The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid’s work, is that of love (and especially the transformative power of love), whether it be personal love or love personified in the figure of Cupid, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to a hero.
Completed in 8 CE
Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18) was a Roman poet who had an enormous influence on English literature of the medieval and renaissance periods. Among his extant works are a collection of love elegies (Amores), a collection of fictional letters of mythological heroines (Heroides), and a 15 book mythological narrative (Metamorphoses). Metamorphoses was the most influential of Ovid’s works for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It was written in epic metre but instead of focussing on a unified epic narrative, it collects together a large number of self-contained stories, including the tales of Daphne and Apollo, Diana and Actaeon, Daedalus and Icarus, Orpheus and Euridice, Achilles, Midas and many more.
rome, italy
How far back?
2020 | Present
