The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books I-VII.

Ovid's great poem of endless change has fed the Western imagination for two thousand years, and this volume presents its opening movement.

What it's about

The Metamorphoses, Books I-VII carries the reader from the creation of the ordered world out of chaos through a flowing sequence of myths, each one turning, sooner or later, on a transformation. Here are the flood, Apollo and Daphne, Io, Phaethon's ruinous ride, the tragic love of Pyramus and Thisbe, the tale of Medea, and many more, all linked in Ovid's cunning, ever-moving design so that one story slides into the next. Gods pursue, mortals suffer, and bodies are forever changing into laurel, river, bird or stone.

Themes

Transformation itself is the poem's grand theme, and through it Ovid explores love and desire, power and punishment, art and the instability of all things. Beneath the wit and beauty runs a serious meditation on flux, on how nothing keeps its form for long.

Why it still matters

Countless painters, poets and playwrights have drawn on these stories, and much of what we call classical mythology reaches us in Ovid's telling. To read the Metamorphoses is to go to a wellspring of Western art and literature.

Who it's for

For lovers of poetry and myth, students of the classics, and any reader who wants the ancient stories in the hands of their most brilliant teller.