Everyone knows that opera arose at the end of the sixteenth century as an experiment in recapturing the music of Greek tragedy. But strangely, the composers of the first operas had little use for the actual texts of Greek tragedies. Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600) and Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) were both based on the story of Orpheus as known principally from Ovid's Metamorphoses X, with certain details taken from Virgil's Georgics IV and Angelo Poliziano's terse drama La favola di Orfeo (1480). There is no extant Greek tragedy starring Orpheus, but the early opera writers were so enamored of the tale that they created a sort of fake Greek tragic text especially suited to the fake Greek tragic music they were composing.

Ovid was far more congenial than Aeschylus. Music is the art of change. Metamorphoses, endless reshapings of fields of sensation, were more appealing to the early opera composers than Aeschylus's rough-hewn rhetoric of heroic steadfastness. In Aristophanes's Frogs, Euripides denounces Aeschylus—both of them are in hell—as a

There is enough truth in this caricature to show why Aeschylus's rugged, orotund plays were unsuited to an art that prized (at least at its beginning) delicacy of emotional transition. Early opera is overwhelmingly Ovidian: the fifth intermedio from La pellegrina (1586, composed by Malvezzi and Peri) retells Ovid's story (Fasti II) of Arion and the dolphin. Marco da Gagliano's La Dafne (1608) retells the famous tale of Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel tree (Metamorphoses I).

In fact, at the beginning of Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto to La Dafne, Ovid himself descends from Elysium to warn the spectators that they’re about to see a play about the dangerousness of love: beware, you might fall in love with a girl only to find her turned into a tree. Immediately after this brief prologue, Apollo kills a dragon with his bow and arrow. The whole protocol of this opening is all wrong by the standards of Greek tragedy.