Ovid's Homer: Authority, Repetition, Reception
ISBN: 9780190680077
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Classical Studies;

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.


Barbara Weiden Boyd is Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Ovid's Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores, and editor of Brill's Companion to Ovid and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition.

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