A long time must-read on my buck-it list, Metamorphoses would have been extremely hard going, and probably I would have turned back before getting even halfway, were it not for this highly enjoyable and current, 2005 verse translation by Charles Martin.
The text is a massive synthesis, a compendium of mythology, lineage, tropes, and a detailed omnibus of the whole Greco-Roman epic soap opera. Turns out Greek mythology doesn't quite sum up as "Zeus can't keep it in his pants" after all, but close enough. There is a prevalent unifying theme of metamorphoses which keeps the whole shaggy haystack hanging together. Also, a lot of it gets schematic and repetitive: inadvertantly, heroes, gods and other creatures get into the same sort of feuds and jealousies, violence and rape abound, and the mighty fall right and left. Many are transformed into birds, flowers or wellsprings in the process, accounting for a lot of antique geograpy and wildlife.
Ovid single-handedly delivers some of the most epically tedious cast and location listings, and virtually all of the romance-intrigue, comicbook-superhero and notably, horror scenes, which are today more familiar from screenplays than antique lit. What a guy! I can even bring myself to overlook his shameless sucking-up to sponsor and patron Emperor Augustus at the end: there must have been strings attached. He rightly boasts, "My work is finished now: no wrath of Jove, nor sword nor fire nor futurity is capable of laying waste to it."
Overall, an accessible classic masterpiece.

Not going to leave a rating on this one... I read it but I can't say it held my attention span. Have to say though that probably says more about me than the text!

Never had I been more surprised to like a book in further recommended reading for World literature I, an exam I have passed two years ago.

This is a collection of stories told in various points of view and set in different time periods, from the beginning of time until Julius Caesar, and they are centered on transformations – literal and metaphorical.

There are many well-known stories and characters like Lycaon, Apollo and Daphne, Io, Semele, Persephone, Europa, Pygmalion, Arachne, Medusa, Medea and Jason and etc.

Of course, the Gods are present as well, and heroes like Theseus and Hercules, Ulysses, and Achilles.

Even if you didn’t have any knowledge about Greek/Roman mythology this book is enjoyable. And has a great reread ability? You have a wish to reread it right after reading it. Certainly worth spending your day/week on reading.
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A must-read for anyone who likes mythology. Review to come.

Siempre es vital, en todo lector de clásicos que se precie de tal, recorrer las páginas de los pioneros, los creadores, los que antecedieron a toda la literatura moderna, tal es el caso de Ovidio como también lo son Virgilio, Homero, Sófocles, Esquilo, Eurípides y tantos otros. He leído con interés la mayoría de las transformaciones narradas en Las Metamorfosis y por supuesto, algunas me gustaron más que otras; por eso enumero la galería de mitos que desfilan por sus gloriosas páginas.

Todos ellos me han maravillado con sus variadas transformaciones, a saber:
Apolo, Europa, Júpiter, Dafne, Narciso, Perseo, Medusa, Teseo, Proserpina, Palas, Jasón, Medea, Minotauro, Dédalo, Ícaro, Aquiles, Ulises, Orfeo, Eurídice, Ganímedes, Pigmalión, Ifigenia y sobre todo mi admiradísimo Eneas.

Para finalizar, debo remarcar cómo Ovidio aseguró su nombre en letras de oro para la posteridad a través del Epílogo. Es como si él mismo hubiera sido Tiresias, el sabio ciego que podía adivinar el futuro (algo que Edipo no logró entender):

“Y ya he dado fin a una obra a la que no podrán destruir ni la cólera de Júpiter, ni el fuego, ni el hierro, ni el tiempo voraz. Que aquel día que no tiene ningún derecho más que sobre mi cuerpo, cuando quiera, ponga término a curso incierto de mi vida; sin embargo, inmortal en la parte más noble de mi persona, seré llevado sobre la alta región de los astros y mi nombre será indeleble; y por cualquier parte por donde aparezca el dominio de Roma sobre la tierra seré leído por los pueblos y por todos los siglos; viviré, si algo de verdad existe en el presentimiento de los poetas, gloriosamente.”

