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Review Article: Editing Ovid's Metamorphoses: Problems and Possibilities

The appearance of a new Teubner edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a major event in classical studies. No genuinely new critical edition of this fundamental poem had been published since 1914, and for some time the only editions readily available have been unsuitable for scholarly purposes. The task of producing a new critical text has been undertaken and subsequently abandoned several times in the past half-century; W. S. Anderson has now faced it intrepidly and completed it with remarkable dispatch,2 thereby earning the congratulations of all readers of the Metamorphoses. The reviewer of a critical edition must attempt to answer two questions: how does the text printed by the editor differ from those already in existence and how fully and reliably does the apparatus record the evidence on which the text is based? Most users of editions will naturally be more interested in the answer to the first of these questions, but the second is arguably even more important: an edition that accurately records all important manuscript variants and conjectures has a value independent of the quality of its text, since its readers have the means with which to dissent from the dubious or eccentric choices of the editor. That is one reason for devoting much of this discussion to the apparatus of the new Teubner text. There are two further reasons for this emphasis: first, A.'s text is relatively free of novelty and so calls for little comment on that score; second, I am myself preparing a critical text of the Metamorphoses for the Oxford Classical Texts series, and that edition, together with a projected companion volume of notes on disputed passages, will provide a full account of the places in which I would print a text different from A.'s. The main purpose of this review is thus to consider how A.'s edition adds to the evidence available for editing the Metamorphoses, to assess how well it pre-