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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
Amores
There is an essential difference between Ovid and Propertius or Tibullus as poets of love. Not only is he much more the poet of pleasure and intrigue, they of serious sentiment or passion; but they treat the feeling of love, not as mere desire, but as the admiration of something above them. They willingly accept the position of servitium, while Ovid in the Amores and the Ars Amandi shows us only transient desire, and regards the whole subject in the spirit of persiflage. He never deals with it seriously, except when it is the love of the woman for the man. With Ovid, love poetry is a study of psychological observation: with the others an utterance of their own feeling. Even in the Amores, still more in the Ars, Ovid is much more disinterested and objective: he is absolutely so in the Heroides.
The Amores, in which he first came before the world, were originally published in five books, but afterwards judiciously restricted to three: in the interval between the first and second draught of this record of his personal experience and feelings, appeared at least ten of his Epistles. In these three books of Amores he carries on the role of Tibullus and Propertius, but in a very different spirit. The love poems of the two older poets are essentially elegies, plaintive in the former, passionate and melancholy in the latter. They have their source in actual experience and real feeling.
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