Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 18)

Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds is Hermann Fränkel’s masterful reappraisal of Rome’s most mercurial poet, presented as part of the Sather Classical Lectures. Long dismissed as a frivolous craftsman, Ovid here emerges as a writer whose artistry and contradictions mark the twilight of antiquity and the dawn of a new cultural world. Moving through the Amores, Heroides, Metamorphoses, and the exile poems, Fränkel demonstrates how Ovid combined rhetorical brilliance with startling innovations—probing identity, love, myth, and history in ways that resonate beyond the confines of Augustan Rome. By attending both to close readings and broader literary traditions, this book restores Ovid’s poetry to its full complexity, balancing entertainment with depth, charm with insight.

Fränkel situates Ovid’s career “between two worlds”—the last convulsions of the Roman Republic and the formative stirrings of a Christian sensibility. His analysis highlights the poet’s distinctive treatment of myth as a mirror of human experience, his frank explorations of erotic and emotional life, and his persistent negotiation between art and reality. Written with a clarity that invites students of literature and seasoned classicists alike, Ovid: A Poet Between Two Worlds not only rescues Ovid from centuries of critical complacency but also illuminates the enduring fascination of a poet whose playful verse concealed, and revealed, profound cultural transformations.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1945.