'He had a wondrous gift for song and a voice like the sound of waters,' wrote A.S. Pushkin about Publius Ovidius Naso, the great poet of the 'golden age' of Roman literature. Ovid's magnum opus, Metamorphoses, written with the poet's characteristic refinement of style, is a kind of mythological encyclopedia of classical antiquity. Comprised of individual stories of transformations (metamorphoses proper), it contains an endless number of mythological characters, historical realities, heroism, passions, pathos, fantasies, whims, playfulness, witty turns, and irony. Later, this rich collection of mythological stories, skillfully combined into a single book, repeatedly became a source of inspiration for artists and poets, and therefore Ovid's Metamorphoses is rightly considered one of the works from which a significant part of world literature 'grew.'