The Love Poems (Oxford World's Classics) by Ovid

by Ovid

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) is best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths and legends from Ancient Greece and Rome. His works continue to be widely read and admired, and he is regarded as one of the most significant poets of ancient Rome.

Ovid’s love poems are both brilliant and evocative. In Amores (‘Loves’), the romantic mysteriousness of elegiac love-poetry is exploded by his witty and ironic treatment of the form. Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (The Cures for Love) both lay down the rules for the game of love, which both sexes can play.

A.D. Melville’s translations, which also include the lesser-known Cosmetics for Ladies, have been specially licensed for this recording. It is delivered with customary panache by David Timson.

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About the author

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Ovid is most famous for the Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters. He is also known for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.