SOURCE: Gildenhard, Ingo and Andrew Zissos. “Inspirational Fictions: Autobiography and Generic Reflexivity in Ovid's Proems.” Greece and Rome 47, Second Series (April 2000): 67-79.

In the following essay, Gildenhard and Zissos examine the relation between the elegiac mode, metrics, and the influence of Cupid in Ovid's poetry.

When the first edition of the Metamorphoses appeared in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city. His literary début, the Amores, immediately established his reputation as a poetic Lothario, as it lured his tickled readers into a typically Ovidian world of free-wheeling elegiac love, light-hearted hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery. Connoisseurs of elegiac poetry could then enjoy his Heroides, vicariously sharing stirring emotional turmoil with various heroines of history and mythology, who were here given a literary forum for voicing bitter feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing...