Ovid’s primary theme, in these exciting productions of his, is: Love is a campaign, long and ruthless. It requires skill, training, equipment, strategy, vision. So, in his pleas to Corinna his poetic offerings are in the nature of addresses to Woman, tantalizing, shameless, an epitome of feminine wiles and graces. As stimuli toward erotic diversions, Ovid generously and without resentment recommends, in addition to his own poetic manuals, his Roman contemporaries Propertius and Tibullus, the elegiac poets, as well as Vergil: and, among the Greeks, the erotic lyrics and occasional pieces of Callimachus and Philetas, Anacreon and Sappho. In Book 3 of the _Metamorphoses_ we have the story of Narcissus, enamoured aphrodisiacally by his own image reflected in a pool. The image of himself is so clearly defined, the lips move so appealingly in response to his own pleas, that he is ready to succumb amorously. Then he realizes the truth, that he and his reflection are one, his own self, his very identity. And he longs to free himself from himself, to escape the duplication. By this imaginative and symbolical mythological design, Ovid is unquestionably stressing the erotic passion itself, the frenzied ecstasy to detach oneself from one’s own being, the clamor of man against his fettered self and his erotic agonies. A potion may appear in various guises. A vision of beauty can itself act like an enriched, stimulating philtre. The enraptured glance sends its erotic pronouncement to the enraptured heart, and the potion is virtually consummated. So, it seemed to Ovid, was the strange episode involving the sculptor Pygmalion: