Three books of love elegies — witty, irreverent, and deliberately outrageous. Ovid invents a mistress called Corinna and chronicles an affair that is more literary game than emotional confession.
Start ReadingCupid bends Ovid's epic hexameter into elegiac couplets by force. The poet submits to love and catalogues his erotic education: the races, the banquet, the locked door, the dawn.
The lover matures but does not improve. Ovid addresses his ring, his slave, his mistress's abortion, another man's wife.
The poet grows weary of love's conventions. The poems become sharper, more self-aware. The final poem bids farewell to elegy.