[Sidenote: Ovid’s Poems] Ovid’s poems fall into three divisions: poems of love, in elegiac metre, the works of his earlier years; antiquarian and mythological poems (the _Fasti_, in elegiacs, and the _Metamorphoses_, in hexameters), written before his banishment; and the poems written, in elegiac verse, at Tomi. The exact chronological order of the love poems is hard to fix, as the first series of elegies, the _Amores_, appeared in two editions, at first in five books, later in three. The later edition is preserved. Most of these elegies were probably written between 22 and 15 B. C. The _Heroides_, letters from mythical heroines to their absent husbands or lovers, were written soon after the _Amores_, then followed the poem _On the Care of the Face_ (_De Medicamine Faciei_), then the _Ars Amatoria_ (_The Art of Love_) and the _Remedia Amoris_ (_Cures for Love_). The last two seem to have been published between the beginning of 1 B. C. and the end of 1 A. D., but need not have been entirely written in the space of those two years. [Sidenote: The Amores] The three books of the _Amores_ contain forty-nine elegies, nearly all of which are love poems. Among the comparatively small number on other subjects the best known and most interesting are the elegy on the death of Tibullus (III, ix) and the description of a festival of Juno (III, xiii). The love poems are in great part addressed to Corinna, who seems to be a mere figment of the poet’s imagination, not, like the Lesbia of Catullus, the Delia of Tibullus, and the Cynthia of Propertius, a real person under a fictitious name. Ovid’s love poems are not expressions of his own feelings for any individual, but the means by which he exhibits his astonishing facility in versification and his lively imagination. From beginning to end the poems show an utter lack of serious purpose. All the vicissitudes of a long love affair are treated with equal lightness and grace. Corinna is ill, she goes away, she receives a letter, to which she replies unfavorably, her parrot dies, and her lover laments it in an elegy; but nowhere does any real feeling make itself manifest. The poet seems to wish to give a complete series of pictures of the feelings and conduct of a lover under all possible circumstances, and his lively imagination plays lightly with all the varying phases of passion, but it is all play. Some of the poems are based upon Greek originals, many contain mythological allusions, a few are heavy with Alexandrian learning, some are harmlessly sportive, others extremely indecent, but all alike are masterly in technical execution, and empty of real sentiment. In these, his earliest poems, Ovid is already the most brilliant of Roman elegists. The easy flow of his verse is admirable. The rules that each distich must form a complete sentence, or at least express an independent thought, and that each pentameter must end with a word of two syllables, give great uniformity to the