Category: Poetry
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part VII: There’s always the Dinner-Table
llustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD The table laid for a feast also gives you an opening: There’s something more than wine you can look for there. Often rosy Love has clasped Bacchus’s horns, drawing him to his gentle arms, as he lay there. And when wine has…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part VI: Triumphs are good too!
llustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD Behold, now Caesar’s planning to add to our rule what’s left of earth: now the far East will be ours. Parthia , we’ll have vengeance: Crassus’s bust will cheer, and those standards wickedly laid low by barbarians. The avenger’s here, the leader, proclaimed,…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part V- Or at the Races, or the Circus
llustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD Don’t forget the races, those noble stallions: the Circus holds room for a vast obliging crowd. No need here for fingers to give secret messages, nor a nod of the head to tell you she accepts: You can sit by your lady:…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part IV- Or at the Theatre
Illustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD But hunt for them, especially, at the tiered theatre: that place is the most fruitful for your needs. There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with, one to be with just once, or one you might wish to…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) – Book I Part III – Search while you’re out Walking
llustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD Just walk slowly under Pompey’s shady colonnade, when the sun’s in Leo, on the back of Hercules’s lion: or where Octavia added to her dead son Marcellus’s gifts, with those rich works of foreign marble. Don’t miss the Portico that takes its…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part II: How to Find Her
Illustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD While you’re still free, and can roam on a loose rein, pick one to whom you could say: ‘You alone please me.’ She won’t come falling for you out of thin air: the right girl has to be searched for: use your…
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Ovid: The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) Book I Part I: His Task
Illustration by Frederico Righi Publius Ovidius Naso 43 BC – c. 17 AD Should anyone here not know the art of love, read this, and learn by reading how to love. By art the boat’s set gliding, with oar and sail, by art the chariot’s swift: love’s ruled by art. Automedon was skilled with Achilles’s chariot…
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Momento Mori
Remember that you must die – The ”Memento Mori” Mosaic dated to the mid-first century AD, before the Mt. Vesuvius eruption (photograph by Erich Lessing in Art Resource) In Roman culture, there was a belief in life after death and that the soul lived on after the person had died. The Romans believed that after…
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A poem by Sappho
A Fayum mummy portrait, a painted portrait on wooden board attached to the body of an usually upper class person before burial in Roman Egypt. Immortal Aphrodite, on your intricately brocaded throne, child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, this I pray: Dear Lady, don’t crush my heart with pains and sorrows. But come here, if ever before, when you heard…
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Peleus and Thetis
Praise for Tales from Ovid: ‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror. There should be a copy of his book in…
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