The Book That Turned the World Into Myth

In 8 CE, in the last stretch of years before Emperor Augustus banished him to the edge of the Roman world, the poet Ovid completed a work unlike anything Latin literature had produced before. He called it Metamorphoses—from the Greek for 'transformations'—and packed into its nearly 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter more than 250 myths, arranged across fifteen books, tracing existence from the birth of Chaos to the death of Julius Caesar, whose deification had occurred only a year before Ovid's own birth.

Ovid did not invent the idea of stringing together transformation myths; the Hellenistic poet Boios had done something similar centuries earlier in a fragmentary poem called Ornithogonia, about humans turned into birds, and Nicander of Colophon's Heteroioumena supplied 21 of the stories that Ovid would rework. But Ovid dwarfed his models. Where Nicander's collection ran to perhaps four or five books, Ovid built fifteen, and he did something no predecessor had attempted: he threaded his myths onto the frame of world history itself, from creation to his own recent past.

The poem resists easy classification. It is long enough, elevated enough, and metrically disciplined enough—written in the same hexameter as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid—to qualify as epic. Yet it borrows the tones of elegy, tragedy, and pastoral, and its true hero is not a warrior but Amor, the god of love, who spends the poem outwitting and humiliating his fellow deities, Apollo included. Scholar Karl Galinsky has suggested it is misguided to force any single genre label onto it at all.

The scope is dizzying even in outline. Book I moves from the four ages of man—gold, silver, bronze, iron—through a divine war and a flood, into the stories of Apollo slaying the python and pursuing Daphne, who becomes a laurel tree, and Io transformed into a heifer. Book II brings Phaethon's disastrous ride and Callisto turned into a bear. By Book III, Actaeon becomes a stag for glimpsing Diana bathing, and Narcissus withers into a flower while Echo fades into a voice with no body left to own it.

The later books keep widening the net. Book VI gives us Niobe petrified in grief and Philomela turned into a nightingale. Book VIII holds the story of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple transformed by Zeus into an oak and a linden tree so they might guard his temple forever together. Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion carving a woman from stone, Midas and his golden touch, all arrive in the middle books, before the poem turns, in its final stretch, toward the fall of Troy, the journeys of Aeneas, the founding of Rome, and finally Julius Caesar's ascent among the stars.