 Title page of a 1644 edition of Ars amatoria, published in Frankfurt. | |
| Author | Ovid |
|---|---|
| Original title | Ars amatoria |
| Language | Latin |
Publication date | c. 2 AD |
| Publication place | Roman Empire |
The Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) is an instructional elegy series in three books by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. It was written in 2 AD.
Book one of Ars amatoria was written to show a man how to find a woman. In book two, Ovid shows how to keep her. These two books contain sections which cover such topics as 'not forgetting her birthday', 'letting her miss you - but not for long' and 'not asking about her age'. The third book, written two years after the first books were published, gives women advice on how to win and keep the love of a man ("I have just armed the Greeks against the Amazons; now, Penthesilea, it remains for me to arm thee against the Greeks..."). Sample themes of this book include: 'making up, but in private', 'being wary of false lovers' and 'trying young and older lovers'.
The standard situations of finding love are presented in an entertaining way. Ovid includes details from Greek mythology, everyday Roman life and general human experience. The Ars amatoria is composed in elegiac couplets, rather than the dactylic hexameters, which are more usually associated with the didactic poem.
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The work was such a popular success that the poet wrote a sequel, Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love). At an early recitatio , however, S. Vivianus Rhesus, Roman governor of Thracia, is noted as having walked out in disgust. [1]
The assumption that the 'licentiousness' of the Ars amatoria was responsible in part for Ovid's relegation (banishment) by Augustus in 8 AD is dubious, and seems rather to reflect modern sensibilities than historical fact. For one thing, the work had been in circulation for eight years by the time of the relegation, and it postdates the Julian Marriage Laws by eighteen years. Secondly, it is hardly likely that Augustus, after forty years unchallenged in the purple, felt the poetry of Ovid to be a serious threat or even embarrassment to his social policies. Thirdly, Ovid's own statement [2] from his Black Sea exile that his relegation was because of 'carmen et error' ('a song and a mistake') is, for many reasons, hardly admissible.
It is more probable that Ovid was somehow caught up in factional politics connected with the succession: Agrippa Postumus, Augustus' adopted son, and Augustus' granddaughter, Vipsania Julilla, were both relegated at around the same time. This would also explain why Ovid was not reprieved when Augustus was succeeded by Agrippa's rival Tiberius. It is likely, then, that the Ars amatoria was used as an excuse for the relegation. [3] This would be neither the first nor the last time a 'crackdown on immorality' disguised an uncomfortable political secret.
The Ars amatoria created considerable interest at the time of its publication. On a lesser scale, Martial's epigrams take a similar context of advising readers on love. Modern literature has been continually influenced by the Ars amatoria, which has presented additional information on the relationship between Ovid's poem and more current writings. [4]
Pioneering feminist historian Emily James Putnam wrote that Medieval Europe, deaf to the humor that Ovid intended, took seriously the mock-analytical framework of Ars amatoria as a cue for further academic exegesis:
The tendency of the Middle Age toward the neat, the systematic, and the encyclopaedic, which made it so easy a prey to Aristotle, had the oddest results when directed toward the passion of love. Ovid's jeu d'esprit, the Ars Amatoria, was playfully set in a framework of Alexandrian didacticism. It was mildly amusing in his day to assume that rules could be laid down, by the use of which any one could become 'a master of the art of love,' to use the phrase of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. This work was well known to clerks in its Latin form, and when love became a matter of general theoretical interest, it was rendered into French and became the textbook of the subject. Thanks to its method, love became a department of scholasticism, a matter of definition and rule. [5]
The Ars amatoria was included in the syllabuses of mediaeval schools from the second half of the 11th century, and its influence on 12th and 13th centuries' European literature was so great that the German mediaevalist and palaeographer Ludwig Traube dubbed the entire age 'aetas Ovidiana' ('the Ovidian epoch'). [6]
As in the years immediately following its publication, the Ars amatoria has historically been victim of moral outcry. All of Ovid's works were burned by Savonarola in Florence, Italy in 1497; an English translation of the Ars amatoria was seized by U.S. Customs in 1930. [7] Despite the actions against the work, it continues to be studied in college courses on Latin literature. [8]
It is possible that Edmond Rostand's fictionalized portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac makes an allusion to the Ars amatoria: the theme of the erotic and seductive power of poetry is highly suggestive of Ovid's poem, and Bergerac's nose, a distinguishing feature invented by Rostand, calls to mind Ovid's cognomen, Naso (from nasus, 'large-nosed').
