Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

Nature imitates art-not a paradox from Oscar Wilde's pen, but instead the bold formulation of the Latin poet Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), marking a radical turning point in ancient aesthetics, founded on the principle of mimesis. For Ovid, art is independent of reality, not its mirror: by enhancing phantasia, the artist's creative imagination and the simulacrum's primacy over reality, Ovid opens up unexplored perspectives for future European literature and art. Through an examination of Narcissus and Pygmalion, figures of illusion and desire, who are the protagonists of two major episodes of the Metamorphoses, Rosati sheds light on some crucial junctures in the history of reception and aesthetics. Narcissus and Pygmalion has, since its first publication in Italian, contributed to the poet's critical fortunes over the past few decades through its combination of sophisticated literary critical thinking and patient argument applied to the poetics of self-reflexivity and, in particular, to the fundamental interface between the verbal and the visual in the Metamorphoses. A substantial introduction accompanies this new translation into English, positioning Rosati's work anew in the forefront of current discussions of Ovidian aesthetics and intermediality, in the wake of the postmodern culture of the simulacrum.