This collection of essays was inspired by the 2000th anniversary of Ovid’s death in about 17 ce. Of course, this is a conventional reckoning, based on the fact that nothing in Ovid’s poetry can be securely dated after that year. It is therefore not impossible that the many conferences held in honor of the bimillennium, including the one held in Rome in March 2017, where most of the papers in this collection were originally given, were premature, and that this volume is appearing unexpectedly in the year of the true anniversary, assuming it does not even anticipate it. Fittingly, both the individual contributions and the plan of the volume as a whole have undergone changes during the interval between conference and publication.1 All of this seems appropriate to the volume’s main purpose, which is to explore and to celebrate the theme of change in Ovid’s poetry and in his posthumous fortuna, not excluding the element of surprise.
Since we have no external evidence about when Ovid died, the concept of “transfiguration” usefully alludes both to this and to other uncertainties regarding death and posthumous fame as a theme in Ovid’s poetry. The collection’s title is taken, of course, from Richard Strauss’s masterpiece Tod und Verklärung (op. 24, 1888–1889), a tone poem that represents the experience of an elderly artist who, in the throes of death, struggles for and ultimately achieves transcendence of his earthly existence. The piece is closely associated with a poem of the same title by Strauss’s good friend Alexander Ritter, in which the dying artist reviews his entire life and career in preparation for this transcendence. The relevance of these motifs to Ovid’s life and work are obvious; but, in addition, the conventional English title of Strauss’s masterpiece speaks even more directly than the original German to Ovid’s own experience. “Verklärung” is related to “klar,” and while the word’s meaning is different from those of “Klärung” or “Klarstellung,” it nevertheless denotes a process that is akin to clarification. In contrast, “transfiguration” is a latinate equivalent of “metamorphosis,” and so is related to the Greek title of Ovid’s Latin masterpiece, in which bodily transformation is such a dominant theme. More than this, it signals the protean quality of Ovid’s poetic achievement as a whole and in its parts.
Change in every sense of the word is a Leitmotiv of Ovid’s career and a hallmark of his work. From the beginning of the Amores to the end of the Epistulae ex Ponto, Ovid’s poetic program, his authorial persona, his subject matter, his characters, and virtually every other aspect of his poetry are in constant flux.2 This observation in itself is hardly groundbreaking, nor does this volume mark the first time that the theme of change, particularly as it is explored in the Metamorphoses, but not only there, has been put into dialogue with that of death. In fact, these themes and the relationships between them have been acknowledged in a basic way for a long time.3 But a lot has happened in Ovidian criticism over the last two or three decades, and these themes are now ripe for reconsideration. The exile poetry is probably the portion of the Ovidian corpus in which the most significant progress has been made, especially where the linkage between change and death, including the death of the author, is concerned.4 By comparison, the erotic and erotodidactic works have received less attention, and many episodes even of the Metamorphoses, to say nothing of the Fasti, remain underexplored from this point of view. The same is true of connections among the various components of Ovid’s work, especially if one takes seriously a point often raised by critics of the Metamorphoses, which is that transformation—quite apart from the question of whether it is a form of death or a substitute for it, a punishment or a reward—often reveals an abiding sameness beneath an altered surface.5 It is also true that critics have continued to find imaginative ways of interrogating Ovid, ways that might seem at first outlandish but that quickly prove surprisingly apt, often because they take their inspiration from Ovid’s own occasional outlandishness.6 Finally, while reception studies have now become an indispensable part of the classicist’s toolkit, the area encompassed by Ovidian reception is so vast that even some of the most familiar districts that lie within it have not yet been adequately explored.7 These were the aspects that the organizers of the original conference wished to emphasize. All of the contributors grasped this idea beautifully, so that the organizers, now acting as editors of this volume, have been able to “reshape” the conference program into a coherent survey of the relevant themes consisting of eighteen chapters divided into four highly focused sections.
The four sections follow a loosely chronological order, in that earlier sections introduce themes that begin to be prominent in Ovid’s first works and then continue throughout his career, while each later section centers on a theme that becomes prominent in successively later works and then in reception. Further, each of the four sections is organized around the motif of death as a metaphor or symbol of some crucial aspect of Ovid’s poetry. Thus the eighteen chapters as a whole are arranged according to a clear chronological arc, while specific themes are anticipated and recalled across the four different sections.
Part 1, “Death and the Lover,” examines the elegiac and Freudian dyad of love and death. As a love poet in the earliest phase of his career, perhaps Ovid does not initially share the often morbid fascination with death that characterizes his elegiac predecessors, Tibullus and Propertius. He nevertheless inherits from them a keen awareness of the genre’s funereal etymology, with the result that themes of death and lamentation form important parts of Ovid’s poetic DNA, in every genre. For the poet of “epic,” aetiological, and exilic themes in his later career, death takes different forms, including bodily metamorphosis, literary canonization or obscurity, political disfavor, and social banishment.
In chapter 1, “Death, Lament, and ‘Elegiac Aetiology’ in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Anke Walter confronts several of these themes directly. Many have speculated on the relationship between death and transformation in Ovid’s masterpiece, the Metamorphoses.8 For Walter, too, “Dying itself is … the ultimate metamorphosis.” Walter’s approach focuses not on death as metamorphosis, however, but on the survivor’s grief in response to the death of a loved one as itself transformative. Walter gives to this phenomenon the name “elegiac aetiology,” a kind of transformation rooted not directly in death itself, but in the consummately and even etymologically elegiac emotion of grief.9 This is not a restorative grief cured by mourning for a limited time, but a literally transformative grief that changes the mourner into something new and unprecedented that is also a permanent reminder of what has been lost. Walter’s test case for this elegiac aetiology begins with Phaethon’s death, which is not itself figured as a transformation. Instead, grief transforms his sisters and his cousin Cygnus, giving rise to a new species of tree, the poplar, and of bird, the swan. The boy’s death sets the process in motion, but grief for his death is the proximate cause of his mourners’ transfigurations. Further, Phaethon’s wild ride in the Sun’s chariot causes a temporal disruption that is manifested in the transfigured condition of his survivors. Trapped in a continuous present that looks ever back upon the past in bereavement, they become new species, each in its way perpetually commemorating their grief. At the same time, the tears shed by Phaethon’s grieving sisters in their post-metamorphic state look to the future when they are transformed by the Sun into drops of amber, which will become adornments for Latin brides on their wedding day. In this way Phaethon’s sisters celebrate, and grieve for, the wedding days that none of them will have. By the same token, a bit of cunningly ambiguous phrasing leaves it open whether Cygnus’ preference, as he becomes a swan, for avoiding the air and keeping to watery places, is like that of one who remembered his beloved cousin’s fate or one who was actually motivated by it. The possibility is thus raised that Cygnus’ swan descendants, in some sense, remember the aetion of their existence. (Ovid’s implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, analytical approach to the details involved in his transformations is a topic that will return from time to time throughout the volume.) In this way, Walter enlists the reader’s imagination in contemplating the extent to which Ovid’s metamorphic world is inextricably tied to memory, grief, and lamentation.
