An insult is answered not with a blow but with a change of shape — a person, or a herd, or a whole family remade into something lower or stiller as the wage of a wrong. This is transformation used as punishment, and the record keeps three sharp examples of it.

The Finnish witness, from the Kalevala (compiled 1835–1849), turns the punishment loose on a household. The shepherd boy Kullervo, cutting his loaf, strikes a stone the mistress has baked into it and "Breaks his ancient knife in pieces" — the one relic of his mother's people. His revenge is a work of magic: he "Changes all his herd of cattle" "Into wolves and bears by magic" — then drives the beasts home with the command "Tear and kill the wicked hostess" when she stoops to milk them. The transformed herd is the punishment made flesh, turned back upon the hand that fed it.

The Greek witnesses set the change on the offender's own body. In Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), Niobe boasts that she is richer in children than the goddess Latona; the goddess has her sons and daughters shot down, and Niobe herself, fleeing to Sipylus, is "transformed into a stone, and tears flow night and" day from the stone — grief made permanent, the mother frozen mid-weeping. In The Metamorphoses of Ovid (completed c. 8 CE), the punishment is smaller and crueller: King Midas judges the piping of Pan above the lyre of Apollo, and the god "does not allow his stupid ears to retain" their human shape, so that "he assumes the ears of the slowly moving ass" — the bad judgment worn forever on the head that made it.

Stone, ass's ears, a herd turned to wolves: the shape of the offence and the shape of the sentence are made to rhyme. When a myth punishes by transforming rather than killing, what does it want the guilty to go on being — and for whom is the changed shape really meant to be read?