For over two thousand years, readers have delighted in Ovid's playful eloquence; his influence on other writers has ranged from Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton. This selection of 30 stories from the verse translation by F. A. Wright of Ovid's famous work, The Metamorphoses, does full justice to the poet's elegance and wit. All of the tales involve a form of metamorphosis, or transformation, and are peopled by the gods, demigods, and mortals of classical mythology: Venus and Adonis, Pygmalion, Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus, Perseus and Andromeda, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Cyclops, and Circe, among others. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.