The depths of Ovidian poetry are as profound as its surfaces are dazzling. The present book explores these depths, one might say on an almost metaphysical level. The subtitle profitably limits the potentially vast area of coverage to strategies of revision that are conspicuously linked to the figure of the author. Furthermore, this approach serves to emphasize the vision of revision, that is: the theoretical outlook on the relationship between poet and poetry as one that is never wholly fixed. The idea that a literary composition might change challenges conceptions about intention, originality, authenticity, authority and the permanence of art, all of which are still very much in use in literary studies, despite having been thoroughly contested since the 1960s. Yet, as Francesca Martelli demonstrates, this challenge appears all the more pressing once the promoter of such an idea is the poet him- or herself, as in the case of Ovid.

The book is divided into six chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter places Ovid and his authorial revision in a wider context, which mainly consists of ancient parallels (Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides, Callimachus and Vergil) and modern-day literary theory (Freud, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Brooks). The chapter closes with an overview of the kind of revisions that are employed in the various works of Ovid. Ch. 2 sports Ovid's most obvious case of revision, namely the alleged second edition of the Amores. This is a fascinating chapter, which demonstrates that the ghost of a previous five-book collection haunts the extant three-book edition like a lost twin. While the Amores thus represent the revisionary strategy of reduction, M. argues that the Ars amatoria, which is at the heart of ch. 3, represents the opposite. M. advocates the plastic unity of the work by pointing out that it keeps extending, first from two to three books and then to four when the sequel Remedia amoris is taken into consideration. Ovid's Fasti represent another kind of authorial intervention, namely that of premature closure, which is the object of M.'s scrutiny in ch. 4. Here M. brings Augustus to the fore as Ovid's contestant over the very definition of time. The fifth chapter, on the Tristia, sports an Ovid, exiled by Augustus, who toys with literature as monument. Finally, in ch. 6, M. discloses Ovid's editorial manipulation of the ‘natural’ order of the epistolary collection of the Epistulae ex Ponto. The epilogue ties the various strains up in important reflections on the concept of the Ovidian author.

As seen from this brief outline of the chapters, M.'s term ‘revision’ is inclusive and stretches over the wide field between the text understood as a monument and the text understood as performance. Only occasionally do M.'s interpretations come across as somewhat idiosyncratic. At one point M. touches upon women's sexual satisfaction, as she argues that Ovid's revisionary strategies play on both ‘the puella's naked body [as] a desired end point’ (87) and male fear of castration in the face of ‘reddente obscena puella’ (Rem. 437, cf. 91: ‘the girl … getting rid of obscenities’). M. understands this as a reference to masturbation: doubly disturbing from a male point of view, M. argues, as a girl who masturbates not only is (at least partially) naked but also renders the male member dispensible. This passage is, however, normally understood as referring to the act of relieving oneself (cf., for example, C. Brunelle in R. Ancona and E. Greene (eds), Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry (2005), 141–58, not in M.'s bibliography). Regarding masturbation, however, there is one passage preserved in the Ovidian oeuvre, which uniquely evokes sexual satisfaction from a female first-person perspective (Sappho, Her. 15.134). Notably, this passage echoes two other passages in the Ars amatoria, where Ovid — in the pose of praeceptor amoris — prefers to make love to a woman who is not sicca (‘dry’), but climaxes (Ars 2.684–92) and wants women in general to enjoy the pleasures of orgasm (Ars 3.793–4). Ovidian poetry might play on fear of castration as described in psychoanalytic theory, but contains also passages that appear to balance such fears through positive depictions of women's sexual satisfaction, even on their own. While this balance can sometimes seem to be lacking, the book as a whole is compelling.

The volume is commendably free from typos (apart from ‘ontrol’ for ‘control’ on p. 2), but I miss some entries in the index (e.g. Erato). On a final note, the concept of revision extends in an appealing way even to M.'s different translations of the same passages, which thus embody the truth of what this study is fundamentally about, namely that you cannot enter the same text twice, not even if you are its author: ‘hoc quoque composui …/ ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae;/ hoc quoque iussit Amor – procul hinc, procul este, severi’ (Am. 2.1.1–3); ‘This too I composed – I, Naso … poet of my own profligacy. This too love ordered – be off with you, far off, austere readers!’ (53). And: ‘This too I composed – I, Naso … , poet of my own scrapes; this too Love ordered me to write – be off with you, far off, you kill-joys!’ (59).