Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Limos.
The gallery
Plate 80: Ceres' Nymph Telling Famine to Strike Erysichthon, from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'
Antonio Tempesta, 1606
An engraving by the Florentine printmaker Antonio Tempesta from his celebrated 1606 series illustrating Ovid's Metamorphoses, captioned 'Insatiabili fame Erisichtonem torquet Fames' (Famine torments Erysichthon with insatiable hunger). The plate depicts the Roman Fames, the personification of starvation who is the Latin counterpart of the Greek Limos. Because the goddess Ceres (Demeter) could not approach her enemy Famine directly, she sent an oread nymph to the frozen wastes of Scythia to summon her; here the gaunt, emaciated daimon is dispatched to breathe her ravenous curse into the sleeping Erysichthon as punishment for felling the sacred grove. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the print is one of the few attributable images to render Limos/Fames as a figure rather than merely her victim.
Erysichthon Tormented by Hunger (Erysichthon gekweld door honger), from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'
Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, 1591
An etching by the Flemish artist Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, made in 1591 for an illustrated edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (page 215) and inscribed 'ERISICHTHON FAME TORQVETVR' (Erysichthon is tormented by Famine). The scene shows the consequence of Limos's curse: the impious Thessalian Erysichthon, having earned the wrath of Demeter, is consumed by the unappeasable hunger that the famine-spirit Fames (the Roman Limos) breathed into him, devouring everything he owns until he turns at last upon his own flesh. Held in the print collection of the Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp (inv. PK.OPB.0003.107), it is a key early-modern witness to the myth that gives Limos her most famous role in literature.