On first viewing, Ovid and Gabriel García Márquez could not seem to be much further apart. One was born into a well-to-do family in the peaceful, golden reign of the emperor Augustus in the first century BC. Enjoying the life of a wealthy, talented young man in Rome, he tried his hand at love poetry before penning the imaginative delights of his epic story of things changing into other things, in a bid to impress his eager literary audience of fellow poets. The other was born in the heat of twentieth- century Colombia, raised in a climate that was politically charged and even dangerous, and became a journalist, with barely enough money to pay for the postage of the manuscript of Cien años de soledad to his publishers (Hart 2010, 80). It might initially seem completely absurd to make even a tenuous connection between these two writers and their most defining works.

In this book, however, I will be going much further than that. I will be using García Márquez's novel Cien años de soledad as a prism through which to illuminate the role played by magical realism in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and ultimately I will be exploring what I believe to be the very strong similarities between these two texts and the worlds from which they emerged.