An Ovid Reader: Selections from Seven Works by Carole Newland is now available from Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. An Ovid Reader is the seventeenth title in the BC Latin Reader Series.

These readers, written by experts in the field, provide well annotated Latin selections to be used as authoritative introductions to Latin authors, genres, or topics, for intermediate or advanced college Latin study. Their relatively small size (covering 500-600 lines) makes them ideal to use in combination.

Each volume includes a comprehensive introduction, bibliography for further reading, Latin text with notes at the back, and complete vocabulary.

Ovid’s poetry, once regarded as superficial in comparison to that of other Augustan poets, is now hailed for its artistry, its mastery at storytelling, and the profound influence it has had on literature and art from the poet’s own time to the present day.

This Reader’s commentary gives grammatical and syntactical assistance, seasoned with appreciation of the fine points of Ovid’s complex literary style. Latin selections are drawn in part from his elegiac poems and demonstrate the new range of directions for elegy developed by Ovid: not merely love elegy (Amores, and with a fresh epistolary form in Heroides); but also didactic and aetiological elegy (Ars Amatoria, Fasti), each with a twist on expected subject-matter; and exile poetry (Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto), whose elegiac themes are adapted from earlier poetry to express emotional as well as political meaning after Ovid’s banishment from his beloved Rome. Select passages from the epic Metamorphoses, a brilliant experiment that uses a variety of genres under a unifying theme, fill out the collection with the work acknowledged to be Ovid’s major achievement.

Special Features

Introduction to Ovid’s life, works, style, and meter

556 lines of unadapted Latin text in 30 selections from 7 works: Amores 1.1.1–4; 1.6.27–40; 1.9.1–20; 1.13.1–18, 21–26, 47–48; 2.15.1–28 • Heroides 3.1–4, 113–20; 5.61–88; 7.181–96 • Ars Amatoria 1.1–4, 17–34; 1.89–102; 1.505–24; 3.329–48 • Metamorphoses1.168–88; 2.227–34, 272–84; 3.173–98; 3.402–17; 4.93–127; 5.585–600; 10.270–94; 13.764–69, 838–53; 15.75–95; 15.871–79 • Fasti 1.89–102; 2.813–36; 4.305–28; 5.193–212 • Tristia 1.7.15–30; 4.6.1–18; 4.10.1–2, 17–26, 41–66 • Epistulae ex Ponto 3.3.5–20