Overview

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).

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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. 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.

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