ovid

Echoes in the Forest: Fable Tradition and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Phaedrus 1.12

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Echoes in the Forest: Fable Tradition and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Phaedrus 1.12

By Alethea Lam

Phaedrus opens Book 1 of his fables with the phrase Aesopus auctor, anchoring his work in the animal fable tradition of the legendary Greek storyteller. With this phrase, the Latin poet credits Aesop as the pioneer of the genre itself as well as the original narrator of the fables he is about to retell (Phaedrus 1.1.1). Phaedrus’s poems exhibit the classic characteristics of animal fable, namely morals communicated in promythia and epimythia, instructive narratives to demonstrate these lessons, and recurring semi-anthropomorphized animal characters whose behavior reflects stereotypes of their species.

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Penelope’s Wait: A Translation of Ovid’s Heroides Book I Lines 1–50

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Penelope’s Wait: A Translation of Ovid’s Heroides Book I Lines 1–50
By Erin Schott

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have endured for thousands of years because they tell stories still true to the human experience. The Iliad recounts the horrors of war and the egotism of those in power, while the Odyssey narrates an arduous homecoming to a place that is not the same as before…

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Orpheus as a Muse

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Orpheus as a Muse
By Maggie Yuan

What do a tragic love story, the Can-Can, and a critique on industrialization have in common? All are rooted in the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Everybody loves a good love story, and as far as the Greeks were concerned, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice represents a version of true and pure love devoid of any ill intentions. At the core of the story, however, is the importance of divine faith, even over such passion…

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Bar the Dawn from My Bed

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Bar the Dawn from My Bed
By Alicia Lopez

One of my favorite parts of studying Classics is stumbling across little nuggets of relatable content. While of course, there are always big themes that span most works of literature (heroics, sacrifice, love, loss, etc.), I treasure the little similarities, like wanting to stay in bed, that are still wildly relatable thousands of years later…

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Sappho’s Shadow: Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction

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Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction
By Clare Kearns

Ovid’s Heroides are fundamentally paradoxical. As a collection of letters that take on the point of view of spurned mythological heroines writing to their former lovers, the poems purport to express the sadness, fear, and anger felt by the heroines from their own perspective—though, of course, the Heroides is the work of male poet Ovid…

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