In Heroides, Ovid (43 BC-AD 17) allows legendary women to narrate their memories and express their emotions in verse letters to absent husbands and lovers. Ovid's Amores are three books of elegies ostensibly about the poet's love affair with his mistress Corinna.

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In Heroides, Ovid (43 BCE-17CE) allows legendary women to narrate their memories and express their emotions in verse letters to absent husbands and lovers. Ovid's Amores are three books of elegies ostensibly about the poet's love affair with his mistress Corinna. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE-17 CE), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars Amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile. Ovid's main surviving works are the Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration to artists and poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare; the Fasti, a poetic treatment of the Roman year of which Ovid finished only half; the Amores, love poems; the Ars Amatoria, not moral but clever and in parts beautiful; Heroides, fictitious love letters by legendary women to absent husbands; and the dismal works written in exile: the Tristia, appeals to persons including his wife and also the emperor; and similar Epistulae ex Ponto. Poetry came naturally to Ovid, who at his best is lively, graphic and lucid. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid is in six volumes.

The most sophisticated and daring poetic ironist of the early Roman Empire, Publius Ovidius Naso, is perhaps best known for his oft-imitated Metamorphoses. But the Roman poet also wrote lively and lewd verse on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, and adultery—a playful parody of the earnest erotic poetry traditions established by his literary ancestors. The Amores, Ovid's first completed book of poetry, explores the conventional mode of erotic elegy with some subversive and silly twists: the poetic narrator sets up a lyrical altar to an unattainable woman only to knock it down by poking fun at her imperfections. Ars Amatoria takes the form of didactic verse in which a purportedly mature and experienced narrator instructs men and women alike on how to best play their hands at the long con of love. Ovid's Erotic Poems offers a modern English translation of the Amores and Ars Amatoria that retains the irreverent wit and verve of the original. Award-winning poet Len Krisak captures the music of Ovid's richly textured Latin meters through rhyming couplets that render the verse as playful and agile as it was meant to be. Sophisticated, satirical, and wildly self-referential, Ovid's Erotic Poems is not just a wickedly funny send-up of romantic and sexual mores but also a sharp critique of literary technique and poetic convention.

Parallel latin & English texts.

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE?17 CE), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars Amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile. Ovid's main surviving works are the Metamorphoses, a source of inspiration to artists and poets including Chaucer and Shakespeare; the Fasti, a poetic treatment of the Roman year of which Ovid finished only half; the Amores, love poems; the Ars Amatoria, not moral but clever and in parts beautiful; Heroides, fictitious love letters by legendary women to absent husbands; and the dismal works written in exile: the Tristia, appeals to persons including his wife and also the emperor; and similar Epistulae ex Ponto. Poetry came naturally to Ovid, who at his best is lively, graphic and lucid. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid is in six volumes.

Parallel Latin text, English translation.

From the Introduction. The "Heroides" have been more than once translated into English verse, and they were published in prose by Davidson about the middle of the last century. Though the latter is professedly a literal Translation, it has no pretensions to be considered as such. It is, however, accompanied by many useful Notes, a portion of which, as embodying a careful analysis of the spirit of the writer, have been made available in the present Translation. The "Amores" have also been previously translated into English verse, but not into prose. The "Ars Amatoria" and the "Remedia Amoris" have never appeared in English prose, but a poetical version of them was made by Dryden, Congreve, and others. Their fluent lines, however, as might be presumed from the frequent allusion to powdered beaux, wigs, " the playhouse," and other fashions of their day, are less a translation, than an adaptation of the work to the manners of the times. Their version, too, entirely omits a considerable portion of the original, and, in many instances, apparently for no other reason than because the passages so omitted are difficult of interpretation. In the present translation of the Amatory Poems, paraphrases have in a few instances been found necessary, where a literal rendering could not have been presented to the public without a violation of the rules of decorum. It has also been thought advisable to leave the more exceptionable passages in the original Latin. The reader, if he is classical, will be able to translate them for himself; if he is not, he may rest assured that he sustains no loss. At the same time, it must in justice be acknowledged that both the Amours and the Art of Love contain a vast amount of most interesting information upon the domestic life of the Romans, not to be found in any other of the Classics, with the exception, perhaps, of Petronius Arbiter. The fragment "De Medicamine Faciei," "on the Care of the Complexion," better known to the English reader as the "Art of Beauty," has been once previously translated into English verse, but not, it is believed, into prose. The "Nux," or "Walnut-tree," has never before been published in English; nor has the "Consolation to Livia Augusta," a poem of considerable beauty, and now generally admitted to be the composition of Ovid.