When the people heard this resolve of his, they came and told him there was a pitiless dragon in human disguise in the Haunted Cave, a dread creature which no knight had yet been bold enough to face, and begged him to rid the land of its desolating presence.
Ovid is most famous for the Metamorphoses, a single poem of fifteen books, which was probably completed around a.d. 8. By writing the Metamorphoses in dactylic hexameter, the meter of epic, Ovid intentionally invited comparisons with the greatest Roman poet of his age, Virgil, who had written the epic the Aeneid.
In his 1979 edition of the play for the second series of the Arden Shakespeare, Harold F. Brooks argues that Shakespeare used the source story from Ovid 's Metamorphoses first to examine the tragic potential and then to exploit its comic and farcical elements in his next play.