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OVIDIO, METAMORFOSI. VOLUME II. LIBRI III-IV. Edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero Rosati, with translation by Ludovica KochI. Rome: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla; Milano: A. Mondadori (Scrittori Greci e Latini). 2007. Pp. xxxi, 354.
WITH THE TIMELY APPEARANCE of this, the second in the six-volume commentary on the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses for the Lorenzo VaUa series, the reader has good reason to hope that the completion of the project is in view and this exceptional resource wiU soon be available in fuU. For a complete commentary on the poem readers hitherto have had to rely primarily on the eccentric and (alas) indispensible morass of notes compiled by Franz Borner (Heidelberg 1969-86). But with the recent publication of the extensive commentary in ItaUan by Luigi Galasso (Turin 2000), a work that deserves to be better known in anglophone circles, students of the poem have had access to a commentary more attuned to the literary qualities of Ovid's masterpiece. The commentary being overseen by Alessandro Barchiesi has many of the same quaUties to be found in Galasso's work, while the more ample confines of this series aUow for greater depth and exposition on points of detail. The volume under review contains notes by Barchiesi on Book 3, whfle Gianpiero Rosati takes up the thread in Book 4, thus offering a glimpse of his approach in the next volume, containing Books 5 and 6, for which he wiU have sole responsibility. Within the Umits of this review, there is no scope for detailed criticism of the sort that an important commentary such as this wiU inevitably stimulate, and so here we wiU be limited to a few notes of applause, quibbling, and exhortation.
The text of the Metamorphoses is taken from the Oxford Classical Text by R. J. Tarrant (Oxford 2004), from which Barchiesi and Rosati diverge in only nine instances Usted in the introduction (xxxvi), which amount to restoring...