This multi-authored volume offers an approach to classical literature which brings both novel insights and disquieting surprises. These surprises are such that they deepen the Heraclitean truism that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. In this respect, the volume mirrors one of Ovid's greatest achievements as a poet, which may be summed up in the famous line from his Metamorphoses: ‘omnia mutantur, nihil interit’ (Met. 15.165, ‘everything changes, nothing perishes’). The line is conspicuously absent from the volume, which is no cause for criticism, but rather underscores the freshness of the volume's approach to a theme that is both well-established in scholarship (cf. T. S. Thorsen, JRS 106 (2016), 345–6) and still in need of exploration.

The volume is an important contribution to the history of Ovidian scholarship. In the hands of the editors, Laurel Fulkerson and Tim Stover, the volume embodies its own theme, repetition, but also points out new directions, for example through the editors’ proposal of three categories of Ovidian repetition in the ‘Introduction: echoes of the past’: ‘revision (of a published work), recycling (of his own words) and reappropriation (of the work of others)’ (8). These categories of repetition are then exemplified by the person of Echo, an obvious case in point. In many ways the introduction, as well as all subsequent chapters, is indebted to the important book The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (1987) by Stephen Hinds, who also closes this volume by revisiting the metamorphosis of Persephone beyond Ovid, in the tantalising world of Claudian. Thus Hinds provides the volume with an exemplary ‘repeat performance’ of scholarship.

Within this framework, the volume's overall trajectory departs from the deeper ontological implication of Ovid's poetics of openness, discussed by Andrew Feldherr in ch. 1, which focuses on repetition and representation in Ovid's Phaeton narrative. The volume then spans the historical trajectory from Homer to Late Antiquity, pointing out avenues of Ovidian reception within Christian Europe in the final chapter. Throughout this trajectory, the volume pivots on Ovid's chef d'oeuvre, the Metamorphoses, and demonstrates that Ovid necessarily opens his universe up for the strong presence of others alongside himself when he employs repetition as one of his major tropes. This feature has numerous consequences, which are revealed in masterly fashion by the various contributors to the volume.

This ‘otherness’ may appear in the form of influential precursors, as shown by Barbara Weiden Boyd in ch. 2, who focuses on Homeric features in several key Ovidian passages. In ch. 3, Peter Heslin unravels disquieting aspects of Achilles’ character as he is recast in the Metamorphoses, and in ch. 4 Antony Augoustakis draws a chilling portrait of Ovid's Hecuba, with important reverberations for our understanding of both her Euripidean pedigree and the metapoetics of repetition more generally. Next, literary followers also contribute to the particular openness of Ovidian literary dynamics through their receptions of Ovid's work, as demonstrated in ch. 8 by Alison Keith, who throws new light on the re-workings of Ovidian erotic-martial epic in the Flavian poets Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus. Furthermore, in ch. 9 Neil W. Bernstein uses quantitative analysis (by means of the digital Tesserae project) alongside qualitative examination in order to identify the Ovidianism of Silius Italicus; last but not least, in ch. 10, Stephen Hinds revisits the metamorphosis of Persephone through Claudian's receptions of Ovid.

Finally, Ovid's poetry is open not only to the otherness of past and future poetic colleagues, but also to other versions — repetitions, one might say — of his own works and himself as a poet, as demonstrated by Darcy Krasne's ‘Succeeding succession: cosmic and earthly succession in the Fasti and the Metamorphoses’ (ch. 5), Sharon James's ‘Rape and repetition in Ovid's Metamorphoses’ (ch. 6) and Peter Knox's ‘Metamorphoses in a cold climate’ (ch. 7), focusing on the exile poetry, where even female figures such as Niobe and the Heliades may represent the poet (cf. 191, and Pont. 1.2.29–32).

A paradoxical effect of this ‘key feature of Ovidian poetics, [and] techniques that encompass much of what makes Ovid Ovid’ (4) is that what may appear familiar becomes alienating. And at this point the effect becomes doubly paradoxical. For at the same time as Ovid's epic narratives estrange that which is assumedly familiar, these narratives also appear more human, cruel and realistic in a non-romantic sense. This effect is particularly conspicuous in Heslin's ‘Ovid's Cycnus and Homer's Achilles heel’ (ch. 3), Augoustakis’ ‘Loca luminis haurit: Ovid's recycling of Hecuba’ (ch. 4) and — perhaps most intensely — James's chapter on the obsessive repetition of rape in the first part of the Metamorphoses (ch. 6). Through her sober, acute and accurate analysis, James shows how the Ovidian repetition of rapes puts the cruelty of the act on display in a way that other authors rarely do.

The introduction and chapters are equipped with endnotes, which makes for a somewhat cumbersome read (footnotes would have been easier!), followed by a rich, consolidated bibliography, short biographies of the contributors, and a general index and index locorum (both very helpful). The volume is well edited; no typos were grave enough to mar this reader's experience, and almost all the Greek and Latin has been commendably translated (at 191, there is one line missing in the translation of Pont. 1.2.33–4). In sum, this is a page-turner of a contribution to Ovidian scholarship, which will most probably alter any reader's perception of what he/she thought that they knew.