Playing Gods explores the nuanced strategy of reading that the Metamorphoses, according to Feldherr, stages for the contemporary Roman reader. It does so from the much less examined perspective of cultural discourses, particularly those of civic and religious spectacle and of the visual arts. F. argues that the poem operates on a ‘politics of fiction’ that works toward constructing a double vision, or a double reading response, as readers encounter and negotiate images of status, hierarchy, and power. For F., the proem (1.1–4) lays down the framework for this kind of response: while the promise to unfold an unbroken (perpetuum) history of time that links a Greek mythological past to Ovid's contemporary Rome draws the reader's attention to the narrative of metamorphosis per se, the poem's claim to be the result of ‘fine spinning’ (deducite), conversely, encourages the same reader to contemplate the poem as a literary and artistic artifact. The principles, or the ‘politics’ of fiction, that promote a simultaneous view of the Metamorphoses as content and form, furthermore, emerge as analogous to the principles that govern the universe in which the reader and Ovid's work exist, since, as the proem announces, all things in our world are changed into new forms by an external force (i.e. the gods). From the perspective of readers, then, the poem is a mise-en-abîme of our world, its workings, and hierarchies (here (p. 2) F.’s reference to the politics of fiction in Julio Cortázar's La continuidad de los parques (1956) is very apt).

Discussion is organized into three parts (Part One: ‘Fiction and the Empire’; Part Two: ‘Spectacle’; and Part Three: ‘Ovid and the Visual Arts’). All the close readings, some of which are excellent (e.g. the episode of Io as a parallel between the first representation of reading in the Metamorphoses and the audience's task of interpreting the book as text (ch. 1); Pythagoras’ view of sacrifice as a model for modes of viewing which are generated by metamorphosis (ch. 3); the clever appeal to the amphitheatre as a paradigm for grasping Ovid's narrative as imperial display (ch. 4); or the analysis of Pygmalion as a viewer, rather than a maker, of art (ch. 6)), are examined through the lens of the double vision which, F. argues, prompts readers to negotiate the complex relationship between fiction and reality in the poem. That the word ‘politics’ figures prominently in the subtitle of this book, is not to say, however, that its central thesis seeks to emphasize an Ovidian view of Augustus. Nor does discussion take sides on the pro- and anti-Augustan debate (and here one can argue that F. stands with Kennedy, who argues that the term ‘Augustus’ has become ‘the point of intersection of contesting ideologies [in criticism's] control over the discourse of the past’ (1992, 27)). ‘The politics of Metamorphoses that [Playing Gods] addresses’, F. explains, ‘[aims to] expand our understanding of the modes by which the work facilitates the audience's reflection on and redefinition of the hierarchies operative within Roman society’ (7). Thus, for instance, when it comes to the power relations between the artist and the princeps, F. contends that ‘the grand fictions that the poem discloses seem to be the artist's way of controlling and containing empire as well as emperor; at others’, he adds, ‘the comparative triviality of the artist's product is balanced by the recognition of the real status of the artist’ (61). Fiction, therefore, has certain limitations in articulating hierarchy and identity for the reader, since it is both able and unable to gain the authority and presence of other discursive forms.

Methodologically speaking, F. partially complements new historicist approaches to the Metamorphoses (especially those of Feeney (1991) and Barchiesi (1997)) in his attempt to examine the poem, not simply from a formalistic perspective, but for its capacity to become a constituent element of the discourses of power and culture current in Augustan Rome. A departure from previous criticism, and particularly from Hardie's study of illusion vis-à-vis audiences (2002), can be found in F.’s examination of the trajectory of reception from the ‘outside inwards’, i.e. from the reader of the Metamorphoses’ real world into the text of the Metamorphoses: ‘my emphasis’, F. states, ‘will be to imagine [the text's illusionistic capacity] to appear from the outside in, that is, from the horizons defined by the material and social circumstances of its first readers’ (9). Some readers might take issue with this approach, and F. is aware of a potential crack in the formative stages of his methodology (9–10): the ‘realities’ that Ovid's first readers may have brought to their response/s to his poem remain subject to speculation, as well as being too varied to be gathered into one neat representative form of reception; so, too, are both the set of outside references which might have been brought by audiences into the interpretation of Ovid's work, and the way in which each reader would have applied them. Also problematic is F.’s identification of Augustus as an artist, rather than as a promoter of the arts, especially in the light of the discussion of Perseus in ch. 7, where one of the similarities between the hero and emperor is that they are, emphatically, not artists. Presumably, by artist, F. means something close to creator or maker of the Rome in which writers such as Ovid operate?

While its target audience may, arguably, exclude the non-expert, Playing Gods will be equally interesting and relevant to literary theorists and critics and cultural historians. F. offers an attractive new model for reading politics in a work of fiction, and pushes, considerably further than recent studies of the Metamorphoses, the boundaries of our understanding of the interplay between narrative and exegesis, fiction and reality, and content and form in the reception of Ovid's poem.