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During the summer fellowship, I read A. D. Melville’s English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, paying particular attention to Ovid’s use of rape narratives in the epic. Although I had read excerpts of the poem in a mythology course in the spring of 2023, this was the first time I read the piece in full. Since Ovid was primarily retelling existing myths, I thought it was especially important to examine the poet’s linguistic delivery of the verse, so I also read excerpts from the poem in the original Latin. Meetings with my faculty advisor included going over Latin translations and discussing written analyses of the epic. I read many pieces of criticism on the epic as well, mostly addressing the roles of gendered power and voice in the poem. Some elements of the piece that I analyzed through my research included the relationship of sexual assault to male competition for power and how the order and structure of the myths contributed to the poem’s meaning. The reading and research I conducted over the summer has culminated in a research paper on how Ovid’s use of rape narratives challenges and criticizes hierarchical structures of power, as well as how this criticism relies on narrative, which is the one aspect of the epic that is not subject to change.