Carole Newlands' Ovid is a 2015 entry in the I. B. Tauris series Understanding Classics, intended, as editor Richard Stoneman writes, ‘to introduce the outstanding authors and thinkers of antiquity to a wide audience’. Any volume of this type must target its readership to some degree, and this one aims high, toward the knowledgeable enthusiast and the advanced undergraduate or graduate student in a literature course. In a readable and engaging narrative, N. combines basic who/what/when content with plentiful close readings that provide superb instruction for advanced students on how to approach Ovid's rich and complex oeuvre. For example, the twelve-page introduction concludes with a thoughtful nine-page reading of the rôle of Cupid as a ‘flexible, generic marker’ (15) in Ovid's works, revealing his shifting persona from mischievous child in the early elegies and Metamorphoses (although the mention of Cupid climbing a tree in Met. 1 is puzzling) to dispirited fellow outcast in exile (Ex Ponto 3.3) within a web of allusions to Horace, Vergil and other Latin sources.

N. eschews a strictly work-by-work organization for a semi-thematic scheme in which genre, love and politics predominate. The chapter on elegy touches on the most important generic and contextual issues (Rome, empire, sex, comedy, Augustan moral legislation) without sacrificing attention to representative texts from across Ovid's career, examined in this case through the repeating motif of the Roman triumph (36–42). Especially welcome is the inclusion of several of the poems from Tomis, in which Ovid's conjuring of Roman triumphs underscores his distance from Rome and the imperial family, thus far deaf to his pleas to return from exile.

Ch. 3 is one of the best introductions to Ovid's Heroides available. N. clearly spells out the challenges facing the reader of a collection that represents a new poetic genre of female vocalizations performing critical reinterpretations of the epic tradition. But the reader is again ushered along the path of close textual readings so characteristic of this monograph, here of Heroides 7 (the well-known Dido) and 5 (the less-familiar Oenone). The discussion here of Philomela's ‘letter’ in Met. 6, perhaps its logical home among other female ‘vocalizations’, may be overlooked by the less careful reader.

A chapter on the Metamorphoses in less than thirty pages is necessarily a feast of small plates which struggles to convey the whole through a selection of parts. N. opts to introduce the new and historically important theme of metamorphosis and Ovid's complex of imbedded epic narrators alongside the theme of ‘love’, loosely construed from the earlier amatory works. The chapter is again full of gems of close readings: Daedalus as failed father and murderous uncle, Narcissus, Myrrha and Pygmalion as participants in ‘uncommon loves’, and the rape narratives of Books 1–5 are all featured. The inevitable question of Ovid, Augustus and power, raised from Jupiter's first appearance in Book 1, is deftly handled. Ovid's important treatment of art and artists in the epic is discussed all too briefly.

The Fasti is an equally daunting poem for the uninitiated, and ch. 5 offers a thread to guide us through the labyrinth. N. situates the poem generically (didactic) and culturally (as part of an Augustan dialogue). Her major focus is on speech permitted and not, in keeping with the original purpose of the Roman calendar (days fas and nefas). Lucretia, who is compared with Arethusa in Propertius 4.3 and Philomela of Met. 6, and Lara, both in Book 2, provide fertile ground for a gendered analysis; the tales of Anna Perenna in Book 3 and Flora in Book 5 serve very well for an Augustan political analysis.

In ch. 6 the exile poems are characterized, like the Heroides, as ‘an innovative experiment with the elegiac genre’ (124). While N.’s comparative/reception inclinations are on display throughout the volume, here they take centre stage; the influence of these poems on later writers introduces the chapter. Other subjects here include debts to Ovid's former poetry and earlier epic, and the poet's continuing engagement with the imperial family.

N.’s focus on reception is most effective when part of a consideration of particular passages. In the capable but summary final chapter on Ovidian reception, we march in twelve pages through eighteen centuries of Ovid's literary reception. It provides the reader with a taste of the reverberations of these astonishing texts, but the intricacies of their reception will best be found in the earlier chapters.

The scholarly notes are thoughtful and up to date, but the concluding select bibliography is very select indeed; many major scholarly works on Ovid must be excavated from their first mention in the notes, as they are abbreviated thereafter.

N.’s Ovid is a strong contribution to this series. It successfully balances value and appeal to both the classicist and the ‘wider audience’ envisioned by the editor, while providing excellent direction in close reading to the classicist-in-training.