This book is intended to assist students preparing for public examinations in Latin who are required to study this text, but it can of course be used by any students of Latin who have mastered the basics and who are now ready to start reading some Latin verse and developing their skills and their understanding. The notes assume that the reader has studied the Latin language roughly as far as GCSE, but the vocabulary list glosses every word in the text and the Introduction assumes that the reader is coming to Ovid for the very first time. The commentary seeks to elucidate the background and the literary features of this highly artistic text, while also helping the reader to understand how the Latin words fit together into their sentences.
My thanks are due above all to Charlotte Loveridge and Dhara Patel and their team at Bloomsbury who have been a model of efficiency and enthusiasm and a delight to write for. My thanks also go to Martin Thorpe and to Stephen Anderson who both read the whole of this book in draft form and made many highly useful comments which saved me from error as well as pointing me towards a better reading of the text. Professor Richard Tarrant of Harvard University was of great assistance with a knotty linguistic matter. All mistakes which remain are, of course, my own.
John Godwin, Shrewsbury
February 2013