INTRODUCTION
with a strain of thanksgiving to his muse, and a prophecy of his world-wide fame and literary immortality.
Though Ovid says that he strove to bear his misfortunes with a manly fortitude, the poems of his exile abound in plaintive lamentations at his hard lot, petitions to his friends in Rome, and unmanly subserviency to Augustus, and later to Tiberius, in the hope of gaining his recall. These, however, were all in vain, and he died at Tomi in A.D. 18, after a banishment of nearly ten years.
Ovid's greatest work, the fruit of the best years of the prime of his life, when his imagination had ripened and his poetic vigour was at its height, was the Metamorphoses, finished in A.D. 7, just before his banishment.
In the poet's own judgment, however, the poem was not finished, and, in his despair on learning of his impending exile, he burned his manuscript. He himself tells us of his motive for this rash act (Tristia, i. 7): "On departing from Rome, I burned this poem as well as many others of my works, either because I was disgusted with poetry which had proved my bane, or because this poem was still rough and unfinished." But fortunately copies of this great work still survived in the hands of friends; and in this letter he begs his friends now to publish it, and at the same time he begs his readers to remember that the poem has never received its author's finishing touches and so to be lenient in their judgment of it.
In the Metamorphoses Ovid attempts no less a task than the linking together into one artistically harmonious whole all the stories of classical mythology. And this he does, until the whole range of wonders
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