Recent additions to the Latin poetry pages include the first of what will be quite a few extracts from the works of Ovid, the last of the Big Four – the others being Horace, Virgil and Catullus – to feature. If you want to know more about them, there is information and the Augustan age in which the last three wrote on the “About the Poets” page. The piece – “Ovid’s broad-minded advice to his mistress” – is from his Amores and exemplifies his enthusiasm for good, old-fashioned sex.
A recent addition from Horace is a short poem from his Odes which also has quite an erotic charge but of a more sophisticated kind. In this poem, traditionally known as the Pyrrha ode, the narrator is looking back on the end of an affair and compares it to an escape from drowning in the sea of love, which he implies can be pretty stormy. even as he is celebrating his escape, however, it is clear that part of him is very nostalgic for the place in Pyrrha’s arms now occupied by her new,unsuspecting lover.