This is the OCR-endorsed edition covering the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription for examinations in 2026–28 of Tibullus I.2, I.5, II.4 and the the A-Level (Group 2) prescription for examinations in 2027–28 of Ovid's Metamorphoses VII and Lucretius' de rerum natura I, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed material to be read in English for A Level.

The three poets contained in this volume present a wide range of Latin verse from the end of the republic and the early empire. There is some challenging philosophical poetry on the world in which we live, explaining and exploring the atomic nature of matter and seeing the wonderful ways in which nature works, there is Ovid’s wonderfully inventive and dramatic account of the sorceress Medea and her doomed love for the Argonaut Jason, and there are three poignant love-poems by the poet Tibullus. These three writers in their different ways manage to use Latin verse to convey a picture of the world which is both strange and familiar: Lucretius anticipates much of classical Physics, Ovid is the ancient world’s magic realist before the term was coined, and Tibullus offers us a case-study in heartbreak which rings as true today as it did in ancient times.

Supporting resources are available on the Companion Website: https://bloomsbury.pub/OCReditions-2026-2028.

John Godwin was for many years Head of Classics at Shrewsbury School, UK. He has written for each cycle of OCR-endorsed text editions since 2016, for works by Catullus, Juvenal and Ovid. His other publications include Ovid: Metamorphoses III An Extract (Bloomsbury 2013), Lucretius (Ancients in Action series, Bloomsbury 2004) and editions of Lucretius De Rerum Natura Books IV and VI and Catullus Poems 61-68.