The worldview that The Metamorphoses presents is one profoundly defined and destabilized by constant mutability; the landscape created is a human one formed from violence and pain. Ovid does not in the end wish to cast doubt on the believability of metamorphosis, but rather on the power of any poet to explain and perhaps even survive in a universe in which power is ultimately arbitrary and beyond the control of any poets or philosophers, since it rests in the hands of the powers in the heavens and on the Palatine.

K. Sara Myers, Ovid's Causes:
Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses,
(Univ. of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 1994) page 25-26.