Ovid Book 1: Epistulae Ex Ponto

＂In the modern revival of interest in Ovid’s exilic poetry, the Tristia have long received the most attention, although his last elegies, the Epistulae ex Ponto, reward the reader no less and are arguably more appealing - works in which his inventivenessflourishes no less than before, and in which his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging, though now in a minor key, as it was always was from the time of his Amores. Their comparative neglect resulted partly from a dearth of commentaries. Whereas Luck’s commentary on the Tristia (1967, 1977) long made that collection more accessible, the reader of the Epistulae ex Ponto had until recently little beyond Keene (1887) in English and Scholte (1933) in Latin on book 1, both difficult to obtain. Now, however, Ovid’s readers can look forward to the completion of M. Helzle’s German commentary on all four books, of which the first volume, on books 1-2, appeared in 2003; his commentary on selected elegies of book 4 (1989) is in English. On book 2we have Pâerez Vega (1985) in Spanish and Galasso (1995) in Italian. In 2005 appeared J. F. Gaertner’s commentary in English on book 1, a valuable work, whose vast scale perhaps diminishes its accessibility to some readers.＂