page 39 note 1 Cf. Postgate, Proc. Brit. Acad. iii (1908), 167.1 will take this opportunity of remarking on a certain insularity in Bömer's scholarship. He makes no mention of D. A. Slater, Towards a Text of the Metamorphosis of Ovid (1927), and appears to be unaware of the existence of G. M. Edwards's text of Met. in Postgate's Corpus, which was much more sensibly edited than that of Merkel–Ehwald. The categorical rigidity of which I complain might have been mitigated by study of A. J. Bell's The Latin Dual and Poetic Diction (1923); it must be used with caution, as all who open it soon discover, but it is based directly on the texts, not on what modern grammarians say about them, and it recognizes the fluidity and complexity of poetical syntax. The same is true of a much greater book, James Henry's Aeneidea, perusal of which might have led Bömer to comment on a very characteristic feature of Ovid's style, theme and variation: see, for instance, the notes that he has not written on i. 85–6, 272–3, 488–9, ii. 72–5, etc.; also (variation and theme) i. 433, where all we hear is of ‘fast tautologische Wiederholung des vorhergehenden Gedankens’. At iii. 125 a reference to Pearce's useful articles on enclosing word-order in C.Q. lx (1966), as well as to (e.g.) Met. i. 112, would have been helpful. Study of J. A. Richmond's edition of Halieutica might have induced Bömer to desist from quoting this poem as if its usage proved anything about Ovid's (ii. 400, 716 nn.). Conversely Jackson Knight's largely negligible piece in Ovidiana is freely cited; and space for which better use could have been found is occupied by a superfluous refutation of Owen (iii. 264 n.).