Next, in chapter 2, “Duo moriemur: Death and Doubling in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Florence Klein focuses on the question of individual identity by considering the extent to which either the uniqueness or else the representative quality of an Ovidian character is either overwhelmed or most fully expressed by the circumstances of his or her death. In her analysis, the uniqueness of Narcissus’ tragic demise, brought on by his desire for his own insubstantial image, is complicated by similarities between his fate and that of Orpheus and Eurydice. These are, as Klein points out, the only two stories in the Metamorphoses in which a lover loses his beloved and is thus caused to fantasize about a shared death.10 By tracing patterns of detailed repetition between the two, Klein suggests that the fate of Orpheus and Eurydice can be regarded as doubling that of Narcissus. In the first place, then, this intertextual repetition comments on Narcissus’ death and transfiguration: his afterlife is transformed, within the Metamorphoses, into Orpheus’ double harrowing of hell, together with his double sundering from and ultimate reunion with Eurydice. Then, taking account of repetitions and revisions of Vergil’s Orpheus episode in the Georgics, Klein argues that Ovid’s Narcissus was always already an intertextual Orpheus, and that the Vergilian Orpheus experiences a double afterlife, as do both Ovidian heroes. The paper thus opens up a perspective on the poetic intertext as a kind of Underworld, perhaps offering Vergil’s shade an afterlife in Ovid’s poem that anticipates Dante, while reserving for Ovid himself the kind of Ennian and Pythagorean series of endless rebirths that the poet, at the end of the Metamorphoses, claims will be his posthumous reward.11
These aspects, which are implicit in Klein’s argument, are made more explicit by Thea S. Thorsen in chapter 3, “Ovid’s Artistic Transfiguration, Procris and Cephalus.” Thorsen’s analysis turns on a comparison of the relationship between two Ovidian lovers to that between Ovid and his posthumous readers. The argument begins with Ovid’s claim to poetic immortality, just mentioned above, focusing on the physical mechanism that is the basis of the poet’s quasi-Pythagorean afterlife. That consists in the phrase ore legar populi, “I shall be picked up (and/or) read in the mouth of the people” (Met. 15.878). The phrase refers to the Roman custom by which a survivor tries to catch the dying breath of a loved one, elaborating Ennius’ boast in his epitaph that he continues to “live flying about on the lips of men” (volito vivus per ora virum).12 In this conceit, the poet lives on as pure utterance that moves from one body to another, as if in a never-ending recitation. Quite apart from the effect of the appropriation of Ennius’ boast, however, Thorsen observes that the end of the Metamorphoses stands in pointed contrast to the virtual living death to which Ovid consigns himself in the exile poetry. To explore further the irony of this self-contradiction, Thorsen focuses on the enactment of the ore legar motif in the story of Cephalus and Procris. This is one of those stories that Ovid tells at some length in more than one poem, something he never does without making provocative alterations to delight the reader. For the most part, though, these have to do with the manner of the narration, and not with the facts of the story itself. The case of Cephalus and Procris is something of an exception. Crucially, Ovid’s “first” version of the story is told by the narrator of the Ars amatoria; the second is told in the Metamorphoses by Cephalus himself. Discrepancies between the two versions reveal the importance of treating Cephalus as an unreliable narrator and expose the possibility that his commemoration of Procris’ tragic death is culpably self-serving. In relation to the ore legar motif, Thorsen makes a case for regarding Procris’ afterlife as not spiritual but ghostly, or even like that of a zombie, a dead body subject to distortion and mutilation as well as ghastly reanimation. The implications of this insight for Ovid’s representation of his own afterlife are in part immediately obvious, but they will be made more explicit later in this volume.
Thorsen’s analysis of transfiguration as misrepresentation sounds a skeptical note in discussing a poem that seems generally to imagine death as merely a transition to a more permanent and, if not a more exalted state, then often at least a less vulnerable one. In Chapter 4, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris offers another skeptical perspective on the meaning and value of death across Ovid’s poetic corpus. Her title, “Suicides for Love, Phyllis, Pyramus and Thisbe: Critical Variations on a Famous Motif of Erotic Poetry?” frames the issue in terms of literary history, proceeding from the fact that the theme of erotically inspired suicide is valorized in the Latin love poetry written during the generation that preceded Ovid. Moreover, the pattern of appearances strongly suggests that the motif occupied a significant place in the lost Amores of Cornelius Gallus, a work that was foundational for Latin love elegy and influential on many other genres, as well. With such antecedents in mind, a reader might well approach Ovid’s poetry, above all the Metamorphoses, with the expectation of finding a similar valorization of suicide for love as a heroic act. And indeed, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe ends in a double suicide for love (as Klein discusses in chapter 2) that has been interpreted by many critics—influenced, no doubt, by the reception of the tale by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet—not only in a positive light, but even as an ideal romance in a tragic key. In contrast, Fabre-Serris argues that in the Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris Ovid deplores suicide, boasting that, if a tragic heroine such as Phyllis had only enjoyed the benefit of his teaching, she would never have ended her life in desperate and mistaken reaction to the behavior of her negligent lover, Demophoon. After analyzing Ovid’s apparently heterodox treatment of this motif in his earlier work, Fabre-Serris moves on to Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses to suggest that the episode is much better read not with romantic approval of its deadly outcome, but as a cautionary tale—and as one that reflects especially poorly on the misguided young lover, Pyramus, but not on Thisbe, in whom one finds “the ‘ideal’ elegiac puella.”
Chapter 5 rounds out the first part of the volume with Laurel Fulkerson’s study of “Ovidian Pathology, in Love and in Exile.” The general theme of this first part, “death and the lover,” informs Fulkerson’s perspective on Ovid’s career as more or less one long terminal disease. The trajectory of the disease, however, is not simple. As a love poet, Ovid inherited an ancient tradition that regarded desire as a kind of illness, and this trope had become codified as a constitutive element of first-person erotic elegy in the preceding generation.13 In the earliest phase of his career, Ovid handled this theme sure-handedly and with his usual wit, “debilitated” only in a metaphorical sense by the symptoms of his “disease.” Then, by the time he began to approach the height of his powers in his erotodidactic works, he claimed to have mastered love to the extent that he could teach others not only how to endure this malady but actually to exploit its effect on others and to cure oneself of it if need be. Little did he know at the time that his disease had not run its full course. The brief period of seeming recovery was merely a prelude to its second, and ultimately fatal stage. As Ovid himself never tires of repeating, it was his most important poem of this transitional period, the Ars amatoria itself, that caused him to take a turn for the worse. Relegated to Pontus because of it, Ovid remained a lover, but the object of his desire shifted, from the bounteous supply of puellae who populated Venus’ city, to the city itself. Lovesickness became homesickness, but sickness of whatever kind remained a basic condition of the poet’s life. Even the symptoms, as Fulkerson shows, remained largely the same. What mainly changed was any sense of gaining control over one’s fate. By enduring the disease of exile, all one learns that can be taught to others is that some ailments really have no remedy. For the poet, even “the act of writing,” as Fulkerson puts it, “may exacerbate his condition, rather than mitigating it.” It is of course a tantalizing irony that we have no definite information about the cause or even, as was noted above, the precise date of Ovid’s death. We have his own poetic record of a gradual demise, but no record of the moment of transition to what continues to be a fascinating afterlife.
