The Art of Love

The great classical poet Ovid was born Publius Ovidius Naso in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), Italy, on March 20, 43
B.C.
Although biographical information is scant—and based largely on Ovid’s autobiographical poetry—it is known that Ovid’s father had the wealth and position to anticipate a political career for his son. Ovid was educated in Rome, where he studied rhetoric, and traveled in Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. Reluctantly, he held minor official posts upon his return, but poetry became increasingly important to him. The contemporary works of Virgil and Horace had spurred Ovid’s imagination, and he decided to give up public life and begin writing.

Ovid is believed to have written his first surviving work, the
Amores
(
The Loves
), between 25 and 20
B.C.
The
Amores
consisted of short poems of 86 to 106 lines in proper elegiac couplets. With its simple and obvious theme, the
Amores
was a successful stepping-stone for the young poet, and it was republished in a shorter second edition years later.

At roughly the same time, Ovid composed the
Heroides
(
Heroines
), a collection of fifteen imagined letters from famous women of
Greek mythology to absent or abandoned lovers. Though it is uncertain when the
Heroides
was written, some scholars date it after the
Amores
because Ovid again utilizes the form of the love elegy, but augments it with dramatic monologue and mythical themes. The influence of Greek tragedy on Ovid’s writing was significant, and he wrote his own version of the
Medea
, perhaps around the time he worked on the
Heroides
.

Building on some of the themes of the
Amores
, Ovid turned next to the composition of three poems on the art of seduction. The first of these didactic poems was likely the
Medicamina Faciei
(
On Cosmetics
), a short poem, of which only a fragment remains, that professes very technical knowledge on how to cultivate physical beauty. The second and more substantial work,
Ars Amatoria
(
The Art of Love
), was probably finished between 2
B.C.
and
A.D.
2 and published in three volumes—two addressed to men, one to women. This ambitious and very popular handbook taught readers how to find, catch, and hold on to lovers, and it highlighted Ovid’s lack of reverence for Emperor Augustus’ strict moral codes. While finishing the third book of the
Ars Amatoria
, Ovid wrote a follow-up poem titled
Remedia Amoris
(
Remedies for Love
). In this recantation of sorts, Ovid offers cures for falling out of love in the spirited and burlesque style of the
Ars Amatoria
.

Soon, Ovid began exploring different literary themes and forms. Around
A.D.
1–4, he worked on the
Fasti
(
Calendar
), a long poem consisting of twelve books of elegiac couplets that describe the origins of Roman religious festivals and holidays. The six surviving books of the
Fasti
chronicle the first six months of the year and are filled with bits of astronomical detail as well as patriotic enthusiasm. During this period, Ovid also began work on what is perhaps his most famous work, the
Metamorphoses
(
Transformations
). Totaling fifteen books and nearly twelve thousand lines, this long poem was inspired largely by Virgil’s Aeneid. Ovid’s epic, written in hexameter verse, sweeps from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar in a variety of historical and mythological tales. By
A.D.
8, Ovid had completed the poem; final revisions, however, were
left unfinished when Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from Rome that year (some claim that the hedonistic themes of
Ars Amatoria
were to blame). Exiled to the harsh Black Sea port of Tomis (now Constanta, Romania), Ovid continued writing and hoped for reprieve.

Ovid produced three major poems from exile:
Tristia
(
Poems of Sadness
),
Ibis
, and the
Epistulae ex Ponto
(
Letters from Pontus
). It is believed that the
Tristia
, a set of fifty autobiographical poems in five books, was written first, between
A.D.
8 and
A.D.
12. In the
Tristia
, he returns to the first person and to the use of elegiac couplets as he woefully describes his journey into exile. The undated
Ibis
is a lengthy imputation directed at an anonymous enemy in which Ovid again shows the breadth of his mythological learning. The
Epistulae ex Ponto
consists of forty-six poems in four books written between
A.D.
12 and
A.D.
16. Like the
Tristia
, the
Epistulae
recounts the miseries of life in Tomis, but in this work Ovid addresses his melancholy “letters” to specific people in Rome—his wife, his friends, and the emperor—and appeals for aid and sympathy. These compositions failed to move Augustus, and although Ovid was popular among Romans, he remained in exile until his death in late
A.D.
17 or early
A.D.
18.

