Overview

The third and final book of Ovid’s love elegies is a complex farewell to the genre. It begins, programmatically, with Ovid, torn between Tragedy and Elegy, persuading Tragedy to give him a little more time for his love poetry and love affairs. As the book progresses, familiar obstructions to the pursuit of illicit love in urban Rome, beyond the easily circumvented Leges Iuliae, are interspersed with conclusive impediments, such as impotence or even Death.     Other elegies manifest Ovid’s developing interest in alternative poetic modes and subjects. The last poem, 3.15, bids Elegy a final farewell, while asserting the magnitude of Ovid’s achievement as a love-poet. The present volume, a Commentary on Poems 1 to 8, goes halfway on Ovid’s journey towards this final renunciation, up to the point where Ovid is resoundingly defeated in love by his wealthy military rival. As volume IV.i of the four-volume Prolegomena, Text, and Commentary on the Amores begun in 1987, it is jointly authored by J.C. McKeown and R. Joy Littlewood.

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9780995461239

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J.C. McKeown was Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to his Prolegomena, with text, to Ovid's Amores (1987) and his magisterial commentary on the first two books (1989, 1998), he is the author of  Classical Latin: An Introductory Course (2010),  A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (2010), A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities (2013) and A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosites (2017). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature (2013). R. Joy Littlewood’s early work on Ovid’s Fasti and her interest in Roman religion and Archaic Italy inspired a commentary on Fasti Book 6 (Oxford 2006). Since then she has worked chiefly on Flavian epic, publishing commentaries on Silius Italicus, Punica 7 (Oxford 2011), Punica 10 (Oxford 2017) and Punica 3 (Oxford 2022) in collaboration with Antony Augoustakis, with whom she also edited Campania in the Flavian Poetic Imagination (Oxford 2019).

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