Oh, Ovid. What I wouldn't give to travel back in time and make sweet love to you on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

No, I don't think it's unhealthy to have lustful fantasies about Ovid. I don't care what you think! I do very much care that his work was lush, provocative and unforgettable in its revolutionary translation (often taking liberties) of what was at the time contemporary folk literature. A treasury of verse!

This book is quite long. It’s actually a work consisting of fifteen books. Not all of its contents were equally as interesting for me, but I am glad I read the whole thing; and glad to be finished with it.

The most interesting part for me was the first book. This section deals with creation and world ages. The parallels with Middle Eastern and Levantine myths are pronounced in this section. It has been speculated by scholars before, that Greek and Roman mythology was often influenced by Phoenician and Middle Eastern mythology. I’ve taken the position that this was almost certainly the case. The mythological founder of Thebes, Cadmus, was said to have been a Phoenician prince, so I don’t think it’s over speculative to posit a Phoenician provenance for much of Greco-Roman myth. This seems to be the case even more so when the mythology deals with the origins of the gods and humanity. Even the Deucalion myth seems to have its origin in the Middle East. Also, the myth of Phaethon is particularly intriguing in this regard. Phaethon was said to be the son of Helios (the Sun). He wanted his father, Helios, to allow him to drive the sun chariot for a day. Helios reluctantly allows Phaethon to do this and Phaethon crashes the sun chariot into the earth and causes a conflagration. Plato used this myth as one of his bases for the theory that the earth experiences regular cataclysms of fire and water. Various Bible scholars have posited a myth such as this to be lurking behind the fall of Lucifer in Isaiah 14. It seems like myths either become conflated, or possibly, become fragmented into distinct myths over time. In the Greco-Roman myth of world ages, the Golden Age was ruled by Cronus and was basically a utopia. Zoroastrianism recognizes a similar world age that was ruled by Yima/Jamshid. Yima was not said to be a god (although in Hindusim, Yama is an underworld god) which is an interesting divergence, but he was said to have been the ruler of the entire world during this age, and it was considered to be an idyllic time. He also had superhuman powers, which included power over the daevas (demons). Eventually this supposedly righteous king fell from grace and was cast out of his kingdom. In Jewish myth (i.e. Midrash), Solomon takes on many of the attributes of this primordial king. This is even more pronounced in Islam’s adoption of Solomonic myth. Probably the influence of Zoroastrianism on Islam also played a role here. Also, the legend of Nimrod in Genesis seems to contain some interesting parallels here as well. The Lucifer (i.e. light bearer) spoken of in the Latin Vulgate of Isaiah 14 was, in the original Hebrew, Halel ben Shahar, that is, "son of the dawn." In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of “Halel” was “eosphoros” (i.e. dawn bringer). Just as this Son of the Dawn falls in Isaiah 14, the Greek Ceyx was also said to have been a son of Eosphoros and also fell because he claimed divine honors. The parallels are divergent to a degree, but undoubtedly still there.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a great source for Greco-Roman mythology. Ovid seems to have been dependent on the writer Nicander for some of his material, but Ovid was certainly not slavish to this source. The translator of this edition of the Metamorphoses, often says in his commentary that Ovid added details from his own imagination. But, considering that so much material has been lost over time, it is pure speculation to say that Ovid invented details in his various treatments of myth. It is just as likely that he had access to sources no longer extant and was able to pick and choose details he liked and reject those he didn’t. I have no negative criticisms in regard to the translation. Some of the translator’s commentary I thought was simply personal opinion and was not particularly necessary, but much of it was informative. I give this book around 4 to 4-and-a-half stars. A great resource for studying Greco-Roman mythology.

