page_title: Metamorphoses
section_title: Contents
hierarchical_section_title: Metamorphoses / Contents
caption_attribution_description: English: Deification of Julius Caesar. Engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses Book XV, 745-850. Français&#160;: La déification de Jules César. Gravure de Virgil Solis pour les Métamorphoses d'Ovide, livre XV: 745-850.
context_page_description: The Metamorphoses is an 8 AD Latin narrative poem by the Roman poet Ovid, considered his magnum opus. Comprising 11,995 lines, 15 books and over 250 myths, the poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework.
  Although meeting the criteria for an epic, the poem defies simple genre classification by its use of varying themes and tones. Ovid took inspiration from the genre of metamorphosis poetry, and some of the Metamorphoses derives from earlier treatment of the same myths; however, he diverged significantly from all of his models.
  One of the most influential works in Western culture, the Metamorphoses has inspired such authors as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare. Numerous episodes from the poem have been depicted in acclaimed works of sculpture, painting, and music. Although interest in Ovid faded after the Renaissance, there was a resurgence of attention to his work towards the end of the 20th century. Today the Metamorphoses continues to inspire and be retold through various media.
context_section_description: Scholars have found it difficult to place the Metamorphoses in a genre. The poem has been considered as an epic or a type of epic (for example, an anti-epic or mock-epic); a Kollektivgedicht that pulls together a series of examples in miniature form, such as the epyllion; a sampling of one genre after another; or simply a narrative that refuses categorization.
  The poem is generally considered to meet the criteria for an epic; it is considerably long, relating over 250 narratives across fifteen books; it is composed in dactylic hexameter, the meter of both the ancient Iliad and Odyssey, and the more contemporary epic Aeneid; and it treats the high literary subject of myth. However, the poem "handles the themes and employs the tone of virtually
  every species of literature", ranging from epic and elegy to tragedy and pastoral.
  Commenting on the genre debate, G. Karl Galinsky has opined that "... it would be misguided to pin the label of any genre on the Metamorphoses."
  The Metamorphoses is comprehensive in its chronology, recounting the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar, which had occurred only a year before Ovid's birth; it has been compared to works of universal history, which became important in the 1st century BC. In spite of its apparently unbroken chronology, scholar Brooks Otis has identified four divisions in the narrative:
  Book I–Book II (end, line 875): The Divine Comedy
  Book III–Book VI, 400: The Avenging Gods
  Book VI, 401–Book XI (end, line 795): The Pathos of Love
  Book XII–Book XV (end, line 879): Rome and the Deified Ruler
  Ovid works his way through his subject matter, often in an apparently arbitrary fashion, by jumping from one transformation tale to another, sometimes retelling what had come to be seen as central events in the world of Greek mythology and sometimes straying in odd directions. It begins with the ritual "invocation of the muse", and makes use of traditional epithets and circumlocutions.  But instead of following and extolling the deeds of a human hero, it leaps from story to story with little connection.
  The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is love—be it personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor (Cupid).  Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon, who is the closest thing this putative mock-epic has to a hero.  Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god out of reason.  The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.
  The Metamorphoses ends with an epilogue (Book XV.871–9), one of only two surviving Latin epics to do so (the other being Statius' Thebaid). The ending acts as a declaration that everything except his poetry—even Rome—must give way to change:
  Now stands my task accomplished, such a work
  
  As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword
  
  Nor the devouring ages can destroy.
caption: A woodcut from Virgil Solis, illustrating the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, the final event of the poem (XV.745–850)
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