The study offers a comprehensive insight into Ovid's relationship to his predecessors from the tradition of the didactic poem in the Metamorphoses. While the references to Lucretius have been studied many times, the influence of Empedocles has so far hardly been researched. His teaching of a changing cosmos through the two cosmic actors love (concordia) and strife (discordia) is already evident in the cosmogony in which Ovid describes the change from chaos (discordia) to cosmos (concordia). The reminiscences testify to the admiration of the teaching poets, but Ovid questions their authority with innovative modifications.