“. . . and we are a-changing, too”

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