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.

"This is no small achievement. For the language-lover the translation provides elegant, flowing English verse, for the classicist it conveys close approximation to the Latin meaning coupled with a sense of the movement and rhythmic variety of Ovid's language"—Geraldine Herbert-Brown, editor of Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium "This book fills a gap. There is no similar annotated English translation of Ovid's exile poetry. Thoroughly grounded in Ovidian scholarship, Green's introduction and notes are helpful and informative. The translation is accurate, idiomatic, and lively, closely imitating the Latin elegiac couplet and capturing Ovid's changing moods."—Karl Galinsky, author of Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects

This is a full-scale commentary devoted to the third book of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. It includes an Introduction, a revision of E. J. Kenney's Oxford text of the book, and detailed line-by-line and section-by-section commentary on the language and ideas of the text. Combining traditional philological scholarship with some of the concerns of more recent critics, both Introduction and commentary place particular emphasis on: the language of the text; the relationship of the book to the didactic, 'erotodidactic' and elegiac traditions; Ovid's usurpation of the lena's traditional role of erotic instructor of women; the poet's handling of the controversial subjects of cosmetics and personal adornment; and the literary and political significances of Ovid's unexpected emphasis in the text of Ars III on restraint and 'moderation'. The book will be of interest to all postgraduates and scholars working on Augustan poetry.

Of all the poets of ancient Rome Ovid had perhaps the most influence on the art and literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even today he is probably the most accessible of all classical poets to the non-specialist, both in his subject matter and in his style. Ovid is no less fascinated than we are by the human psyche and by the ways men and women relate to each other, and many of his views on these questions seem centuries ahead of his time. Ovid’s interest in narrative technique is so much like ours that modern critical terms such as “reader-response” could have been coined for his experiments with story telling. In the creation of different personae and points of view his ingenuity is endless. For the Amores he invented a posing poet-lover; for the Art of Love, his narrator is a cynical professor of seduction who is convinced, quite wrongly, that he has love down to a science. In the Heroides, a series of verse-letters from the famous women of legend to their lovers, he brilliantly recreated great moments of heroic mythology from the feminine point of view. The longest and most enchanting of his works, the Metamorphoses, an epic-length poem on the infinite changes of mythology and history, afforded him the richest opportunities of all to experiment with narrative techniques. In this book Sara Mack introduces Ovid to the general reader. After considering Ovid’s modernity, Mack surveys his poetry chronologically. Next she examines his most influential poems: the Amores, Heroides, Art of Love, and Metamorphoses. Finally she explores Ovidian wit, concluding with a look at Ovid’s influence on the arts.

Ovid is one of the greatest poets in the Classical tradition and Western literature. This book represents the most comprehensive study to date of his early output as a unified literary production. Firstly, the book proposes new ways of organising this part of Ovid's poetic career, the chronology of which is notoriously difficult to establish. Next, by combining textual criticism with issues relating to manuscript transmission, the book decisively counters arguments levelled against the authenticity of Heroides 15, which consequently allows for a revaluation of Ovid's early output. Furthermore, by focusing on the literary device of allusion, the book stresses the importance of Ovid's single Heroides 1-15 in relationship with his Amores I-III, Ars amatoria I-III and Remedia amoris. Finally, the book identifies three kinds of Ovidian poetics that are found in his early poetry and that point towards the works of myth and exile that followed in his later career.