Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings....

One of the founding texts of Western literature, theand Metamorphosesand is nevertheless anything but earnest or off-putting. Ovid's sequence of fifteen witty and playful poems sketches the history of the world from its creation to the poet's own time through a series of transformation...