The impact of Ovid's Metamorphoses on our culture can hardly be overestimated. The poem is one of the most exciting and accessible classical texts, our key source for nearly all the famous myths of Greece and Rome. Sarah Annes Brown offers a lively, and sometimes provocative, introduction to the Metamorphoses, exploring the impact of recent critical developments and tracing its rich afterlife in both high and popular culture. The book's later chapters are devoted to five of the most memorable Ovidian stories - Apollo and Daphne, Actaeon, Philomela, Arachne and Pygmalion. Each subtle and elusive story is found to have generated a huge range of creative responses. The influence of the Pygmalion myth, for example, can be traced in Frankenstein, Vertigo and Blade Runner, as well as in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Synthesizing a wealth of detailed observations, Joseph Solodow studies the structure of Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, the role of the narrator, Ovid's treatment of myth, and the relationship between Ovid's and Virgil's presentations of Aeneas. He argues that for Ovid metamorphosis is an act of clarification, a form of artistic creation, and that the metamorphosed creatures in his poem are comparable to works of art. These figures ultimately aid us in perceiving and understanding the world.

A powerful version of the Latin classic by England's late Poet Laureate, now in paperback.When it was published in 1997, Tales from Ovid was immediately recognized as a classic in its own right, as the best rering of Ovid in generations, and as a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry; Hughes translated twenty-four of its stories with great power and directness. The result is the liveliest twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, inspiring artists and writers from Titian to Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as you've never read them before—sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious—from the fall of Troy to birth of the minotaur, and many others that only appear in the Metamorphoses. Connected together by the immutable laws of change and metamorphosis, the myths tell the story of the world from its creation up to the transformation of Julius Caesar from man into god. In the ten-beat, unrhymed lines of this now-legendary and widely praised translation, Rolfe Humphries captures the spirit of Ovid's swift and conversational language, bringing the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet to modern readers. This special annotated edition includes new, comprehensive commentary and notes by Joseph D. Reed, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University.