Dirty Love: The Geneaology of the Ancient Greek Novel by Tim Whitmarsh

390 PHOENIX transformative elegiac response to epic and of Circe in Remedia Amoris and Metamorphoses deftly becoming an emotionally volatile personality that is “almost the antithesis of the Homeric Circe” (211). Ovid’s reimaginings of Homer’s women both retain their famous epic pasts and give them new and vastly different narrative opportunities. The penultimate chapter, “Homeric Desires,” takes Odyssey 8’s tale of Ares and Aphrodite as a case study. Specifically, “ ‘repetition with a difference’ is central to Ovidian intertextuality,” and the poet relies on his “intimate understanding of the power of repetition to transform his subject” (213). Boyd traces Ovid’s divergent retellings in Ars Amatoria 2, in which Vulcan becomes the butt of the joke in a lesson on discretion, and in Met. 4, as part of the Minyades’ (meta)literary discussion. Ovid’s reiterations are a form of reception, and the chapter clarifies this well. Finally, as a pendant to Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine (“Homer’s Gods in Rome”) considers Ares and Aphrodite in Ovid’s day when as Mars Ultor and Venus Genetrix they become more the dignified patrons of Rome and less the adulterous lovers of Homer. Fasti 3 comes into play, as Boyd suggests that Mars only develops a full literary personality in a Roman context (240). Boyd’s project offers much food for thought, though a few quibbles arise. The lack of a proper conclusion is a missed opportunity to draw together the many threads of a discursive, occasionally diffuse monograph. The topic of Homer is vast, and I am sympathetic to the argument that a comprehensive, detailed catalog of Ovid’s Homeric receptions is not the goal here. Nevertheless, it might have been useful to make an attempt at an overview, perhaps in the introduction. In terms of configuration, the chapters occasionally seem a disparate collection of ideas interesting in themselves but not in resonance with each other; a consistent through-line is not always obvious, though the book’s subtitle of Authority, Repetition, and Reception nods to one. In that vein, the book does well in taking up repetition and reception, but its treatment of authority is a little unclear. For instance, one should be wary of believing that Ovid is fundamentally respectful of poetic authority: he is no Statius humbly admitting secondary status. With regard to political authority, neither was Ovid entirely supine towards Augustus, the inescapable presence of the era who brandished auctoritas as his personal watchword. A brief discussion of Ovid’s specifically Augustan context may have made the introduction even more useful. In the end, this is a book to recommend gladly. With her elegantly written monograph Boyd has given a great gift both to Ovid studies and to classical philology as a whole. Whether she has entirely managed to sketch out “a broader framework for Ovid’s reception of the Homeric poems” (5) may be up for debate, but she has absolutely succeeded in encouraging her readers to engage anew with Ovid, Homer, and their creative legacy, and for that we may indeed be grateful. University of Vermont Angeline Chiu Dirty Love: The Geneaology of the Ancient Greek Novel. By Tim Whitmarsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. 201. In this slim but ambitious volume, Whitmarsh tackles two subjects on which a great deal of ink has been spilt without producing much in the way of scholarly consensus: the origins of the Greek novel as a genre, and the influences of traditional Greek genres and contact with non-Greek cultures, particularly the Near East. Sensibly, Whitmarsh does BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 391 not attempt to propose any single doctrinaire answers, but instead encourages us to view the traditional questions from a different angle—or rather, many different angles. The work forms a kaleidoscope of small units, connected by the argument that the Greek erotic novel should be understood in terms of what Whitmarsh calls “Dirty Love”: both the Greek novel proper and novel-like texts explore and encourage non-endogamous connections (between people, between worlds) within a hybridized environment. The volume is divided into five parts, each consisting of several smaller than usual chapters, twenty in all, not including the Prelude. “Hellenism and Hybridity” (Chapters...

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