© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi � �. ��63/�5685�5X- � �34��46 Mnemosyne 70 (�0 �7) 406-4�6 brill.com/mnem Requests as Orders On Ov. Met. 13.377-379 Luis Rivero García Departamento de Filologías Integradas, Facultad de Humanidades Universidad de Huelva, Huelva, Spain lrivero@uhu.es Received June 2015 | Accepted September 2015 Abstract The authenticity of Ov. Met. 13.377-379 is defended, based on arguments of form and literary composition. Keywords Ovid – Metamorphoses – textual criticism The ‘Judgment of the arms’ which brings Ajax and Ulysses face to face in their struggle to inherit the arms of Achilles is, in addition to being a traditional ele- ment in the Trojan saga, an opportunity for its protagonists to show off their rhetorical skills. This is no doubt how it was seen by Ovid, who devoted to it no fewer than the first 398 lines of book XIII of the Metamorphoses.1 A brief description of the setting in which the contest is to take place (1-5) is followed by the opening of the speech by Ajax (5-122), whose irascibility has already been clearly depicted by the poet (3f. impatiens irae, toruo . . . uultu). His case is based first of all on his blood ties with Achilles and secondly, and more 1  Given that the literary and rhetorical structure of the episode is not the specific objective of this article, I simply refer the reader, from all the vast bibliography, to the syntheses by Bömer 1982, 195-200, and Hopkinson 2000, 9-22, or else to the more detailed examination by Huyck 1991, 10-68 and recent analyses by Lorenzetti 2001, Papaioannou 2007, 153-206 and Hardie 2015, 213-218.