American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Joan Didion once observed: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”1 If we broaden her idea to include storytelling to others, then Ovid’s claim in the last word of the Metamorphoses (15.879) fully applies: vivam – “I shall live.”2 In the preceding line Ovid had prepared this point: ore legar populi (“people will read me”). In this way an ancient author appended a seal – in Greek, sphragis – to his work. Today a great filmmaker could say: “People will watch my films” – or, in not quite Ovidian (because unmetrical) Latin: oculis spectabor populi.