Metamorphoses

Ovid's Metamorphoses is an expansive hexameter epic of transformation, gathering more than two hundred Greek and Roman myths into a continuous song from creation to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Its literary brilliance lies in elegant narrative transitions, psychological acuity, irony, and tonal mobility: tragic violence, erotic comedy, pathos, and philosophical speculation coexist within a poem that both inherits and playfully revises Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus, and Virgil. Publius Ovidius ...