Ovid is a poet to enjoy, declares William S. Anderson in his introduction to this textbook. And Anderson’s skillful introduction and enlightening textual commentary will indeed make it a joy to use. In these books Ovid begins to leave the conflict between men and the gods to concentrate on the relations among human beings. Subjects of the stories include Arachne and Niobe; Tereus, Procne, and Philomela; Medea and Jason; Orpheus and Eurydice; and many others, familiar and unfamiliar. For students of Latin-and teachers, too-they provide an interesting experience. In his introduction the editor discusses Ovid’s career, the reputation of the Metamorphoses during Ovid’s time and after, and the various manuscripts that exist or have been known to exist. He describes the general plan of the poem, its main theme, and the problem of its tone. Technical matters, such as style and meter, are also considered. In notes the editor summarizes the story being told before proceeding to the line-by-line textual comments.

Witty, erotic, sceptical and subversive, Ovid (c. 43BC-AD17) has been a seminal presence in English literature from the time of Chaucer and Caxton to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. This superb selection brings together complete elegies from the Amores, Heroides and poems of exile as well as many self-contained episodes from the longer works, vividly revealing both the sheer variety of Ovid's genius and the range of his impact on the English imagination.

Ovid's Metamorphosesis a weaving-together of classical myths, extending in time from the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar. This volume provides the Latin text of the first five books of the poem and the most detailed commentary available in English of these books.

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.

A powerful version of the Latin classic by England's late Poet Laureate, now in paperback.When it was published in 1997, Tales from Ovid was immediately recognized as a classic in its own right, as the best rering of Ovid in generations, and as a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry; Hughes translated twenty-four of its stories with great power and directness. The result is the liveliest twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.