follows the lover’s progress and the narrative possibilities he confronts through Ars 2 (with somewhat less supporting evidence from mythological digressions, though this lack may invite further scholarship). Thus she asks, if the love story begins with a young man’s journey to the hot spots of Rome, how does the mythological digression on the Sabine women move the story along? S. 2 She is concerned with how the narrative of a love story implicit from the instructional parts of the text interacts with the poem’s mythological excursuses. Divisions in the volume organize these topics into major areas of scholarship on the poems: poetics, erotics, politics, reception, though there is enough overlap within the collection to render such categories somewhat superficial.Īlison Sharrock’s narratological approach to Ovidian erotodidaxis joins other recent efforts at discovering manifestations of narrative in traditionally non-narrative poetry.

Also included are attempts to pin down the nature of love in the poems and to reconcile the praeceptor’s mythological excursuses with a broader concept of Ovidian ars and humanitas. These arguments confront matters of intertextuality, narratology, and reception, as well as Augustus and the early imperial social context. Steven Green’s overview introduces the specific arguments advanced in the volume and places them within an appropriate scholarly context. 1 The editors have included German and especially Italian scholarship in translation, in the hopes of better integrating Anglophone traditions of scholarship on the poems with continental approaches. Since the 1990’s commentaries and extended treatments of Ars 2-3 have appeared, and contributors to the volume have taken advantage of these recent arrivals. This collection of essays, the first in English devoted exclusively to the Ars and Remedia, emerged from a 2002 conference celebrating the bimillenium of Ovid’s erotodidactic cycle. Table of Contents (also at the end of the review).

The art of love by ovid