International audienceEPITOME — Many literary sources can be recognized in Seneca's dramatic works, but the influence of Ovidian poetry and, in particular, the Metamorphoses is remarkably salient. Using Oedipus as an example, this paper studies the modalities of Ovid's presence in Seneca's tragic writing, proposing the hypothesis of a common poetics of metamorphosis, considered in its relationship with both passions and the issue of identity. The project that leads the Metamorphoses (In noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora, II, 1-2) is also Seneca's in his plays : to tell the transformations caused by passions when, pushed to their paroxysmn they materialize or implement, primarily in the bodies, the characters' union with what ...