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METAMORPHOSES |
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Inside Cover OVID (43 B.C.-A.D. 17) was the favorite Latin poet of the Renaissance, and the Metamorphoses was his most favored poem. Its fifteen books explain more than 250 myths in chronological order, beginning with the organization of Chaos into separate entities and ending with the deification of Julius Caesar. A bodily change or transformation of some kind marks each story. Among the best-known stories in the poem are those of the lovers Echo and Narcissus (book 3); Perseus and Andromeda (book 5); Pyramus and Thisbe (book 5); Orpheus and Eurydice (book 10); the flight of Daedalus and Icarus (book 8); and Midas's golden touch (book 11). Quick, charming, and inventive, the Metamorphoses has delighted scholars, critics and common readers for two millennia. OVID Publius Ovidius Naso was born March 20, 43 B.C., in Sulmo, Italy. He was sent to school in Rome and intended for the law, but his passion was for literature. He traveled to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily before settling in Rome to write poetry full-time. He married three times and had one daughter. In A.D. 8 the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis (modern-day Costanza, Romania) on the west coast of the Black Sea. Isolated and despairing, Ovid attributed this to a "song," probably the Ars amatoria, and an unexplained "error." His main poetical works, in their approximate order of composition, includes Amores (Loves), Heroides (Heroines), Ars amatoria (Art of Love), Metamorphoses (Transformations), Fasti (a work about the calendar), Tristia (Sorrows), and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). He died at Tomis in 17. |