Ovid’s Homer: Authority, Repetition, and Reception

Ovid’s Homer examines the Latin poet’s engagement with the Homeric poems throughout his career. Boyd offers detailed analysis of Ovid’s reading and reinterpretation of a range of Homeric episodes and characters from both epics, and demonstrates the pervasive presence of Homer in Ovid’s work. The resulting intertextuality, articulated as a poetics of paternity or a poetics of desire, is particularly marked in scenes that have a history of scholiastic interest or critical intervention; Ovid repeatedly asserts his mastery as Homeric reader and critic through his creative response to alternative readings, and in the process renews Homeric narrative for a sophisticated Roman readership. Boyd offers new insight into the dynamics of a literary tradition, illuminating a previously underappreciated aspect of Ovidian intertextuality.

Reviews

“This innovative study offers the first scholarly investigation specifically devoted to Ovid’s reception of the Homeric poems across the breadth of his Latin poetry – from Ovid’s earliest amatory poems through the erotodidactic corpus into the works of his maturity, the Metamorphoses and Fasti, all the way to the exile poetry. The volume will be of interest to students not only of Homer and Ovid, but also of the reception of classical mythology and of the sophisticated artistic and critical traditions their works inform.”
–Alison Keith, University of Toronto

“Surprisingly, this is the first book to tackle comprehensively the presence of Homeric poetry in the works of Ovid. The very conception of the topic is a major strength. Barbara Boyd, one of our best Ovidian critics, has complete control of the texts, and she brilliantly deploys her fine interpretive skills in examining the reception of Homer in Ovid.”
–Richard F. Thomas, Harvard University