A detailed commentary on Tristia 2, Ovid's verse letter addressed from exile to the emperor Augustus. Jennifer Ingleheart provides an indispensable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical and political - while her introductioon explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.
"This is no small achievement. For the language-lover the translation provides elegant, flowing English verse, for the classicist it conveys close approximation to the Latin meaning coupled with a sense of the movement and rhythmic variety of Ovid's language"—Geraldine Herbert-Brown, editor of Ovid's Fasti: Historical Readings at its Bimillennium "This book fills a gap. There is no similar annotated English translation of Ovid's exile poetry. Thoroughly grounded in Ovidian scholarship, Green's introduction and notes are helpful and informative. The translation is accurate, idiomatic, and lively, closely imitating the Latin elegiac couplet and capturing Ovid's changing moods."—Karl Galinsky, author of Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects
Banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, the poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors. In his Tristia (Sad Things) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland. Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid is an interdisciplinary study of the impact of Ovid's banishment upon later Western literature, exploring responses to Ovid's portrait of his life in exile. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the rôle of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation; and to explore exile from a number of perspectives, including both the personal and the fictional.
This work brings together a selection of the author's articles, written over a period of 20 years, observing the place of alcohol in American culture. The text also contains several ethnographic studies of bars in San Diego and a study of court-mandated programmes for drink drivers.
Ovid's Ars Amatoria has met with astonishingly varied fortunes down the centuries. Ten years after publication the book became a reason, or more probably a pretext, for the author's banishment from Rome. It was removed from public libraries, and more recently the poem suffered a virtual embargo in schools and universities. This is the first detailed English commentary on any part of the poem. Examined afresh, it emerges as the wittiest of Ovid's love poems, turning upside down the attitudes and conventions of orthodox love elegy. The work is full of psychological insight and is richly embroidered with details of contemporary Roman social and political life. This new paperback edition intends to bring out the spirit of provocative frivolity which was undeniably meant to irritate Roman traditionalists. The text of Kenney's Oxford Classical Text is reproduced and supplemented with a full introduction to the style and historical background the poem, as well as with a full commentary and appendices.
"After a period of neglect, the Fasti, Ovid's elegiac poem on the Roman calendar, has been the focus of much recent scholarship. Joy Littlewood suggests that Book 6 is unified by the theme of War, so providing a framing bracket to balance the dominant theme of Peace in Book I. While January celebrates the blessings of Augustan peace, June presents a multifaceted portrait of Roman war, a uniquely Roman combination of virtus and pictas. The three goddesses who dispute the origin of the month in the Proem have associations with military success and Roman power, a distinguishing characteristic that they share in varying degrees with the goddesses whose festivals fall in June (Carna, Vesta, Mater Matuta, Fortuna, and Minerva), most of whom, like Juno of Lanuvium, are also the focus of women's cult. Throughout the month, republican military conflicts are recalled in temples vowed and anniversaries of victory and defeat in Rome's struggle for hegemony. Finally, a complex extended epilogue, which culminates in the celebration of Hercules Musarum, coalesces with familiar themes of Augustan ideology: apotheosis, dynastic eulogy, and the monuments of the Pax Augusta. These and other themes are discussed in the Introduction to the Commentary, which includes analyses of the literary and historical background of the work, Augustus' dynastic restructuring of Roman religion, as evinced in the iconography of his new monuments, Ovid's adaptations of material from Livy's Histories and Horace's Roman Odes, his narrative technique, and his expansion of the elegiac genre through the antiquarian content of the book. Fascinating literary questions are raised by the poet's audacious violation of generic boundaries, no less than by his inclusion of sound antiquarian material artfully camouflaged by literary allusion. Ovid's Fasti Book 6 offers new insights into the complex role played by religion in Roman life."--BOOK JACKET.
The Fasti is one of Ovid's most complex, inventive, and remarkable works. This commentary on Book 2 - the first detailed commentary in English - guides the reader towards a fuller appreciation of the poem, through detailed analysis of its religious, historical, political, and literary background.
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 intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.
"Vivam" is the very last word of Ovid's masterpiece, the Metamorphoses: "I shall live." If we're still reading it two millennia after Ovid's death, this is by definition a remarkably accurate prophecy. Ovid was not the only ancient author with aspirations to be read for eternity, but no poet of the Greco-Roman world has had a deeper or more lasting impact on subsequent literature and art than he can claim. In the present day no Greek or Roman poet is as accessible, to artists, writers, or the general reader: Ovid's voice remains a compellingly contemporary one, as modern as it seemed to his contemporaries in Augustan Rome. But Ovid was also a man of his time, his own story fatally entwined with that of the first emperor Augustus, and the poetry he wrote channels in its own way the cultural and political upheavals of the contemporary city, its public life, sexual mores, religion, and urban landscape, while also exploiting the superbly rich store of poetic convention that Greek literature and his Roman predecessors had bequeathed to him. This Very Short Introduction explains Ovid's background, social and literary, and introduces his poetry, on love, metamorphosis, Roman festivals, and his own exile, a restlessly innovative oeuvre driven by the irrepressible ingenium or wit for which he was famous. Llewelyn Morgan also explores Ovid's immense influence on later literature and art, spanning from Shakespeare to Bernini. Throughout, Ovid's poetry is revealed as enduringly scintillating, his personal story compelling, and the issues his life and poetry raise of continuing relevance and interest. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.