Ovid's fifteen-book song of changed forms — from Chaos and the ages of man through divine loves, mortal pride, and the punishments of heaven, until Caesar rises among the stars: a Roman tapestry woven from Greek myth, where nothing keeps its shape for long.1
The song of change
The poet opens with a promise to tell of bodies changed to new forms from the beginning of the world to his own day — and asks the gods to breathe upon his undertaking, for they themselves wrought the changes he must sing.2
Gods and mortals alike
Through flood and famine, through rape and revenge, through contest and hubris, Ovid returns again and again to the same device: the body altered — laurel, spider, stone, bird, star — so that desire, pride, or pity may be fixed forever in a new shape.3
The Roman frame
The catalogue is not merely Greek antiquity retold: the poem closes with Julius Caesar's apotheosis and Augustus' reign, so that metamorphosis becomes the lens through which Rome too reads its own succession of power.4
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Episodes
How the centuries saw it
Apollo and Daphne
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622–1625
Bernini catches the instant of Ovid's metamorphosis — bark closing over Daphne's flesh as Apollo's hand still grasps what is already becoming laurel.