(2) Heroides, twenty letters in elegiac verse, feigned to have been written by ladies or chiefs of the heroic age to the absent objects of their love (15-20 are in pairs, e.g. Paris to Helen and Helen to Paris, and are probably spurious). ‘The Letters 1-14 are thoroughly modern: they express the feelings and speak the language of refined women in a refined age, and all exhibit an artificiality both in the substance and the manner of their pleading.’—Sellar.
(3) Ars Amatoria, in elegiac verse in three Books. This is an ironical form of didactic poetry in which Ovid teaches the art of lying quite as much as the art of loving.
(4) Remedia Amoris, in elegiac verse, while professing to be a recantation of the Ars Amatoria, shows, if possible, a worse taste.
(5) Metamorphoses, in hexameter verse in fifteen Books, containing versions of legends on transformations (mutatae formae) from Chaos down to Caesar’s transformation into a star. In some respects this is his greatest poem: Ovid himself makes for it as strong a claim to immortality as Horace does for his Odes:
Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
Ore legar populi perque omnia saecula fama,
Siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
Met. XV. 877-end.
‘The attractiveness of this work lies in its descriptions; but the attempt to divest it of the character of a dictionary of mythology by interweaving stories, after the fashion of the Arabian Nights, is only partially successful.’—Tyrrell.
(6) Fasti, in elegiac verse in six Books, a poetical calendar of the Roman year. Each month has a Book allotted to it, and Ovid probably sketched out Books vii-xii, but his exile made it impossible for him to complete the work. It contains much valuable information on Roman customs and some exquisitely told stories (e.g. the Rape of Proserpine), but leaves the impression of being an effort to produce on the reader the effect of a patriotism which the writer did not feel.