The Metamorphoses is rarely read as history, but its immediate models were both historiographical: the Chronica of Castor of Rhodes and the De Gente Populi Romani of Marcus Terentius Varro. They determined the poem s chronological ordering of episodes and anticipated the way it views dynastic history in the -mythical- era of Greece and Italy as both a prelude to, and a source of precedents for, Roman imperium and Roman ruler cult. Ovid s myth-historical poem is true to the -facts- of fabularis historia transmitted in Varro and Castor in the same way...