Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Playboy of the Roman World
By Bernard Knox
The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse
by Alessandro Barchiesi
University of California Press, 292 pp., $45.00
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
edited by Michael Hoffman, by James Lasdun
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 298 pp., $14.00
Tales from Ovid
by Ted Hughes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 257 pp., $25.00
The Metamorphoses of Ovid
translated freely into verse by David R. Slavitt
Johns Hopkins University Press, 342 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Publius Ovidius Naso[1] (the last name, 'Nose,' was a family inheritance from an ancestor who presumably had a big one), though admired by Shakespeare,[2] was distrusted in the nineteenth century as an immoralist and dismissed for most of the twentieth as a lightweight, but is now back in favor. He was all the fashion in his own time, too, and that time has some intriguing resemblances to our own. It was an age of peace that succeeded generations of war and also one that saw the obsolescence of the stern moral code that had made the early Roman republic a nation of dedicated farmer-soldiers and faithful, fertile wives.
Review, 6614 words
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