Metamorphoses

Gods become beasts. Lovers become trees. Men become monsters. And nothing in the world remains unchanged.

For more than two thousand years, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been one of the great storehouses of Western mythology—a sweeping collection of gods, heroes, monsters, doomed lovers, and miraculous transformations whose stories have inspired generations of poets, painters, playwrights, and storytellers.

Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the rise of Rome, Ovid moves through more than two hundred myths united by a single idea:

Everything changes.

This edition from The Lyceum Press presents The Metamorphoses as an accessible, abridged prose rendering, preserving the poem’s fifteen-book structure, principal narratives, dramatic power, and extraordinary imaginative range while bringing its language to the modern reader.

Within these pages are many of the most enduring stories of the classical world:

• Apollo’s relentless pursuit of Daphne and her transformation into the laurel
• Phaethon’s disastrous attempt to drive the chariot of the sun
• Narcissus falling hopelessly in love with his own reflection
• Pyramus and Thisbe, the doomed lovers who helped inspire Romeo and Juliet
• Perseus and the terrible power of Medusa
• The abduction of Proserpina and a mother’s grief that changes the seasons
• Arachne’s challenge to the goddess Minerva
• Jason, the Golden Fleece, and the terrible magic of Medea
• Daedalus and Icarus taking flight on wings of wax and feathers
• Hercules passing from mortal hero to god
• Orpheus descending into the underworld for Eurydice
• Pygmalion falling in love with the statue he created
• King Midas and the disastrous gift of the golden touch
• The Trojan War and the contest for the armor of Achilles
• Aeneas carrying the story of Troy toward Rome
• The apotheosis of Julius Caesar

Yet The Metamorphoses is more than a collection of myths.

Again and again, Ovid returns to transformation as punishment, escape, desire, grief, mercy, violence, and rebirth. Women become trees and fountains. Men become wolves, birds, and stone. Cities rise and disappear. Gods assume mortal forms. Human beings attempt to escape fate only to discover that change itself is unavoidable.

Behind the fantastic stories lies a remarkably modern fascination with identity: what remains of a person when the body changes? What does love become when it cannot possess its object? Can suffering destroy us—or merely transform us into something new?

Ovid carries that idea from the birth of the cosmos all the way to his own age. Near the end of the poem, Pythagoras gives its governing principle:

Everything changes; nothing perishes.

And Ovid closes with one final transformation—his own. Empires may fall and bodies may die, he declares, but his poetry will survive.

He was right.

This edition includes a List of Characters and Glossary of Terms to help readers navigate the gods, heroes, monsters, places, and traditions of the classical world.

For readers discovering Ovid for the first time—or returning to the myths that shaped Western literature—this is a direct path into one of antiquity’s most imaginative and influential works.