This book argues that Ovid's debt to the natural philosophical theories and works of Empedocles and Lucretius is pervasive in the Metamorphoses. It thus follows recent trends in scholarship that highlight Empedocles’ role in the development of the ancient epic tradition, particularly through the association of his thought with the theory of the two cosmological forces of Love and Strife and the four elements (or roots). S. argues that Empedocles is a ‘Schlüsselfigur’ for understanding the poem, thus pursuing, and acknowledging, the lines of argument inaugurated by especially P. Hardie (1986; 1995), D. Nelis (2009; 2014) and M. Garani (2007; 2014). Nelis in 2001 has already argued that ‘both Apollonius and Vergil imagine a specifically Empedoclean cosmos in which the forces of Love and Strife are at work’ (Vergil's Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, pp. 107–8). W. Gladhill, in a review of Garani's important book, Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry and Analogy in Lucretius (2007), conjectured that we may be witnessing an Empedoclean revival and that ‘a century from now Sedley's groundbreaking work [‘Lucretius and the New Empedocles’, LICS 2.4 (2003), 1–12] concomitant with the publication of the Strasburg papyrus by Martin and Primavesi in 1999 will be considered the terminus post quem of this resurgence’ (BMCR 2009.05.24). While this new emphasis on Empedoclean influence is important and compelling (and I am among those who have jumped on the bandwagon recently), his philosophical fragments are sparse and difficult to interpret, and we Latin literary critics need to be careful not to simplify his philosophy (as we did for too long with ‘Callimacheanism’). The concepts of love and strife are, moreover, extremely broad and pervasive in ancient literature. J. Farrell has recently warned against associating the four elements exclusively with Empedocles, pointing out as well that discordia in Rome is the ‘mot juste for civil dissension’ (Dictynna 11 [2014], 14). This book may overstep in its eagerness to find Empedoclean influence, but such an approach is perhaps justifiable at this exploratory stage. S. does a valuable service in pursuing this reading of the Metamorphoses further.

Most of S.'s premises are not new, but she presents a thorough review of previous scholarship and delivers close readings of individual passages of the poem that extend the investigation of philosophical intertextuality. It is generally agreed that the Metamorphoses is engaged with natural philosophy, that through allusions to Lucretius and Empedocles Ovid enrols himself in the epic tradition of cosmogonic poetry (groundbreaking was Hardie, Cosmos and Imperium [1986], on Virgil) and that Ovid's combination of physical theory and mythology interrogates both narrative modes. The philosophical frame of the Metamorphoses, embodied in its opening cosmogony and the closing speech of Pythagoras, establishes a sort of ‘scientific’ field of reference for the elemental ‘physics’ of the process of transformation throughout the poem. S. suggests that the Empedoclean cosmic dualism of love and strife is represented in Ovid's poem by deus (identified as the unifying element) and Chaos, and that, in Ovid's cosmogonic vision, love causes chaos. She follows Garani in arguing for simultaneous (‘window’) allusions to Empedocles and Lucretius. Each chapter begins with a review of the major scholarly secondary sources and is followed by passage analysis and conclusion, which can, at times, make the book repetitive. The bibliography is quite extensive, although a number of major commentaries on Ovid and some studies on Empedocles are omitted (importantly, S. Trépanier, Empedocles: an Interpretation [2004] and Dictynna 11 [2014]).

Chapter 1 re-examines Ovid's opening cosmogony and anthropogonies, arguing for Empedoclean influence and underlining the frequent recurrence of chaos. Humans are to be understood as microcosms, embodying a similar discors/concordia and a mixture of elements (cf. D.O. Ross, Virgil's Elements [1987], p. 120: ‘The most convenient characteristic of the four elements and their qualities is how easily and thoroughly they lend themselves, in various mixtures, to balances and imbalances, to be found in microcosm and macrocosm alike, in the universe, on earth, and in the human body’). Chapter 2 looks at the continuation of these cosmogonic and chaotic forces into the next book, with the twin disasters of fire and flood. Underlined again is the tension between mythical and philosophical discourses, which suggests both the fluid boundaries between the two, while calling into question the truth claims of natural philosophy. The ‘myth of ages’ is shown to be a moral manifestation of the inevitable and recurrent returns to chaos, connecting human passions and natural disorder. Chapter 3 turns to the amatory episodes of the first pentad with the goal of showing that in these episodes the cosmic powers of chaos and deus (disorder and order) are still important. Within these stories amor has a destructive function quite different from Empedoclean thought (‘Liebe als chaotische Kraft’), but it ultimately leads to a new order in metamorphosis (metamorphosis is cosmogony in miniature). The stories in the next pentad (Chapter 4) represent metamorphosis caused by inner conflict rather than divine power. In the stories of Medea, Scylla, Byblis and Myrrha the chaos is psychological, as these women struggle with the conflict between their furor and pietas. Chapter 5 highlights the elemental nature of metamorphosis in stories involving stone and water transformations. Chapter 6 examines a number of passages that have already been identified as combining myth and natural science (such as Narcissus and Echo, the plague at Aegina), raising the question again of parody of natural philosophy. Chapter 7 looks in detail at the speech of Pythagoras, who serves as a ‘Reflexionsfigur’, and suggests that his narrative reflects on the relative truth claims of the vatic figures of poets and philosophers.