Homer is gripping, Plato is readable and Julius Caesar chronicles major historical events with brevity.
So why don’t I get Ovid, hailed as a great classical and innovative writer of poetry?
Maybe it’s the 1986 translation by A..D. Melville. here’s a taste of a new translation by David Raeburn:
PROLOGUE
Changes of shape, new forms, are the themes which my spirit impels me now to recite.
Inspire me, O Gods (it is you who have even transformed my art) and spin me a thread from the world’s beginning
Down to my own lifetime, in one continuous poem.
THE CREATION
Before the earth and the sea and the all-encompassing heaven came into being,
The whole of nature displayed but a single face, which men have called Chaos…
odespinner 