A major work of Latin literature, Tristia 2 is a verse letter addressed by the exiled poet Ovid to the man who banished him from Rome, the emperor Augustus. Ovid apologizes to Augustus for the misdemeanours that led to his banishment, but, more importantly, defends both his life and his poetry in light of the accusation that his earlier Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) had promoted adultery. Jennifer Ingleheart's commentary, the most up-to-date and comprehensive one available, is an invaluable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical, and political - while her Introduction explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.

Banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, the poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors. In his Tristia (Sad Things) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland.
Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid is an interdisciplinary study of the impact of Ovid's banishment upon later Western literature, exploring responses to Ovid's portrait of his life in exile. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the role of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation; and to explore exile from a number of perspectives, including both the personal and the fictional.

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

Much has been written about the contribution of ancient Greece to modern discourses of homosexuality, but Rome's significant role has been largely overlooked. Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities explores the contested history of responses to Roman antiquity, covering areas such as literature, the visual arts, popular culture, scholarship, and pornography. Essays by scholars working across a number of disciplines analyse the demonization of Rome and attempts to write it out of the history of homosexuality by early activists such as John Addington Symonds, who believed that Rome had corrupted ideal (and idealized) 'Greek love' through its decadence and sexual licentiousness. The volume's contributors also investigate the identification with Rome by men and women who have sought an alternative ancestry for their desires. The volume asks what it means to look to Rome instead of Greece, theorizes the way in which Rome itself appropriates Greece, and explores the consequences of such appropriations and identifications, both ancient and modern. From learned discussions of lesbian cunnilingus in Renaissance commentaries on Martial and Juvenal, to disgust at the sexual excesses of the emperors, to the use of Rome by the early sexologists, to modern pornographic films that linger on the bodies of gladiators and slaves, Rome has been central to homosexual desires and experiences. By interrogating the desires that create engagements with the classical past, the volume illuminates both classical reception and the history of sexuality.