Ovid
43 BCE–c. 17 CE · Ancient Rome
“I see, and I desire the better: I follow the worse.”
#64of 111Best Authors
Influence95th pct
Popularity67th pct
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Influence
The lineage through Ovid
Drew From(5)
who shaped Ovid
VirgilAncient Rome
via The Aeneid
- Buried in Books 13-14 is Ovid's "little Aeneid" — Virgil's epic replayed in miniature, bent toward metamorphosis
- Reading the Aeneid first reveals what Ovid is doing: compressing, re-angling, and quietly competing with the poem that defined Roman epic
- The irony only registers if you know the grand original he's playing against
HesiodAncient Greece
- The Metamorphoses opens with the world emerging out of Chaos — that cosmogony is straight out of Hesiod's Theogony
- Ovid knew the Theogony exceedingly well and counted Hesiod among his principal sources
- Read Hesiod first and Ovid's opening reveals itself as a Roman poet building on the oldest Greek account of how the gods and the world came to be
- The "little Iliad" at the center of the Metamorphoses (Book 12) takes Homer's Trojan War and turns it into a chain of transformations
- Ovid keeps the cast and several Homeric lines, then sidelines the famous combat for the odd, marginal stories the Iliad left out
- Reading Homer first shows you exactly what Ovid is reshaping — and which great scenes he cheekily skips
- Book 7's Medea is a tragic palimpsest — Euripides' heroine rewritten underneath Ovid's lines
- Her opening soliloquy, weighing passion against reason, echoes the deliberation Euripides put on the Athenian stage
- Read the play first and you'll hear the older voice still speaking through Ovid's verse
LucretiusAncient Rome
- Behind Ovid's account of a world in perpetual transformation stands Lucretius's poem of atoms in eternal motion
- The closing Pythagoras speech borrows Lucretius's didactic voice and cosmic scope — then bends his materialist physics toward myth, the exact opposite conclusion
- Read On the Nature of Things first and the Metamorphoses reveals itself as a sustained, mythologizing answer to it
Inspired(15)
who Ovid shaped
William ShakespeareShakespeare
via Titus Andronicus
- Ovid doesn't just shape Titus Andronicus — he walks onto the stage as a physical book
- In 4.1, the mutilated Lavinia turns the pages of the Metamorphoses to the tale of Philomela and Tereus (Book VI) to name her rape when she can't speak it
- Shakespeare lets Ovid's most savage myth — severed tongue, woven revenge — become the literal key to his bloodiest play
Francesco PetrarcaMedieval
via Canzoniere
- Ovid's Apollo-and-Daphne (Book 1) is the seed of the entire Canzoniere — Petrarch rewrites the laurel-into-which-Daphne-flees as Laura, and the lauro/Laura pun anchors his whole love sequence
- Rvf 23, the "canzone delle metamorfosi," cycles the lover through a chain of Ovidian shape-changes lifted straight from the Metamorphoses
- Where Ovid told the myths from outside, Petrarch climbs inside one of them and lives there for 366 poems
Dante AlighieriMedieval
- After Virgil, Ovid is Dante's most-used source — and Dante names him in Limbo among the great poets (Inferno IV)
- The Metamorphoses taught Dante how to write transformation as poetry; in Inferno XXV he stages thieves turning into snakes and openly claims to out-do Ovid at his own art
- Scholarly consensus treats the Metamorphoses as a primary model standing behind the Comedy
- Dryden kept coming back to Ovid for a lifetime — Englishing the first book of Metamorphoses in 1693 and theorizing translation itself in his Ovid prefaces
- His Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700) gathers eight verse selections from the poem, including Books 12 and 15
- He called Book 15 "the Master-piece of the whole Metamorphoses" — Ovid is the poet Dryden measured his own English against
Geoffrey ChaucerMedieval
- Ovid was Chaucer's quarry — the Tales mine the Metamorphoses at the level of named, lifted plots
- Ovid's tale of Phoebus and the crow becomes Chaucer's Manciple's Tale; the Midas story is reworked into the Wife of Bath's Tale
- The Metamorphoses is the storehouse the medieval English poet kept coming back to for ready-made myth
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheRomantics
via Faust, Part Two
- Goethe said he learned Ovid's Metamorphoses by heart as a child — and it surfaces, decades later, at the close of his life's work
- Act V of Faust, Part Two dramatizes Philemon and Baucis, the old couple of Metamorphoses Book VIII — names, cottage, and all, carried straight across
- Where Ovid rewarded their hospitality, Goethe darkens the tale into murder: the couple is sacrificed to Faust's modernizing land-grab
