Thoughts about Divine Encounters Homework assignment

For homework we were asked to read about the myths of Europa, Io, Semele, Adonis, Callisto, and Actaeon. One major commonality that surrounded these six mythological tales is that these mythological characters all were transformed into animals at one point in time. Europa was the bull, Io was the cow, Callisto was the bear, etc. I did some further research on the grouping of these mythological figures and found that these figures were present in Ovid's Metamorphosis, which is an epic poem describing the creation and history of the world. It incorporates many of the best known and loved stories from Greek mythology, although centering more on mortal characters than on heroes or the gods. Each story contains some sort of transformation (or metamorphosis) as the link that ties them all together and could be known as the classical work best known to medieval writers and strongly influenced medieval and Renaissance poetry. 

http://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_ovid_metamorphoses.html