Ancient Literature

The collection of essays focuses on works in ancient Greek and Latin but also includes a fair representation of Chinese literature. The literature of other languages, including Japanese and Sanskrit, is explored as well (an opening listing shows "Writers Covered, by Language of Composition"). Entries include authors, titles, and themes and literary forms. Works such as Julius Caesar's The Civil Wars, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses are discussed book by book.

The Art of Love celebrates the bi-millennium of Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love, traditionally assumed to have been brought to completion around AD 2. Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), which purport to teach young Roman men and women how to be good lovers, were partly responsible for the poet's exile from Rome under the emperor Augustus.