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    Amores
    Amores
    Amores
    Ebook160 pages1 hour

    Amores

    By Ovid and Tom Bishop

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This new translation closely follows the movement and meter of Ovid's verse, masterfully rendering his world of love, licentiousness, and conspiracy while fully capturing Ovid's raciness. An introduction sets the work in its historical context.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9781847776105
    Amores
    Author

    Ovid

    Ovid, or Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom Ovid is often ranked one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature.

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    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      I very much enjoy Ovid's amores, and once you know some of the history his poems become even better. The best part about it I find, is that historians believe he invented Corinna so that he would have a mistress to talk about. This has always amused me, instead of talking of only one relationship, he took aspects from all the relationships he had had throughout his life and combined them into the perfect love elegy muse. Brilliant. As for the translation, it is a good, but having translated the Amores for myself, I'm a bit more partial to my version (I suppose purely because of artistic differences between myself and Guy Lee in respect to our translation methods). I do love Ovid's Amores, especially when compared with some of John Donne's work. Definitely a book to have around for dipping into on a romantic (or frustrating) afternoon.
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful collection of love poems. My favorites were the ones in which the wutor has been unfortunate in love and is pining. These peoms are much more emotional and moving. The triumphant poems sound a bit like bragging, but are still very good. The edition I read had the english on one side and the original latin on the other. It was fun to try to translate some of the latin, at the time I had only taken latin for one year so I didn''t get very far.

    Book preview

    Amores - Ovid

    FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

    FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

    Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

    Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

    Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

    from ‘Thyrsis’

    OVID

    Amores

    Translated with an introduction by

    TOM BISHOP

    for

    Gordon Kerry and Jeffrey Mueller

    CONTENTS

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Introduction

    Amores

    Book One

    Book Two

    Book Three

    About the Author

    Copyright

    INTRODUCTION

    Ovid’s Amores: Masks of Love and Ambition

    Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, has been for ten centuries the most influential poet in Western art. Aside from poets and novelists – to say nothing of painters, sculptors, film-makers and others – the catalogue of later writers who have mined him for their own purposes includes philosophers, theologians, erotic theorists, divine genealogists, moralists, emblematists, and anthropologists. Yet Ovid’s omnipresent influence has consistently been accompanied by reservations about both his work and life, the former vivid, daring and transformative, the latter blessed, blithe and finally blighted.

    Ovid was born in the town of Sulmo, now Sulmona, on a small but fertile flood plain circled by mountains, some 75 miles east across the Apennines from Rome. Sulmo was a city of the Paeligni, a Sabellian people conquered and annexed by the Romans around 300

    BC

    and admitted to Roman citizenship during the revolt of Italian allies (the so-called ‘Social War’) in 90

    BC

    , only 47 years before the poet’s birth. The Ovidii, his father’s family, were well established and of ‘equestrian’ rank, in effect provincial gentry. He had a brother, Lucius, one year his elder, and through these two sons their father seems to have planned the family’s entrance into Roman high politics. He sent them both to Rome in their teens for instruction by famous tutors in rhetoric, the normal prelude to magisterial office and membership of the Senate.

    Publius, however, had other ideas. From an early age he was attracted to poetry, despite his father’s disapproval, and, though he dutifully plied the career selected for him, he seems to have done so without great enthusiasm or notable success. The elder Seneca records hearing him deliver a school declamation, which he describes as more poetic than forensic. As a young and ambitious provincial writer, Ovid cultivated literary circles in the great metropolis, though its most famous lion, Virgil, was mostly absent at Naples working on his epic. He met Horace, in town from his Sabine farm, counted Propertius his friend, wrote an elegy for Tibullus, and presumably knew many others of whom we now have little or no notice. By day he was a student and, later, a minor magistrate serving on tribunals; by night and in his leisure time, an ephebe poet and a reveller in the urbane world of the Great City.

    That city was itself learning a new role and status. Ovid was one year old when Horace threw away his shield at Philippi, and twelve when the Battle of Actium left Octavius Caesar (now ‘the August One’) sole master of the empire. Ovid’s generation had no direct memory of the civil wars that had decimated the years before them, and the central political institutions of the Republic were declining into irrelevance. Public service itself, once the quintessential arena of Roman liberty, was losing its allure. At the same time, Rome, the capital of the world, had never been so powerful, prosperous or exciting. Its change into marble, of which Augustus later boasted, was well underway. From the first, Ovid’s writing is full of his feeling for this city, the headquarters of imperial glamour. It was the life of high society – parties, affairs, intrigue, entertainment, fashion, literary and sexual sophistication – that fired his first imagination, and that he brought together with his larger poetic ambitions in his earliest work, the Amores.

    When he was about nineteen, a family disaster freed Ovid to embrace his literary vocation: his brother Lucius died, leaving him sole heir, and his father resigned himself to seeing his son a poet rather than a senator. Ovid went to study in Athens, and then undertook a literary Grand Tour with his friend Pompeius Macer, visiting Asia Minor and Sicily. After returning to Rome and fulfilling some minor magistracies, Ovid declined further advancement and withdrew into private life. The career that followed made him the poet to watch in the Roman world. From early bravura performances in the Amores and Heroides, through his epic and kaleidoscopic Metamorphoses, to his unfinished poem on the religious calendar of Rome, Fasti, Ovid excelled in dramatising in smooth verse the clash of feelings, stories and voices. He worked in love-elegy, epistle, epic and drama (his tragedy of Medea does not survive). He was provocative, ironic, passionate and suave, with a brash inventiveness that remade established genres in original and daring ways, and challenged authorities of the past with a pose of easy, assured modernity.

    That daring and modernity may have been his undoing. While the poet embraced and championed the new, the Emperor, for all his own revolutionary changes to the Roman government, laboured to restore the façade of the old. If Rome could not have Republican liberty, she would at least have Republican morals. Around the turn of the Christian Era, Augustus attempted to legislate the defence of ‘traditional’ Roman morality, encouraging large families and making adultery a capital offence. His own family, however, scandalously refused to co-operate, and he was forced to exile first his daughter, and later his granddaughter, both named Julia, for sexual licence. In

    AD

    8, for good measure, he also banished Ovid, the libertine poet and self-proclaimed trumpeter of his own vices, relegating him to the small town of Tomis on the Black Sea, the far border of the Roman world. The reasons for this abrupt move are only partly known. Augustus cited Ovid’s knowing manual The Art of Love, but Ovid, beseeching the Emperor for reprieve while conceding this charge, speaks also of some obscure ‘error’, to give details of which might have repeated the offence. Perhaps there was some political gaffe or misstep – there was much half-inchoate conspiracy around Augustus at this time, into which Ovid may somehow have stumbled. The mystery remains, and so did the poet. Tomis was bleak, dank, barbaric. Devastated by exile from his wife, friends and city, Ovid wrote a series of verse letters back to Rome – begging, lamenting, recalling, confessing, enlisting friends. But neither friends nor poems moved Augustus or Tiberius, his grim successor, to look his way. Ovid lived on in cold Tomis, drinking frozen wine, and died there ten years later, in

    AD

    17, at the age of 60.

    In many ways, we might think of Ovid as Augustan Rome’s Oscar Wilde. Like Wilde, he was a brilliant and ambitious provincial of prominent family though not of ruling stock. Both proceeded through their different educational systems with colourful

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