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
Aeneas and the Trojans sail to Crete, but they can’t endure the climate. Next they head for Italy, but a storm blows them off course. They pass Ulysses’s kingdom, an island owned by gods, and other places. They stop briefly on an island called New Troy, then continue on to Sicily. There, they sail into a cove between dangerous whirlpools on the left and Scylla—a ravenous monster with a girl’s face—on the right. Scylla used to be a girl who liked to go to the bottom of the sea and tell the nymphs how she eluded all her suitors.
This passage shows how the Trojans are constrained by nature when it comes to finding their new home. They wander around the Mediterranean, landing on different shores and sailing through different straits, but climates and landforms turn them back. This shows how humanity is at the mercy of nature, not the other way around, when it comes to their wanderings and searches for a homeland.
Themes
