A Commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

Table of Contents:
Introduction Alessandro Barchiesi; Commentary on Book 1 Alessandro Barchiesi; Commentary on Book 2 Alessandro Barchiesi; Commentary on Book 3 Alessandro Barchiesi; Commentary on Book 4 Gianpiero Rosati; Commentary on Book 5 Gianpiero Rosati; Commentary on Book 6 Gianpiero Rosati; Bibliography; Introduction to Books 7-9 E. J. Kenney; Commentary on Book 7 E. J. Kenney; Commentary on Book 8 E. J. Kenney; Commentary on Book 9 E. J. Kenney; Preface to Books 10-12 Jay Reed; Commentary on Book 10 Jay Reed; Commentary on Book 11 Jay Reed; Commentary on Book 12 Jay Reed; Bibliography E. J. Kenney and Jay Reed; Commentary on Book 13 Philip Hardie; Commentary on Book 14 Philip Hardie; Commentary on Book 15 Philip Hardie; Bibliography Philip Hardie; Index of Proper Names (Books 1-15); General Index (Books 1-15).

About the Author :
Alessandro Barchiesi is a professor of Classics at New York University, after teaching at Stanford and the University of Siena. He has been visiting professor at Berkeley and Harvard, and his activity as a lecturer includes the Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley (2011), the Nellie Wallace Lectures at Oxford (1997), the Gray Lectures at Cambridge (2001), the Jerome Lectures (AAR/University of Michigan, 2002), the Housman Lecture at UC London (2009), and the Martin Lectures at Oberlin (2012). His work combines close reading of Roman literary texts (poetry and fiction) with interest in contemporary criticism, literary theory, and reception history. He is author of inter alia a commentary on Ovid's Heroides 1-3 (1992) and the Ovidian volumes of essays The Poet and the Prince (1997) and Speaking Volumes (2001), and co-editor with W. Scheidel of the Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies (2nd ed. 2020). His forthcoming work includes The War for Italia and Apuleius the Provincial. Philip Hardie is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Honorary Professor Emeritus of Latin Literature in the University of Cambridge; and Fellow of the British Academy. He has published extensively on Latin poetry and its reception, and is widely identified as one of the world's leading Latinists. His books include Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge 2002); (edited) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge 2002); and Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge 2012): . His 2016 Sather Lectures have been published as Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry (2019) and his 2016 Warburg Lectures as Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art (2022). E. J. ('Ted') Kenney, who died in 2019, was one of the most influential and original Latinists of his generation. He spent most of his career at Cambridge, and held the Kennedy Chair of Latin from 1974 to 1982. Kenney is one of the most distinguished Ovidian scholars of all time, and this commentary on books 7-9 of Metamorphoses represents the culmination of his scholarly activity. His interpretations combine deep analysis of the text and its language with unusual literary finesse and wit. He played a key role in the re-appraisal of Ovid that has been ongoing since the 1950s. He edited Ovid's amatory poetry and some of the Appendix Vergiliana for the Oxford Classical Texts, and he published commentaries of exemplary quality (with accompanying freshly edited texts) on Ovid's 'double' Heroides, the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, the tale of Cupid & Psyche in Apuleius' Metamorphoses, and Lucretius' De rerum natura Book III. The Classical Text, the published version of his Sather lectures, is a history of editing from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. J. D. Reed is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He works principally on Hellenistic and Latin poetry and on the myth and cult of Adonis. He has published a commentary on Bion of Smyrna in the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series (1997) and Virgil's Gaze (2007), a study of the poetics of Roman identity in Virgil's Aeneid, and notes to Rolfe Humphries's translation of the Metamorphoses (2018), as well as many articles and book chapters on ancient Greek and Roman cultures and their reception in the early modern period (including Humanist Latin literature) and later. Gianpiero Rosati is Emeritus Professor of Latin Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, where he has also served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He works on Augustan poetry, in particular on Ovid (with essays, editions and commentaries), the literature of the Neronian and Flavian ages, and Latin narrative. His early book Narciso e Pigmalione. Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (1983; English translation 2021) has influenced more recent developments of Ovidian criticism, such as the emphasis on illusion and the Roman culture of spectacle and the relationship between art, landscape, and text. He is also a leading scholar of the Heroides, having published various studies and a commentary on the letters of Hero and Leander (1997). He has written on all the most important Augustan poets (and some minors), on Petronius and on Apuleius. His more recent research concerns the poetry of Statius, particularly the poetics of occasional lyric in the Silvae. He is currently working on a commentary on Statius' Silvae in the Fondazione Valla series.

Review :
'… with the final publication of this commentary, … Barchiesi himself and his “companions on this long journey,” as he calls them - Rosati, Reed, and Hardie, along with Kenney - have placed a capstone on the last fifty years of scholarship on the Metamorphoses. The rising generation of Ovid's readers has every reason to be grateful.' Peter E. Knox, Bryn Mawr Classical Review