Ovid: Amores. Text, Prolegomena and Commentary in Four Volumes. Volume IV.i: A Commentary on Book Three, Elegies 1 to 8

Ovid begins the third book of the Amores with an awkward choice: Tragedy calls him towards grander poetry, while Elegy wants him to stay with love. He stays, at least for a while. The poems that follow turn the familiar obstacles of Roman love affairs into witty contests of power, money, desire and literary ambition. By the eighth elegy, the lover-poet has been outdone by a wealthier rival.

J. C. McKeown and R. Joy Littlewood guide readers through these first eight poems in detail, following Ovid’s language, allusions and changes of poetic direction. The commentary attends to jokes that can be easy to miss and to the Roman world in which they were written. This is Volume IV.i of a larger scholarly project, limited to Amores Book III, elegies 1–8; the remaining elegies are not covered here.