The present work descends from the fourth and fifth volumes (of six) in the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Those 2011/2013 works (like the others in the set) remain a marvel. Conveniently, in one handy book you have a critical text (based on Tarrant’s OCT), translation and full commentary for the given section of the epic (complete with two marker ribbons). One has the sense that the problem posed by that magisterial edition (at least in the anglophone world) is the need to read Italian.
Six Italian volumes become three in the new Cambridge English edition. There is no text/translation; one is assumed to have the OCT, and notes are provided for where the editor diverges from Tarrant. The late, lamented Latinist E. J. Kenney was responsible for Books 7–9; his original English commentary is now available, a dozen years and more after the Italian translation thereof for Mondadori. Kenney died in 2019, and so his commentary has been only lightly revised, under the care of the general editor Alessandro Barchiesi; the changes reflect edits made by Kenney after the publication of the Italian volume. J. D. Reed handled Books 10–12, and like the other living editors of the project, he has had the chance to revise and update his commentary. Reed states clearly that the 2024 English ‘supersedes’ the 2013 Italian.
Let it be said plainly: the Mondadori Ovid is splendid, a wonderful counterpart to Bömer’s commentary. Its English descendant/version is also splendid. While important scholarship has appeared on the epic in the intervening decade plus, the English edition is not radically different from the Italian. For those who because of language barriers did not survey its predecessor, the Cambridge edition offers a chance to be immersed in a wondrous product that offered a model of what large-scale commentaries on difficult and dense works should look like.
Praise of specific qualities of Kenney’s 7–9 and Reed’s 10–12 is easy to render. If criticism is to be made of any aspect of the volume, it may be rooted in the fact that it is difficult to produce a coherent reading of such a mammoth work as the Metamorphoses when you have five editors. This difficulty is more or less serious depending on one’s view of the poem; for those of us inclined to think that Ovid’s epic displays admirable unity of design and cohesive structure, it can be jarring to move from three-book set to three-book set (convenient, though in some regards arguably arbitrary divisions) under different editors. The poem has a readily apparent tripartite arrangement that might have offered a better organisational model (here we may compare the Oklahoma set of W. S. Anderson, woefully still unfinished).
Along these lines, it is strange that we find a rather full introduction to Books 7–9, though not for 10–12 (where the introduction is limited to notes and acknowledgements about the revision). Some readers may emerge from the commentaries with the sense that individual trees have been described with expert care, but a guide to the forest is still lacking. Having one editor, to be sure, is no guarantee that this concern would be addressed; working through Bömer, one can also be left wondering about overarching questions. This issue is exactly what inspired my own 2011 Madness Transformed, a work that is recommended in Barchiesi’s introduction in Volume I, though not used by Reed in his revision. Ovidian readers who revel in a sprawling work that is mythological, intertextual, more often than not comic and subversive, and above all ludic in its manipulation of genre and language, will be sated with the immense treasures on display here. Those convinced that Ovid crafted an elegant edifice of intricate and purposeful design, anchored in breathtaking intratextual connections from Mercury’s Herse and Romulus’ Hersilie to the resounding closes of Books 5, 10 and 15, may be left hungrier. Ultimately, the commentaries of this volume are exceptionally good at answering the ‘what’ of a given passage; as for the ‘why’, that inherently speculative preserve is left more or less untouched.
For example, when we come to the discussion of the story of Atalanta’s race in Book 10, we are reminded that the heroine is not named in her appearance in Book 8, whereby ‘Ovid eschews the effect of doubling that obtains in his two Scyllas … and Iphises … also the various Cycnuses …’ One is tempted to ask, ‘so what?’ We are not afforded any consideration of the possible significance of the poet’s reintroduction of Atalanta.
The general index for the set appears in Volume III. While it would no doubt have been daunting to produce, an index locorum would have been invaluable. The index can on occasion be misleading to the unaware reader; in line with the mythological exemplum just noted, one is directed to Book 10 for Atalanta, though not to Book 8 (simply because she is not named ‘Atalanta’ during the narrative of the Calydonian boar hunt).
These methodological matters aside, the present volume and its set belong on the shelves of those who have the Italian books and those who never consulted them. Ovidians today enjoy a surfeit of scholarship on the poet’s masterpiece, and Barchiesi deserves sincere gratitude for bringing this project to completion not once, but twice.
