Metamorphoses
Ovid(8)
Extract
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora. (My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.)
Bodies will not hold their shape. A girl fleeing a god's desire becomes a laurel tree, her fingers sprouting leaves even as she runs, and a boy so beautiful he falls in love with his own reflection dissolves into a flower at the water's edge. Ovid composed this epic around the year 8 AD, gathering some two hundred and fifty transformations into a poem that spans from the creation of the world to the deification of Caesar. Exiled soon after to the Black Sea coast, he had written the essential encyclopedia of classical myth, a work that would hand the Renaissance its entire visual vocabulary. Every change in these pages speaks the same truth: that form is merely the temporary clothing of desire, grief, and wonder.
If you loved this
Another inexhaustible collection of stories that flow into each other, but told to delay death instead of explain creation.
Dante raids Ovid constantly: the punishments in Hell are Ovidian transformations given a Christian address.
Borges inherits Ovid's gift for making the impossible feel inevitable, but compresses each myth to a few pages.