The short answer
It is about changes of shape. In fifteen books of Latin verse, finished around AD 8, Ovid strings together more than 250 myths in which people become trees, birds, stars, stones and flowers. The poem runs in one continuous thread from the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar, who becomes a star.
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A poem of changes
The title is Greek: metamorphōsis means a change of form, from meta, change, and morphē, shape. Ovid states his subject in the opening lines:
My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time!
In Latin he asks the gods for a perpetuum carmen, a continuous song. That is the poem’s trick. It is not a collection of separate tales but one unbroken chain of about 12,000 lines in the meter of epic, each story sliding into the next through a family tie, a place, a teller, even a passing comparison. It has no single hero. Its only constant is change.
From Chaos to Caesar
The order is roughly the order of time. Book 1 begins before the world, with Chaos as a shapeless, jumbled mass, not the yawning gap of Hesiod (see what Chaos was in Greek myth). Then come the creation, the ages of gold to iron, and the great flood. The early books are full of gods in love and gods in anger. The middle books turn to heroes: Perseus, Medea, Theseus, Hercules. Books 12 to 14 pass through Troy and follow Aeneas to Italy. Book 15 reaches Rome’s kings, gives a long speech on change to the philosopher Pythagoras, and ends with the murdered Julius Caesar raised to the stars and praise for Augustus.
Ovid worked on it in the years before AD 8, when the emperor’s order sent him away; the page on why Ovid was exiled tells that story.
The stories everyone knows
Many myths reached later centuries mainly through Ovid’s versions. A few of the best known:
- Midas (Book 11): the king whose wish for the golden touch ruins his dinner, and who later earns a donkey’s ears.
- Narcissus and Echo (Book 3): the nymph who can only repeat, and the youth who gave us narcissism.
- Arachne (Book 6): the weaver who became a spider after a flawless tapestry.
- Phaethon (Books 1 and 2): the boy who crashed the chariot of the Sun.
- Pygmalion (Book 10): the sculptor whose ivory statue comes to life, never named Galatea by Ovid.
- Apollo and Daphne (Book 1), Pyramus and Thisbe (Book 4), Daedalus and Icarus (Book 8) and Orpheus and Eurydice (Book 10).
The last word: vivam
Ovid ends by claiming that his work will outlast everything, even the anger of Jove. The final lines read:
Wherever Roman power extends her sway over the conquered lands, I shall be read by lips of men. If Poets’ prophecies have any truth, through all the coming years of future ages, I shall live in fame.
The last word of the Latin is vivam, I shall live. The boast came true. Arthur Golding’s English translation of 1567 was read by Shakespeare, whose Pyramus and Thisbe play inside A Midsummer Night’s Dream comes from Book 4, and painters and sculptors from Titian to Bernini drew on it. Even Kafka’s 1915 novella is known in English as The Metamorphosis.
Sources
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.1–4 and 15.871–879 (tr. Brookes More, 1922)
- Arthur Golding, English translation of the Metamorphoses (1567)