SOURCE: Coleman, Robert. “Structure and Intention in the Metamorphoses.” The Classical Quarterly 21, no. 2 (November 1971): 461-77.

In the following essay, Coleman argues that the placement of the stories in the Metamorphoses creates structural unity in the poem and establishes an anti-heroic, anti-Augustan theme.

Ovid's great poem has held its place in the European artistic and literary tradition primarily as a collection of superbly told individual stories, in which successive generations have found inspiration and pleasure. But the poet himself clearly thought of it as something more than a series of detached narratives. In fact he describes it (1. 4) as perpetuum carmen. The object of the present essay is to inquire into the nature of this perpetuitas and to suggest some of the implications that it has both for the poem as a whole and for the appreciation of its individual parts.

The phrase perpetuum carmen has interesting ideological connotations. The...