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Acknowledgments
I began my study of Ovid’s Metamorphoses while I was a graduate student in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. The Near Eastern background of its Amathusian myths became the topic of my dissertation, which was guided to completion by the members of my committee: my Doktorvater G. Karl Galinsky, Michael von Albrecht, John Kroll, M. Gwyn Morgan, and Douglass Parker. All of them were very tolerant of my ideas about Near Eastern elements in Greek and Roman myth, at a time when this topic was still controversial. It seems somehow fitting that a project that began in graduate school has come to fruition at the end of my career, albeit in a very different form.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people. I would like to thank Professor Athanassios Vergados of Newcastle University, who has provided support in many ways over the years, most importantly by being a good friend. My wife, Angela, generously gave me the time that I needed to focus on the final stages of this book, while James Lipka, my long-suffering guitar teacher, offered me a much needed distraction from it. Todd Green, Will Croft, Skyler van Valkenburgh, and Andrew Minton, the editorial team at Wiley, made the production of this book virtually painless, as did my copy-editor, Manuela Tecusan, and Surendar Adhavan, who oversaw the production process. Any infelicities in the text are due to my inveterate stubbornness. Franklin & Marshall College provided sabbatical funds that allowed me to spend a year in the excellent library of Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg.
If nothing else, I hope to have left behind something to remind my children, Caelan Alexander Patrick O’Bryhim, Brendan Augustus Conchobhor O’Bryhim, Aidan Constantine Conlan O’Bryhim, and Collin Arthur Declan O’Bryhim, that their father was not, in Milton’s words, a burden to the earth.
Shawn O’BryhimArcadia, Indiana
Preface
Of Ovid’s many works, Book 10 of the Metamorphoses has had perhaps the greatest impact on western culture. Its tales of Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and his statue, and Venus and Adonis have inspired artists, poets, writers, and composers from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Because most commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses survey large portions of the epic, the attention that they are able devote to individual books is limited. Bömer’s German commentary is a scholarly resource that provides a wealth of information on the individual myths that constitute Book 10, but offers little analysis of their significance to the book as a whole. Although the German commentary on the Metamorphoses by Haupt, Korn, Ewaldt, and von Albrecht is better for literary analysis, the space devoted to Book 10 is limited by the commentary’s broad scope. The same can be said of Bosselaar’s Metamorphoseon in Dutch and Galasso’s Le metamorfosi in Italian. Although Anderson’s commentary on Books 6–10 is very good, it rarely ventures beyond literary analysis, as does Hill’s short commentary on Books 9–12, which is intended for students of literature. Reed’s Ovidio: Metamorfosi, vol.