No author is more helpful than Ovid to anyone whose task it is to express modern ideas in Latin or to sum up in a brief and memorable way the achievements of distinguished men and women. Here I have gratefully brought together some examples of the help he has given me during the last twelve years in presentations for honorary degrees at Oxford. My hope is that this form of bimillenary tribute will not seem out of place in Greece & Rome. The Editors will know that the revival of spoken Latin is much in the air at the moment—there was a conference on the subject at Avignon in 1956—and they themselves not long ago invited suggestions for a Latin rendering of ‘television’. Ovid's own prophetic shot at this word is listed among the other examples of his foresight given below. All my borrowings from him have been actually used in public orations; but I have not thought it necessary to name the honorands concerned, nor have I sometimes scrupled to adapt to present purposes the Latin used to introduce the borrowed quotation.