The elegiac couplet or elegaic distich is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
In Greek mythology, the Crinaeae were a type of Naiad nymphs associated with fountains or wells.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his magnum opus. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar in a mythico-historical framework comprising over 250 myths, 15 books, and 11,995 lines.
In ancient Rome, Appias was a statue of a nymph near the Appiades Fountain in the Forum of Caesar. Ovid wrote that the fountain was in the middle of the Temple of Venus Genetrix and surrounded by statues of nymphs who were called "The Appiades". Traditionally the Appiades are said to be of Concordia, Minerva, Pax, Venus, and Vesta.
Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasises instructional and informative qualities in literature, art, and design. In art, design, architecture, and landscape, didacticism is a conceptual approach that is driven by the urgent need to explain.
The Tristia is a collection of poems written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during the first three years following his banishment from Rome to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. Despite five books in which he bewails his fate copiously, the immediate cause of Augustus' banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as a 642-line curse poem called Ibis, directed against the unnamed enemy who had apparently caused his downfall. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died in AD 17 or 18 without ever returning to Rome.
Amores is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity.
The Heroides, or Epistulae Heroidum, is a collection of fifteen epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek and Roman mythology in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them. A further set of six poems, widely known as the Double Heroides and numbered 16 to 21 in modern scholarly editions, follows these individual letters and presents three separate exchanges of paired epistles: one each from a heroic lover to his absent beloved and from the heroine in return.
In Greek mythology, Corycia or Corycis (Kōrukis), was a naiad who lived on Mount Parnassus in Phocis.
Remedia Amoris is an 814-line poem in Latin by Roman poet Ovid. In this companion poem to The Art of Love, Ovid offers advice and strategies to avoid being hurt by love feelings, or to fall out of love, with a stoic overtone.
Hylonome was a female centaur in Greek mythology.
Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic poem written in elegiac couplets by the Roman poet Ovid. In the hundred extant verses, Ovid defends the use of cosmetics by Roman women and provides five recipes for facial treatments. Other writers at the time condemned women's usage of cosmetics.
Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis by decree of the emperor Augustus. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid's exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilized world; it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace, and was superficially Hellenized. According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman, he found trying. Ovid wrote that the cause of his exile was carmen et error, probably the Ars Amatoria and a personal indiscretion or mistake. The council of the city of Rome revoked his exile in December 2017, 2,009 years after his banishment.
Pegasides were nymphs of Greek mythology connected with wells and springs, specifically those that the mythical horse Pegasus created by striking the ground with his hooves.
In Greek mythology, Perse is one of the 3,000 Oceanids, water-nymph daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys. Her name was also spelled as Persa, Perseide, Persea or Perseis. Perse married Helios, the god of the sun, and bore him several children, most notably the sorceress-goddess Circe.
Alison Ruth Sharrock is an English Classics scholar. She has been Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester since August 2000. In 2009, she gave the Stanford Memorial Lectures. Together with David Konstan of Brown University, she edits the series Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory published by Oxford University Press.
Roy Gibson is a British Classicist and Professor at Durham University. Specialising in Latin Literature, he has worked extensively on the imperial period, with a focus on Ovid and Pliny the Younger. Gibson is also the joint-chair of the Classical Association and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Roman Studies.
Pseudo-Ovid or Pseudo-Ovidius is the name conventionally used to designate any author of a work falsely attributed to the Latin poet Ovid. The term first appears in the second edition of the Lexicon Latinae Linguae Antibarbarum Quadripartitum of Johann Friedrich Nolte in 1744. The collective term for such texts is Pseudo-Ovidiana, which may be defined simply as "works not authored by Ovid that circulated under his name".
Frederick Adam Wright was an English classical scholar known for his translations of Greek and Latin classics.
The Ars amatoria [...] now has an established place on university curricula.
Poems by Ovid | ||
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Double Heroides (authorship uncertain) | ||
