If metamorphosis produces an apprehensible trace of distant or incredible events in the real world of readers, so too does a statue, a painting, or the book-roll before them. Thus metamorphosis becomes a way of dramatizing the act of representation itself and the alternative political valences the process of transformation acquires within the work apply also to what Ovid's own text is doing. As Solodow and others have shown, much of the poet's vocabulary for the product of metamorphosis, such as the word imago, overlaps with terms for artistic depictions. And in cases of petrifaction, the frozen forms, like those produced by the head of Medusa (5.177-209), are essentially indistinguishable from statues. Another way of suggesting the same point is by alluding to the visual iconography of the figures described: so the second book ends with a description of Europa riding on the bull's back, her clothes billowing behind her in the breeze, precisely the aspect in which she was most commonly shown in actual paintings. The connection between representation and the ordering, clarifying aspects of metamorphosis can apply to literary as well as visual representations. This becomes particularly clear when we examine the relationship between metamorphosis and metaphor. Niobe's transformation into a stone begins when she 'stiffens with evils' a common Latin metaphor. Thus not only does her final form again appear motivated by some essential quality of her experience – as Lycaon's innate bestiality makes him a wolf – it also offers a means for the figurative to become something more than figurative, for a trope to become a reality.