Could someone pass the salt?

Well, after reading about Narcissus yesterday and talking about how everyone knows that story, I read a section today featuring someone I had never even heard of (and wouldn't know how to pronounce even if I had) ... Erisychthon. This was the first section of Tales from Ovid that actually surprised me, mostly because I was at least familiar with the previous myths. The matter-of-fact way that the twist ending is declared, though, contributed to the surprise, because I felt like this was something I was supposed to have seen coming - and not just have seen, but have thoroughly expected to see.

Erisychthon has been cursed with insatiable hunger by Ceres, who's pissed because he chopped down a tree that she had stashed a nymph in at some point. His daughter, in turn, figures out how to shape-shift herself and helps Daddy Dearest get money for his hunger habit by morphing into various forms in the marketplace (horses, slaves, parrots, etc.) for her dad to sell to unsuspecting customers. But of course this doesn't help, because his hunger can never be fulfilled. She did all of this


to feed the famine in her father.
But none of it was enough. Whatever he ate
Maddened and tormented that hunger
To angrier, uglier life. The life

Of a monster no longer a man. And so,
At last, the inevitable.
He began to savage his own limbs.
And there, at a final feast, devoured himself.


End of poem. It seems very odd to me that the climax is just stuck in there like a denouement, and that the daughter is not really dealt with at all. It's also interesting to think about who's undergoing the metamorphosis. The daughter is literally, of course, but the father's last act is also a type of grisly metamorphosis.

One wonders if, like the Shel Silverstein poem, all that's left of him is a chomping pair of teeth, doomed to grind on forever.