Now since the sea's great surges sweep me on,
All canvas spread, hear me! In all creation
Nothing endures, all is in endless flux,
Each wandering shape a pilgrim passing up
And time itself glides on in ceaseless flow,
A rolling stream- and streams can never stay,
nor lightfoot hours, as wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies and follows,
Always, for ever new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed (p.357)

The Melville translation was recommended to me. I have not read any others and have no idea how varied the field is. In this epic around the theme of metamorphoses Ovid weaves a continuing narrative of classical myth, each one transforming into the next, it could be a good book to read for an introduction to the ancient myths of classical Greece, but really maybe more as a companion to European renaissance art, or occasional operas like Handel's Acis and Galatea

It is an impetuous, non-stop rush from creation - here an act of division and separation - from adventure to adventure and narratives nesting inside each other down to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and the triumph of his (adopted) son Augustus.

In places as Ovid rushes through time and space he alludes through people and places to other stories, not included in Metamorphoses giving a sense of a universe of narrative that Ovid's poem is relentlessly driving through.

The unifying theme is of change - people becoming trees, or rocks, women becoming monsters (or men), people becoming birds and other animals, frequently as a result of contact with gods or semi or demi divine beings, often as a result of the lust of said divine persons, repeating the subversive message of Ovid's love poems that desire is the driving force of history.

It is often violent - retelling sections of the Trojan war for instance and the centre of the poem is the hunt for an epic boar in Scilly when Nestor was a young man and helpfully for him still capable of vaulting into a tree, toward the end of the poem is the really grisly and horrifying battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs which I hope was not based too much on Ovid's personal experience of weddings. And yet in the final of the poem's fifteen books we have the figure of Pythagoras, not telling us about triangles, but promoting vegetarianism - because of, as he also taught, the transmigration of souls which feeds back to the poem's theme of change, it is not just that arbitrary gods may turn us from ants into unusually hard working men, or from men and women into snakes, but that changes is part of the nature of existence in a fundamental way, in this life we may be humans, in the next life we may be chickens or sheep.
Although the poem ends with the triumph of Roman power and the deification of Rome's rulers, the poem has a subversive energy. Earlier great powers had fallen, even gods have been toppled, while new gods and new great powers rise and have their day too, why then will Roma and its Caesars be any different?

Jupiter decries disorder and sin, but he overthrew his father and pursues girls and boys insatiably  but not I think women or men. The victims are blamed, persecuted and then left voiceless - but here Ovid memorialises them in to a fabric as complex as Ariadne wove, or now might still weave in her transformed state.

”All things are changing, nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts…so do I teach that the soul is ever the same, though it passes into ever changing bodies.”


Ovid’s Metamorphoses is unlike other ancient epics. It does not follow a single event (Homer’s Iliad) or the travails and adventures of a single hero (Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid). Instead, it encompasses hundreds of myths and tales, over eons of time, starting with World’s creation and moving up to the deification of Julius Caesar. What makes this work an epic rather than a random collection of tales is it’s overarching theme, signaled by its title — transformation and change.

Ovid’s epic is the most accessible and the most modern of all the classic epics of the ancient world. The myths are lively, bawdy, violent, and action packed. Each is self contained and easily digestible, yet the connecting theme of transformation is readily apparent. And that theme — all things change, nothing is permanent, but nothing is truly destroyed either — feels completely relevant and applicable to modern sensibilities.

What will become of me, gripped as I am
by this queer longing for a kind of lovemaking that no one understands?

Did not connect fully to this, but mostly had a lovely time reading this very old epic poem.

I learned about Ovid many many years ago (my Romanian teacher would probably be happy that I read this), because he was exiled in Pontus Euxinus, aka The Black Sea, in the city of Tomis, now Constanța. There's actually a town that bears his name (Ovidiu), that you pass through on the way to the seaside.

The book has some interesting themes, like the powerlessness of humans against gods, women in the face of men who want them (so many chapters are titled 'X rapes Y', like a huge amount of them, so read with care), but also quite a lot of queerness, gender type of metamorphoses and some sweet gay love. A lot of the characters (too many, I have to confess I couldn't always remember who we were talking about, because there are many many names of characters and complex relationships between them) are turned into plants, trees, birds and so on - and it seems to me like they're objectified further, after the transgressions against them, by becoming only a reminder of what was done to them. Well. In some cases it's what they've done.

