The Metamorphoses is a Latin epic poem of approximately 12,000 lines composed by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-17/18 CE). The poem narrates over 250 mythological transformation stories, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar, organized around the theme of bodies changed into new forms. Written in dactylic hexameter, the Metamorphoses became one of the most influential works in the entire Western literary tradition, shaping the art and literature of every subsequent century. Its narratives of gods, heroes, and mortals undergoing physical transformation provided an inexhaustible repertoire of images for painters, sculptors, poets, and, crucially for our purposes, alchemists.

The alchemical reading of Ovid has deep roots. Petrus Bonus, in his Margarita Pretiosa Novella (1330), explicitly identified Virgil and Ovid as chemical authors who concealed alchemical secrets in their mythological narratives. The Metamorphoses' governing theme of transformation made it a natural candidate for alchemical interpretation: if all of Ovid's stories describe the change of one form into another, and if alchemy is fundamentally the art of transforming matter from one form into another, then the correspondence between mythological and chemical transformation seemed self-evident to the Renaissance reader steeped in the Hermetic tradition.

Maier draws the entire titular narrative of the Atalanta Fugiens from Metamorphoses X.560-704, where Venus narrates the story of Hippomenes and Atalanta to her beloved Adonis. Atalanta, the swiftest runner in the land, refuses to marry any man who cannot defeat her in a footrace, with death as the penalty for failure. Hippomenes wins by a ruse: he throws three golden apples, obtained from Venus out of the Garden of the Hesperides, before Atalanta's feet, and she stops to pick them up, allowing him to win the race and claim her as his bride. The couple then consummate their love in Cybele's temple, provoking the goddess to transform them into the lions that pull her chariot.

Maier reads this Ovidian narrative as a comprehensive allegory of the alchemical work. Atalanta represents volatile Mercury, the fleeing principle that cannot be captured by brute force. Hippomenes represents fixed Sulphur, the pursuing principle that must use Art (the golden apples) rather than mere strength to overtake and fix the volatile. The golden apples are the catalytic agents of the work. The couple's union represents the coniunctio oppositorum, and their transformation into lions represents the fixation of the volatile and the animation of the fixed into a new, powerful, stable form.

De Jong demonstrates that Maier's reading of Ovid is mediated through sixteenth-century alchemical commentators, particularly Robertus Vallensis, who had already established the hermeneutic framework for reading the Atalanta story as alchemical allegory. Maier's innovation is to transform this interpretive tradition into a visual, musical, and textual program of unprecedented scope, making the Ovidian narrative the structural backbone of an entire emblem book.

Maier also draws on Ovid for individual emblem mottos and narrative material beyond the frame story. The death of Adonis by boar provides the subject for Emblem XLI, the transformation of Isis and Osiris provides material for Emblem XLIV, and the theme of metamorphosis itself provides the conceptual logic for the entire sequence.

For the modern reader, recognizing Ovid's Metamorphoses as a primary source for the Atalanta Fugiens opens the work to literary as well as chemical interpretation. Maier's emblem book is, among other things, a sustained commentary on Ovid, transforming one of the great poems of Western literature into an alchemical curriculum.