The Metamorphoses is a narrative poem penned by the Roman poet Ovid. Widely considered to be his ultimate work, comprising fifteen books and over 250 myths. The poem portrays a history of the world from creation up to the deification of Julius Caesar. Metamorphoses is viewed as one of the most influential works in Western culture, inspiring authors such as Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. It has also inspired countless works of art from various artists throughout the centuries.
Ovid, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria, three major collections of erotic poetry, the Metamorphoses a mythological hexameter poem, the Fasti, about the Roman calendar, and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of poems written in exile on the Black Sea. Ovid was also the author of several smaller pieces, the Remedia Amoris, the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, and the Ibis, a long curse-poem. He also authored a lost tragedy, Medea. He is considered a master of the elegiac couplet, and is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. The scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the canonical Latin love elegists.[1] His poetry, much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, decisively influenced European art and literature and remains as one of the most important sources of classical mythology.[2] ([Source][1].)
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid
