Approximately two hundred and fifty stories, mostly drawn from the Greek mythological heritage, are intertwined in Ovid's Metamorphoses (43 BC - 17 AD). This most famous and bestselling mythological encyclopedia of the West presents a universe where everything – organic and inorganic matter, gods and humans, and everything in between – is in a state of transformational alert.

Deities who sometimes arbitrate and other times dispense justice write the metamorphic epilogue to stories of romantic excitement, nurturing solidarity, thoughtless arrogance, and extreme sensualities, while the narrative tone makes "quantum leaps" across the spectrum from genuinely tragic and epic to burlesque and parody.

In their Ovidian version, Greek mythological celebrities gained archetypal prestige for painters, sculptors, composers, writers, and psychoanalysts, while more recently the continuous metamorphosis between the natural world and the human condition has captured the interest of deep ecology.

Following selective journeys through the Bodies that changed their appearance (Gutenberg, 2009), this translation completes the marathon of approximately 12,000 verses of the most idiosyncratic, yet bestselling, among the epic compositions of Greco-Roman antiquity.