ABSTRACT
The Fable of Iphis and Ianthe From her birth (with which this extract commences), the girl Iphis is brought up secretly as a boy to placate her father’s need for a male heir. He plans to marry ‘him’ to Ianthe, but in the nick of time Iphis is metamorphosed into a man! The poem manipulates and dramatizes the erotic (the spectre of lesbianism), and the ambiguous, ‘secret’, body. Text John Dryden’s translation from Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books. Translated by the most eminent hands (1717).
