Roman Poets > Ovid
It's customary to divide the corpus of Ovid poems into 3 categories:
- Love/Erotic poems
- Myth themes
- Exile poems.
One could also look at the poems with a set of parallel contrasts: ones where Ovid was trying to be especially urbane and witty (his early works), ones where he was being fantastically informative (his mature works), and ones where he doesn't much care if he bores the reader with his whining -- not that he lacked reason for it (the works of his period of exile). There is overlap -- after all, it's one man with the same basic attitudes and experiences.
- Early Period
- Amores 'Loves' - 49 elegies about love.
- Heroides 'Heroines' - 21 love letters from heroines in elegiac verse.
- Medicamina Faciei Femineae The Art of Beauty - (Fragment of 100 lines.) Advice on cosmetics thought to have been written before the Ars Amatoria.
- Ars Amatoria 'The Art of Love' - 3 books on seduction and winning the game of love. The third book is addressed to women; the first two, to men.
- Remedia Amoris 'Remedies for Love' - 814 lines of basically Stoic advice on handling the problems that come with love.
- Period of Ovid's Maturity
- Metamorphoses 'Transformations' 15 books of ancient mythology loosely tied together in heroic hexameter verse. Ovid's greatest work. [Download a text-only English translation of the Metamorphoses. Read the Latin.]
- Fasti 'Festival Days' or 'Calendar' - 1 for each month, but only 6 months were finished, in elegiac verse. Contains information on the myths behind the holidays.
- Period of Ovid's "exile" (really, his relegatio)
- Tristia 'Sorrows' - 5 books of elegies as letters without the people addressed named..
- Epistulae ex Ponto 'Letters from Pontus' - 4 books like the Tristia lamenting and begging specifically named people to let him back to Rome.
- Ibis 'The Ibis' - 644 elegiac lines of invective.
- Halieutica 'About Fishing' - About 129 lines of fragments and possibly spurious. Didactic poetry about the fish in the Black Sea.
In addition to these works, the corpus of Ovid poems includes more spurious poems: Consolatio ad Liviam, Nux, and Somnium, and a lost tragedy of Medea.
