Metamorphoses, Book 12

Book 12 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hexameter poem of transformations he had completed by AD 8, brings the poem to the Trojan War. Ovid deliberately avoids retelling the Iliad, and instead fills the book with episodes Homer passed over and with a long tale told by the aged Nestor.

The Greek fleet gathers at Aulis, where a serpent devours a nest of birds as an omen of the ten-year war and Iphigenia is sacrificed, or replaced by a deer. Ovid describes the house of Rumour, where every word spoken in the world echoes. At Troy Achilles fights Cycnus, a son of Neptune whom no weapon can wound, strangles him, and sees him become a swan. At the feast that follows Nestor tells of Caeneus, born a girl, Caenis, and changed into an invulnerable man by Neptune. This leads to his account of the wedding of Pirithous, where the drunken Centaurs try to carry off the bride and a savage battle with the Lapiths breaks out, including the love and death of the centaurs Cyllarus and Hylonome. Caeneus, who cannot be wounded, is buried under a pile of trees and flies out as a bird. Nestor explains why he will not praise Hercules, who killed his brothers, and the book ends with Achilles killed by an arrow of Paris guided by Apollo, and the dispute over his arms.

The battle of Lapiths and Centaurs is Ovid's most extravagant parody of epic violence, gruesome and comic at once. The Latin is vigorous and full of rare names.