Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction

(Princeton University Press) This study offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid’s epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, the author argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. Feldherr is a professor of classics at Princeton.