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INTRODUCTION

IT IS A STRANGE THOUGH CRITICAL IRONY THAT OVID (43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.), the ancient world’s greatest love poet, has a reputation for outstanding frivolity, particularly in his fundamental erotic works, the Amores (Loves) and Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Frivolity and romantic love don’t match up very well in our minds.

But from one angle that characterization makes sense. Ovid is one of our richest sources on otium, literally “leisure,” and in Rome the word was particularly suggestive of things that are extra, ephemeral, disposable—such as the love affairs a young man might indulge in as long as they did not involve serious infatuation that might distract him from duties and prescribed ambitions. Every relationship Ovid depicts comes under the heading of dalliance: any assertion of real, lasting emotional involvement is canceled out by the poet’s satirical wit.

His persona’s involvement with a woman whom he calls Corinna in the Amores amounts to little but a series of clichés brilliantly undercut: the lover constantly protests his helplessness, for example, but his superb rhetorical control in itself makes that protest ridiculous. He is far more interested in declaiming on stock themes such as the wickedness of sailing, and in creating dramatizations in which Corinna—or another woman, or more than one—is a mere prop. In Book II, Poem 11 of the Amores, Corinna is about to go to sea, and he protests her decision and prays for her safety in fifty-six allusive lines that would be absurdly pretentious if he meant a word of them.

Ars Amatoria, for its part, is a parody in its very form, that of didactic verse. Two long, discursive books instruct men on the science of selecting a woman, flirting with her, handling her—then, briefly, how to please her in bed. A third book tells women how to handle their side of the romantic confidence game. Again, spicing up what by this time had become the pabulum of literary eroticism is Ovid’s prevailing technique.

Ovid’s love poetry is therefore the antithesis of negotium and its literature. Negotium was almost the defining condition for respectable men of the citizen class. I prefer to translate the word according to its etymology, as “non-leisure” rather than “business,” because it covers everything someone would do to advance his interests in the public sphere. First, there were private commercial dealings, politics, and public administration, often jumbled together—all three were based on rhetoric, or the science of speaking and writing. Witness the orator Cicero’s mammoth yet exquisitely crafted personal correspondence that complements his published speeches and treatises. But negotium included even literary avocations such as writing history or poetry, a rather shocking example of which was Cicero’s (now mercifully lost) epic poem De consulatu suo (On His [Own] Consulship), celebrating his alleged heroism in Rome’s highest public office. The literature of negotium purported to show a man at his real, solid best.

The literature of otium seems to have emerged only a generation or two before Ovid and is first extant in the work of the poet Catullus (who died, young, in the mid-fifties B.C.E.). Ovid’s erotic poetry represents—to my mind, anyway—the ancient world’s tightest combination of delight in the world with delight in writing. He is by far the keenest observer of early Imperial Rome’s details, and the wittiest confabulator to use this material, from the look and sound of public entertainments to the mechanics of recreational sex, and from the distant spectacles of large historical events to the moods in an apartment where a courtesan tries a new hairstyle to better suit the shape of her face or fights for her life after an abortion.

But even though some of the topics are still customarily called “light,” the term “frivolous” is unfair: at this stage of his career (as opposed to his time of exile after 8 C.E., when loneliness, humiliation, and a campaign to be recalled produced what can look like real personal writing), Ovid is not concerned with anything so trivial as his own physical desires or emotional attachments, or even his own wider circumstances or experiences. Even his career as a roué may have been fictional or brief, given what he writes in exile in the collections entitled Tristia (Sad Things) and Letters from Pontus (the Black Sea, beside which he made his involuntary new home) about his loving, loyal, desperately missed third wife, whom he probably married around the age of thirty, when many Roman men contracted their first legal unions).

But in the texts of the Amores and Ars Amatoria themselves lies the main evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was about itself, so that his freedom and achievement there went far beyond the necessary narrow limits of self-depiction or self-expression: it was creation in a broader sense that concerned him, creation feeding on the infinity of literary possibilities rather than the decidedly finite store of individual human experience. The writing luxuriates in rhetorical convolutions and send-ups of the love elegy genre that it technically inhabits, and is obviously determined to use all its contents as mere combustible material for verbal and dramatic fireworks.

But in a stunt such as this, the indispensable thing, the thing that prevents the composition from being a mere pile of dry tiresomeness that over time will grow soggy and rot, is the spark of genius. If genius is above all the ability to create a new world, then Ovid is one of literature’s great geniuses; and if the genius of modernity is above all independent, individual creation, then Ovid is the foundational modern mind. Authors of all kinds had come before him, but in my opinion he was the first writer, and the erotic poetry seems a fitting prelude to the first writerly masterpiece, his epic Metamorphoses, in which the whole range of Greek and Roman mythology is a mere playground for his narrative skill.

