The Madness of Epic: Reading Insanity from Homer to Statius. By Debra Hershkowitz.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 346. $80.00.)

In this enormously learned first book, the author presents a series of essays on madness--in Vergil's Aeneid, in Homer, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and Statius's Thebaid--with a 67-page introduction. The study is a revision of the author's 1995 dissertation, and she appears to have read everything on the subject in ...