Ovid's Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of hexameter by Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid), finished around 8 CE. It retells more than 250 myths with a single thread: someone or something changes shape. Daphne becomes a laurel, Narcissus a flower, Arachne a spider, and Philemon and Baucis become intertwined trees. The poem begins with the creation of the world out of chaos and ends with the deification of Julius Caesar and a prediction of the poet's own lasting fame.¹

Ovid was a leading poet of Augustan Rome, known for his love elegies, and he set out to write something on the scale of the Aeneid. Instead of a single heroic plot, he strings stories together, handing off from one to the next in a way that is witty, playful and often cruel, and he draws on Greek poets and Hellenistic collections. It is a main reason that Greek myth reached later ages in Latin form. The poem was finished around the time Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea, for reasons the poet described only as 'a poem and a mistake'; he never returned.¹²⁴

The Metamorphoses was copied and read all through the Middle Ages, when it was moralized as Christian allegory in works such as the Ovide moralise. Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton drew on it, and Arthur Golding's English version of 1567 was Shakespeare's source for much of his mythology, including Pyramus and Thisbe. Painters including Titian and sculptors such as Bernini turned its scenes into some of Europe's best-known art.²³⁴