ABSTRACT
Date and publication. First printed in its entirety by Tonson in Ovid’s Art of Love. In Three Books. Together with his Remedy of Love. Translated into English Verse by Several Eminent Hands. To which are added, The Court of Love, A Tale from Chaucer. And The History of Love (1709), where it is said to have been ‘Translated, some Years since, By Mr. DRYDEN’. The episodes of ‘The Rape of the Sabines’ (ll. 111–51) and ‘The Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne’ (ll. 590–635) had previously been published in Poetical Miscellanies: The Fifth Part (1704). The poem was written in August–September 1693 (see below), but since there is no evidence that it was circulated in MS at that date, it is included here under the date of its posthumous printing. The present text is based on 1709, with one variant from 1704 noted at l. 149, and one adopted at l. 605. Paragraphing of 1709 is overridden at l. 52.
