Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.511-733. Latin Text with Commentary

Reviewed by Elizabeth Manwell, Professor, Kalamazoo College on 6/23/23

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The text provides everything you would want: introductory essays, text, vocabulary, and commentary. There is no comprehensive glossary (for more details see below).

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The text is accurate and error-free. They have also consulted a wide array of scholarship, which informs the commentary. This is especially clear in the introductory essays, where they accurately summarize various critical approaches to the Metamorphoses (for more details see below).

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

As noted above, the text engages with recent secondary bibliography. It is written in a way that will make it useful to decades to come. The materials for students are absolutely appropriate to an intermediate Latin student's needs (for more details see below).

Clarity rating: 4

The essays and supporting materials are written with clarity, and in a lively style. There are occasional places in the commentary where knowledge is assumed that might elude even the advanced student (e.g., discussions of focalization in terms of narratology). Likewise, the essays are lively and erudite, but might some language might be a bit too elevated for readers with less cultural capital. Yet, for the most part, these do not intrude, and offer points of entry for those readers with more experience (for more details see below).

Consistency rating: 5

The commentary has been carefully edited to provide a consistent voice throughout.

Modularity rating: 5

The division of the commentary is one of its real strengths, and it is easy to see how this could be incorporated into a reading course for even early intermediate students (for more details see below).

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

Again, the organization of the essays, text and commentary is a great strength of this resource (for more details see below).

Interface rating: 5

The interface works well, both online and as a PDF.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

Grammar is clear and error-free throughout.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The authors have provided rich cultural detail about the text (for more details see below).

Comments

Gildenhard and Zissos’s text offers the intermediate Latin student the kinds of support that they need, which other commentators too often forget to include. This starts with a list of abbreviations (including things as simple as macrons and BC vs BCE, which could be really confusing for students), and a series of essays to orient a reader unfamiliar with who Ovid is, when he is writing, and what sort of work the Metamorphoses is. Essays on Ovid’s Theban tales and the specifics characters of the set text (Met. 3.511-733) offer important context. The second essay, “Ovid’s Literary Progression,” is especially useful for anyone teaching the Metamorphoses, as it explores clearly and succinctly the kinds of expectations a reader would have had about Ovid’s poetry, and how those expectations are upset even in the poem’s first lines. G. and Z. have also taken pains to include charts to organize material (e.g., key features of major ancient epics), which communicate key background information.

The set text (the tale of Pentheus), one that does not often appear in textbooks, is divided into sections of eight to twelve lines. Each section is followed by vocabulary (in order of appearance in the text), Study Questions (parsing, scansion, grammar, etc.), Stylistic Appreciation (word choice, imagery, literary devices), and Discussion Points (larger contextual, literary, or interpretive matters). These questions really set this commentary apart, by encouraging students to identify those places where the Latin might trip them up, and then allowing them to think about Ovid’s method and its larger meaning. The commentary considers the text as four separate episodes. Commentary entries are quite robust for a text of this sort (more akin to a Green and Yellow, than Bryn Mawr). Yet, the authors take care to explain information that might be unfamiliar (e.g., offering a grammatical explanation, and translating it). Thus, there is plenty of support for the intermediate student, and more still for the advanced. If teaching to intermediate students, it would benefit them greatly to first work through the Study Questions and then approach the commentary: the length of the entries and the details offered there don’t always offer a quick answer and will make more sense to the student who has already done some preparation. As with the essays, the commentary offers illustrations and helpful charts, to help students visualize textual information and unfamiliar items (e.g., thyrsus, parts of a ship). At points, they inset additional information, for readers who want to know more, but which is not necessary for making sense of the passage.

There are two appendices: one on rhetorical and syntactic figures, which is short enough not to overwhelm, but long enough to be very useful. Examples of such figures are starred (*) in the commentary, and this would be a useful text to use to introduce students to basic figures, with sufficient reinforcement to make them stick. The other appendix, on versification, is clear and detailed, yet there are no long and short marks produced above the text to visually distinguish long and short syllables. Indeed, there are no macrons in the text or the vocabulary. This is perhaps the single thing missing that an intermediate student new to Latin poetry might really desire. Yet, overall, this is an excellent teaching tool, and a very welcome addition.