Nominative determinism gone crazy.!Of course, Ovid being such an accessible source for subsequent poets, painters, dramatists, opera librettists and others, many of the stories are very familiar, but what is really striking when you read the whole thing is the pace.

Especially if they happen to be called 'Cycnus' - there are three separate characters with this name, in Books II, VII and XII, and they all get turned into swans. (This is the story Ali Smith uses in Girl meets boy.)One moral that really comes out of the story is that we should be very careful not to give our children names that sound like animals or plants. Iphis and Ianthe are the one couple who seem to profit long-term - Iphis is turned into a boy on the eve of the wedding so that they don't violate the Cretan same-sex marriage ban in force at the time. Most of them seem to end unhappily for the mortal in question - in a few cases the transformation saves someone from an imminent danger of rape, but then they are stuck as a tree for the rest of their life. According to Bernard Knox, there are over 250 transformations in the course of the poem (and that's presumably not counting the unnumbered myrmidons and dragon's teeth.).

And when things go wrong or a god gets peeved, then it's usually the unfortunate mortal who gets changed into an animal, tree, or rock, according to taste. Gods (of either sex) lust for mortals (of either sex) and have their wicked way or are frustrated mortals lust for the wrong other mortals individuals make rash promises or accidentally find themselves in the wrong place revenge and jealousy get out of hand or there is simply too much testosterone and alcohol about.

The opening section is a grand, orchestral description of the creation in the spirit of Epicurean philosophy, and the final section includes a long speech by Pythagoras exposing a number of his scientific ideas (and arguments for vegetarianism), but what everyone remembers - and what gives the poem its usual title - is the material that fills the middle 13 books, a vast and unruly collection of stories of sex, violence and magical transformation gleaned from authors like Hesiod, Vergil and Homer (or simply made up on the spot by Ovid himself). The Metamorphoses is not a modest work in scope: in his 12,000-line epic, Ovid tells us that he's attempting nothing less than to give us the history of the world from its creation out of Chaos right up to the time of Julius Caesar.

Metamorphoses by Ovid