With the publication in three volumes of the English version of the six-volume commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses originally produced in Italian under the auspices of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, this epic project can now be called complete.[1] I use the term “version” advisedly, because three of the original volumes—by Edward J. Kenney, Joseph D. Reed, and Philip Hardie—were drafted in English, then translated into Italian, and so they now appear as they were first written. The original volumes, which were published at regular intervals after 2005, have been reviewed in detail as they appeared, including notices of five of them in this journal.[2] While it is clear that Alessandro Barchiesi, the general editor, exercised a firm, guiding hand in the development of each contributor’s section, it is also clear that he allowed each of the commentators considerable latitude in developing his own approach to the poem. The result, when the original Italian version was completed in 2015, was, appropriately enough, a commentarium that was at once perpetuum and deductum. Perpetuum, of course, because it offered notes on the complete poem; deductum in the sense that its individual contributors interpret the poem in a style and manner peculiar to each. The complete commentary is thus as variegated in its approach to exegesis as the Metamorphoses itself is in its approach to narrative style. Importantly, the format of the Italian edition was designed for an audience that was intended to be somewhat broader than scholars and advanced students of Latin literature, while this new, English version is aimed more narrowly at specialists. It will thus be useful to begin by highlighting its major differences from the original publication.
The most significant of these is the absence of a Latin text and facing translation. Richard Tarrant’s critical edition of the Metamorphoses for the series of Oxford Classical Texts formed the basis of the text accompanying the Italian commentary.[3] The volumes in that series also included an apparatus criticus that reproduced most of the critical notes in Tarrant’s edition and employed the same sigla. Divergences from Tarrant’s text by the individual commentators were listed in the introductions to the separate volumes. For the most part, the most significant differences consisted in restoring to the text lines which Tarrant had judged to be spurious and bracketed accordingly. As a result, the number of times that the Valla commentators disagree with Tarrant varied considerably from one book to the other. Thus, for example, in Book V where Tarrant judges there to be no interpolation, Gianpiero Rosati notes only 5 divergences from Tarrant’s text, while in Book XIII Hardie disagrees with Tarrant’s choices in 22 instances. On the whole, the discussions of textual problems in the commentary more than suffice to document the salient issues, allowing readers to form their own judgements. So, while there was undoubtedly some minor advantage to the reader in having the text and apparatus included with the commentary, its omission in the English-language version is entirely justifiable. It is a safe assumption that users of this commentary will either own or have access to a copy of Tarrant’s edition, and in those cases where the commentators diverge from that text, readers will have full information in Tarrant’s critical notes.
The original version also included a facing Italian translation by Ludovica Koch (Books I–IV) and Gioachino Chiarini (Books V–XV), and the absence of a translation in this edition will be felt by at least a portion of potential users. As more than one reviewer of the Italian commentary has noted, each of the five commentators applies a different style of exegesis to his section of the poem and interest in explicating Ovid’s style, metrical technique, and lexical usage is not evenly distributed across the six volumes. Readers are rarely left in doubt as to how Kenney (Books VII–IX) understood any particular passage, because in his notes he makes frequent use of translation to explain interpretative difficulties. It is a particular pleasure to hear his voice now, so to speak, in the original English. But once the entirely reasonable decision was made not to include a Latin text, there was no compelling reason to provide a new translation, which would probably have delayed the project for a considerable time.[4] Users who are in doubt about how to construe Ovid’s Latin at any point will have access to other tools, including a wealth of recent translations in English, duly catalogued in Barchiesi’s exemplary Bibliographical Note at the head of Volume I.
Also absent from this edition is the lengthy essay by Charles Segal, “Il corpo e l’io nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio,” which constitutes the bulk of the introductory material in Volume I of the Valla edition. Reader’s will recognize Segal’s dark vision of sexuality and violence in the metamorphic body from his other publications on Ovid. And one may regret that his premature death robbed readers of the opportunity to see how this interpretative approach might have played out in the commentary that he was meant to contribute to this project. But this essay reads better as a stand-alone contribution to Ovidian criticism than as a general introduction to a commentary on the Metamorphoses, a function that is amply fulfilled in Barchiesi’s lightly revised Introduction.
For the rest, this edition follows the basic contours of its Italian progenitor, with a few changes in the ordering of material necessitated by the different format. Barchiesi’s Bibliographical Note, which now precedes his Introduction, has been updated and adapted to the English language orientation. So, for example, it now focuses on translations and studies of the poem in English, with gestures to the original Italian-speaking audience largely, but not completely, edited out. The bibliography on Ovid and the Metamorphoses is ever expanding and Barchiesi has made a commendable effort at including relevant materials that appeared after 2005. Students of the classical tradition and the reception of ancient authors will be especially grateful for Barchiesi’s labors in updating the corresponding sections of his Bibliographical Note. That this bibliography was already out of date when it was published is, of course, no criticism of its utility, because the pace of scholarly publication on Ovid is only accelerating and Barchiesi’s Baedeker to the first five hundred years of Ovidian studies will be an essential tool for students and scholars for years to come.
