Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Predisposition Of Alexandrian Poetry

Ovid's decision to make myth the dominant subject of the Metamorphoses was influenced by the predisposition of Alexandrian poetry.[4] However, whereas it served in that tradition as the cause for moral reflection or insight, he made it instead the "object of play and artful manipulation".[4] The model for a collection of metamorphosis myths derived from a pre-existing genre of metamorphosis poetry in the Hellenistic tradition, of which the earliest known example is Boio(s)' Ornithogonia — a now-fragmentary poem collecting myths about the metamorphoses of humans into birds.[5]

There are three examples of the Metamorphoses by later Hellenistic writers, but little is known of their contents.[3] The Heteroioumena by Nicander of Colophon is better