where he fights for his place, hinting that the Metamorphoses is getting close to Ovid’s contemporary time period in Rome.
Themes
