Category: Poetry
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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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Raunchy, Rowdy, and Rotten: Provocative Poetry in Ancient Rome
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by
Please be warned, the content of this post is (very) adult in nature. ”In around A.D. 64, Marcus Valerius Martialis (A.D. 31-41 to 103), better known as Martial, arrived in Rome aged 26 from his Spanish hometown of Bilbilis, famous then for its iron mines and for the manufacture of steel, and a center of Roman…
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Erisychthon
Adam Cvijanovic (American citizen, born 1959) Erysichthon, oil on Masonite 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…
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Actaeon
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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Sulpicia
Many women, we know, wrote poetry in ancient Rome. The works of only one have survived. This poem by Sulpicia, the niece of the distinguished statesman and patron of letters Valerius Messalla Corvinus, allow us to hear an aristocratic female voice from the late first century B.C. and the Augustan milieu of Horace and Virgil.…
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Statius – An Ode to Sleep
An Ode To Sleep by Publius Papinius Statius, a Latin poet of the 1st century CE. Gentle divinity, how have I merited?Whither, unfortunate wretch, have I strayed,Thus of thy bounty to lie disenherited –I alone whilst every other is paid?Sleeping are cattle and birds without number,Beasts of the wilderness rest in their lair;Even the hills,…
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Echo and Narcissus
Narcissus and Echo (45–79 AD), wall painting from Pompeii 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…
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Hercules and Dejanira.
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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