Ovid: Metamorphoses

Nearly two thousand years before Goethe welcomed a break with national literature and the dawn of a new epoch of world literature, the Roman poet Ovid was already claiming such status for his epic work, Metamorphoses. Ovid begins and ends his poem with programmatic declarations concerning its global significance and reach, marking the Metamorphoses as a work of world literature avant le lettre. But we are also invited to question the wider implications of this, and to consider what is at stake when the city of Rome (urbs) becomes synonymous with the world (orbis), when world history and world stories become synonymous with Roman history and Roman stories.