Even if you haven’t heard of Ovid, you almost certainly know some of his stories. His most famous work, the Metamorphoses, is a Latin epic poem composed of hundreds of tales of mythical transformations, many of which are still being told and retold today.
Take Ovid’s story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who crafted an impossibly beautiful woman from ivory. After falling in love with his own creation, he prayed to the goddess Venus and she brought the statue to life. You can trace the echoes of this story through the centuries – from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), which recast the sculptor as a speech therapist and became the musical My Fair Lady (1956), to Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), which reimagines the tale for the AI generation.