Ovid’s Life

This poet’s biography, plausibly presented in one of his exile poems, looks at the beginning a good deal like that of a typical Roman author of the Republican Era, which ended when Ovid was still a child. His family belonged to the wealthy, land-owning Italian aristocracy and sent him to Rome to distinguish himself first as a student of famous rhetoricians and then as an advocate in the law courts and as a politician. Much later in life, he asserted that his undeniable natural impulse was toward poetry, and that this was the reason he shunned a political career, but he very likely perceived early on that politics was no longer the best choice for a really ambitious man.

Though the senate, the popular assembly, and the law courts met as usual, important policy in these new Imperial times was decided within the emperor’s household, leaving orators in the public sphere to speak only on cue and to excite no one. No wonder Ovid evinced a stubborn interest in another branch of literature than political or forensic rhetoric. And given the opportunities a previous generation of poets had found to be celebrated in their own right (though their voices were hardly autonomous), no wonder this branch was poetry.

This was because of the patronage of a remarkable man. Caesar Octavian, ruling under the title Augustus (roughly, “the Man Who Is the Source of Growth,” with sacral overtones), had ended a hundred years of on-and-off civil wars. After his decisive victory in the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.E.) allowed him to take control of Rome’s political system as the first of the Roman emperors, he propagandized—partly though poets—that under Roman governance the world was now beginning a golden age of peace and prosperity. This news, of course, would have made little impression had he not been a supremely able administrator.

The most solid and lasting evidence of Augustus’s skill and judgment survives from his literary program. Employing his highly cultured friends Maecenas and Messalla as talent scouts, he fostered several geniuses, apparently never snubbing obscure origins or an uncongenial political past. Horace (65–8 B.C.E.) was actually the son of a freed slave and had fought in the losing Republic army against the forces of Julius Caesar, the new emperor’s adoptive father and quasi-predecessor. Nonetheless, under Augustus’s auspices and Maecenas’s management Horace was funded, defended, and not overtaxed with demands for court poetry. Another poet was Virgil, and it is arguable that his career could not even have started without the emperor’s help.

Perhaps in part because Augustus was firmly settled in power and less in need of kudos by the time of Ovid’s early maturity, or perhaps because Ovid’s inherited status was higher, or perhaps simply because of his innate independence of mind, the poet’s erotic verses have a very different tone from that of anything by his older colleagues. Though Ovid was ostensibly pro-Augustan, his support was expressed in such flip connections that he must not have felt any great pressure to propagandize, or even to avoid constant irony about the very existence of the public sphere, which he depicts mainly as a stage for flirtation. An anticipated Triumph (a grandiose parade celebrating a major military victory) by a young relative and protégé of Augustus, reports Ovid in Book I of the Ars Amatoria, will be an ideal occasion for picking up a girl; a man on the make can plant himself next to one and identify each part of the pageant representing conquered places, peoples, and leaders:

Tell her everything, and not just if you’re bid;

If you don’t know, respond as if you did. (I.221–222)

The content and tone of the erotic poetry is one basis for debate about the most intriguing juncture in Ovid’s life. In 8 C.E. he found Augustus to be something other than a benevolent dictator and patron of the arts. There is no way to know the precise nature of the poet’s indiscretions—as tantalizingly cited by himself in Tristia 2.207 as carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake”—that brought this change about (though Augustus’s daughter Julia, notoriously promiscuous, is a good candidate for involvement, and a conspiracy within the imperial household was harshly repressed around the time Ovid was banished), but whatever happened was so enraging to the emperor that it saw the poet exiled to the hardscrabble outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta, in Romania), toward the far end of the Black Sea. Ovid pleaded in hundreds of lines of exile poetry to be allowed to return, but Augustus’s anger was implacable—or more than implacable, as it survived his death, to keep Ovid at his immense distance from the Roman metropolis until the poet’s own death three years later.

How could the emperor resist such appeals? Ovid’s poetic reports swell with images of the wild, barren, freezing country he has landed in and the dangers to the fortified outpost from attacking barbarians, whose poisoned arrows land in the street and stick in the roofs. But making the best of it, he learns (or so he claims) the local language well enough to compose a poem about the apotheosis of Augustus (imperial propaganda ascribed to him divine ancestry and a heavenly destiny); the locals, hearing a recitation, are sure (according to Ovid) that this will win a summons home. Interestingly, grave as the offense must have been to have brought a punishment this harsh and inescapable, the scandal never broke—into the historical record, that is. Perhaps the permanent exile of a popular, well-connected poet served mainly as a warning and helped keep the facts hushed up.

