Amores, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris (Oxford Classical Texts) (Latin Edition)

This here is an older version of the Carmina Amatoria —we now have the Teubneriana ed.— but mostly excellent. Excepting the bad binding process, the book is beautiful and, besides, everyone acknowledges the quality of OCT's editions.

I love OCT's. They are great for classicists.

Since I began these in my graduate school Ovid course, they have been my standard for poetry (along with 17C English poets), wittyand urbane--mostly in "elegiac" verse form, though far from the requiems previously in that verse form. Donne learned so much from Ovid his famous "The Indifferent" mostly translates, in his first stanza almost literally, Ovid's Amores II.iv. Both tell how they can love the tall women, the short, the smart etc, concluding: "I can love her and her, and you and you,/ I can love any, so she be not true." Ovid has "sive aliqua est," then moves to YOU, "sive es docta." So Donne has "borrowed" his shocking and dramatic shift of pronouns, 3rd to 2nd familiar, one of his noted achievements--from Ovid. ( Although Shakespeare also learned much from Plautus, and Publilius Syrus, his favorite Latin was Ovid, whom Dryden points out writes as in "drama,"with emotions "discomposed.")( Shakespeare learnedmuch from Ovid, from Plautus, and from Publilius Syrus.) True, Ovid was banished to the outskirts of the empire partly because of the poems herethat compare lovers and soldiers: they both stand outside all night under windows, they both are dedicated, they both...you get the picture.*Then Ovid adds: So, You go off to war, I'll soldier along at home with the girls. I read this during wartime, and it seemed like a good plan for me,two millennia later. But Ovid's plan completely undermined the hypocritical Augustus's military policies. (Gibbon says Augustus was so hypocritical that "Even his vices were pretended." Ovid also had something to do with Augustus's alienation from a young female relative.)It's a sad result of great poetry; Ovid spent his last years amongst barbarians--literally, bearded peoples who did not know Latin,rather like my generation of grad school Americans. He wrote plaintive verse requests to return to Rome from what's now Constanta, Romania.Perhaps I should revise my own saying on my Google author page, "Good teachers are fired, great teachers are killed: Socrates, Christ, and Giordano Bruno. Good poets are censored, great poets are banished, unpublished, or shot: Dickinson, Ovid and Pushkin."*Amores I.IX, shows how risky and wonderful Ovid's poems are. The equivalent today would be:You guys are great, go to Afghanistan, fight;I'll stay home with the girls you left behind.For we lovers are just like you soldiers,We stand out in the cold all night on watch,And it's a long hard road to victoryFor us both; we both play the lowly partTo come out on top. War is doubtful,But believe me, Love's no sure thing.It goes on with great imagination, and leaves you thinking,You know, he's right. Soldiers and lovers both suffer, butwhich has the better reason? You can see why Augustus was pissed, though it's more likely something personal, his daughter's rebellion, he blamed on Ovid. Out at Tomi on the Black Sea, where nobody even spoke Latin, Ovid wrote a whole book of laments trying to get back in Augustus's good graces, Tristia, and then his letters, Epistulae ex Ponto

One of the best editions of the love poems of Ovid in the original latin.

Diese Bücher sind nur für Kenner und Liebhaber geeignet.Das Lesen wird erschwert durch die Verwendung eines 'u' statt einem 'v'.Der textkritische Apparat ist sehr anspruchsvoll.