Teaching the Elegiac Lover in Ovid’s Amores

This paper explores the evolution of views of Ovid’s elegiac lover. To counteract the tendency to define Ovid as a poet whose humor and irony were weaknesses, recent approaches have explored the complexities of Ovid’s lover, seeing him as both dominated by his puella and as her shrewd manipulator, a true desultor amoris. The paper summarizes five different approaches to the Amores (those of Paul Veyne, J. T. Davis, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ellen Greene, and Sharon James), and in addition suggests a series of steps that might be used in the classroom to enhance students’ understanding of Ovid’s elegiac lover.