Ovid Metamorphoses

R. J. Tarrant’s Oxford Classical Texts edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses presents the poem in Latin as a critical text for scholarly use. It is not an English translation. Tarrant reassesses the manuscript tradition and the transmitted text throughout the fifteen books, taking a notably searching approach to suspected interpolations and recording significant variants and conjectures in the critical apparatus.

For readers working directly with Ovid’s Latin, the importance of the edition lies in those textual decisions. Passages familiar from earlier editions are sometimes bracketed or reconsidered, while the apparatus makes clear where alternative readings remain plausible. This is therefore a specialist edition for philological and advanced literary study of the Metamorphoses, rather than the version to choose for a first encounter with Ovid in English.