The third and final book of Ovid’s love elegies is a complex farewell to the genre. It begins, programmatically, with Ovid, torn between Tragedy and Elegy, persuading Tragedy to give him a little more time for his love poetry and love affairs. As the book progresses, familiar obstructions to the pursuit of illicit love in urban Rome, beyond the easily circumvented Leges Iuliae, are interspersed with conclusive impediments, such as impotence or even Death. Other elegies manifest Ovid’s developing interest in alternative poetic modes and subjects. The last poem, 3.15, bids Elegy a final farewell, while asserting the magnitude of Ovid’s achievement as a love-poet.

The final volume of James McKeown’s Commentary on Ovid’s Amores, the commentary on Book three, was jointly authored with R.J. Littlewood, and is published in two parts. The first, on elegies 1-8, appeared in 2023. Now the volume is completed with this second part, on elegies 9 to 15, which also contains indexes to all four volumes of the commentary.