A Reply to P. Valeri-Tomaszuk

199 A REPLY TO P. VALERI-TOMASZUK P. Valeri-Tomaszuk's rebarbative review of my Ovid With Love appeared recently in EMC n.s.3.1 (1984) 114-116. Significantly, the reviewer begins with dTScussion of the cover of the book; and the comments that follow are no less lacking in substance. However, even if one ignores the trivial, the conjectural and the eccentric, the review still does not quite deserve to be passed over in complete silence. For, although sensible readers will have rejected instinctively much of the reviewer's criticism, they will nevertheless have been given an incorrect impression of the nature of Ovid With Love by several of Valeri-Tomaszuk's remarks. - - - - - To start with some less serious but still typical inaccuracies, Valeri-Tomaszuk misquotes the statements on p. 3 of my Introduction, shows a somewhat surprising inability to count (in connection with the number of pages occupied by my vocabulary) and, aptly enough, ends her review with a misleading comment from which readers would infer that I myself would describe the Ars as a "Latin Kama Sutra or Perfumed Garden". To move on to morermportant points, discussion of the lierrorli partially responsible for Ovid's exile is abbreviated but not avoided (see my Introduction p.2, and also p.21, where the reader is referred to Thibault's The Mystery of Ovid's Exile); so far from not allowing the beginner to reach his own critical interpretation and usurping the corrective function of the instructor, I explicitly recommend in my Preface that less advanced students should be told to omit the literary criticism in my commentary and that teachers should use that portion as they see fit (and my arrangement of the notes is specifically designed to facilitate such a process); in addition, I do point out and analyse wit, humour and jests, and, in fact, I do so more fully than any previous commentator on the Ars. To conclude with a still more disquieting class of errors, ones which suggest various deficiencies in scholarship, the remarks on p. 143 and 194 of my commentary, which are quoted (the latter misquoted) as examples of humorous additions by me, are hardly that, but are valid points of interpretation, and the observation that Ovid Ars 1.453 contains a reminiscence of Virgil Aeneid 6.128f. is of coursenot, as Valeri-Tomaszuk apparently imagines, an original contribution of my own. UNIVERSITY OF NATAL P. MURGATROYD ...