Ovid's Metamorphoses, the great compendium of mythological transformations completed around 8 AD, includes several transformations into insects and verminous creatures as punishments or expressions of divine power. The transformation of Arachne into a spider, of Myrmidons from ants, and various other insect metamorphoses reflect the ancient world's fascination with the boundary between human and insect life. Ovid himself was exiled from Rome by Augustus in 8 AD, and his poetry of transformation may reflect on the experience of human beings reduced to something less than their former selves.

Ovid's insect metamorphoses became standard reference points for later poets writing about human transformation, degradation, and vulnerability. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton all drew on Ovid's metamorphic insects when they needed images of radical transformation or humiliation. The tradition of humans becoming insects — later most powerfully explored by Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis — has Ovidian roots, and the insect as figure for the humiliated or reduced human is one of the most persistent motifs in Western literature.