Daphne in Wikipedia

According to Greek myth, Apollo chased the nymph Daphne (Greek: Δάφνη, meaning "laurel"), daughter either of Peneus and Creusa in Thessaly,[1] or of the river Ladon in Arcadia.[2] The pursuit of a local nymph by an Olympian god, part of the archaic adjustment of religious cult in Greece, was given an arch anecdotal turn in Ovid's Metamorphoses,[3] where the god's infatuation was caused by an arrow from Eros, who wanted to make Apollo pay for making fun of his archery skills and to demonstrate the power of love's arrow. Ovid treats the encounter, Apollo's lapse of majesty, in the mode of elegiac lovers,[4] and expands the pursuit into a series of speeches. According to the rendering Daphne prays for help either to the river god Peneus or to Gaia, and is transformed into a laurel (Laurus nobilis): "a heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots, her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left."[5] "Why should she wish to escape? Because she is Artemis Daphnaia, the god's sister," observed the Freudian anthropologist Géza Róheim,[6] and Joseph Fontenrose concurs;[7] baldly stating such a one-to-one identity doubtless oversimplifies the picture: "the equation of Artemis and Daphne in the transformation myth itself clearly cannot work", observes Lightfoot.[8] The laurel became sacred to Apollo, and crowned the victors at the Pythian Games.[9] Most artistic impressions of the myth focus on the moment of transformation...

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