Actaeon, transformed into a stag by Diana, goddess of the hunt, asks: 'For how is error crime?' and yeah, the gods are cruel.

Love and Hymen shake their wedding torches.

Oh yeah, Hymen's the god of marriage.

Even if the injustices done to women in this book are many and rendered compassionately, there's still a bit of a sexist bent to these stories, like the witchy Medea and Circe and their stories. There's also a... checks notes... woman rapist? (Aurora) Enjoyed the story of Iphis, who becomes a man in order to be a husband to his beloved, Ianthe. It was an interesting gender-transitioning sort of story, but also Iphis did not know how to satisfy Ianthe without a penis so... can he find the clit though?

Also enjoyed quite a few stories I knew already from Greek myths, like Orpheus and Eurydice, some bits of the Illiad, and so on. Also, catching a lot of characters and places with names used by Tamsyn Muir in The Locked Tomb, lol. (Cytherea, Ada, Protesilaus, Ianthe, Palamedes, Sarpedon etc). Oh and the lengthy bit about Pythagoras and metempsychosis (the soul moving from one body to another), which is also an interesting plea for vegetarianism, but also describes a lot of beautiful transformations / metamorphoses that take place in nature - including the transness of hyenas!

Another thing that was nice was all the places mentioned here that I've been, like Mount Hymettus, the island of Euboea, driving past the coast of Corinth and others.

4 Stars, Completed April 24, 2016

They say leave the best for last, right? My last assigned reading for my classics class happened to be my favorite. It incorporated all the famous myths I already knew (and some unknown ones I haven't heard before) but also put them all in context and sequence.

Ovid's Metamorphoses documents the origin and creation of the world up until the life of the poet himself. There are some familiar segments pulled from n  The Iliadn (my review), n  The Odysseyn, and n  The Aeneidn (my review). We see recurring characters and gods/goddesses from those works and many more recognizable myths.

n  “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.” (Everything changes, nothing perishes.)n

The series of stories divided out between the 15 books portray the most essential theme: the change and transformation of things or people into different forms, hence "metamorphoses." Ovid does this in a careful and considered manner making the translated prose quite tricky but still beautiful (I read this in translated English but I do remember reading and translating some passages of this in Latin when I took the language in the past).

As for something I found intriguing, were the recurring commonalities found in a lot of these stories. Often times a myth would begin with Jupiter (or Zeus) falling under lust and raping some young and unwilling maiden. Juno (or Hera) would be filled with jealousy upon discovering her husband's infidelity, and she usually would find a way to make the maiden's life miserable. She does so successfully and most of the women end up crying and morphing into rivers/streams/other bodies of water (or the occasional tree). Sometimes there's a diversifying story where it'll focus on the men's tragic lives instead. In that case, the man is usually transformed into a bird by the end. But of course, no surprise, as most Roman and Greek literature, there was a lot of sex, violence, and bad decisions (which led to tragic deaths) caused by fate. But again, transformation is a huge idea that pops up time and time again (along with idea that there are divine consequences when denying a god/goddess).

Anyway, instead of continuing to describe the events of Metamorphoses I'd liked to go ahead and just end this review here. What really made Metamorphoses stand out to me in comparison to other epic poetry was how it was written. Ovid shares these myths and stories by allowing them to be more episodic than a continual narrative, which made the reading feel not as heavy despite the overall length. After reading, I can easily recognize why the great Ovid influenced many works of art and entertainment made by famous individuals (including Shakespeare, a list of Renaissance and Baroque artists, and also more recent painters from the modern movements in the 20th century like Salvador Dalí). To sum it up: Metamorphoses is a thick classic with a challenging narrative structure but certainly worth trudging through to gain "scholar points" or more knowledge on Greek/Roman mythology.

