This course is an opportunity to encounter, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the hundred and first, some of those ancient mythical narratives that are so deeply embedded in Western thought and art.  Although there are many different sources for the myths of Greek and Roman culture, we will explore a selection of them as seen through the unique imagination of the 1st Century Roman poet Ovid, whose extensive poetic collection he called Metamorphoses, and which has become the most widely known and most influential collection of such myths.  The late English poet, Ted Hughes, translated about a third of Ovid’s stories in a lively and graphic poetic style that captures much of Ovid’s own distinctive tone, and it his collection that we will use for our encounter or re-encounter with Greek and Roman myth.