The pattern established in Part 1 is followed in the subsequent sections, which develop more fully the various themes broached by the first five chapters. One of these themes, on which several of the earlier chapters make trenchant observations, is the relationship between the lover and the poet. Part 2, “Death and the Artist,” moves this theme very much to the fore, with the first two chapters of this section exploring Ovid’s exile poetry as depicting an imaginary landscape of death. In the first of these, chapter 6, Alison Keith examines the relation between “Frigid Landscapes and Literary Frigidity in Ovid’s Exile Poetry.” Death in this case means freezing to death as a familiar, conventional metaphor in Keith’s reading of Ovid’s repeated laments in Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto about losing his poetic ability and even his command of proper Latin. With reference to Ovid’s parallel complaint about the chilly climate of Tomis, his place of relegation, Keith argues that the poet’s putative loss of his former powers can be explained as deriving from ethnographic descriptions of wintery Scythia dating back through Vergil to Herodotus—traditions that tell us little, of course, about actual conditions in Tomis—by way of the literary-critical concept of “frigidity”—what a modern critic might call “flatness”—as we know it from ancient rhetorical treatises. The authors of these treatises regard frigidity as the product of a failed straining for some greater effect, whether the “sublime” as defined in the treatise on that quality that has come down to us under the name of Longinus, or just correct Latinity in the opinion of those self-styled Atticist orators and rhetoricians who criticized Cicero himself for faults ranging from bombast and extravagance to misplaced wit and preciosity.14 These of course are charges that were leveled against Ovid, as well, and not only, or even principally, in his exile poetry.15 In this sense, Keith’s analysis, which focuses on Tristia 3, implicitly parallels Fulkerson’s account of “disease” across Ovid’s career: as lovesickness mutates into homesickness, so does the poet’s excessive “love” of his own talent (a Leitmotiv of Ovidian reception in antiquity16) reveal itself in the exile poetry as a source of frigidity that puts the poet and his work in unhappy sympathy with his surroundings, at last.
As was noted above, Ovid’s love poetry, unlike that of Tibullus and Propertius (and evidently Gallus, as well), is not overtly haunted by premonitions of death, but the poet is well aware of his predecessors’ preoccupation with this theme. In chapter 7, Luigi Galasso examines Ovid’s reception of earlier elegy first in the Amores and then in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. In much the same way that Laurel Fulkerson sees the motif of love as disease mutating into that of exile as a terminal ailment, so does Galasso find that Ovid’s characteristically clever handling of the earlier elegists’ brooding transforms itself into the idea of exile as a living death. In this sense, Ovid’s relegation is not so much a terminal disease as, effectively, a form of execution virtually carried out the moment he set foot in Tomis. Far from conflicting with the notion that homesickness is not in fact an immediate death sentence, however, Galasso shows that the exile poet, in a strange way, not only is already dead, virtually at any rate, from the moment of his arrival, but that he continues to find himself more and more firmly in digitis mortis as “life” in Tomis slowly passes away. As Ovid gives expression to this predicament, he returns to the morbid ruminations of the previous generation of elegists, together with their own evocations of earlier treatments of the theme of the poet’s death. In the process, as one finds in, again, Fulkerson’s chapter and also in Keith’s, an aspect of Ovid’s early poetry, whether it be lovesickness, cacozelia, or a merely frivolous attitude to elegy’s generic preoccupation with mortality, comes into its own at last only in the exile poetry.
The final two chapters of this section conclude the first half of the volume by turning from the highly poeticized and mythologized literary landscapes of Ovid’s amatory poetry, his exile poetry, and especially the Metamorphoses, to a number of broadly analogous, but conceptually distinct representations in the visual arts. Specifically, the material discussed is, in the first of these chapters, Pompeian wall painting and, in the second, the recent and exciting discovery of an ancient Roman sculpture garden. Of course, a certain affinity between Ovid’s poetry and the visual arts is widely acknowledged, even celebrated.17 That said, it is probably not wrong to suppose that, for the majority of literary scholars, the relationship mainly has to do with Ovid’s influence on the visual arts, primarily in the post-antique epoch. During Ovid’s own lifetime, however, the situation was much more complex. All artists, whether their medium was literature, painting, or sculpture, shared a mythological repertoire that was broad, thematically diverse, and multiform. In most cases, and in contrast to the situation that is familiar from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it is not a question of visual artists illustrating tales as known from any canonical literary treatment. On the other hand, one certainly does have to reckon with the likelihood that Ovid’s myths would have been very familiar to his readers from frequent representation in the visual arts. There is also the fact that different media created meaning in accordance with conventions specific to each of them, even as they all drew on interpretive practices that facilitated explorations of dialogical relationships both within particular genres and across the different media.18
In keeping with this last point, art historian Bettina Bergmann in chapter 8, “Seeing and Knowing in Roman Painting,” outlines a dynamic of what she calls “intervisuality,” comparable to the “intertextuality” that is so familiar to literary scholars. In thematic terms, Bergmann’s focus is on the moment of recognition within an intervisual discourse, i.e. on the reader’s sudden understanding that the fate of a given character is being visually identified with that of another, quite “different” personage. More broadly, Bergmann compares this effect in the genres of fresco, mosaic, and sculpture to similar effects in Ovid’s poetry, especially the Metamorphoses. Among the diverse stories with which Bergmann deals, the deaths and transformations of Actaeon and Pentheus stand out as offering particular insight into the questions explored in this volume. The House of the Gilded Cupids in Pompeii contains a depiction of Actaeon as he happens upon Diana in her bath. It is the same moment when, in the Metamorphoses (3.192–193), the goddess commands Actaeon to tell people that he has seen her naked—if he can. This taunt, of course, anticipates Actaeon’s impending metamorphosis into a stag. In the painting, however, it is not Actaeon’s transformation that counts so much as that of the goddess: the painter has modeled his Diana after the well-known statue type of Venus, also in her bath, ineffectually seeming to shield her nudity from the viewer. By this iconographic allusion, the viewer is offered a tantalizing perspective on the identity of his virginal subject as if she were intervisually transfigured into her polar opposite, the goddess of love herself. A vertiginous sense of convergence is enhanced by the perception that comparison to Venus not only emphasizes Diana’s sexual allure but also alludes to Venus at a moment of uncharacteristic modesty. In the painting, as in Ovid, Actaeon’s discovery of the goddess puts the audience in a voyeuristic position not only with regard to the voluptuous goddess, but also to Actaeon’s death. The same linkage appears in a different painting found in the House of the Vettii, in which Agave leads a group of frenzied maenads in the dismembering of her own son Pentheus. Like Actaeon being torn to pieces by his own hounds, the women—Pentheus’ own aunts—fail to recognize that he is a human being, not an animal. The ideal viewer’s perspective on both scenes contrasts sharply with the misprisions that are dramatized within them.
