Funny, devastating, flip, throat-catching - the moods of the Metamorphoses are as various as the hundreds of stories that form the poem"s subject-matter. The title of the poem, Metamorphoses, is the Greek word for "transformations", and the myths that provide the source material for Ovid"s torrent of stories are all linked together by this theme of transformation, which Ovid, with an insight of characteristic genius, had at some moment realized to be the single potential unifying thread that ran through the chaotically diverse bundles of stories in the Greek and Roman traditions. A classical text with impeccable formal credentials and an encyclopaedic stock of Greek and Latin literary history, the Metamorphoses has nonetheless always appealed to iconoclastic readers, who have responded to its energy, verbal wit and subversive intelligence.