Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women by Ioannis Ziogas (review)

These days a book on Ovid, whose recuperation as an author of the first rank has long since been accomplished, ought to have something new to offer. Ovid and Hesiod is such a book, not least because it defamiliarizes the familiar Roman poet. Ziogas has the daunting task of tracking Ovid’s debt to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women—not only its succession of stories about women taken by gods, but also its program of destabilizing the martial epic of Homer. Ziogas succeeds admirably, bringing to bear attentive readings of the Catalogue’s fragments as well as (primarily) the Metamorphoses, and broadening the Hesiodic-Ovidian dialogue to include other authors as needed, among them Homer, Callimachus, Apollonius, and Vergil.

Ziogas’ introduction lays the critical foundation for the chapters that follow, the pillars of which are essentially (by this reviewer’s count) four. (A) Close attention to Hesiod, both the texts and the tradition, the latter encompassing the reception of Hesiod from Homer to the Hellenistic period and beyond. (B) Sustained engagement with Hesiod on Ovid’s part across his career. (C) Ovid’s engagement with Hesiod as an intersection of the textual (words, subject matter, themes) and the generic. (D) Hesiodic poetry as a gendered ēhoie-strain of epic—one concerned with “female excellence and renown” rather than “glorious deeds of men” (13)—which serves as a master or “host” genre (14) for the spacious and often erotic Ovidian epic that is the Metamorphoses. Ziogas shows these pillars functioning in various Ovidian passages, from the Heroides to the Amores to the Metamorphoses, and aptly suggests “how. . . interrelated texts influence each other” (2). Particularly striking is how the legendary contest between Homer and Hesiod has echoes in a similar rivalry between Vergil and Ovid (14–15).

At times the introduction feels a little piecemeal, a mild critique that applies to the book as a whole. For example, Ziogas dutifully gives Ēhoiai as the alternate title for the Catalogue of Women (1), but gets around to etymologizing the title five pages later (ἠ’ οἵη, 6, and even then without much context for the important but formulaic nature of these words). Ziogas discusses the Homeric/Hesiodic Certamen by way of a Dio Chrysostom anecdote about Alexander and Philip (11–12), but re-introduces the Certamen a little further on, almost as if it hadn’t been mentioned before, when discussing Vergil and Ovid (14–15). The alignment of intertextuality with questions of genre might have been handled more explicitly, as opposed to initially being relegated to a footnote (n. 49, p. 14). Admittedly, this is quibbling, and Ziogas’ ideal readers should already be well acquainted with Hesiodic reception and with strategies of reading ancient authors. On the whole, Ziogas demonstrates deep awareness of previous Hesiodic and Ovidian scholarship and sets up the rest of the book with intriguing case studies (some of which are expanded in later chapters).

Chapter 1 makes various connections between the Catalogue and Heroides 16 (and 17). These include Paris’ phrase Venus aurea (16.35), which not only translates the Hesiodic formula χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης (fr. 196.5 M-W), but also recalls how Hesiod frames the wooing of Helen as a contest of wealth among her suitors; and Paris’ genealogy, which is problematic if Homer is taken as Ovid’s model, but patently unproblematic if Ovid has followed the Hesiodic stemma. Ziogas’ argumentation here is nuanced but convincing and avails itself of established intertextual theories (such as Ross’ Alexandrian footnote) that Ovidians have come to expect from their poet—nowhere more so than in the suggestion that Paris and Helen themselves are among Hesiod’s readership and cite his text to further their rhetorical claims (38–43 passim).

Chapter 2, by far the longest in the book, lays out a case for the Theogony, Works and Days, and especially the Catalogue as thoroughgoing intertexts for the Metamorphoses—most obviously in book 1, which contains the cosmogony, the ages...