Metamorphoses

The world as one unbroken story of change. Ovid strings together some two hundred and fifty Greek and Roman myths — from the first shaping of chaos into the cosmos to the death and stellification of Julius Caesar — on a single thread: bodies turning into other bodies. Daphne becomes a laurel, Narcissus a flower, Arachne a spider; Pygmalion’s statue wakes, Daedalus and Icarus take to the air, Orpheus descends for Eurydice. Wit, pathos, and dazzling invention across fifteen books of hexameter — the single richest source of classical myth for all later art. Read myth by myth beside the Latin.