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Article: Love and error.('Ovid: The Poet and His Work')(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Niklas Holzberg Ovid: The Poet and His Work, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Cornell, 217 pages, $39.95
Ovid is not exactly the proper example for Roman greatness. He is the author, after all, of famously lascivious love manuals and erotic poetry, teaching in his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) how to pick up girls outside the Forum and generally mocking the pretensions of early imperial Rome, which caused Augustus to exile him in late middle-age. For generations of schoolboys (myself included), Ovid was excluded from the usual high-school cursus authorum romanorum of Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil. Along with the equally off-color Catullus, Ovid had to wait for the ...