The Essential Metamorphoses, Stanley Lombardo's abridgment of his
translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, preserves the epic frame of
the poem as a whole while offering the best-known tales in a
rendering remarkable for its clarity, wit, and vigor. While making
no pretense of offering an experience comparable to that of reading
the whole of Ovid's self-styled history from the world's first
origins down to my own time, this practical and judicious selection
of myths at the heart of Roman mythology and literature yet manages
to relate many of the most fascinating episodes in that
world-historical march toward the Age of Augustus--and is
accompanied by an Introduction that deftly sets them in their
cosmological, theological, and Augustan contexts.