For the most part, Barchiesi’s Introduction maps closely onto his original introduction to the Italian edition, with occasional interventions to take into account more recent scholarship. It is, as one would expect from the pre-eminent Ovidian critic of this century, a tour-de-force; just what the user of this commentary would want or need. As Sergio Casali noted in the (virtual) pages of this journal, “Barchiesi succeeds in giving the inexperienced reader all the essential information, but from a fresh perspective which makes even the most basic paragraphs sound somehow ‘new’ even to the experienced reader.”[5] The English translation retains much of the elegance of the original, which can also be said of the translations of his commentary, as well the section by Rosati (Books IV–VI).
The commentaries themselves are reproduced largely as they appeared in the Italian edition. E.J. Kenney passed away in 2019 and his three books have been revised the least. Anyone who knew Ted Kenney even a little will appreciate Barchiesi’s introduction to the English version of his commentary, with its generous and, indeed, touching tribute to his unique talents as a student of literature and a commentator on ancient authors. As fine as Ilaria Marchesi’s translation of Kenney’s work for the Valla edition is, it is a delight to have his commentary in his native tongue, of which he was such a master. The commentaries by Barchiesi, Rosati, and Hardie have been revised by their authors, but not much changed, as random comparisons with the Italian original show. They consist primarily of stylistic alterations, with requisite interventions to introduce references to subsequent publications. At the very least, users of the Italian commentary will want to cross-check with the English translation to be sure that they have the authors’ last word on any given subject. That is not the case with Reed’s commentary on Books X–XII, which, as he notes, “revises, augments and supersedes” the Italian version in the Valla series. Much of the commentary has been extensively rewritten, even if the principal focus on the literary context and mythographical background remains unchanged. In addition, Reed now bases his commentary on a text that differs from Tarrant’s OCT in 36 instances, most of which are not trivial, as opposed to only 11 in the Valla edition. As he notes in the introduction to his commentary, Reed has made use of the resources of the Research Group “Nicolaus Heinsius” at the University of Huelva, and his textual preferences in this version reflect the conservative editorial tendencies of its members. Readers of these three books will look back to the Valla edition primarily to see if and how the commentator’s views have shifted.
About fifty years ago, when as an undergraduate I first took an interest in the Metamorphoses, an eminent Latinist once remarked to me that Ovid was the author whom classicists most enjoyed reading in their leisure time; but serious scholars worked on Virgil. As an unserious person, I did not need this added incentive to pursue my interests in Ovid, but it must be conceded that what that scholar said then was largely true of the preceding century. At that time, there was no modern critical edition of the Metamorphoses. Only the first volume of Franz Bömer’s commentary had been published and the only useful commentary on the complete poem was the very dated work by Moritz Haupt and Rudolf Ehwald (with a bibliography added by Michael von Albrecht in 1966).[6] And critical studies were few and far between, with those by L.P Wilkinson and Hermann Fränkel standing out in a very small crowd.[7] As Barchiesi notes in his graceful introduction to the commentary on Books VII-IX, it was the author of that section, E.J. Kenney, who played a major role in altering the landscape of Ovidian studies through his influence as a scholar and a teacher. But with the final publication of this commentary, it should also be acknowledged that Barchiesi himself and his “companions on this long journey,” as he calls them—Rosati, Reed, and Hardie, along with Kenney—have placed a capstone on the last fifty years of scholarship on the Metamorphoses. The rising generation of Ovid’s readers has every reason to be grateful.
Notes
[1] A. Barchiesi, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. I: Libri I-II (Milan 2005); A. Barchiesi and G. Rosati, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. II: Libri III-IV (Milan 2007); G. Rosati, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. III: Libri V-VI (Milan 2009); E.J. Kenney, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. IV: Libri VII-IX (Milan 2011); J.D. Reed, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. V: Libri X-XII (Milan 2013); P. Hardie, Ovidio: Metamorfosi. Vol. VI: Libri XIII-XV (Milan 2015).
[2] Vol. I by Sergio Casali, BMCR 2006.07.38; Vol. II by Gauthier Liberman, BMCR 2007.10.55; Vol. III by Karen Sara Myers, BMCR 2010.07.33; Vol. IV by Joseph B. Solodow, BMCR 2012.03.59; and Vol. VI by Bartolo Natali, BMCR 2016.03.46. For a detailed review of Vol. V, see F. Stok in Exemplaria Classica 18 (2014) 269-72. Of course, reviews of the individual volumes have also appeared in a broad spectrum of other scholarly journals, including, in the interest of full disclosure, two by me: Vol. II in Phoenix 63 (2010) 412-14 and Vol. VI in Exemplaria Classica 21 (2017) 331-33.
[3] P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant (Oxford, 2004).
[4] Experto credite: I am completing a translation for the Loeb Classical Library.
[5] Above, n. 2.
[6] F. Bömer, P. Ovidius Naso. Metamorphosen, 7 vols. (Heidelberg 1969-86); M. Haupt and R. Ehwald, P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosen, rev. ed. M. von Albrecht (Zürich 1966).
[7] L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge 1955); H. Fränkel, Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1945).