Of All the Stars, The Evening Star
Real And Fictional Latin Women Poets
Of all the stars, the evening star is the brightest and most beautiful. It is of course not a star but the planet Venus, the Roman goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility, and thus is an appropriate title for Jim Levy’s book about first century Roman women.
As he says in the author’s note, for over two thousand years the Latin poets have had their say about love and hate and sex and marriage, and he decided to give voice to the women that they wrote about: Catullus’ Lesbia, Propertius’ Cynthia, Ovid’s Corinna, Horace’s Lydia, and others. In all there are twenty-two, three of them historically real women (an aristocrat, an actress and a poet) and nineteen fictional; twenty human and two goddesses.