[5] Written in Latin hexameters and structured in six books, this 6,000-line poem[6] gives historical background and narrates the siege, capture and destruction of Liège, in present-day Belgium, by Louis XI of France and Charles the Bold of Burgundy.
[7] Sabino composed the poem at the request of Onofrio de Santa Croce, the papal legate who traveled to Liège in 1467 in an effort to negotiate a peace settlement.
[12] When Onofrio had traveled back to Rome from the Low Countries, he brought along the young Matthaeus Herbenus[13] of Maastricht, a future historian, grammarian, and musician.
The manuscript for d'Oupeye ends with short argumenta or summaries of each book, composed by Paschacius Berselius (d. 1535), a Benedictine monk of St. Laurent's abbey near Liège.
[22] On 9 August 1474, Georg Sachsel and Bartholomæus Golsh[23] published Sabino's commentary on the ancient Roman satirist Juvenal (Paradoxa in Iuvenalem), which he dedicated to his friend Niccolò Perotti.
Although Sabino's Paradoxa had been written long before they were published,[20] Calderini attacked their editor as "Fidentinus", after the plagiarist in Martial's epigrams,[28] and Perotti as "Brotheus", the son of Vulcan who threw himself into the fire because his imperfections exposed him to ridicule.
[30] Calderini had published an edition of Martial, to which he appended an annotated text of Ovid's gruesomely erudite curse poem Ibis, the source for the obscure figure Brotheus.
[33] In his Defensio adversus Brotheum, which he attached to his own commentary on Juvenal, Calderini implies more than poor pedagogy when he says that Sabino (sub nomine Fidentinus) "teaches boys in the wrong way every day.
The three epistles continued to be published in editions of the Heroïdes as the authentic work of Ovid's friend until the era of post-Enlightenment literary studies, and can be found in some collections into the 1800s, long after Sabino had been revealed as the author.
Salusbury accepts the praenomen Aulus as the correct form of the ancient Sabinus's name and the poems as authentic, asserting that they express "a true poetic genius."
The assumption of Latin or Greek identities by Renaissance men of letters was common, and adopting an Ovidian persona in writing Neo-Latin poetry had been a literary pose since the Middle Ages.
As Peter E. Knox notes in A Companion to Ovid: By observing classical norms in meter and diction and drawing on literary and mythographic resources, scholars such as Sabinus employed imitation as a means of working toward interpretation.
Rather like similarly inspired efforts to flesh out and make sense of the narratives of classical literature — Maffeo Vegio's thirteenth book of the Aeneid … comes to mind — Sabinus takes up the implicit challenge of re-imagining Ovid.
[48] Sabino had been one of the few poets inclined to question Penelope's utter chastity during her husband's two-decade absence, albeit through the voice of Ulysses himself, on the grounds that he must have wondered.