Selections from Ovid's Amores, translated by John Svarlien and Diane Arnson Svarlien Weapons and war were my theme (JS) It was hot (JS) There's a certain madame (JS) She's coming (JS) How many times did I tell you? (JS) You won't catch me making excuses (DAS) For trying to unseat the burden (DAS) What good does it do for girls to be exempt? (DAS) Where's your self-respect? (DAS) You're strict, but your severity is pointless (DAS) Notes on Ovid and the Amores by William W. Batstone At that time, due to some "error" unknown to us, he was banished by the emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea. This was an old Greek colony, now inhabited mainly by barbarians, where no one spoke Latin and few spoke Greek. He left behind, unfinished, a series of etiological/astrological poems on the Roman calendar, and from Tomis composed his Tristia, or Poems of Sadness, and his Letters from the Black Sea. He was unable to win a reprieve, either from Augustus or the next emperor, Tiberius, and died in exile in 18 C.E. He had been married three times; two brief marriages which produced one daughter, and a third wife who remained with him during his exile. Amores I: Ovid began writing the Amores at about eighteen years of age in 25 B.C.E. When he came to revise this five-book edition sometime after 10 B.C.E. into the three books we have, he apparently rearranged the order of the poems, roughly speaking, from pre-infatuation to disenchantment. In this way Ovid can construct an apparent narrative of his love affair which may also seem to parallel his attraction to the genre and his eventual abandonment of it. The first book of the Amores has the clearest structure as a book: it begins and ends with programmatic poems which correspond to each other and places the longest poem in the center. On either side of this poem, I 8, the other poems are arranged in pairs of success and failure: 2 with 9, 3 with 10, etc. | |
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