1 In the present paper, though, I shall concentrate on an Ovidian passage that has special resonance for Christian readers, the account of creation at the beginning of the Metamorphoses. But Ovidian references and allusions recur with sufficient frequency throughout the period from the fourth to the sixth centuries to leave no doubt that both poets and readers were familiar with and continued to derive inspiration from his poetry: to take three examples, in the fifth century (probably), an anonymous poet, writing of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, compares those cities' fall to the crash of Phaethon-the metamorphosis of the Heliads provides a counterpart to the transformation of Lot's wife in the last decade of the same century, the African poet Dracontius, it has been persuasively argued, employs language from the Ovidian Pygmalion story to describe the creation of Eve finally, in the second half of the sixth century, Venantius Fortunatus, the 'last poet of antiquity,' shows an affinity for the Ovidian persona of the Heroides, a woman mourning for her separated beloved, though, in Fortunatus's case, the mourner may be a mother for a daughter traveling to a far country to be married (and soon to die), a Christian virgin for her divine bridegroom, or the queen and saint Radegund for her childhood companion and cousin, Amalfrid, in distant Constantinople. Ovid, typically, comes second, though a distant second.

In the Latin poetry of late antiquity, the influence of Virgil is all pervasive.

Metamorphoses latin