In any case, Ovid’s several mentions of his erotic poetry as forming part of Augustus’s motivation are probably little more than an attempt to throw readers off the trail. If Augustus did object to the admittedly irreverent poems, then why hadn’t he done anything when they were published in at least one version each—we’re not certain at what point that was, but at least six years earlier than the blowup immediately before the exile? Why had it not been sufficient for Ovid to have carefully dismissed married women, in words reminiscent of religious prohibition, from among his pupils at the beginning of Ars Amatoria (I.31–43)? This would seem to correct poems in the earlier work, the Amores (such as the entire Poem I.4), that could be deemed disrespectful to Augustus’s morals legislation. These laws were aimed in part at adulterous wives and their corruptors—but not at men roving at large, nor at sex professionals, and the two categories seem to comprise the usual actors in Ovid’s scenarios. Not only sporting eroticism but also literary eroticism were sanctioned diversions for men. A statesman as proper as Cicero leaves us an example of the latter, cited with amused indulgence by another statesman, Pliny the Younger, more than a century later. At worst, Ovid’s taste for publicity was problematic, as the normal forum for “trifles” and “jokes” concerning sex was the private dinner party.

Moreover, though Ovid may have been best known for his love poetry, his output as a whole speaks of a learned eclecticism that should have done the regime proud. His first extant book (the Heroides) comprised love letters of mythological characters, and, besides assorted minor works, he also produced a tragedy (Medea, now lost), an unfinished collection of Roman lore (the Fasti) based on the calendar, and of course the Metamorphoses. If Augustus did suddenly turn censor, it was in the spirit of “You’re no good! I should have known it back when you did X, but I’m certain of it now that you’ve done Y.” Without Y, there would never have been an outburst about anything.

Erotic Poetry and Elegy in Greece and Rome

Love poetry was quite a late development in the ancient world. At least in oral form, epic poetry dates back for millennia, and of course it contains erotic elements. For example, the Odyssey (VIII.266ff.) features the tale of the adulterous lovers Aphrodite and Ares caught naked in an invisible net rigged over the goddess’s bed. But it was not until the late seventh century B.C.E. on the island of Lesbos that someone emerged as a love poet. This was of course Sappho with her lyrical outpourings.

The circumstances of her writing remain disputed, but the surviving fragments give the same impression to us as the complete poems did to the ancients: the poet is frankly helpless against her passions, which can be like a form of madness. Roughly five hundred years later, the Roman poet Catullus (Poem 51) imitated her most famous poem, about a seizure brought on watching a man and a woman—who is addressed in the first person—as the woman talks and laughs with him. (We also have the original Greek version quoted in the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to a critic called Longinus.) Folklore had long held that Sappho died by hurling herself into the sea, because of unrequited love for a young man.

Catullus’s special homage—apparently the only poem of his that is close to a word-for-word translation of a predecessor—is apt. He is the first Roman we could call a love poet in the mode of Sappho, and we have plausible historical accounts of his unhappy love affair, including a name: it was Clodia, the wife of the consul (one of two Roman yearly heads of state) Metellus, to whom he gives the pseudonym Lesbia (not meaning “lesbian,” which was not at the time the emphasis in Sappho’s reputation: though she reports emotional involvements with women, her memory merely evoked the transports of love—and the delights of literature).

But a word of caution is in order for those who might think that Greek and Roman erotic poets were similar to troubadours, modern love poets, or pop balladeers. Even for Sappho and Catullus, the erotic poets most likely to have spoken sincerely and personally, the work shows literary functions far removed from simple self-expression, one-to-one communication, or even the publicizing of either of these. For example, in asserting the power of love, Sappho uses an exemplum, or invocation of authority from the literary tradition, and here at least this is the lofty, almost abstract tradition of epic. She picks out one character from the Iliad, Helen, and describes the Trojan War’s precipitating crisis from her point of view: Helen left her royal husband and her young child behind to follow her lover Paris to Troy (Fragment 16).

The common modern critical explanation is that Sappho re-forms mythology to testify to a woman’s special interests, as a sort of protest, but this makes little sense. For one thing, though some minds (like Ovid’s, certainly) could be more independent than others, there tended to be no clean delineation between an individual’s inner sense of self and a sense of the self’s outward endowments obtained from education, clan, religion, culture, and nationality, and traditional stories inhered in all of these. Even the poets we might call not erotic but pornographic had no actual ability to set themselves apart from society and claim, “That’s society over there; here I am in defiance of it.” The one exception is Archilochus (early seventh century B.C.E.); perhaps because as an illegitimate son, a mercenary, and a colonist at a time when Greece was emerging from its dark ages, he was that almost unknown phenomenon in the ancient world: an outsider with a standard education.

