This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. It combines detailed discussions of individual poems with discussion and criticism of a variety of sophisticated modern theoretical approaches. It thus aims to advance the argument not only in the field of elegy, but also in issues such as gender, ideology and the theory of reading.

The Heroides, a collection of elegiac poems written as letters, fused Ovid's interests in erotics and myth into a new and unique genre, in which experiments with epistolary form and the psychology of first-person narrative would go on to have a profound influence on European literature. This two-volume edition of 1898 remains an essential resource for the poems; but it has long been difficult to obtain. It contains what is still the only detailed commentary in English on the whole collection, as well as extensive discussion of the text and its transmission. It also offers the full text of the...