Apollo's failure to give oracles in P. Oxy. 3723 has its closest parallel in Tibullus' elegy 2, 3, where the god is described as completely helpless and bereft of all his divine attributes as a result of his servitium amoris. The seeming parallel in Ovid's narration of the story of Apollo and Daphne in the first book of the Metamorphoses exhibits a more complicated concept: Apollo presents himself in command of all divine powers, but mourns the failure of these powers (...) to archieve the love of Daphne. He does not humiliate himself as in Tib. 2, 3, but the comic element in his appearance consists in the self-reflected discrepancy between his divine self-confidence and his erotic failure. The haughtiness of Ovid's Apollo is in line with the broader context of met. 1, especially his defeat of Pytho and his quarrel with Cupido. Ovid regularly contrasts in the early books of the Metamorphoses ‘epic’ and ‘elegiac’ structural sections. In book one he programmatically contrasts his modified concept of divine love not absorbing completely the god's personality with the exhausting and uncompromising divine servitium amoris in Tib. 2, 3. (shrink)

This paper offers critical remarks to the text of four epigrams of the Greek Anthology, namely V 39 , VII 562 , VII 597, and IX 794.