Ovid and His Ars: Preparing A Commentary For The Online Companion To The Worlds Of Roman Women

This article describes the author’s experience of preparing a text commentary for the Online Companion to The Worlds of Roman Women. Companion is unique resource because of its feminist focus and its target audience of intermediate Latin learners. The article outlines the process of identifying a suitable text, creating grammatical glosses, and collaboratively editing the commentary into its final form. The article analyses the value of Companion as a teaching tool within the classroom, and encourages others to join the collaborative project of building Companion’s texts. Companion provides a collection of unadapted Latin texts, with hyperlinked grammatical support, by or about Roman women from all parts of Roman society; it also places each text in its cultural and social context. By building a corpus of available resources about Roman women, Companion provides a balanced perspective in classrooms dominated by texts that speak as if all Romans were men, creating variety for all students and assisting both the learning and the retention of female students. The more people who participate in this venture, the greater the benefits for our students.