In the Library
Metamorphoses
Ovid, 8 CE
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Henry T. Riley
- Original
- Original la
- Chapters
- Chapters 15
- Length
- Length 143k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Metamorphoses
A poem with a fearsome reputation as the great storehouse of classical myth, when what you are actually holding is a fast, witty, often shocking collection of stories you can dip into one tale at a time.
The reputation of Metamorphoses is that it is the reference book of ancient mythology, an encyclopedia of gods and heroes that serious readers are supposed to have consulted, and that to read it you need to arrive already knowing who all these people are. That reputation makes it sound like homework, and it gets the experience almost exactly backward. What Ovid actually wrote is a long, racing sequence of around two hundred and fifty stories, most of them short, many of them funny or cruel or strange, and the great relief of it is that you can open the book almost anywhere and read a single tale to its end without owing anything to the hundred pages before it.
If you like this, try
One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous
Another inexhaustible collection of stories that flow into each other, but told to delay death instead of explain creation.
£1.99
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
Dante raids Ovid constantly: the punishments in Hell are Ovidian transformations given a Christian address.
£1.99
About the book
She runs from the god, and just as his breath reaches the back of her neck the change overtakes her: bark climbs her thighs, her fingers stiffen into twigs, her hair shivers into leaves, and Apollo, pressing his mouth to the warm new wood, feels her heart still beating somewhere underneath. Daphne into laurel is one of hundreds. Ovid threads the whole of pagan myth into a single unbroken poem, from the first sorting of chaos to the streets of his own Rome, and everywhere the same thing happens: a person pushed past the edge of what a body can hold, and the body giving way to it. Narcissus thins to a flower over his own reflection, a weaver's pride hardens into a spider, a raped girl is silenced into a bird. The wonder is how tender Ovid stays toward each one. Nothing in him holds its shape, and that, he seems to know, is exactly what it is to be alive.