![]() ![]() ![]() The text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is preserved in a tradition of relatively late date and abundant medieval manuscript witnesses. Ovid’s epic of transformation and wondrous metamorphosis has had a profound influence on later art and literature, inspiring works as diverse as the 14th-century Old French Ovide moralisé, the paintings of the Italian Renaissance master Titian, and the first opera of Mozart ( Apollo et Hyacinthus, K. ![]() It is also very much a product of the political and social milieu of Augustan Rome, with attendant reflection and commentary on the nature of the Augustan principate and the place of the poet in the nascent new order. Ovid’s magnum opus is deeply invested in intertextual relationships with the literary achievements of his predecessors, including the tradition of metamorphic myth that was popular in the Hellenistic Age. Ovid refers to his own work at Tristia 1.1.117–120, where he speaks of the fifteen books of his epic that have been saved from the metaphorical funeral pyre, books that reflect the poet’s own changing fortunes in the wake of his banishment to Tomis. The hexameter epic was composed in the last years before the poet’s exile in 8 CE the text that has survived is complete, though now and again it shows evidence of a lack of final revision. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem in fifteen books that offers a panoramic vision of classical mythology from the creation of the world through the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. ![]()
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