By the same token, Pentheus, too, has been seeing things that he should not, spying on the Bacchic rites celebrated by the women. In Ovid, as if sight alone could guarantee understanding, Pentheus begs Agave to “see” who he is (adspice, mater 3.725), but to no avail. He even invokes the fate of Actaeon (3.720) to call his aunts to their senses. Similarly, early in his exile period, Ovid likens himself to Actaeon, asking “why did I see something?” (cur aliquid vidi? Tr. 2.103; cf. inscius Actaeon 105), but later (Tr. 5.3.35–46) he implicitly contrasts himself with Pentheus, praying on the Liberalia that the shade of the Theban hero might continue to be punished, and that Bacchus as a patron deity of poets might intervene with Augustus, as one god with another, to bring about a commutation of Ovid’s sentence.19 The poet’s treatment of the two episodes as dealing similarly with issues of voyeurism and recognition seems well aware of the visual tradition represented by the Pompeian paintings. One could add to these themes the implication of artist and viewer, writer and reader, in the dynamics of the tale and its treatment by both painter and poet. At the same time, Ovid’s insistence that Actaeon’s glimpse of the goddess had been a “mistake” (error, Met. 3.142) while his Pentheus confesses that, in spying on the maenads, he “had sinned” (peccasse, Met. 3.701–733), seems to distinguish between the cousins in terms that are similar, if not quite identical, to the terms of another distinction, that between the two causes of Ovid’s relegation, in the infamous phrase carmen et error (Tr. 1.207).
The second part (and first half) of the volume concludes with chapter 9, “The Niobids and the Augustan Age: On Some Recent Discoveries at Ciampino,” in which Alessandro Betori and Elena Calandra offer the first authoritative treatment in English of a sculpture garden, excavated initially in 2011 and 2012 and then again in 2016–2017, in what is believed to be the suburban villa of Ovid’s friend and perhaps patron M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus. The centerpiece of the garden is a sculpture group representing the death of the Niobids, a story told memorably by Ovid in Metamorphoses 6. The existence in this area of a villa owned by Messalla had been suspected since 1861, and the villa in question can be dated to the second half of the 1st century bce, exactly the right period for Messalla to have occupied it. Though once an adherent of Marcus Antonius, Messalla subsequently became a distinguished supporter of the Augustan regime. The basic theme of the myth of Niobe, the punishment of mortal hybris by the gods, has a clear place in Augustan propaganda. We thus may infer a historical and social context for this impressive ensemble. Moreover, because Ovid claims Messalla as one of his nobiles amici, the possibility exists that the poet might have visited this garden and brought his own ideas and sensibility to its treatment of the myth.20 In the Metamorphoses, of course, the story of the Niobids takes its place in a sequence of myths that deal with conflicts between rival divinities (the Pierides and the Muses) or between gods and humans (Minerva and Arachne, Latona and Niobe, Apollo and Marsyas). In all cases, except that of Niobe, it is a question of artistic rivalry, and in all cases, including that of Niobe, the issue is decided by force rather than skill. By documenting the discovery of this statuary ensemble and explicating its artistic and social significance, this chapter brings the volume to its midway point by offering a provocative case study, from an archaeological perspective, of issues surveyed from an art historical point of view by Bergmann in chapter 8. At the same time, it opens up new areas of potential engagement with all of the papers that precede and follow it.
The second half of the volume broods over various ways in which Ovid treats death either as a kind of transfiguration that is not decisive, or that treats metamorphosis as a durable state between life and death. These perspectives involve specific elements of the uncanny, some of them hinted at in the volume’s first half, which Ovid himself explores both in tales of death and in reflections on his virtually “posthumous” exilic existence, as well as on his actual Nachleben, both as he foresaw it and as it appears from our vantage point. In this spirit, part 3, “Revenants and Undead,” begins with Alison Sharrock’s chapter 10, “Ambobus pellite regnis: Between Life and Death in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” which launches an exploration of metamorphosis as a liminal condition that partakes of elements drawn both from the metamorph’s former existence and from its transformed state. Sharrock stresses that there is such a varied typology of transformations that almost every case is more individual than representative.21 It matters, for instance, whether the vector of transfiguration begins with an inanimate object that becomes animate, or vice versa. It matters whether a plant, being alive, resembles more a creature possessed of an anima or one that is not. Of particular interest to Sharrock are not just general questions like these, but special cases in which these questions converge, or are made to converge, in Ovid’s handling of a myth that may have been told differently by others. Such a case is that of Myrrha, who, while pregnant, is transformed into a tree and only then gives birth to the baby Adonis. How does this happen? Here we have another instance of the precision that, surprisingly often, Ovid brings to bear on issues that the rapid pace of his narrative seemingly encourages readers to overlook. Here Ovid’s treatment of Myrrha’s transformation makes it clear that she is not merely enveloped by a tree to continue her existence as a woman wrapped inside it until she can carry her baby to term. Like the paradigmatic Daphne, who is herself transformed into a tree precisely so that she might avoid Myrrha’s fate by remaining a virgin, Myrrha actually becomes a tree; but unlike Daphne, she is no longer a virgin, but is pregnant, and so, even as a tree, she gives birth to a human child. How is the reader to imagine this experience? What does it imply about the continued existence of the myrrh tree, and of other myrrh trees, the Myrrha tree being evidently the first of its kind? What does it imply about the child? More generally, what is the reader to suppose about the world of the Metamorphoses as Ovid describes it, a world populated, as it were, with many plants and animals endowed with origin stories that, each in its own way, present problems analogous to Myrrha’s? (Here we may compare Walter’s observations on Cygnus in chapter 1.) In addition to a world of semihuman animals and plants, semianimate plants and stones, and (in effect) semihuman humans (and many of them in addition to the infamous semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem, Ars 2.24; cf. Tr. 4.7.18, Sen., Contr. 2.2.12), Myrrha focuses on the statue “as an intermediary between raw material and human person … because it functions as a visual, and indeed concrete, metaphor.” This observation reflects directly on the myth of Niobe—“the classic case,” according to Sharrock—and so, on Betori and Calandra’s observations in chapter 9. Moreover, in accordance with Ovid’s technique of exploring nearly parallel situations, it applies as well to other art forms, potentially including painting (with relevance to Bergmann’s remarks on figural painting in chapter 8) and, of course, myth, poetry, and storytelling, as well (recall here, for instance, Thorsen’s reflections in chapter 3 on Cephalus’ (re)telling of Procris’ death as a distorted intertextual afterlife). The statue, however, as Sharrock maintains—citing the myth of Perseus and Medusa (cf. Galasso in chapter 7) and that of Pygmalion and Galatea, as well as Niobe—stands as an especially emblematic example of metamorphosis frozen between two states that seem to stand at opposite extremes.
In chapter 11, “Ovid’s Exile Poetry and Zombies,” Stephen Hinds embraces the implications of Ovid’s representation of exile as a living death by reading the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Ibis in the light of modern “fan-fiction” in which “Jane Austin meets the zombie apocalypse.” While provocatively experimental, his strategy takes its cue from Ovid’s own poetics of exile along lines similar to those followed by other contributors to this volume, especially Thorsen in chapter 3, Galasso in chapter 7, and Sharrock in chapter 10. In one sense, Hinds contributes to an understanding of the exile poetry, and perhaps especially of the Ibis, that is new; but at the same time, his purpose is to recover one aspect that is old and in some danger of being lost. That is the sense that the exile poetry is something different from Ovid’s earlier work, and far less appealing, even somewhat repulsive. Several decades of recuperative criticism have won the works that Ovid composed in Tomis a much wider readership perhaps than they have ever had. At the same time, Hinds argues that this newfound popularity has normalized these works and deprived them of a crucial component of their total effect. To regain some sense of the shock that Ovid’s first readers must have felt upon encountering these gloomy productions of the erstwhile tenerorum lusor Amorum, Hinds revisits the Amores themselves to uncover the gothic possibilities lurking within them. He then shows how much more forcefully this aspect appears when one takes seriously the idea that the exile poems need not, and perhaps should not, be seen simply as practicing the sort of playful self-revision of Ovid’s earlier work. Thus, perhaps, the idea of resuscitating a dead body may be taken to describe not only the exile corpus itself but also Hinds’s critical effort to revise a normalizing trend in recent scholarship on that material, suggesting both how ghastly Ovid’s fate may have felt to his earliest readers and how evocative of the poet’s reduced circumstances they seemed to modern readers not very long ago.
