Written after he had been banished to the Black Sea city of Tomis by Emperor Augustus, the Fasti is Ovid's last major poetic work. Both a calendar of daily rituals and a witty sequence of stories recounted in a variety of styles, it weaves together tales of gods and citizens together to explore Rome's history, religious beliefs and traditions. It may also be read as a subtle but powerful political manifesto which derides Augustus' attempts to control his subjects by imposing his own mythology upon them: after celebrating the emperor as a Jupiter-on-earth, for example, Ovid deliberately...

Ovid's sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation--often as a result of love or lust--where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic and yet...

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.
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"Sources and Backgrounds" includes Seneca's inspired commentary on Ovid, Charles Martin's essay on the ways in which pantomimic dancing--an art form popular in Ovid's time--may have been the model forMetamorphoses, as well as related works by Virgil, Callimachus, Hesiod, and Lucretius, among others. From the enormous body of scholarly writing onMetamorphoses, Charles Martin has chosen six major interpretations by Bernard Knox, J. R. R. Mackail, Norman O. Brown, Italo Calvino, Frederick Ahl, and Diane Middlebrook. A Glossary of Persons, Places, and Personifications in...

In Book XIV of the Metamorphoses Ovid takes his epic for the first time into Italy and continues from book XIII his close intertextual engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. His tendentious treatment of his model subordinates Virgil's epic plot to fantastic tales of metamorphosis, including the erotic Italian tales of Circe Glaucus, and Scylla, and Picus, and Canens. Other Roman myths include Pomona and Vertumnus, as well as events from Romulus' reign. The deifications of Aeneas and Romulus anticipate the poem's closing episodes of imperial apotheosis. This commentary provides guidance to advanced...

Ovid's deliciously clever and exuberant epic, now in a gorgeous new clothbound edition

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation--often as a result of love or lust--where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and...

When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists...