by Ovid
Ulysses, Son of Laertes; husband of Penelope; Greek hero famed for his endurance and verbal cleverness, XII.914
Urania, One of the nine Muses, V.378
Venus, Roman goddess of love; daughter of Jupiter and Dione, or, as Greek Aphrodite, sprung from the foam of the sea; husband of Vulcan; mother of Cupid (by Mars) and of Aeneas (by Anchises), I.643
Vertumnus, Etruscan god of changing seasons and fruitfulness, XIV.922
Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth, XV.903
Virbius, See Hippolytus, XV.639
Vulcan, Son of Juno, husband of Venus; armorer of the gods, II.7
Xanthus, River near Troy, II.325
Zephyr, The west wind, I.87
1 Ovid uses this name when he refers to himself in his poems; Ovidius, with its first three syllables short, could not be fitted into either hexameter or the second line of the elegiac couplet.
2 In Love’s Labour’s Lost (IV. ii), Holofernes dismisses a poetic love letter addressed by Biron to Rosaline as lacking in “the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy…. Ovidius Naso was the man. And why indeed ‘Naso’ but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?”
3 Ars Amatoria III, 121–22.
4 Ars Amatoria III, 122ff. Translated by Peter Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems (Penguin, 1982).
5 Amores I, 8. 39–40; Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems.
6 Book XI. 20. In the Loeb Classical Library’s original edition of the Epigrams (1925) this one (like many another) was translated into Italian. In the new edition edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey it is turned into plain English.
7 Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems.
8 Ovid never uses the word, but later writers (Seneca, for example) refer to the poem under this title.
9 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books I–V, edited with a commentary by William S. Anderson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
10 Tales from Ovid, trans. Ted Hughes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
11 The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
12 The Tennessee Quarterly (Fall 1995); Eclectic Literary Forum, vol. 7, no. 1 (1997).
13 He is the author of Steal the Bacon (1987) and What the Darkness Proposes (1996), both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
14 “A Dangerously Modern Poet,” The New York Review, December 3, 1992.
* Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