The period of the last few decades is one that Hinds defines as one in which Ovid’s exile poetry came to be reintegrated with the poet’s canonical works. It is largely the same period that Francesco Ursini identifies as a “new age of Ovid,” or perhaps as the latest in a series of such ages. More precisely, Ursini notes a general tendency to connect this period with the appearance, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, of many works of poetry, fiction, theater, and several forms of popular culture that take their bearings from specific aspects of an Ovidian sensibility and from certain formal features of his poetry. At the same time, these works reserve to themselves a right to place greater or less emphasis on one or another of these aspects without accepting any obligation to represent Ovid or any of his individual works in toto. This attitude to revision of the received text is itself, of course, consistent with an Ovidian sensibility. While acknowledging the significance of this movement, however, Ursini argues in chapter 12, “C.H. Sisson’s Metamorphoses and the ‘New Age of Ovid,’ ” that the origin of this aetas Ovidiana is to be found several decades earlier than most scholars have assumed. Sisson’s Metamorphoses, a poem cycle, appeared as early as 1968, but his occasional treatments of tales from Ovid go back at least to his 1961 collection The London Zoo, which includes “The Deer-Park,” his first version of the myth of Actaeon. Sisson’s second treatment of the same myth, “The Withdrawal,” appeared seven years later in the Metamorphoses volume. It is in Sisson’s work above all that Ursini finds regular exploitation of features that characterize the “new age.” These include an embrace of the fragmentary as principle of composition, various techniques of defamiliarization (in a spirit not unlike that of Hinds’s accessing of the “zombie apocalypse” aesthetic), an achronological mixing of mythic story patterns with quotidian modern elements, and so on. In addition to recognizing Sisson as a prophet of the Ovidian revolution that was to come, however, Ursini goes a step further and traces Sisson’s discovery of this approach to important predecessors of his own. These include not only recent ones like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the High Modernist masters who inspired so much of Sisson’s style, but more distant ones like Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other poets of the 14th century. Thus the “new Ovid,” he suggests, is a recurring phenomenon, and the pointed incongruity that breathes afterlife into the most contemporary reanimations appears to be so much a feature of Ovidian reception that it is hard to distinguish such reanimators from Ovid himself.
The final paper of this penultimate section, chapter 13, is Emma Buckley’s “Reviving the Dead: Ovid in Early Modern England.” Her focus is on the English Renaissance reception of Ovid as exemplifying the motif of reviving the dead in relation to various philosophical and religious conceptions of this idea. Buckley’s principal examples are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and the intricate relationship of each to Ovid and to one another. She argues that the Ovidian lover represented in the first edition of Marlowe’s Elegies, which itself consists of selections from Marlowe’s important translation of the Amores—the first complete translation into English—is “brought back to life” only to find himself eternally confined within an elegiac prison from which, in Ovid’s own amatory works, the poet managed to “escape” during his actual lifetime. This hellish situation is then compounded in Jonson’s Poetaster, which “absorbs” Marlowe’s translation of Amores 1.15 while reducing Ovid to a caricature of the youthful, besotted lover, who stands in sharp contrast to “the ‘true’ poets of the play, Virgil and Horace.” In spite of this satirical reception of Ovid, however, Buckley argues that Jonson and Marlowe “offer a model of collaborative revision rather than competition and erasure that confers upon Ovid true immortality in the face of censorious authority, in antiquity and far beyond.”
The volume’s fourth and final section, “Immortals and Others,” considers elements of Ovid’s representation of immortals and immortalities per se and as tropes for his own afterlife as a canonical author, both as he hoped for and imagined it and also as it actually unfolded. The section begins in chapter 14 with Francesca Romana Berno’s investigation of Chaos as a symbol of both time and permanence in Ovid’s poetry. In “From Chaos to Chaos: Janus in Fasti 1 and the Gates of War,” Berno interrogates the idea of time as a whole and that of eternity as something that is either unchanging or in constant flux. She grounds her discussion in Chaos as the starting point of both the Metamorphoses and, in the guise of Janus, the Fasti. Further, again as Janus, Chaos is seen to be the deity who presides over opening and closing doors—especially those of the god’s own temple. Accordingly, Janus’ chaotic nature is revealed not only, as he himself explains in the Fasti, by his appearance, but also by his function: closing the gates of his temple, the so-called Gates of War, is said both to keep War imprisoned inside, so that it cannot roam freely abroad, but also to keep Peace inside, where it will be safe. Berno identifies this inconsistency as a symptom of chaotic confusion; but at the same time, in Ovid’s linear narrative, she suggests that it represents a transformation on the part of Janus himself “from a rather optimistic role, based on his experience as a peaceful and powerful king, to a pessimistic one, connected with Rome’s recent history, which is no longer ruled by Janus, but by the Imperial family instead.”
In chapter 15, “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Immortality of Poetry: Petronius and Ovid,” Giuseppe La Bua shifts the focus from Janus as a symbol of eternal, chaotic transformation to the poet’s concern—and, as his career proceeds, one might even say obsession—with his own afterlife. As is well known, Ovid figures his hoped-for recognition as a canonical author as “a series of readings and performances of his work” that amounts to “a modality of eternal afterlife.” Arguing that this series of readings and performances “extends to transformations of Ovid’s own textual corpus in the hands of imitators,” La Bua focuses on the reception of Ovid’s early elegiac works to argue that “intertextuality and transformation/manipulation of the intertext” finds potent expression—possibly not exactly of the sort that Ovid himself envisioned—in Petronius. The episode in question, that of Encolpius’ impotence and his ensuing exchange of letters with his would-be mistress, Circe, is based on a mélange of Ovidian intertexts that involve relevant themes. These include the “canonical” elegiac topics of lamentation and love, but also more “experimental” varieties, such as erotodidaxis and epistolarity, including the ostensibly anti-elegiac, but Ovidianly sanctioned, theme of impotence, and extending even to aemulatio with Ovid himself in exploring varieties of elegiac excess. Here we have evidence of an Ovidian reception that has precedents among Petronius’ Julio-Claudian contemporaries and that continues into the Flavian period.22 In the hands of writers like Phaedrus, Persius, Seneca, Petronius, and Martial, however, Ovid’s triumphant afterlife does not resemble the condition of unchanging perfection that he imagines for himself at the end of the Metamorphoses so much as a series of grotesque transformations like the ones he himself evokes in his exile poetry. And yet, not only does this form of survival seem peculiarly appropriate; it was probably essential, as well. With little evidence that Ovid found institutional support in the schools and libraries of the early Empire, it must have been in large part the enthusiasm of his most knowing and talented readers, the poets and creative writers of the period, that helped keep him relevant until the first of his many periods of rebirth came around.