Michel de MontaigneRenaissance
- Ovid's Metamorphoses is the book that made Montaigne a reader — he found it at seven or eight and never let go
- In 'On Books' he names it as the source of his first taste for reading; it stays a quoted companion across the Essays
- Its governing idea — that nothing holds still, everything is in flux — becomes one of Montaigne's deepest themes
Christopher MarloweRenaissance
via Dr. Faustus
- Marlowe knew Ovid firsthand — he translated the Amores — and threads the Metamorphoses through Dr. Faustus to mark his hero's overreach
- The opening Chorus likens Faustus to Icarus: 'His waxen wings did mount above his reach, / And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow'
- Ovid's myths of transformation and fall become Marlowe's shorthand for a man who flies too high
ApuleiusAncient Rome
via The Golden Ass
- Apuleius paid Ovid the highest compliment a writer can — he stole the title, calling his own novel Metamorphoses
- The plot, the narrator, the man-turned-donkey came from a lost Greek tale, but the frame around it — transformation as the engine of a whole story — is Ovid's idea carried into Latin prose fiction
BoethiusAncient Rome
- Even from prison awaiting execution, Boethius reached for Ovid — the Orpheus poem in Book III is a remembering of the Metamorphoses
- He reworks Ovid's singer who loses Eurydice by looking back, verbal echo and all, into a parable about turning toward the light and not glancing behind
- A measure of Ovid's reach: for late-antique readers he wasn't a model to imitate but a presence to think with
Luís de CamõesRenaissance
via The Lusiads
- Camões read Ovid as closely as he read Homer and Virgil — and it shows in his boldest invention
- Adamastor, the spurned giant petrified into the Cape of Good Hope, is a pure Ovidian metamorphosis: thwarted love turning a body into stone
- It's Camões competing with Ovid on his own ground, driving the whole mythological machinery of the epic with a transformation Ovid would have recognized
Miguel de Cervantes SaavedraRenaissance
via Don Quixote
- Ovid's Metamorphoses opens with the Ages of Man — gold, silver, bronze, iron — a world declining from a lost golden age
- Cervantes hands that whole scheme to a madman: Don Quixote's Golden Age speech (I.11) laments being "born in this our iron age to revive the age of gold"
- The Ovidian engine of transformation runs straight through Don Quixote — only now the metamorphoses happen inside a deluded head, where windmills become giants and a peasant girl becomes a princess
John MiltonRenaissance
via Paradise Lost
- Ovid's Metamorphoses is woven into Milton's Eden — the simile that paints paradise itself reaches back to Proserpine gathering flowers before her abduction
- Eve's first moment, gazing at her own reflection in the water, is modeled on Ovid's Narcissus
- Even the dark machinery follows: the Sin-and-Death allegory of Book II expands Ovid's logic of transformation into something monstrous
SenecaAncient Rome
- Ovid is among the poets Seneca quotes in the Letters — the Metamorphoses feeds his prose as well as his arguments
- Seneca leans on Ovid's picture of primitive humankind in Epistle 90, borrowing the poem's vision to make a Stoic point
Giovanni BoccaccioMedieval
via The Decameron
- Boccaccio was nicknamed "the Italian Ovid" — and he earned it before the Decameron, reworking Ovidian myth in his vernacular romances
- Ovid's great matter of love and transformation runs underneath Boccaccio's hundred tales: desire that changes the people it seizes
- The closer tale-sources are Apuleius and the fabliaux, but the ironic, knowing posture toward love — the lover-physician, the cure that wounds — is pure Ovid
In their words
Famous Quotes
“Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes.”
“I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world's first origins to my own time.”
“Wherever Rome's influence extends, over the lands it has civilised, I will be spoken, on people's lips: and, famous through all the ages, if there is truth in poet's prophecies, I shall live.”
“Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases, passing from a wild beast into a human being, from our body into a beast, but is never destroyed.”
Biography
About Ovid
Roman poet whose Metamorphoses — a sprawling epic of mythological transformation — became one of the most influential works of Western literature. A witty, sophisticated stylist, he was exiled by Augustus in 8 CE for reasons that remain mysterious. His retellings of Greek and Roman myths shaped how the Western world imagines its classical heritage.
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