National Collegiate Honors Council

 

Date of this Version

2015

Citation

Published in Honors in Practice: A Publication of the National Collegiate Honors Council, Volume 11 (2015)

Comments

Copyright © 2015 by the National Collegiate Honors Council.

Abstract

From antiquity to now, “All things change” has been a common aphorism. The Romans ascribed the comment first to Heraclitus, who did indeed assert—along with statements such as “you cannot step into the same river twice”—that all things change (πάντα ῥεῖ, panta rhei: after Plato, Cratylus 401d). The Romans translated the aphorism as omnia mutantur, which appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (15.165) as “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (“Everything changes, nothing dies”). Ovid’s comment is hardly surprising in a book titled Metamorphoses.

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