Metamorphoses
Fifteen books of transformations told with such virtuosity and psychological precision that they feel less like mythology than reports from a dream that keeps dreaming itself. Shakespeare, Milton, and Ted Hughes all returned here obsessively. The stories of Orpheus, Daphne, Narcissus, and Pygmalion live in the bloodstream of Western art.
Rape drives an uncomfortable share of these transformations, and Ovid narrates each with the same urbane sparkle, which starts to read as complicity somewhere around Daphne. Connections between tales are openly arbitrary, fifteen books without a destination; near the end, Pythagoras delivers a four-hundred-line lecture on vegetarianism. In translation the wit thins, and wit is most of what protects you.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
