Ovid

You may call it violence, but such violence is welcome to girls; they often want to have yielded unwillingly what they enjoy.

She may put up a fight at first and call you a rogue; yet even as she fights, she will want to lose.

Goodbye, unwarlike elegies, festive Muse—a work that will survive me and endure after my death.

Mantua takes pride in Virgil, Verona in Catullus; I shall be known as the glory of the Paelignian race, whom their own love of freedom had driven to take up arms in an honourable cause when an anxious Rome feared the allies’ forces.

Look for a new poet, mother of the tender Loves! My elegies are rounding the last turning post—elegies composed by me, a son of the Paelignian countryside (nor have my pleasures brought me shame), heir, if that means anything, to a rank held since my great-grandfathers’ day, not a knight just made by the upheavals of war.

The prize comes easily to you: you are beating a man who wants to lose—just make sure your tongue remembers to say, ‘I didn’t!’

You all but parade your guilt before my very eyes; if you won’t spare your good name, at least spare me!

Why do I see writing tablets going out and coming back so often?

A prostitute about to give her body to some unknown Roman bolts the door and keeps the public out.

Have mercy—by the rights of the bed we share, by all the gods who so often lend themselves to your deceptions, by your face, which to me is like some mighty deity, and by your eyes, which have taken mine captive!