Ovid - The Erotic Poems

THE EROTIC POEMS

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO was born in 43 BC at Sulmo (Sulmona) in central Italy. He was sent to Rome to attend the schools of famous rhetoricians but, realizing that his talent lay with poetry rather than politics, he began instead to cultivate the acquaintance of literary Romans and to enjoy the smart witty Roman society of which he soon became a leading member. His first published work was Amores, a collection of short love poems; then followed Heroides, verse-letters supposedly written by deserted ladies to their former lovers, Ars Amatoria, a handbook on love, Remedia Amoris, and Metamorphoses. Ovid was working on Fasti, a poem on the Roman calendar, when in AD 8 the emperor Augustus expelled him for some unknown offence to Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued to write, notably Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, and always spoke longingly of Rome. He died, still in exile, in AD 17 or 18.

PETER GREEN, MA, Ph.D. (Cantab), FRSL, was born in London in 1924, and educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took first-class honours in both parts of the Classical Tripos (1950), winning the Craven Scholarship and Studentship the same year. After a short spell as a Director of Studies in classics at Cambridge he worked for some years as a freelance writer, translator and literary journalist, and as a publisher. In 1963 he emigrated to Greece with his family. From 1966 until 1971 he lectured in Greek history and literature at Athens; from 1971 until 1997 he taught in the University of Texas at Austin, from 1983 as the Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics (now Emeritus). He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the University of Iowa (where his wife is Associate Professor of Classics), and Editor of Syllecta Classica. His publications include Essays in Antiquity (1960), Alexander the Great (1970), Armada from Athens: The Failure of the Sicilian Expedition, 415143 BC (1971), The Year of Salamis, 480479 BC (1971), The Shadow of the Parthenon (1972), A Concise History of Ancient Greece (1973), three historical novels, Achilles his Armour (1955), The Sword of Pleasure (1957) and The Laughter of Aphrodite (1965), a historical biography, Alexander of Macedon 356323 BC (1974), Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture (1989), Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990) and, most recently the Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios (1997). He has also translated Ovids The Poems of Exile and Juvenals The Sixteen Satires for the Penguin Classics.

THE AMORES

THE ART OF LOVE

CURES FOR LOVE

ON FACIAL TREATMENT FOR LADIES

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY PETER GREEN

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This translation first published 1982
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Copyright Peter Green, 1982
All rights reserved

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