In this latest edition of the Classical World series F. provides valuable insights to the works of Ovid. As the subtitle, A Poet on the Margins, promises, there is much in her analysis about alienation of the self from society, aberrant behaviours and their consequences, and the ‘exploitation of power differentials’ (p. 3). In order to frame the themes, artistry and spirit of Ovid's writings, F. notes that ‘the lenses of exile and otherness, on the one hand, and of revision and repetition on the other, serve us throughout his work as structural metaphors’ (p. 3). She applies these lenses with great expertise, reflecting magisterially the vast bibliography of recent decades, and yet manages to impose ideas of her own upon the subject that will delight both the casual and the professional reader of Ovid's works.
Chapter 1, ‘Life on the Margins’, explains Ovid's biography and corpus, and reminds us of the synergy between his work and the times in which he lived. The wealthy, monument-laden, ordered and imperial backdrop of Augustan Rome grants Ovid's authorial personae many places to pose and play (and play tricks): ‘Ovid is similar to Augustus, as well as serving as his negative mirror reflection’ (p. 26). Chapter 2, ‘Repetition-Compulsion and Ovidian Excess’, discusses Ovid's narratorial style of distance, intrusion and layered tellings, a strategy that keeps the reader off-guard and makes it difficult to determine where a story's truth really lies: ‘that how a story goes is very much dependent on who tells it to you’ (p. 42). Chapter 3, ‘Romans at Home and Abroad: Identity and the Colonial Subject’, examines the many instances of wandering, exile, abduction and alienation that appear in Ovid's works, and that become reality in his final years of exile on the Black Sea coast. F. notes that for many of Ovid's literary figures, such as Medea, ‘the position of the exile is not merely one of powerlessness’ (p. 64), and that similarly Ovid in exile ‘comes to see his own power: we find here his boldest claims to poetic immortality’ (p. 66). She also explores the Ovidian theme of ‘unequal power relations’, presented frequently in the way that speech, whether verbal or artistic, is violently punished. To the treatment of victims, particularly women, in Ovid's works, F. dedicates several pages, making the point that ‘gender is but one lens through which he treats the topic of power differentials’ (p. 76). She finishes this chapter with an analysis of Ovid's exilic epistles as deeply reflective of Ovid's inherent Romanitas, marking them as colonial texts in as much as they are reflections upon grief and absence. In the pro-Augustan / anti-Augustan debate, she takes neither side, seeing rather that the poems display ‘a fundamental ambiguity on the issues’ (p. 83), but concludes that each man intruded ‘into the sphere of the other’, and ‘we cannot know who started it’ (p. 86).
The book ends with a list of scholarly works, organised by theme or poem, that have had the most impact upon the field of Ovidian studies. F. has provided a very useful manual on Ovid's poems that combines old and new ideas about his works in a manner that is informative, eloquent and intriguing.
