Heroides: Select Epistles

by Ovid, Peter E. Knox (Editor)

Professor Knox offers a commentary on seven of Ovid's 21 epistles in elegaic verse.

Genres: Classics

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 1996

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.

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want to read/translate the original Latin of the Heroides, this is the version to get. There's over 200 pages of commentary on translation and context that make understanding it super simple. The intro at the front was also pretty interesting. The only drawback is that this is kind of a random selection of the epistles. I really wish this series had a complete collection of the Heroides.

[Grace]

Too creepy to read in straight sequence.

This summer I read I (Penelope to Ulysses) and II (Phyllis to Demophoon).
Previously I have read VII (Dido to Aeneas) and X (Ariadne to Theseus).

Three to go (it's not a complete collection).

[Jennifer Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ovid, the og satirist