Ovid’s adoption of Greek themes and meter into the Latin language, his mastery of classical mythology, and his technical precision are but a few of the reasons many consider him one of history’s most brilliant poets. His influence on Western literature is immeasurable.

The
Ars Amatoria
presents itself as a didactic poem in the manner of Virgil’s
Georgics
. But if we expect it to be solemn and improving, we will from the start be confounded. Its subject is neither farming nor military tactics, hunting, horsemanship, seafaring, rhetoric, or any other practical and socially useful activity. In the topsy-turvy “modern” world that Ovid introduces us to, the flaneur’s world of cruising the streets of a vast cosmopolitan city, of shopping and partygoing, of theaters, taverns, temples, synagogues, colonnades, racetracks, piazzas, Ovid’s subject is the entirely unsolemn and to this point unconsidered art (or so the poet would have us believe) of getting and keeping a lover.

Highly colored, allusive, audaciously tongue-in-cheek, the
Ars Amatoria
is from first line to last a series of surprising and provocative reversals, not only of established literary conventions but of anything that even the most alert and knowing reader might expect.

Comic disproportion is its method. Petty concerns are illustrated with large examples, great matters with ones that are trivial. Moral tags are misapplied, old tales are introduced on the most
tenuous pretext and given new twists, arguments are playfully exaggerated until they collapse under their own weight—it is the playfulness, not the argument, that we are meant to approve and be impressed by, psychological analysis, as in the recounting of Pasiphae’s passion for the bull, pursued to the point where it becomes comically absurd. Seriousness is at every turn averted, but with so disarming a mixture of slyness and candor, and so much infectious joy in the doing of it, that to charge the poet with crime—lèse-majesté or libertinism or the corruption of youth—would be, to steal an image from a later Augustan, like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Is this why it took Augustus so long to accuse and punish Ovid?

In
A.D.
8, a good seven years after the poem first made its spectacular appearance, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, a place from which, despite many appeals for clemency, he was never to return. The
Ars Amatoria
is cited as one part of his offense, and it is not difficult to see in the poem what the emperor might have found offensive.

At its center is a character that was to have a long history in poems of this kind, and not only in Latin: the modern lover—the carefree, pleasure-loving man-about-town who has dropped out of the world of serious civic duty and become a hero not of the battlefield or the law courts but of the bedchamber, where the only “virtue” he recognizes is play. The poem really is subversive—not in the challenge it offers to the new morality, or because it has the effrontery to claim for the lover the same “professional” status as the farmer, the soldier, the holder of high public office, but because it makes the role it creates so invitingly attractive; most of all, because it establishes the lover/poet as the emperor of an alternative and privately constituted state. As one of Ovid’s later incarnations puts it: “She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.”
¹
The poem’s ostensible subject, the art of love, is a decoy. The real subject is the poet himself. To be a poet—to be
the
poet Ovid—is to be a world unto yourself. The emperor’s world, the great world of
Rome, is simply the scene of operations, at the most, “material.” That is the immodest claim. No wonder Augustus felt he had to act.

Around this lively and youthfully impulsive
dramatis persona
(the poet himself, we should remember, was in his middle forties), Ovid organizes a spectacular ado, a series of brilliant sideshows in which what is on display is the poet’s delight in his own talent: the range of his erudition, his verbal dexterity and wit, his inventiveness in painting scenes of sweeping grandeur but also, since he has what we would now call a cinematic eye, illuminating close-ups. The poet can take literally anything into his poem in the assurance that what will hold it together is his own mercurial presence, as guide, joker, confidant, provocateur, storyteller, picture maker, mock scholar, mock sage, magician, stage manager.