Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso is one of the most original and insightful masterpieces of world literature. This genre-eclectic and rhetorically highly poetic epic, ingeniously conceived as both a summation and reinterpretation of the history of humanity based on metamorphic myths, reworks myth as an anthropological, cultural, and political commentary, thus opening up the field of "mythical method" in Poetics, which was to be significantly upgraded by the modernist poets of the 20th century. The poet unfolds the adventure of the human soul starting in the mythical period (Books I-V) with the harsh struggle of man with the primal instincts of love and death, his desperate fight against chance and tragic fate. In the heroic period (Books V-XI), man becomes an autonomous moral protagonist who discovers his logical prowess, but more often ends up a victim of his miscalculations, egoism, and arrogance. The decline of the human species is marked by the socially and politically manipulated subject of the historical period (Books XII-XV), the man of mass society with all his alienated tastelessness and friendless hard-heartedness. The purpose of the work is twofold: a timeless journey through the stages of the "human condition" and resistance to the monumental and inhumane Roma aeterna of Augustus. Metamorphoses is structured on the opposition of power and love.