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.