Ovid's Poetry of Exile


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"Someone clever, passionate, and heartbroken comes very near us, and I think it is Ovid. I found it impossible to stop reading these poems. And poems they are."--Richard Wilbur.




The Poems of Exile


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"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 Voices


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This study examines the literary complexities of the poetry which Ovid wrote in Tomis, his place of exile on the coast of the Black Sea after he was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus in A.D. 8 because of the alleged salaciousness of the Ars Amatoria and a mysterious misdemeanour which is nowhere explained. Exile transforms Ovid into a melancholic poet of despair who claims that his creative faculties are in terminal decline. But recent research has exposed the ironic disjunction between many of the poet's claims and the latent artistry which belies them. Through a series of close readings which offer a new analytical contribution to the scholarly evaluation of the exile poetry, Dr Williams examines the nature and the extent of Ovidian irony in Tomis and demonstrates the complex literary designs which are consistently disguised under a veil of dissimulation. Gareth Williams aims to counteract traditional scholarly antipathy to the exile poetry, which could be said to represent the last frontier in modern Ovidian studies. Scholars working in the field will welcome his insights.




Ovid


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Silenced Voices


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Examines speech loss across all of Ovid's writings and the ways that motif is explored, developed, and modified in the poet's work after his exile from Rome.




The Mystery of Ovid's Exile


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Toward the end of the year A.D. 8, the emperor Augustus publicly sentenced the poet Ovid to exile in remote and barbaric Tomis on the Black Sea. The action presumably followed a secret hearing before the emperor, and the official reason given for the sentence was Ovid's authorship of a licentious work, the Ars amatoria, ten years earlier. The Mystery of Ovid's Exile is both a survey and an analysis of the literary detective work that has been devoted to explaining the cause of Ovid's banishment from Rome. In poems composed during his exile, Ovid laments having written the Ars amatoria, but he obviously considers the poem to be merely a pretext for his punishment. His downfall appears to have been caused by his having witnessed, or in some fashion been implicated in, a crime committed either by the emperor himself or by an immediate member of the imperial family. However, it’s possible that Ovid's banishment may have been ordered merely because he was unwittingly in possession of the key to an embarrassing secret, the importance of which he might have realized had he remained in Rome. John C. Thibault examines more than one hundred available hypotheses that have been advanced by inquisitive scholars from the Middle Ages to our own day. He demonstrates the unsoundness of each hypothesis in turn, and suggests that a solution to the problem of Ovid's exile is not possible given the available evidence. The Mystery of Ovid's Exil treats a controversy that will fascinate classical scholars as well as general readers interested in Roman manners and morals of the period. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.




Ovid's Poetics of Illusion


Book Description

Ovid's poetry is haunted obsessively by a sense both of the living fullness of the texts and of the emptiness of these 'insubstantial pageants'. This major study touches on the whole of Ovid's output, from the Amores to the exile poetry, and is an overarching treatment of illusionism and the textual conjuring of presence in the corpus. Modern critical and theoretical approaches, accompanied by close readings of individual passages, examine the topic from the points of view of poetics and rhetoric, aesthetics, the psychology of desire, philosophy, religion and politics. There are also case studies of the reception of Ovid's poetics of illusion in Renaissance and modern literature and art. The book will interest students and scholars of Latin and later European literatures. All foreign languages are accompanied by translations.




Ovid: A Very Short Introduction


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"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.




The Love Poems


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Sorrows of an Exile


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In AD 8 Ovid's brilliant career was abruptly ruined when the Emperor Augustus banished him, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, to Tomis (Constanta) on the Black Sea. The five books of Tristia (Sorrows) express his reaction to this savage and, as he clearly regarded it, unjust sentence. Though their ostensible theme is the misery and loneliness of exile, their real message, if they are read with the care they deserve, is one of affirmation. With a wit and irony that borders on defiance, Ovid repeatedly asserts the injustice of his sentence and of the preeminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. In technical skill and inventiveness these elegies rank with the Art of Love or the Fasti. For this new translation Alan Melville has reproduced, in rhyming stanzas, the virtuosity, wit, and elegance of the original.