In chapter 16, “Tod und Erklärung: Ovid on the Death of Julius Caesar (Met. 15.745–860),” Katharina Volk explores the concept that gives this collection its title with reference to one of the most significant transformations in the Metamorphoses, that of Julius Caesar into—what? A god, certainly, at least in terms of the state cult, and also, apparently, in terms of the Götterapparat of the Metamorphoses as a notionally epic poem; but also a star, or rather a comet, which takes us into the realm of astronomy, a branch of natural philosophy. This complexity is what Volk explores, following Ovid, who might have concentrated on one or the other aspect, as we have been taught to think is usually the case among the ancient Romans. True, the availability of the “tripartite theology” as articulated by Marcus Terentius Varro allowed the Romans to understand the disparate conventions of poetry, of cult, and of philosophy, including natural philosophy and astronomy, as sometimes contradictory in a theoretical sense, but in practice as capable of being applied as largely separate and more or less equally valid conceptions of the divine.23 It is also true that, for the modern interpreter, it is very interesting to observe the interactions of whatever element may be dominant in any given environment with those that are at home in different contexts. An awareness of the Empedoclean equivalence between the divine couple Aphrodite and Ares and the philosophical principles of Love and Strife, for instance, enriches one’s appreciation of the close spatial relationship between the Forum of Julius Caesar and that of Augustus, with their imposing temples of Venus Genetrix and Mars Ultor, both of them important and innovative contributions to the state cult. What Volk demonstrates, however, is that Ovid goes much farther than poets normally do in fashioning Caesar’s apotheosis as an event that demands to be understood simultaneously in poetic, cultic, and philosophical terms, all in equal measure and in detail. This is true even to the extent that the inherent incompatibility of these three perspectives cannot help but make the episode implicitly self-contradictory. What is more, Volk stresses the relationship between Caesar’s overdetermined apotheosis and Ovid’s comparatively simple one in the concluding episode of the Metamorphoses. This relationship, she argues, is not merely analogous. Since Caesar’s metamorphosis—“the only one that happens to a historical character” within the poem, as Volk observes—takes place in the year 44 BCE, and Ovid’s birth, as we know from his poetic “autobiography,” takes place the very next year, there is “a sense that the poet is the one taking over once history has been transformed into the present.”24 Here Volk follows those who consider Ovid’s own projected metamorphosis into the many voices that will proclaim his poem, passing from one human body to another in the process, as a counterpart to Caesar’s apotheosis, even to the point of casting the poet—and not Augustus—as the principal successor of the dictator.25
In the following chapter 17, “The Books of Fate: The Venus-Jupiter Scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and its Epic Models,” Sergio Casali revisits the episode discussed by Volk in the preceding chapter, focusing not on the remarkable nature of Caesar’s apotheosis, but on the curious pre-Ovidian history of Jupiter’s role as guarantor of fate in epic poetry. Especially curious, in the light of Ovid’s penchant for celebrating contradictions, uncertainties, and in-betweenness, Casali here reveals him as imposing order on an unruly tradition that seems unable to decide whether Jupiter governs fate or is ruled by it himself. That is to say, where Volk finds Ovid to be generating poetic and ideological complexity by bringing the highly separable components of the tripartite theology into direct contact with one another, Casali shows how, in the same episode, the poet insists on resolving questions left unanswered by his predecessors. Throughout the series of closely related passages that Casali considers, the central issue remains the death of heroes, specifically of the descendants of gods, including those of Jupiter himself and, especially, Venus. From the Ur-scene of Zeus’s exchange with Hera as he anticipates the death of Sarpedon in Iliad 16 down to Venus’ protest at the impending assassination of Caesar in Ovid, the entire series is explained as a succession of intertextual and, in effect, theological transformations that end with an imposition of clarity by Ovid on an indecisive antecedent tradition. A rich and highly consequential vein of poetic dialogue is thus revealed as a process of Erklärung that culminates in Metamorphoses 15. Along the way, questions are raised about when, exactly, and where Jupiter promised Venus this or that; Naevius, especially, and also Ennius, emerge as likely protagonists in these events. What is notable, however, is the doggedness with which Ovid sets out to “correct” his most immediate, and in that sense most important predecessor, Vergil, even to the extent of seeming to produce a more committedly Augustan conception of Jupiter and fate than can be extracted from the Aeneid.
In the final chapter, “Apotheoses of the Poet,” Philip Hardie surveys the multitude of ways in which Ovid meditates both explicitly and, even more often, implicitly on his career as an extended process of transfiguration into a transcendent being of eternal existence. This leads directly into a consideration of some of the ways in which the even more extended, and very much ongoing, process of Ovidian reception ratifies the poet’s aspirations. In the first part of his argument, Hardie shows how Ovid’s manner of expressing his posthumous ambitions invites the inference that he aims to become like the gods that are among his most important subjects. That means both monstrous personifications like Fama, the traditional pantheon of the Olympians, “the new-fangled kind of god that is a deified Caesar,” and the newly canonical poets, like Vergil and Horace, of the previous generation. The poet’s power to confer fame, whether on a scripta puella or any other addressee or subject, obviously figures in this analysis.26 So does his role as poeta creator, which resembles that of the deus et melior … natura (Met. 1.21) that sets the world of Ovid’s most ambitious work in motion.27 Ovid’s path to divinity is not a smoothly managed triumphal procession, however, by any means. His chariot also invites comparison with that of the Sun when driven by Phaethon, his flight with that of Daedalus, but also with that of the less fortunate Icarus. Even installation within the pantheon of Roman poetry was never a sure thing, and Ovid’s mimicry of his predecessors’ own statements about their most audacious literary projects suggests that he learned to see himself as challenging gods and as risking a disastrous fall.28 Poets and artists of the early modern and neoclassical periods, well aware of their own efforts to equal and surpass the ancient gods of their respective crafts, like Ovid, took their cues from the boasts as well as the anxious disclosures of their great predecessors and role models.
The volume thus treats the theme of death and transfiguration in a way that is, if not comprehensive (for what treatment of Ovid could make such a claim?), then certainly broad, suggestive, and imaginative. It encompasses new treatments of approaches that will be familiar to experienced Ovidians along with others that are virtually unprecedented, whether because of the new material that they discuss or the novel perspectives that they represent. More than a summa of death and transfiguration over the first two post-Ovidian millennia, perhaps it offers some hints that will be useful as we make our way into the third.
For a full summary of the conference see Marcucci 2017. All of the papers included here have been revised, some extensively. Francesco Ursini’s contribution to the conference had already been promised, and has now been published elsewhere (Ursini 2017); he has instead contributed a different paper to this volume as chapter 12, which is summarized below. See also Oliensis 2020, vi.
On the development of elegy as love poetry, see Conte 1994, 35–66; Sharrock 1994; Kennedy 1984, 2002; Miller 2004; Thorsen 2014; Oliensis 2019; on both the Metamorphoses and Fasti as simultaneously departures from and continuations of this process, see especially Knox 1986; Hinds 1987; Labate 2010. On the exile poetry in relation to Ovid’s earlier work see Davisson 1983; Williams 1994; Gibson 1999; Tissol 2005; Schiesaro 2011; Myers 2014; Blanco Mayor 2017.
