When Ovid calls himself  vates , he is taking a term that had sacred connotations, but then had "fallen into "contempt," ac...

There's a nice contrastive piece by Lucas Kwong in the Yale Undergraduate Journal of Classics about Penelope as she appears in the Odys...

Ovid is not just a great teller of myths, he's also a fine reader of them. To read them as he read them is to be introduced to the cla...

According to Samuel Johnson, John Milton in his latter years had three favorite authors: The books in which his daughter, who used to rea...

It's difficult to get past Ulysses in Metamorphoses 13 -- for Ovid as for us, he's the consummate Greek -- wily, a man of multiple ...

The shield of Achilles gets a couple of hundred lines of description from Homer, and has provoked thousands of pages of commentary. O...

Metamorphoses 12 gave us a sideways glimpse of Troy through the lens of Nestor, the voice of the epic past, featuring a pre-Iliadic battle ...