The Metamorphoses: Selected Stories in Verse
Apr 2012 · Courier Corporation
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About this ebook
One of ancient Rome's most celebrated poets, Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 18) wrote during the reign of Augustus. His works reflect a sentiment of art for pleasure's sake, without the ethical or moral overtones, which perhaps accounts for his enduring popularity. For more than two thousand years, readers have delighted in Ovid's playful eloquence; his influence on other writers has ranged from Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton, and scenes from his stories have inspired many great works by Western artists.
This selection of thirty stories from the verse translation by F. A. Wright of Ovid's famous work, The Metamorphoses, does full justice to the poet's elegance and wit. All of the tales involve a form of metamorphosis, or transformation, and are peopled by mythological gods, demigods, and mortals: Venus and Adonis, Pygmalion, Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus, Perseus, and Andromeda, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Cyclops, and Circe, among others.
Although most of the stories did not originate with Ovid, it is quite possible that had he not written them down, these oral traditions would have been lost forever — and with them, a vast and valuable amount of Greco-Roman culture. This collection of the poet's best and most beloved narrative verses reflects the vitality of classical mythology.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
This selection of thirty stories from the verse translation by F. A. Wright of Ovid's famous work, The Metamorphoses, does full justice to the poet's elegance and wit. All of the tales involve a form of metamorphosis, or transformation, and are peopled by mythological gods, demigods, and mortals: Venus and Adonis, Pygmalion, Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus, Perseus, and Andromeda, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Cyclops, and Circe, among others.
Although most of the stories did not originate with Ovid, it is quite possible that had he not written them down, these oral traditions would have been lost forever — and with them, a vast and valuable amount of Greco-Roman culture. This collection of the poet's best and most beloved narrative verses reflects the vitality of classical mythology.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
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3.7
3 reviews
About the author
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC--AD 17/18), known as Ovid. Born of an equestrian family in Sulmo, Ovid was educated in rhetoric in Rome but gave it up for poetry. He counted Horace and Propertius among his friends and wrote an elegy on the death of Tibullus. He became the leading poet of Rome but was banished in 8 A.D. by an edict of Augustus to remote Tomis on the Black Sea because of a poem and an indiscretion. Miserable in provincial exile, he died there ten years later. His brilliant, witty, fertile elegiac poems include Amores (Loves), Heroides (Heroines), and Ars Amatoris (The Art of Love), but he is perhaps best known for the Metamorphoses, a marvelously imaginative compendium of Greek mythology where every story alludes to a change in shape. Ovid was admired and imitated throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson knew his works well. His mastery of form, gift for narration, and amusing urbanity are irresistible.
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