Ovid scholarship

Bishop - love or lust?

“The Ars Amatoria is about lust rather than love”

Gibson - mythology

“Ovid deflates epic by presenting mythical heroines as mere causes of erotic disappointment”

Green - relationships

“Ovid’s view of human relationships is nothing if not pragmatic”

Gibson - pleasure

“Pleasing the opposite sex is one of the central skills to the art of love”

Gibson - pleasure

“Pleasing the opposite sex is one of the central skills to the art of love”

Wood - Ovid vs Augustus

“In Ovid’s pages, the Emperor’s grand design for the city becomes a kind of erotic memory map, and the immortal is turned into the immoral”

Ingleheart - subversion

“There’s a lot of subversion of the emperors and his ideas about what Rome should be like”

Marshall - Augustan contrast

“An inherent tension between the poem’s erotic content on the one hand and the Augustan context on the other hand”

Gibson - women’s instructions

“When Ovid tells women how to dress and how to do their hair, it’s not about controlling women, but about rejecting the Augustan polarisation of women as either respectable matrons or prostitutes”

Bishop - Ovid’s opinion

“It is difficult to pin him down to a serious opinion on love, he is often subversive and humorous”

Marshall - men

“If love is a game it is undoubtedly rigged in men’s favour”