Which Roman poet wrote 'Metamorphoses'?

Which Roman poet wrote 'Metamorphoses'? Ovid wrote it. The Latin poem, completed around 8 CE, is Ovid's most ambitious work and one of the great narrative poems of classical antiquity.

Metamorphoses contains 15 books and nearly 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter. It retells more than 200 Greek and Roman myths, linking them through the theme of transformation: people become animals, plants, stones, stars, and gods. The poem moves from the creation of the cosmos to the deification of Julius Caesar.

Ovid was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, which explains a common mix-up. Virgil wrote the Aeneid, while Horace wrote lyric poetry and the Latin phrase later quoted in Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' Neither wrote Metamorphoses.

Although the poem draws heavily on Greek mythology, Ovid gives the stories a distinctly Roman literary shape. Its influence reaches medieval and Renaissance art, Shakespeare, and countless later retellings of myths such as Daphne, Pygmalion, Narcissus, and Orpheus.