The biographical information is useful, but I would like to have seen at least a word of caution about taking at face value all the stories that Ovid tells us about himself. The introduction begins with an outline of Ovid’s life and his works, before focusing on the Heroides overall and then on the letters of Acontius and Cydippe. One of the book’s strengths is Michalopoulos’ good command of secondary literature in at least five languages and the way he draws attention to it both in regard to specific ideas about passages under discussion and to broader motifs of the elegiac genre and its literary tradition. The text is accompanied by an elegant and accurate prose translation that will be helpful to students of Latin. Discussions of textual problems are mostly informative and helpfully address the numerous textual difficulties of these letters, even though they rarely solve them. The book is nicely produced and full of excellent points that shed new light on Ovid’s text or summarize the critical insights of modern scholarship. Michalopoulos’ work is ambitious as he sets out to cover a wide range of issues, from textual criticism to literary theory. The book builds on Kenney’s 1996 edition and commentary on the paired Heroides, an exemplary work for its insight, rigor, and succinctness, but not particularly up-to-date with literary criticism. The current volume, an introduction, text, translation, and commentary on Heroides 20-1 (the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe) comes after his English commentary on Heroides 16-17 (published in 2006). The work of Andreas Michalopoulos has contributed over the years to this growing scholarly interest in the Heroides by providing some of the tools necessary for critics and advanced students of Latin poetry. And yet, the work of experts in textual criticism is far from over in the case of the Heroides, a problematic collection which still lacks a solid critical edition.

Those theoretical trends breathed new life into texts that had previously been the focus of traditional philology. The literary value of the Heroides is now established thanks to the rise of intertextuality and gender studies in interpreting Latin poetry. Ovid’s Heroides were often dismissed as indulgent exercises in empty rhetoric until scholars such as Farrell, Barchiesi, Hinds, Lindheim, and Spentzou reconsidered the voice of Ovid’s heroines.

Heroides by Ovid