"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death, this is by definition a remarkably accurate prophecy. Ovid was not the only ancient author with aspirations to be read for eternity, but no poet of the Greco-Roman world has had a deeper or more lasting impact on subsequent literature and art than he can claim. In the present day no Greek or Roman poet is as accessible, to artists, writers, or the general reader: Ovid's voice remains a compellingly contemporary one, as modern as it seemed to his contemporaries in Augustan Rome. But Ovid was also a man of his time, his own story fatally entwined with that of the first emperor Augustus, and the poetry he wrote channels in its own way the cultural and political upheavals of the contemporary city, its public life, sexual mores, religion, and urban landscape, while also exploiting the superbly rich store of poetic convention that Greek literature and his Roman predecessors had bequeathed to him. This Very Short Introduction explains Ovid's background, social and literary, and introduces his poetry, on love, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile, a restlessly innovative oeuvre driven by the irrepressible ingenium or wit for which he was famous. Llewelyn Morgan also explores Ovid's immense influence on later literature and art, spanning from Shakespeare to Bernini. Throughout, Ovid's poetry is revealed as enduringly scintillating, his personal story compelling, and the issues his life and poetry raise of continuing relevance and interest. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This Festschrift in honour of the classical scholar Stephen Heyworth brings together eleven experts on the genre of Latin elegy. All chapters focus on the close reading of elegiac texts primarily by Ovid and Propertius.

Ovid's Fasti, unlike his Metamorphoses, is anchored in Rome: religion, history and legend, monuments, and character. The poem interprets the Augustan period not as a golden age of peace and prosperity, Carole E. Newlands asserts, but as an age of experimentation, negotiation, compromise, and unresolved tensions. Newlands maintains that, despite the Fasti's basic adherence to the format of the calendar, the text is carefully constructed to reflect the tensions within its subject: the new Roman year. Ovid plays with the calendar. Through the alteration or omission of significant dates, through skilled juxtapositions, through multiple narrators and the development of an increasingly unreliable authorial persona, Ovid opens to a critical and often humorous scrutiny the political ideology of the calendar. By adding astronomical observations and aetiological explanations for certain constellations, Newlands says, Ovid introduced the richly allusive world of Greek mythology to the calendar. Newlands restores the poem to a position of importance, one displaying Ovid's wit and intellect at its best. The incompleteness of the Fasti, she adds, is a comment on the discord that characterized Augustus' later years and led to enforced silences.

This is the OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Latin A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Ovid's Heroides, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary for Heroides I lines 1–68, and Heroides VII lines 1–140, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English. Ovid's Heroides is a unique collection of poetry, in which famous mythological heroines write letters to the men who have abandoned them. They offer a new perspective on the otherwise male-centred mythological tradition. Heroides I (from Penelope) and VII (from Dido) respond to the most famous Classical epics, Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, by presenting a new, less positive, angle on the two famous epic heroes. Through his heroines' unique voices, Ovid plays with literary tradition, inviting us all to take a side: epic heroism or loyalty in love? Resources are available on the Companion Website.

For millennia, the passing seasons and their rhythms have marked our progress through the year. But what do they mean to us now that we lead increasingly atomized and urban lives and our weather becomes ever more unpredictable or extreme? Will it matter if we no longer hear, even notice, the first cuckoo call of spring or rejoice in the mellow fruits of harvest festival? How much will we lose if we can no longer find either refuge or reassurance in the greater natural—and meteorological—scheme of things? Nick Groom's splendidly rich and encyclopedic book is an unabashed celebration of the English seasons and the trove of strange folklore and often stranger fact they have accumulated over the centuries. Each season and its particular history are given their full due, and these chapters are interwoven with others on the calendar and how the year and months have come to be measured, on important dates and festivals such as Easter, May Day and, of course, Christmas, on that defining first cuckoo call, on national attitudes to weather, our seasonal relationship with the land and horticulture and much more. The author expresses the hope that his book will not prove an elegy: only time will tell.