Ovid's Art of Love
Assignment and Access
Ovid, The Art of Love, pp. 166-238 in: Ovid. The Erotic Poems. Trans. Peter Green. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England and New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Journal Entries
What would Ovid (or more accurately, the dramatized speaker's voice in Ovid's poem) say about either Finnis or Nussbaum? I'm not interested in whether he would speak ironically or humorously of them (perhaps he would), but whether the value systems or idea systems animating Ovid would "resonate" (agree) in any way with Finnis/Nussbaum? Why or why not?
Study Guide
Biographical and Other Background
43 BCE. Ovid born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona) in central Italy.
Adolescence and young adulthood. Studies at Rome with the intention of pursuing an official career. Abandons studies for poetry; becomes attached to Messalla Corvinus, Sulpicia's patron. Ovid seems also to have formed part of a group associated with Julia, Octavian-Augustus' daughter and only child (by Scribonia, his first wife).
27 BCE. Octavian, now "Augustus," becomes the first emperor.
ca. 20 BCE. First edition of the Amores published.
18 BCE, 9 CE. Augustus' legislation punishing adultery and regulating marriage.
2 BCE. Julia, unhappily married to her then-husband, Tiberius, has her marriage dissolved by her father and is banished for an alleged affair with Iullus Antonius. Ovid starts work on his magnum opus, the Metamorphoses.
After 1 BCE. Books 1-2 of Ovid's Art of Love published (Ars Amatoria). Then Ovid publishes a poem entitled Cures for Love, a kind a recantation of the Art, and also a poem in your collection. Ovid subsequently publishes his book three, for women, of the Art of Love.
8 CE. Ovid exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea.
14 BCE. Augustus dies; is succeeded to emperorship by his adoptive son, Tiberius. Julia, still living in exile, basically starved to death by order of Tiberius.
17/18 CE. Ovid, still in exile, dies.
In his Poems from Exile (Tristia 2.207-213), Ovid relates that a pair of "crimes" led to his being exiled by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE. What one of those crimes was, Ovid won't say, that, supposedly, out of a desire not to offend the emperor. As for the other crime, he describes it as a poem (carmen) alleged to instruct readers in the art of adultery.
Most scholars take that poem to be his Ars amatoria, or "Art of Love," published after 1 BCE. Yet Ovid in his Art of Love expressly denies that his poem has anything to do with adultery.
What, then, to make of the poem? Is it, as Ovid seems to want us to believe, a handbook intended for the would-be lovers of non-citizen women or of prostitutes (books 1-2); or, conversely, to help such women procure customers (book 3)? Or does it, whether subtly or not so subtly, thumb its nose at Augustus' marriage reforms? In either case, what sexual and gender-related mores, what cultural assumptions inform its poetics? What insights can it provide into the ideologies of sexuality and gender under the Caesars?
Ovid, like most of the better Roman poets, came not from Rome but from the provinces, in Ovid's case, from Sulmo, about 90 miles east of Rome. Ovid, of equestrian class (the monied aristocracy just beneath the senatorial class in rank), was, like his brother, intended by his family for a rhetorical education at Rome, to be followed by a political career that would eventually land him in the Roman senate. (That pattern continued under the emperors, who maintained the fiction of a republic ruled by the SPQR, the senatus populusque romanus, the "senate and people of Rome.")
When Ovid's brother died, the pressure to follow the cursus honorum, the sequence of postings, offices, and duties prescribed for ambitious young Romans of rank, can only have increased. Seeing as his father-paterfamilias lived to the age of ninety, control of the young and then not-so-young man's purse-strings will have exerted its own sort of force.
But Ovid wished to follow the beat of a different drummer, that of the poet, and even his father eventually had to acquiesce. Ovid's Amores illustrate for us the lovelorn poet of Roman elegy and related output (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius). The Ars amatoria, or "Art of Love," offers a striking and puzzling handbook on seduction from around the period of Augustus' moral and matrimonial reforms.
Please note that Peter Green, our translator, provides copious notes: pages 337 and following, keyed into the text by "book" and line numbers. Those notes explain all, or most, of the obscure allusions. But I'll bet that, for the most part, those allusions don't get in the way of a basic appreciation of the overall gist of the text, especially as regards sexuality and gender.
Note, too, that Green's introduction supplies detailed historical, biographical, and thematic-literary background.
Adultery
In 18 BCE, Augustus, the first
of the emperors (reigned 27 BCE-14 CE), effected passage of a law known
in Latin as the lex iulia de adulteriis coercendis, "the Julian
law to punish adultery" ("Julian" because Augustus, its author, had
been adopted by Julius Caesar).
QUESTION: What cultural
data (gender, sexual) do you gather from the reading vis-à-vis
marriage, adultery, men-women, values, etc.
Further Questions:
- When Ovid
says, "Safe love, legitimate liaisons | Will be my theme. This poem
breaks no taboos" (p. 167), what does he mean?
- What taboos is he
referring to?
- Does he actually avoid breaking those taboos?
- What to make of a line like, "The harvest is always richer in another man's field" (176), an allusion to Clytemnestra's adulterous love for Aegisthus?
- What do
you make of the "Rape of the Sabine Women" digression, pp. 169-70? (That mythical incident was how the mythical founders of Rome got wives for the city's earliest citizens)
- What to make of the lines, near the bottom of p. 232, "I was going to omit the ways of eluding a crafty husband . . . let the bride respect her husband . . . Modesty, law, and our leader so prescribe. / But watch you? A woman still scarcely used to her freedom? Intolerable!"?
- Ovid evidently doesn't want to seem to be recommending adultery to matronae, married citizen women — that would offend Augustus, "our leader"
- "A woman still scarcely used to her freedom" will be a libertina, a freed female slave, and thus not a full citizen — sexually, fair game for citizens
- So he means to imply that book 3, directed to women, is for the use of aspiring prostitutes — but is it?
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