Samuel Garth

Metamorphoses Samuel Garth

Ovid was an ancient classical & medieval Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature & fiction. Metamorphoses is an ancient classical & medieval work and it is Ovid's most ambitious and most popular work. Metamorphoses consists of a 15 book catalogue written in dactylic hexameter about transformations in Greek and Roman mythology set within a loose mytho-historical framework. Within an extent of nearly 12,000 verses, almost 250 different myths are mentioned. Each myth is set outdoors where the mortals are often vulnerable to external influences. The poetry stands in the tradition of mythological and aetiological catalogue poetry such as Hesiod's Catalogue of Women.