Selections from the Amores and Metamorphoses
LaFleur gathers Ovid's love elegies and myths of transformation, presented in Latin with vocabulary and grammatical notes. It serves intermediate students reading real classical verse.
Love and transformation
4 ideas
Metamorphosis as a poetic principle
Ovid's myths turn humans into trees, animals, and stars, using change of form to explore desire, punishment, and identity. Transformation is the organizing motif of the collection.
Love as unstable and consuming
Ovid depicts erotic love as playful, obsessive, and often destructive across the elegies. Desire drives characters past reason and self-control.
The craft of the elegiac couplet
The selections showcase the elegiac meter and Ovid's wit, wordplay, and rhetorical polish. Reading them trains the ear for Augustan poetic technique.