Description

The Ars amatoria (Latin: ‘Art of Love’) is a poem in three books by the Roman poet Ovid. It claims to provide teaching in three areas of general preoccupation: how and where to find girls (and husbands) in Rome, how to seduce them, and how to prevent others from stealing them.The first two books, aimed at men, contain sections entitled, for example, ‘Don’t Forget Her Birthday!’, ‘Let Her Miss You – But Not For Long’ and ‘Don’t Ask About Her Age’. The third gives similar advice to women: ‘Make-Up, But In Private’, ‘Beware of False Lovers’ and ‘Try Young and Older Lovers’. In fact, however, Ovid gives no advice that is immediately usable, but employs cryptic allusions, while on the surface treating the subject matter in all its many aspects with the range and intelligence of urbane conversation. His intent is often more profound than the brilliance of the surface suggests. In connection with the revelation that the theatre is a good place to meet girls, for instance, Ovid, the classically educated trickster, refers to the story of the rape of the Sabine women. It has been convincingly argued that this passage represents a radical attempt to redefine relationships between men and women in Roman society, advocating a move away from paradigms of force and possession, towards concepts of mutual fulfilment.The superficial brilliance, however, dazzles even scholars (paradoxically, Ovid consequently tended in the 20th century to be underrated as lacking in seriousness). The standard situations and cliches of the subject are treated in a highly entertaining way, spiced with ever-colourful details from Greek mythology, everyday Roman life and general human experience. Ovid likens love to military service, supposedly requiring the strictest obedience to the beloved woman. Women, meanwhile, he advises to make their lovers artificially jealous so that they do not become neglectful through complacency. For this purpose, a slave should be instructed to interrupt the lovers’ tryst with the cry ‘Perimus’ (‘We are lost!’), compelling the young lover to while away some time in a cupboard. Readers can follow the allusive chatter of the poet with a smile, without ever being able to be quite certain how seriously he means any of it. The tension implicit in this uncommitted tone is reminiscent of a flirt, and in fact, the semi-serious, semi-ironic form is ideally suited to Ovid’s subject matter.It is striking that through all his ironic discourse, Ovid never becomes ribald or obscene. Of course ’embarrassing’ matters can never be entirely excluded, for ‘alma Dione praecipite nostrum est, quod pudet, inquit, opus’ ‘…”what you blush to tell”, says Venus, “is the most important part of the whole matter”‘. Sexual matters in the narrower sense are only dealt with at the end of each book, so here again, form and content converge in a subtly ingenious way. Things, so to speak, always end up in bed. But here, too, Ovid retains his style and his discretion, avoiding any pornographic tinge. The end of the second book deals with the pleasures of simultaneous orgasm. Somewhat untypically for a Roman, the poet confesses, ‘Odi concubitus, qui non utrumque resolvunt. Hoc est, cur pueri tangar amore minus’ (‘I abhor intercourse which does not relieve both. This is also why I find less pleasure in the love of boys’).At the end of the third part, as in the Kama Sutra, the sexual positions are ‘declined’, and from them women are exhorted to choose the most suitable, taking the proportions of their own bodies into careful consideration. Ovid’s tongue is again discovered in his cheek when his recommendation that tall women should not straddle their lovers is exemplified at the expense of the tallest hero of the Trojan Wars: ‘Quod erat longissima, numquam Thebais Hectoreo nupta resedit equo’ (‘Because she was very tall, the Theban bride (Andromache) never sat on her Hectorian horse’).The polysemous word ars in the title is not, then, to be translated coldly as ‘technique’, but here really means ‘art’ in the sense of civilized refinement.