Ovid

An Ovid Reader covers a selection of works by the great Roman poet Ovid. Passages from Amores and Metamorphoses are arranged in ways that connect for the reader, and innovative discussion questions prompt thoughtful insights into the tales.

Ovid's love-poetry was typically original and innovative. His witty analysis in the Amores (Loves) of the elegiac relationship develops with relentless irony its essential paradox - love as simultaneously fulfilling and destructive - to its logical conclusion: definitive disestablishment of the poet-lover's role as presented by Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. In its place he went on to offer in the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) an equally brilliant presentation of an alternative and more realistic conception of love as a game at which both sexes can play without getting hurt - providing they stick to Ovid's rules. Under the surface of Ovid's wit there runs an undercurrent of serious meaning: the theme of the poet's complete control of his medium and his art and a proud consciousness of his achievements. His claim to be `the Virgil of elegy' is arrestingly justified in these extraordinarily accomplished poems. Alan Melville's accomplished translations match the sophisticated elegance of Ovid's Latin. Their witty modern idiom is highly entertaining. In this volume he has included the brilliant version of the Art of Love by Moore, published more than fifty years ago and still unequalled; the small revisions he has made will enhance the reader's admiration for Moore's achievement. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis. Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new life through his subtley, humour and understanding of human nature, and elegantly tailoring tone and pace to fit a variety of subjects. The result is a lasting treasure-house of myth and legend. 'The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)' - Ezra PoundOvid was born in 43 BC in central Italy. He was sent to Rome where he realised that his talent lay with poetry rather than with politics. His first published work was 'Amores', a collection of short love poems. He was expelled in A. D. 8 by Emperor Augustus for an unknown reason and went to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died in AD 17. Mary M. Innes graduated from Glasgow and Oxford Universities and subsequently taught in the universities of Belfast and Aberdeen, before spending some twenty years proving to schoolgirls that classical languages can and should be enjoyed.

A new translation of the epic Roman poem on the dynamics of change seeks to remain faithful to the author's original text and reflects Ovid's themes and the poet's original speed and liveliness. Reprint.

In the year A. D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile - permanently, as it turned out - at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia later, the agonized, witty, vivid, nostalgic, and often slyly malicious poems he wrote at Tomis remain as fresh as the day they were written, a testament for exiles everywhere, in all ages. The two books of the Poems of Exile, the Lamentations (Tristia) and the Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto), chronicle Ovid's impressions of Tomis - its appalling winters, bleak terrain, and sporadic raids by barbarous nomads - as well as his aching memories and ongoing appeals to his friends and his patient wife to intercede on his behalf. While pretending to have lost his old literary skills and even to be forgetting his Latin, in the Poems of Exile Ovid in fact displays all his virtuoso poetic talent, now concentrated on one objective: ending the exile. But his rhetorical message falls on obdurately deaf ears, and his appeals slowly lose hope. A superb literary artist to the end, Ovid offers an authentic, unforgettable panorama of the death-in-life he endured at Tomis.

This complete verse translation of Ovid's classical work is illustrated with extensive notes and an index and glossary. To help the reader contend with Ovid's frequent leaps both ahead and back in time, the principle episodes are listed at the beginning of each book and the subsections and digressions marked with indentations. Some footnotes also refer to mythological material Ovid has derived from Greek epic or drama or, occasionally, from later sources. Specific authors referred to in these notes are briefly identified in the index and glossary