About two hundred and fifty stories, mostly drawn from the Greek mythological legacy, are woven together 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 material, gods and humans and everything in between – exists in a state of metamorphotic alert.
Deities that at times act arbitrarily and at other times deliver justice write the metamorphic epilogue to stories of romantic excitement, affectionate solidarity, thoughtless arrogance, and extreme sensuality while the narrative tone makes "quantum leaps" across the spectrum from the genuinely tragic and epic to the 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.
After selective journeys through Bodies that changed their shape (Gutenberg, 2009), this translation completes the marathon of about 12,000 verses of the most idiosyncratic yet bestselling of the epic compositions of Greco-Roman antiquity.
