Although my coursework focuses on the ancient world, I rarely find myself looking at Classical mythology (with the exception of the stories we look at in Latin.) I was surprised, therefore, at the frequency with which elements of Professor Hines’ talk on mora and pregnancy in Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses came up in my other courses in the hours and days after her talk. In my senior seminar on food and foodways in classical antiquity, only an hour or so after Professor Hines’ referenced the myth of Adonis’ birth as an example of body horror in depictions of pregnancy and childbirth, we read an anthropological piece establishing the dichotomy of warm/safe/healthy and wet/withering/excessive through the pairing of Adonis’ birth in the Myrrh tree of his mother’s body and his death in the field of lettuce or anemones. The very next day, in a thesis meeting, I found myself referencing a wall painting (which I have been thinking about for months now) and suddenly realized that it featured an image of a breastfeeding mother– a reference to a myth (and, indeed, a series of cross-cultural myths) in which the experience of pregnancy is neither collapsed nor extended perpetually. While the myths of Isis and Mary (and their iconographies) are outside the scope of the Ovidian works, I couldn’t help but think of them as useful contrasts to the mothers in Ovid and Augustan poetry broadly. I look forward to finding the next surprising moment of overlap between Professor Hines’ talk and my coursework!