Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso

Affirmation. Both directly and, as befitted the Roman Callimachus, allusively, Ovid repeatedly asserts, often with a wit and irony that borders on defiance, his conviction of the injustice of his sentence and of the pre-eminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. These elegies are throughout informed by Ovid's awareness of a continuing pride in his poetic identity and mission. In technical skill and inventiveness, they rank.

Tristia

Sorrows of an Exile

Riley

Were Jove to hurl his bolt at every sinner, he’d find himself unarmed at no far date.

Each word of the whole book that you've been reading was framed while I was on my anxious way.

A work imbued with self-righteousness and self-pity that is difficult to sympathise with when contrasting Ovid's barely-punitive exile (he lost citizenship and physical access to his family and city; he retained his wealth, connections, and aristocratic status) with the horrors inflicted on women, children, slaves, and various populations treated as pawns, none of whom had a choice in being condemned as symbols of treason.

Useful when studying Augustan morality and early imperial family/gender dynamics.

A work imbued with self-righteousness and self-pity that is difficult to sympathise with when contrasting Ovid's barely-punitive exile (he lost citizenship and physical access to his family and city; he retained his wealth, connections, and aristocratic status) with the horrors inflicted on women, children, slaves, and various populations treated as pawns, none of whom had a choice in being condemned as symbols of treason.

Useful when studying Augustan morality and early imperial family/gender dynamics.

Sorrows of an Exile Tristia