But I would like to string together for you, in that Milesian style, various tales, and soothe your kindly ears with a charming whisper (only if you do not scorn to look at an Egyptian papyrus written on with the sharp wit of a Nile reed), so that you may marvel at the shapes and fortunes of people changed into other forms and restored back again into themselves by a mutual bond.

The book begins with “at,” “but” or “well then,” as if a conversation were already going on and we had walked into the middle of it. The voice promises “Milesian” tales. Aristides of Miletus had written a collection of short, racy stories, the Milesiaka, and Sisenna put them into Latin in the first century BC; Ovid names both in the Tristia (2.413–414, 443–444). Lewis & Short, under Miletus, cites this very phrase, sermo Milesius, as its example of stories in that vein. The same dictionary derives sermo, “talk,” from sero, “to join,” “as if conserta oratio,” speech strung together: and the verb the speaker chooses for his stories is conseram, “I would string together.” The promise is the whole book in small: shapes and fortunes “changed into other forms and restored back again into themselves.” The hero will be changed into an ass and, many books later, changed back. The papyrus written with “a Nile reed” is a nod to Egypt, where the book’s ending looks: its last book belongs to the Egyptian goddess Isis. The verbs conseram and permulceam are subjunctives of wish, “I would like to,” and permulcere aures, “to stroke the ears,” is a set phrase for charming a listener; Lewis & Short quotes it from Cicero and Horace.