metamorphoses · ovid

Ovid's fifteen-book Latin poem, finished around 8 AD, strings some 250 Greek and Roman myths on the single thread of transformation, from chaos to the deification of Caesar. Playful, erotic and often cruel, it treats the gods as capricious and change as the only constant, and it became the West's main sourcebook of classical myth.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (Harcourt, 1993). Read in full over two sessions, Freshman Spring at Torrey Honors: Books 1 to 6, then Books 7 to 15.