Heroides

A book with obvious wear. May have some damage to the cover or binding but

A book with obvious wear. May have some damage to the cover or binding but integrity is still intact. There might be writing in the margins, possibly underlining and highlighting of text, but no missing pages or anything that would compromise the legibility or understanding of the text.

New York. 1990. Penguin Books. 1st Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. Very

New York. 1990. Penguin Books. 1st Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. Very Good In Wrappers. ISBN: 0140423559. Translated from the Latin & An Introduction and Notes by Harold Isbell. 255 pages. paperback. The cover shows the Judgement of Paris, from the tomb of the Pancrazi, Rome (photo: Scala). FROM THE PUBLISHER-Written in the form of poetic letters from women to then-absent lovers, the first fifteen of the HEROIDES sensitively portray a range of emotions from love to anger at betrayal. By means of this unusual art form, Ovid personalizes and brings to life many of the outstanding women of classical myth, such as Penelope, Dido and Ariadne. The final ‘double letters' of the book allow legendary heroes such as Paris to initiate the correspondence and their lovers to respond to their pleas. All the letters are alive with the tension between private love and public law; each is written in the urgency of a moment of crisis, the writer impressing his or her own character on love's irrationality, fury, tenderness, despair and longing. And while Ovid's verse-letter form, so slyly perfect to convey the follies of love, makes the HEROIDES rich in irony, it is richer still in poetry and desire. Harold Isbell's translation and metre perfectly capture the lightness and nuances of Ovid's original. Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for collections of love poetry in elegiac couplets, especially the Amores (‘Love Affairs') and Ars Amatoria (‘Art of Love'). His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology. Ovid is traditionally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace, his older contemporaries, as one of the three canonic poets of Latin literature. He was the first major Roman poet to begin his career during the reign of Augustus, and the Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. He enjoyed enormous popularity, but in one of the mysteries of literary history he was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, ‘a poem and a mistake', but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars. Ovid's prolific poetry includes the Heroides, a collection of verse epistles written as though by mythological heroines to the lovers who abandoned them; the Fasti, an incomplete six-book exploration of Roman religion with a calendar structure; and the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, two collections of elegies in the form of complaining letters from his exile. His shorter works include the Remedia Amoris (‘Cure for Love'), the curse-poem Ibis, and an advice poem on women's cosmetics. He wrote a lost tragedy, Medea, and mentions that some of his other works were adapted for staged performance. inventory #29191.