Metamorphoses
Also known as: The Metamorphoses, Metamorphoseon Libri XV, Books of Transformations
A fifteen-book hexameter epic weaving Greco-Roman myths into a continuous history of the world through transformations, from primordial chaos to Julius Caesar’s deification, with change as its unifying principle.
Description
Ovid organizes more than two hundred mythical episodes into an audacious, continuous epic of change. Beginning with a cosmogony and the Ages of Man, he reframes familiar Greek and Roman tales—divine pursuits, punishments, loves, and losses—so that each story turns upon a metamorphosis: bodies into trees, birds, stones, stars, and constellations. His narrative voice is witty, ironical, and highly intertextual, conversing with Homer, Hesiod, and Hellenistic poets while speaking to Augustan Rome’s politics and poetics. The poem culminates in Rome’s mythic teleology: the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and a gesture toward Augustus, claiming permanence for Roman power even as the poem insists that all things change.
Historiography
The text survives in a rich medieval manuscript tradition with over 450 witnesses, enabling a relatively secure reconstruction despite localized corruption. The poem was a school text throughout the Middle Ages and inspired extensive commentary and moralization (e.g., the French Ovide moralisé). Early modern Europe saw influential translations (Golding 1567; Dryden and the 1680 translation project), while modern critical editions refine the stemma and address interpolation. Its visual reception in manuscript illumination, Renaissance painting, and Baroque sculpture shaped Western mythography.
Date Notes
Composed in Rome under Augustus; completed shortly before Ovid’s exile in 8 CE.
Archetypes
Major Characters
- Jupiter
- Juno
- Apollo
- Venus
- Mercury
- Minerva
- Diana
- Bacchus
- Perseus
- Theseus
Myths
- Creation and the Flood
- Apollo and Daphne
- Arachne’s Weaving
- Pygmalion and the Statue
- Orpheus and Eurydice
- Perseus and Andromeda
- Baucis and Philemon
- Julius Caesar’s Apotheosis
Facts
- Written in dactylic hexameter across fifteen books.
- Frames over two hundred myths through bodily or cosmic transformations.
- Opens with a cosmogony and closes with Julius Caesar’s apotheosis.
- Completed around the time of Ovid’s exile to Tomis in 8 CE.
- A foundational source for later mythography, art, and European literature.
- Influenced visual arts from medieval illuminations to Bernini’s sculptures.
- Organizes episodes via associative transitions, speeches, and embedded songs.
- Interweaves Greek materials with Roman aetiologies and Augustan ideology.
- Medieval moralizations reinterpreted pagan tales as allegories of virtue and vice.
- Among the most copied Latin poems in the Middle Ages and early modern period.