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Metamorphoses is an epic poem written by Latin poet Publius Ovidius Naso, also known as merely Ovid. It's compounded by fifteen books that narrates this author's perspective of the world, from the Creation of it to his days in the Roman Empire through a recollection of fantastic myths about transformation, either out of prayer or punishment, but always by divine intervention. It is important, however, to take into account that often, when Ovid refers to these deities, throughout his epic verses, he's actually making allegories about the Roman rulers. He depicted the deeds of those who had power over those who weren't through a transference towards the pagan myths that were very well known in Rome. He basically conveyed how that great nation worked in former and current days, in which peace just began to flourish.

Personally, when I read Homer or Virgil, I'm astounded by their works, but I never felt as connected with them as I feel with Ovid's magnum opus. I would say that this is due to the fact that I do not relate to metaphors on homecoming, war or pagan rites; but ultimately Ovid does the same: he used the art of literature to denounce and to enhance life. However, for me, Ovid's subjects span several fields and issues that still concern us these days. Trust me when I say one will hardly ever read a better written poem that includes rape, abuse of power, injustice and stalking in perfectly constructed verses. But do not think Ovid's only goal was to narrate deviousness and how to get away with it: he shows the sorrowful aftermath. See for instance how many occurrences of suicide happen in this collection of myths out of heartbreaks, the death of a beloved or after divine punishment.

There are several humorous episodes all along the book, but there are also others that are quite touching (at least for me). I remember Narcissus' for example, whom I used to think of as a despotic and egotistic being, but who's actually rather innocent and somewhat pure. There is also Hermaphroditus and how after Salmacis' rejection, intend of rape and caprice lost his virility by union to the latter. Or Daphne, who to after being stalked by Apollo, prays for her beauty, cause of her sorrows, to go away, being thus transformed into a laurel tree. We find also Iphis who was born a girl but it's treated as a boy, her sexuality concealed, just because her father threatened her mother to kill the newborn if it wasn't a boy. Iphis then falls in love with a woman who intends to marry, but she suffers because secretly finds herself amidst a sorrowful trial due to the claims of lesbianism as something unnatural. However, after divine intervention, she's finally turned into a man, happily married. And see Caenis too (another one of my personal favourite myths), who is raped by Poseidon and as a reward is granted a wish. So she wishes for her sex to change, being thus turned into Caeneus who would later be mocked at in fight against a centaur because of his change of sex: people believed his strength would be rather null because of his womanly origins. So my point is that Metamorphoses is filled with contemporary issues, specially those concerning gender identity. We often find news about women harassed by men, the latter claiming to be victims of the former's 'provocative' beauty, like Daphne thought of herself. We find men or women coping with gender dysphoria who have to live through it out of fear of rejection or sometimes death, like Iphis. Little did the author of this book think about his work outliving people's incomprehension about human nature being out of humanity's hands.

However, the myths mentioned above are only a few: the diversity found in the book is really vast. Ovid made an outstanding job with his epic poem recounting human nature and how it can be transformed. According to him, we all change; we are like a river that never stays the same. He closes with a flourish in Metamorphoses' final book that tells the teachings of Pythagoras as a treatise on the art of peace. As stated by him, there's no reason why people should feast in the death of another being. He denounces the pagan practices that pointlessly take an innocent life for a sin that they didn't commit. He, overall, teaches the reader how precious life — any life — is.

n  "Our bodies too, are always incessantly changing,
and what we were, or are, is not what we will be
tomorrow…"n

Even before Book XV I knew this was, without question, one of my favourite books. But after the book in question, I think this is one of the books I'll try to keep rereading for the rest of my days to remind myself that change is normal, that life, regardless of its form, matters; and this will, hopefully, stick to my mind for a while.

If we accept as true the idea that great literature can be read again and again and still yield new insight, then the ancient Greek and Roman myths might be the greatest writing of all. Read 'em for fun, read 'em for philosophy, read 'em from different schools of critical theory - they are gifts that keep on giving!

Familiar stories, these myths are given new life through Charles Martin's excellent translation which is (take your pick) energetic, vivid, dramatic, cheeky, but above all: memorable. 5 stars.