Metamorphoses
This article is about the poem Metamorphoses written by the poet Ovid. The Metamorphoses written by Lucius Apuleius is generally known in English as The Golden Ass. See Antoninus Liberalis for his prose mythological work called Metamorphoses''.
The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid is a poem in 15 books that describes the creation and history of the world in terms of Greek and Roman mythology and since it was first written it has remained one of the most popular mythological works, certainly the one best known to medieval writers and one which had a great deal of influence on medieval poetry.
Ovid takes as his theme tales of transformation so often found in myths, in which often a person or lesser deity is permantly transformed into an animal or plant. The poem begins with the transformations of creation and Prometheus metamorphizing earth into Man and ending with the transformation of the spirit of Julius Caesar into a star. Ovid goes from one to the other by working his worked his way through mythology, often it appearently arbitrary fashion, jumping from one transformation tale to another, sometimes retelling what had come to be seen as central events in the world of Greek myth and sometimes straying into odd bypaths. There is perhaps little depth in most of Ovid's protrayals. But if others have written far more deeply, few have written more colorfully.
The Arthur Golding translation of 1567 influenced William Shakespeare and was characterized as "The most beautiful book in the language" by the poet Ezra Pound.
See Ovid for links to other text and translations not duplicated here.
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