Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem of 11,995 lines written in 8 CE that chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. It comprises over 250 myths across 15 books, with transformation as its central recurring theme. The work defies simple genre classification, mixing epic, elegy, tragedy, and pastoral tones.
Ovid completed the Metamorphoses in 8 CE, the same year he was sent into exile. The poem runs to 11,995 lines across 15 books and contains over 250 individual myths.
Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser are among the major authors the Metamorphoses influenced. Shakespeare drew on it for Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus, Venus and Adonis, and The Tempest. Chaucer adapted stories from it in The Canterbury Tales and The Book of the Duchess.
Titian painted Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and Death of Actaeon based on scenes from the poem, as part of his "poesie" series of seven paintings reunited at The National Gallery in 2020. Pieter Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture Apollo and Daphne are also among the famous works the poem inspired.
William Caxton produced the first English translation of the Metamorphoses on the 22nd of April 1480. It was set in prose and rendered from a French translation known as the Ovide Moralise. The next major translation, by Arthur Golding in 1567, became the version read by Shakespeare and Spenser.
No manuscript from antiquity survives, but more than 400 manuscripts of varying quality have been preserved, with the earliest fragments dating to the 9th century and complete manuscripts from the 11th century onward. The 17th-century Dutch scholar Nikolaes Heinsius collated more than a hundred manuscripts between 1640 and 1652. The two modern critical editions are William S. Anderson's (1977) and R. J. Tarrant's (2004).