and its consequences. In his Amores (Loves, or Love Affairs) he partly celebrates, partly burlesques, the self-dramatising misery and 'slavery to love' that characterise the poet-lover of Roman erotic elegy. The Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) is a mock didactic poem, a self- help manual that teaches its readers how to achieve and retain erotic conquests. Offering methods to control what is definitively uncontrollable - namely, erotic desire - Ovid pursues all the ironies and paradoxes of his theme in this dazzling work. In Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) the poet conceives desire as a disease curable by therapeutic advice. This translation of John Dryden (1631-1700) and his contemporaries in a style matchlessly suited to the originals.

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