Ovid's stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovid's dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts? In Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of renders substantial portions of Ovid's great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid's the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alison's Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet's great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison's guiding principle and Muse. will transform forever readers' experience of this most ingenious of poets. The Elaine Fantham's Alison Keith's Incorporates from classical antiquity that illustrate Ovidian themes (read by Alison) of sixteen selected passages are available at www.oup.com/us/alison