Ovid’s Homer: Authority, Repetition, and Reception by Barbara Weiden Boyd (review)

Everything about this book is provocative. The title alone will cause Ovidian scholars to realize that, for all of the treatments of intertextuality in Ovid’s poetry produced over the last few decades, we have until now lacked an extended study of his reception of Homer. Certainly there have been treatments of Homeric episodes in the works of Ovid, and the commentaries point out relevant Homeric parallels, but, as Richard Thomas comments in his advance praise of Boyd’s book, “Surprisingly, this is the first book to tackle comprehensively the presence of Homeric poetry in the works of Ovid.” What is not a surprise is that Boyd, who has influenced the discussion of Ovid and Ovidianism for over two decades, is the one who wrote it.

Thomas’ comment does not do justice to the book, since Boyd does not, in fact, seek to provide a comprehensive treatment of her subject. Indeed, it would have been a terrible idea to try, and it is a testament to Boyd’s good sense as a scholar that she has opted instead “to sketch . . . the outlines of a broader framework for Ovid’s reception of the Homeric poems” (5). But she does more than sketch; she illustrates how to read Ovid’s Homer by examining passages from the entire Ovidian corpus. Part of the technique involves learning how to see Homer in Ovid’s crowded intertextual landscape. That does not mean ignoring Vergil et al. To try would detract from the richness of Ovid’s interaction with his literary predecessors. Rather, Boyd shows us that examining Ovid’s reading of Homer often leads to a deeper appreciation of Ovid’s reading of those other authors.

Boyd demonstrates this technique in nine chapters, each of which deals with themes familiar to readers of both Homer and Ovid. Heroism, passion, and the gods each receive a chapter, but Boyd devotes most of the central chapters to the complex relationship between fathers and their sons and daughters. Treating her subject thematically instead of analyzing Homer in the love poetry, Homer in the Metamorphoses, etc., makes for a much more enjoyable and informative study, since we end up with a better sense of Ovid’s ongoing dialogue with Homer’s texts throughout his career.

Boyd also does an admirable job of demonstrating her bona fides as a learned reader of Homer without delving into the minutiae of Homeric scholarship. At times she acknowledges that she must bypass an issue of major concern to scholars of Homeric poetry, but her footnotes always point interested readers to appropriate resources for more information. In fact, that is another way in which this book is provocative: the footnotes and bibliography contain plenty of suggestions for further scholarship on Ovid’s reception of Homer. Ovid’s knowledge of the scholia to Homer, for example, has a lot of potential.

Boyd sometimes errs on the side of providing too much summary of an episode, but that is doubtless in service of making the book accessible to a wider readership, and so we should not fault her for that. Boyd has also translated all of the major passages in Greek and Latin into English, and she has mostly eschewed the technical jargon of literary criticism. For these reasons, advanced undergraduates in Classics as well as professional scholars without Greek or Latin will be able to read this book with profit. Without question, however, scholars of Latin poetry are the primary audience, and those interested in the reception of Homer will find much of interest.