Introduction
This book is the English version of a work first published in Italian in 1983 and reprinted in 2016. It originated from my tesi di laurea in Latin literature completed a few years earlier at the University of Florence under the supervision of Antonio La Penna, and followed the tenets of that disciplinary sphere, as was customary in Italian academia at the time: it focused on the philological dimension of Ovid’s text, the framing of the individual episode within the structure of the immediate context and the poem as a whole, and analysis of language and style. The main aim of the work was to interpret the two important episodes of Narcissus and Pygmalion—i.e. Ovid’s rewriting of the respective myths—and to highlight the author’s poetics, in response to the considerable interest that had grown in the latter decades of the twentieth century (documented, and greatly bolstered, by G.B. Conte’s influential 1974 essay ...