Although the Metamorphoses begins with the creation of the world and ends with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, the intervening books do not comprise an orderly account of Greco-Roman myth and history. Some very rough trends can be identified – towards the end of the poem the focus moves westward, from Greece to Rome, as Ovid first retells the story of Rome's founder, Aeneas, and then relates a handful of legends – that of Pomona and Vertumnus for example – which are Roman rather than Greek. But it is difficult to map any orderly scheme – whether narrative, thematic, or contextual – on to the poem. Or rather, it is too easy – any number of competing explanations have been provided by the poem's many commentators. Some are more convincing than others, but collectively they suggest that no single explanation can do justice to the poem's complexity. Each generation, each individual reader, will tend to concentrate on certain stories, themes and threads and disregard others. Seeing the Metamorphoses all in one go is rather like trying to see a free-standing statue all at once – we can only really concentrate on one angle, a few details, at a time.