Overview

Comprising fifteen books and over two hundred and fifty myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the longest extant Latin poems from the ancient world and one of the most influential works in Western culture. It is an epic on desire and transgression that became a gateway to the entire world of pagan mythology and visual imagination. This, the first complete commentary in English, covers all aspects of the text – from textual interpretation to poetics, imagination, and ideology – and will be useful as a teaching aid and an orientation for those who are interested in the text and its reception. Historically, the poem's audience includes readers interested in opera and ballet, psychology and sexuality, myth and painting, feminism and posthumanism, vegetarianism and metempsychosis (to name just a few outside the area of Classical Studies).

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Alessandro Barchiesi is a professor of Classics at New York University, after teaching at Stanford and the University of Siena. He has been visiting professor at Berkeley and Harvard, and his activity as a lecturer includes the Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley (2011), the Nellie Wallace Lectures at Oxford (1997), the Gray Lectures at Cambridge (2001), the Jerome Lectures (AAR/University of Michigan, 2002), the Housman Lecture at UC London (2009), and the Martin Lectures at Oberlin (2012). His work combines close reading of Roman literary texts (poetry and fiction) with interest in contemporary criticism, literary theory, and reception history. He is author of inter alia a commentary on Ovid's Heroides 1-3 (1992) and the Ovidian volumes of essays The Poet and the Prince (1997) and Speaking Volumes (2001), and co-editor with W. Scheidel of the Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies (2nd ed. 2020). His forthcoming work includes The War for Italia and Apuleius the Provincial. PHILIP HARDIE is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Honorary Professor Emeritus of Latin Literature in the University of Cambridge; and Fellow of the British Academy. He has published extensively on Latin poetry and its reception, and is widely identified as one of the world's leading Latinists. His books include Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge 2002); (edited) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge 2002); and Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge 2012): . His 2016 Sather Lectures have been published as Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry (2019) and his 2016 Warburg Lectures as Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art (2022).

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