Daphne

Ovid's Metamorphoses opens the story with an insult, not a chase. Apollo, fresh from killing the serpent Python, mocks Eros's bow as a toy unfit for a real archer's weapon (Ovid, writing in Latin, calls him Cupid). Eros answers by climbing Parnassus and firing two arrows at once: a sharp gold-tipped shaft into Apollo, which forces love on whoever it strikes, and a blunt leaden one into Daphne, which does the opposite, driving out any capacity for love at all. The mismatch is deliberate on Eros's part - not an accident of aim, but Apollo's own punishment for the mockery, engineered so that his love can never be answered.

Daphne wants no part of marriage before the arrow even strikes her: Ovid has her father Peneus already pressing her toward a husband and grandchildren, and Daphne begging him instead to let her stay unmarried the way Artemis does. Once Eros's leaden arrow hits her, that preference hardens into aversion. Apollo, burning with the gold arrow's love, pursues her through the woods, calling out that he is a god and not the shepherd or herdsman she takes him for. Daphne runs faster from the pleading than she would have from an outright attack. When Apollo, helped by Love itself, finally gains ground and is close enough to touch her, Daphne cries out to her father to destroy the shape that pleases too much, or to change the body that has brought her into danger. As she finishes the prayer, a heavy numbness seizes her limbs, bark closes over her softening breast, her hair becomes leaves, her arms become branches, and her feet, so swift a moment before, take root as unmoving ones. Only her shining beauty remains, in the tree.

Apollo does not let the transformation end the relationship. Ovid has him embrace the new tree's branches, feel her heart still beating under the bark, and declare that since she cannot be his wife, the laurel will be his tree instead - to crown his hair, his lyre, and his quiver, to stand at Roman generals' doorposts during their triumphs, and to wreathe the heads of both military and poetic victors, the origin later readers gave for the laurel crown as a mark of achievement. The tree, Ovid says, bowed its new branches in what looked like a nod of agreement. Hesiod makes the Muses nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, set on song (Theogony 53-62).

A separate Greek tradition, recorded later by Pausanias, gives Daphne a different home and a different pursuer first. In Pausanias's Arcadian version, Daphne is a companion of Artemis, hunting at her side by the river Ladon rather than fleeing Apollo in Thessaly. There a young man named Leucippus falls for her and disguises himself as a girl to join her hunting party undetected; when Apollo, jealous, makes the group bathe naked in the river to expose him, Leucippus is discovered and killed by the other companions, and only afterward does Apollo himself begin pursuing Daphne. Pausanias's account ends at the pursuit itself rather than narrating a transformation, so it corroborates Daphne's setting among Artemis's companions without settling how - or whether - it reaches the same laurel ending Ovid tells in full.