Marguerite Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

The Metamorphoses is introduced in my Penguin edition as Ovid’s “epic work on change”. One wonders, reading it, how writing could ever be about anything else. And perhaps, one realises, it never is.

In 2015, four Columbia University undergraduates published an op-ed in their student paper petitioning English professors to affix trigger warnings to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poem’s “vivid ...