On Ovid’s representation of his life and career, see Holzberg 1997; Harrison 2002; Feldherr 2002; Farrell 2004, 2009; Martelli 2013; Beck 2014.
Nagle 1980; Evans 1983; Williams 1994, 2002. Relevant here are Ovid’s efforts in the exile poetry proper to invite the reader to reconsider his entire career from the perspective of his relegation (on which see Martelli 2013, 145–229; Myers 2014), not to mention the vexed question of whether and to what extent he continued working on and revising the Metamorphoses while in Tomis (Kovacs 1987), as he clearly did the Fasti (Fantham 1985; Williams 2002, 244–245; Martelli 2013, 104–144; Heyworth 2019, 5–13).
See, variously, Galinsky 1975; Barkan 1986, 19–93; Solodow 1988; Anderson 1989; Schmidt 1991; Galland-Hallyn 1994; Sharrock 1996; Hardie 1997; Feldherr 2002, 2010, 15–122; Nelis 2009; Vial 2010; Dinter 2019.
A topic approached, variously again, by Hinds 1987 and Janan 1994.
In this case, it is the sheer magnitude of the topic, not lack of interest, that is the limiting factor. Important contributions include Pearcy 1984; Barkan 1986; Hexter 1986; Martindale 1986; Bate 1993; Stapleton 1996, 2014; Cheney 1997; Brown 1999; Hardie 2002; Wheeler 2002, 2005; Hinds 2007; Knox 2009; Filippetti 2014; Miller and Newlands 2014; Moss 2014; Goddard 2015; Fielding 2017; Rosati 1917; Ursini and Ossola 2017; Bessone 2018; Consolino 2018; Goldschmidt 2019.
See Skulsky 1981, esp. 25, cited by Walter, n. 9.
On elegy as poetry of lamentation see Hinds 1987, 103–104 with 160 nn. 13–14; Farrell 2012, 15–16.
Klein acknowledges as almost parallel the situation of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is treated from a different point of view by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris in chapter 4.
On the Underworld as a repository of literary history, see Hardie 1993, 59–65, 96–97, 104–105. On Ennius and Ovid, see the following note.
Epigram 2.10, trans. Goldberg and Manuwald 2018, 232–233. From the vast literature on Ovid’s appropriation of this Ennian conceit see the works cited by Thorsen in her n. 15.
See e.g. Conte 1994, 43–44.
On this topic see Bishop 2019, 173–217.
The summary by Sussman 1978, 60–61 of the Elder Seneca’s comments on Ovid as a declaimer represents the traditional point of view.
Keith quotes Quintilian’s well-known diagnosis that Ovid was nimium amator ingenii sui, “too much a lover—of cleverness, (especially) his own!” (IO 10.1.88).
See especially Rosati 1993; Solodow 1988, 203–232; Hinds 2002; Barolsky 2007, 2014; Feldherr 2010, 243–341; Scioli 2015.
For different perspectives on the relationship between the Metamorphoses and the visual arts in antiquity, specifically regarding directions of influence, see Knox 2014, 2015 and Wallace-Hadrill 2017.
On Tr. 5.3 see Miller 2020.
See Pont. 1.7 with Gaertner 2005 ad loc.; cf. 2.2, 4.16.
See p. 243 below
Currie 1989; Baldwin 1992; Wheeler 2002, 2005; Hinds 2007; Hallet 2012; Antoniadis 2013; Goddard 2015.
Feeney 1998, 14–21.
Cf. Holzberg 1997.
Cf. Farrell 2020, 333–336.
Wyke 1987.
On this theme see Lieberg 1982; Wheeler 1999.
See Chaudhuri 2014, esp. chapter 3, “Theomachy as Test in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” 82–115.
Works Cited
Anderson, W.S. 1989. “Lycaon: Ovid’s Deceptive Paradigm in Metamorphoses 1.” ICS 14: 91–101.
Antoniadis, T. 2013. “Beyond Impotence: Some Unexplored Ovidian Dynamics in Petronius’ Sketch of the Croton Episode (Satyrica 126.1–140.2).” Trends in Classics 5.1: 179–191.
Baldwin, B. 1992. “Petronius and Ovid.” Eranos 90: 63.
Barchiesi, A. 2020. “Boccaccio, Ovid, and the equites: Autography and the Question of the Audience.” In Excessive Writing: Ovids Exildichtung, ed. M. Möller. Heidelberg: 137–156.
Barkan, L. 1986. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven.
Barolsky, Paul. 2007. “Ovid’s Protean Epic of Art.” Arion 14: 107–120.
Barolsky, Paul. 2014. Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso. New Haven.
Bate, J. 1993. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford.
Beck, J.-W. 2014. Hoc illi praetulit auctor opus: Ovids Amores und die Entwicklung seines weiteren Werkes. Spudasmata 158. Hildesheim.
Bessone, F. 2018. “Effetti ovidiani nella scrittura di Stazio.” Aevum Antiquum 18: 31–55.
Bishop, C. 2019. Cicero, Greek Learning, and the Making of a Roman Classic. Oxford.
Blanco Mayor, J.M. 2017. “Power Play in Latin Love Elegy and its Multiple Forms of Continuity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Trends in Classics suppl. 42. Berlin.
Brown, S.A. 1999. The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes. London.
Chaudhuri, P. 2014. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. New York.
Cheney, P. 1997. Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood. Toronto.
Coelsch-Foisner, S. and W. Görtschacher, eds. Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English Poetry. Wissenschaft und Kunst 10. Heidelberg
Consolino, F.E., ed. 2018. Ovid in Late Antiquity. Studi e Testi Tardoantichi 16. Turnhout.
Conte, G.B. 1994. Genres and Readers. Trans. G.W. Most. Baltimore.
Currie, H.M. 1989. “Petronius and Ovid.” In Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 5, ed. C. Deroux. Collection Latiomus 206. Brussels: 317–335.
Davisson, M.H.T. 1983. “Sed sum quam medico notior ipse mihi: Ovid’s Use of Some Conventions in the Exile Epistles.” CA 2: 171–182.
Dinter, M.T. 2019. “Intermediality in the Metamorphoses.” Trends in Classics 11.1: 96–118.
Evans, H.B. 1983. Publica Carmina: Ovid’s Books from Exile. Lincoln.
Farrell, J. 1992. “Dialogue of Genres in Ovid’s ‘Lovesong of Polyphemus’ (Metamorphoses 13. 719–897).” AJP 113: 235–268.
Farrell, J. 1999. “The Ovidian corpus: Poetic Body and Poetic Text.” In Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception, ed. P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S.E. Hinds. Cambridge Philological Society suppl. 23. Cambridge: 127–141.
Farrell, J. 2004. “Ovid’s Vergilian Career.” In Re-presenting Virgil: Special Issue in Honor of Michael C.J. Putnam, ed. G.W. Most and S. Spence. MD 52: 41–56.
Farrell, J. 2009. “Ovid’s Generic Transformations.” In A Companion to Ovid, ed. P.E. Knox. Oxford: 370–380.
Farrell, J. 2012. “Calling Out the Greeks: Dynamics of the Elegiac Canon.” In A Companion to Roman Love Elegy, ed. Barbara K. Gold. Chichester: 11–24.
Farrell, J. 2020. “Ovidian Synchronisms.” CJ 115: 324–338.
Feeney, D.C. 1998. Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs. Cambridge.
