![]() ![]() Ovid’s work follows three other prominent elegists of the Augustan Era, including Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Later, Ovid adopted the city of Rome as his home, and began celebrating the city and its people in a series of works, including Amores. The rhetoric used in Amores reflects Ovid’s upbringing in this education system. There was a great emphasis placed on the ability to speak well and deliver compelling speeches in Roman society. During the Augustan Era, boys attended schools that focused on rhetoric in order to prepare them for careers in politics and law. Based on the memoirs of Seneca the Elder, scholars know that Ovid attended school in his youth. ![]() Ovid was born in 43 BCE, the last year of the Roman Republic, and he grew up in the countryside of Sulmo. ![]() While several literary scholars have called the Amores a major contribution to Latin love elegy, they are not generally considered among Ovid's finest works and "are most often dealt with summarily in a prologue to a fuller discussion of one of the other works". The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. ![]() Amores is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. ![]()
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