1.1), by which title Ovid also refers to the Metamorphoses in the exile poetry, does double duty in this regard, for while it can be read as alluding to Homer’s Odysseus, a man ‘of many turns’ ( polytropon, Od. The phrase mutatas formas (‘changed shapes’, Met. Thus, the proem draws on the language of Homeric and Vergilian heroic epic to announce a theme characteristic of didactic rather than martial epic. Ovid mines Homer as well as Vergil for myths of metamorphosis, making their epics prototypes for his new poem. Yet while Vergil may have been the most immediate spur to Ovid’s epic production, the whole of the classical epic tradition informs his essay in hexameter poetry. Ovid’s decision to compose the Metamorphoses in dactylic hexameters, the meter of classical epic, has often been explained as arising from ‘the impulse of the Aeneid’, and the influence of Vergil is everywhere apparent in the poem, from the renovation of Vergilian diction and metrical techniques to the appropriation of Vergilian themes (e.g., city-foundation and familial piety) and subjects, including the fall of Troy and Aeneas’ wanderings in the Mediterranean in a mini-‘Aeneid’ ( Met. The metaliterary comment revisits and reverses the opening scene of Ovid’s earlier Amores, where the god Cupid steals a foot from the second line of his projected epic and thereby sets him on an elegiac course ( Amores 1.1.1-4). The novelty of the poem’s subject-matter is complemented by the poet’s new excursion into hexameter verse, a metrical innovation underscored in the second line’s parenthetical comment crediting the gods with transforming not only the changed forms which constitute the poem’s subject matter, but also Ovid’s verse form itself, since they have metamorphosed his poetry from elegiac verse into epic. 1.1), which can be read autonomously to mean ‘my inspiration bears on to new things’. 1.1-4) a change of meter, from the elegiac couplets of his previous poetry to epic hexameters, and of inspiration, from Cupid to the whole divine pantheon and he comments on his innovation in the opening words, in noua fert animus ( Met. Ovid announces in the proem of his epic ( Met.
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