| Acknowledgments | |
| Abbreviations | |
| Introduction | 3 |
| Ch. 1 | Glittering Trifles: Verbal Wit and Physical Transformation | 11 |
| Transgressive Language: Narcissus and Althea | 11 |
| Indecorous and Transformative Puns | 22 |
| Misunderstanding aura: Cephalus, Procris, and the Pun | 26 |
| Divinatory Wordplay: The Pun Overheard | 30 |
| Vox non intellecta: Irony and Metamorphic Wordplay (Myrrha) | 36 |
| Littera scripta manet - Or Does It? (Byblis) | 42 |
| Self-Cancelling and Self-Objectifying Witticisms | 52 |
| Wordplay, Personification, and Phantasia | 61 |
| True Imitation: Ceyx, Alcyone, and Morpheus | 72 |
| The House of Reception | 85 |
| Ch. 2 | The Ass's Shadow: Narrative Disruption and Its Consequences | 89 |
| Some Exemplary Interruptions | 89 |
| Daedalus and Perdix | 97 |
| Cyclopean Violence and Narrative Disruption | 105 |
| Some Scandalous Passages | 124 |
| Ch. 3 | Disruptive Traditions | 131 |
| Indecorous Possibilities: Callimachus's Hymn to Artemis and Ovidian Style | 131 |
| Elegiac Contributions: Propertius's Tarpeia and Ovid's Scylla | 143 |
| Epic Distortions: The Hecale in the Metamorphoses | 153 |
| Ch. 4 | Deeper Causes: Aetiology and Style | 167 |
| Aetiological Wordplay | 167 |
| Ovid's Little Aeneid | 177 |
| Aetiology and the Nature of Flux | 191 |
| Conclusion | 215 |
| App. A | G. J. Vossius on Syllepsis oratoria | 217 |
| App. B | Syllepsis and Zeugma | 219 |
| App. C | Further Examples of Syllepsis in Ovid | 221 |
| References | 223 |
| Index locorum | 231 |
| Index | 235 |
