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).
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).
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).
Henriksén offers the first extensive commentary on Book 9 of the Epigrams of M. Valerius Martialis. The book consists of an introduction discussing the date, characteristics, structure, and themes of Book 9, followed by a detailed commentary on each of the 105 poems, which places them in their literary, social, and historical context.
The political allegiances of major Roman poets have been notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because they often shift the onus of political interpretation from themselves to their readers. By the same token, it is often difficult to assess their authorial powerplays in the etymologies, puns, anagrams, telestichs, and acronyms that feature prominently in their poetry. It is the premise of this volume that the contexts of composition, performance, and reception play a critical role in constructing poetic voices as either politically favorable or dissenting, and however much the individual scholars in this volume disagree among themselves, their readings try to do justice collectively to poetry’s power to shape political realities. The book is aimed not only at scholars of Roman poetry, politics, and philosophy, but also at those working in later literary and political traditions influenced by Rome's greatest poets.
"Of Ovid's many works, Book 10 of the Metamorphoses has had perhaps the greatest impact on Western culture. Its tales of Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and his statue, and Venus and Adonis have inspired artists, poets, writers, and composers from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Because most commentaries on Ovid's Metamorphoses survey large portions of the epic, the attention that they are able devote to individual books is limited. Bèomer's German commentary is a scholarly resource that provides a wealth of information on the individual myths that constitute Book 10, but offers little analysis of their significance to the book as a whole. Although the German commentary on the Metamorphoses by Haupt, Korn, Ewaldt, and von Albrecht is better for literary analysis, the space devoted to Book 10 is limited by the commentary's broad scope. The same can be said of Bosselaar's Metamorphoseon in Dutch and Galasso's Le metamorfosi in Italian. Although Anderson's commentary on Books 6-10 is very good, it rarely ventures beyond literary analysis. The same can be said of Hill's short commentary on Books 9-12, which is intended for students of literature. Reed's Ovidio: Metamorfosi, vol. V on Books 10-13 is excellent, but it is in Italian and is far too advanced for undergraduates. Fratantuono's stand-alone commentary on Book 10 offers some observations on Orphism, but otherwise it is purely literary. This book differs from its predecessors in that it deals not only with the literary, grammatical, and textual matters that are integral parts of any commentary on a classical text, but it also examines the religious, archaeological, and cultural background of its myths. For Book 10, this background is not only Greek and Roman, but also Near Eastern. It is my hope that this multidisciplinary approach will facilitate a more holistic understanding of Book 10, especially at a time when a broader conception of Classics is coming to the fore that encompasses the contribution of the Near East to the Greek and Roman world"--
The verse-by-verse commentary on the Ovidian text includes the reading of more than 300 manuscripts, including the so-called Heinsian manuscripts, and of almost 100 editions, from the two "editiones principes" of 1471 to the present day. The introduction describes the manuscripts used, and a history of the Ovidian editions is also traced. A new text of book VI is presented, accompanied by a slim and lucid critical apparatus. Futher information appears in the commentary and in the appendices, particularly readings of manuscripts and editions. The verbatim commentary offers, with reliable quotes for each term, the critical observations of all the editors and commentators of the Ovidian work throughout the centuries. This aspect of critical edition has been neglected by commentators of Ovid since Heinsius (1659) and Burman (1727). Two appendices ("Readings of manuscripts" and "Readings of editions") are added for the first time for readers of the Ovidian work. The volume closes with a "Select index of textual problems", a large "Index locorum" and an "Index nominum".
The present collection samples the most current approaches to Lucan’s poem, its themes, its dialogue with other texts, its reception in medieval and early modern literature, and its relevance to audiences of all times.