Feldherr, A. 2002. “Metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses.” In Hardie, ed. 2002: 163–179.
Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton.
Fielding, I. 2017. Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity. Cambridge.
Filippetti, A. 2014. Il Remedium amoris da Ovidio a Shakespeare. Pisa.
Gaertner, J.F., ed. 2005. Ovid: Epistulae ex Ponto, Book 1. Oxford.
Galinsky, G.K. 1975. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. Oxford.
Galand-Hallyn, P. 1994. Le reflet des fleurs: description et métalangage poétique d’Homère à la Renaissance. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 283. Geneva.
Gibson, B. 1999. “Ovid on Reading: Reading Ovid. Reception in Ovid Tristia II.” JRS 89: 19–37.
Goddard, A.L. 2015. “Ovid’s Satirical Successors in the Early Imperial Period.” Diss. Pennsylvania.
Goldberg, S.M. and G. Manuwald, eds. and trans. 2018. Fragmentary Republican Latin Vol. 1, Ennius: Testimonia, Epic Fragments. Cambridge, Mass.
Goldschmidt, N. 2019. Afterlives of the Roman Poets: Biofiction and the Reception of Latin Poetry. Cambridge.
Hallett, J.P. 2012. “Anxiety and Influence: Ovid’s Amores 3.7 and Encolpius’ Impotence in Satyricon 126ff.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient Novel, ed. M.P. Futre Pinheiro, M.B. Skinner, and F.I. Zeitlin. Berlin: 211–222.
Hardie, P. 1993. The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge.
Hardie, P. 1997. “Questions of Authority: The Invention of Tradition in Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.” In The Roman Cultural Revolution, ed. T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro. Cambridge: 182–198.
Hardie, P, ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge.
Hexter, R.J. 1986. Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School on Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum. Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik und Renaissance-Forschungen, 38. Munich.
Hinds, S.E. 1987. The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-conscious Muse. Cambridge.
Hinds, S.E. 2002. “Landscape with Figures: Aesthetics of Place in the Metamorphoses and its Tradition.” In Hardie, ed. 2002: 122–149.
Hinds, S.E. 2007. “Martial’s Ovid / Ovid’s Martial.” JRS 97: 113–154.
Holzberg, N. 1997. “Playing with his Life: Ovid’s ‘Autobiographical’ References.” Lampas 30: 4–19.
Janan, M. 1994. “‘There Beneath the Roman Ruin Where the Purple Flowers Grow’: Ovid’s Minyeides and the Feminine Imagination.” AJP 115: 427–448.
Kennedy, D.F. 1994. The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy. Cambridge.
Knox, P.E. 1986. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry. PCPS suppl. 11. Cambridge.
Knox, P.E. 2014. “Ovidian Myths on Pompeian Walls.” In Miller and Newlands, eds. 2014: 36–54.
Knox, P.E. 2015. “The Literary House of Mr. Octavius Quartio.” ICS 40: 171–184.
Kovacs, D. 1987. “Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.2.” CQ 37: 458–465.
Lieburg, G. 1982. Poeta creator: Studien zu einer Figur der antiken Dichtung. Leiden.
Marcucci, M. 2017. “Cronache: Ovidio, morte e trasfigurazione, Convegno internazionale: Roma, Sapienza Università di Roma-American Academy in Rome, 9–11 marzo 2017.” Bolletino di Studi Latini 42: 736–741.
Martelli, F.K.A. 2013. Ovid’s Revisions: The Editor as Author. Cambridge.
Martindale, C. ed., 1986. Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge.
Miller, J.F. 1991. Ovid’s Elegiac Festivals: Studies in the Fasti. Studien zur klassischen Philologie55. Frankfurt am Main.
Miller, J.F. 2020. Apollo, Augustus, and the Poets. Cambridge: 332–373.
Miller, J.F. and C.E. Newlands, eds. 2014. A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid. Chichester.
Miller, P.A. 2004. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton.
Moss, D.D. 2014. The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England. Toronto.
Nagle, B.R. 1980. The Poetics of Exile: Program and Polemic in the Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto of Ovid. Collection Latomus 170. Brussels.
Nelis, D.P. 2009. “Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.416–451: Noua monstra and the foedera naturae.” Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture, ed. P. Hardie. Oxford: 248–267.
Oliensis, E. 2019. Loving Writing / Ovid’s Amores. Cambridge.
Pearcy, L.T. 1984. The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560–1700. Hamden, Conn.
Rosati, G. 1983. Narciso e Pigmalione: Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio. Florence.
Rosati, G. 2017. “Et latet et lucet: Ovidian Intertextuality and the Aesthetics of Luxury in Martial’s Poetry.” Arethusa 50: 117–142.
Schiesaro, A. 2011. “Ibis redibis.” MD 67: 79–150.
Schmidt, E.A. 1991. Ovids poetische Menschenwelt: Die Metamorphosen als Metapher und Symphonie. Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 1991.2. Heidelberg.
Scioli, E. 2015. Dream, Fantasy, and Visual Art in Roman Elegy. Madison.
Sharrock, A.R. 1994. Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s Ars amatoria 2. Oxford.
Sharrock, A.R. 1996. “Representing Metamorphosis.” In Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jás Elsner. Cambridge: 103–130.
Skulsky, H. 1981. Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile. Cambridge, Mass.
Solodow, J. 1988. The World of Ovid’sMetamorphoses. Chapel Hill.
Stapleton, M.L. 1996. Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare. Ann Arbor.
Stapleton, M.L. 2014. Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon. Ashgate.
Sussman, L.A. 1978. The Elder Seneca. Mnemosyne suppl. 51. Leiden.
Thorsen, T.S. 2014. Ovid’s Early Poetry from his Single Heroides to his Remedia amoris. Cambridge.
Tissol, G. 2005. “Maimed Books and Maimed Authors: Tristia 1.7 and the Fate of the Metamorphoses.” In Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature: Essays presented to William S. Anderson on his Seventy-fifth Birthday, ed. W.W. Batstone, and G. Tissol. Lang Classical Studies 15. New York: 97–112.
Ursini, F. 2017 “Lo sguardo di Aglauro da Ovidio a Dante.” SIFC 15: 167–192.
Ursini, F. and C. Ossola. 2017. Ovidio e la cultura europea: interpretazioni e riscritture dal secondo dopoguerra al bimillenario della morte: (1945–2017). Rome.
Vial, H. 2010. La métamorphose dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide: étude sur l’art de la variation. Collection d’Études Anciennes, Série Latine 70. Paris.
Wallace-Hadrill, A. 2017. “Ovid and Mythological Painting in Pompeii.” In Ovidio 2017, prospettive per il terzo millennio: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Sulmona, 3–6 aprile 2017, ed. P. Fedeli and G. Rosati. Teramo: 299–312.
Wheeler, S.M. 1999. A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philadelphia.
Wheeler, S.M. 2002. “Lucan’s Reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Arethusa 35: 361–380.
Wheeler, S.M. 2005. “Before the Aetas Ovidiana: Mapping the Early Reception of Ovidian Elegy.” In Aetas Ovidiana?, ed. D.P. Nelis. Hermathena 177–178: 9–26.
Wyke, M. 1987. “Written Women: Propertius’ Scripta Puella.” JRS 77: 47–61.