In contrast, though Catullus howls about his girlfriend’s betrayals—and a speech extant from the murder trial of one of her lovers provides some evidence that he had plenty to howl about—he does it in strict, rarified meter inherited from the great lyric poets of Greece, and his emotion is no less raw when displaced into a female mythological heroine, Ariadne standing in disarray on a lonely sea shore and lamenting her abandonment by Theseus (Poem 64).

Interestingly, this poem is not a lyric but a “little epic,” in dactylic hexameters. Erotic subject matter in epic both relatively short and of the full traditional length had been favored among the learned Alexandrian poets in Egypt and its surrounds, between the Greek Classical period and the Roman literary ascendancy. This phenomenon crystallizes some important differences between ancient erotic poetry and our own, differences I have already stressed: ancient erotic poetry had profound debts to learned tradition, and this kept it relatively impersonal—more in the character of artifact than of documentation. Beyond that, it was hardly ever a practical tool such as a message or a gift to a real beloved. Shakespeare’s sonnets or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese are nothing like what the ancient erotic poets were up to. In their environment, it was easier than it would have been elsewhere for Ovid to transcend toward pure language and pure imagination.

At any rate, in erotic poetry’s evolution, elegiac couplets must have been an apt mediating form where the tension between the personal and public needed balancing over long works—that is, when erotic poetry had developed to the point where long, almost novelistic works became possible. This began in Greece around 400 B.C.E. with the poet and dramatist Antimachus, whose lost poem Lyde made literary myths the vehicle for a lament over a beloved’s death. The genre flowered in Rome under Augustus, when three writers were known mainly or exclusively as love elegists: Gallus (very little of whose work is extant), Propertius, and Tibullus.

Propertius begins his collection with the line “Cynthia was the first to capture poor me with her [sweet little] eyes,” and proceeds to narrate the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the love affair; Tibullus features two girlfriends, Delia and Nemesis. The poems, like Ovid’s Amores, are dozens of lines long, and like them constitute vignettes or episodes; together, they are a sort of story, but without the linear narrative drive of a novel. There are various stock scenes and situations: a blissful, too-short night together; clandestine correspondence; the threat of a rival; the lover is locked outside the beloved’s house at night; he renounces a military career to serve in love’s army; the girl’s shallow or outright mercenary character or influences send him into despair; and so on. Some of these tropes go back at least to Greek Old Comedy and are rife in the early Roman theater of Plautus and Terence. The lover’s speeches on familiar topics, including Beauty Unadorned, Old-Time Piety, and Virtuous Poverty, link the genre to the philosophical schools and the practice of declamation, or display rhetoric.

A special feature of love elegy was the concentration on a single woman and the evolution of her relationship with the narrator. As with Catullus’s Lesbia playing with a pet bird and then mourning its death (Poems 2 and 3), we get a sense of a living personality, and the poet’s infatuation is credible. Cynthia and Delia, it might be said, are more convincing than if we saw them only through a man’s lovesick mind. They don’t retreat quickly and irrevocably from idealization into the obscurity of resentment and estrangement; they come and go, and their moods and circumstances change realistically. They don’t disappear when their admirer isn’t there but have independent occupations such as religious observances and visits among women friends, and they display their own learning and tastes. Here, where the female protagonists are probably for the most part fictional, their roles cohere and convince. In Augustan Rome, with its army of courtesans who were both consumers and consumed, cultured and part of the culture in the first really well-established imperial society, a form of literature became popular that still rings true.

Elegiac meter is an excellent vehicle for this achievement. The meter consists of an indefinite series of couplets, the first line of each being the same as an epic hexameter, or six-foot unit. The basic schema of the hexameter is the following, with one long (—) and two short syllables making up each foot but the last:

But most pairs of short syllables can be replaced by a single long one. This is because Latin meter is quantitative, not qualitative, as in English verse. In quantitative meter it takes longer to pronounce some syllables than others, whereas in qualitative meter the rhythm on which the line is built is based on stress, on whether the natural beat in a word falls on a particular syllable or not. The final long syllable of the hexameter can be replaced by a single short one.

It is an organic, flowing meter in Greek and Latin, pausing where the words for a single image or action are likely to pause, and so apt for narrative, as in English, where the often-cited example is Longfellow’s “American epic,” Evangeline:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.

But in elegiac couplets the hexameter alternates with a line that has a mandatory, very distinct pause separating the first two-and-one-half feet from the second; these two halves together amount to five feet and give the line its name, “pentameter.” This one, with conventional replacement syllables, would be:

The translations in this volume show a rare commitment to reproducing in English the authentic sound of Roman elegiac couplets, and along with it their essential effect, commonly called the “pointed style” of later Roman rhetoric:

My one-time love, who started up with only me,

I see is now Rome’s common property.

Now, stop me, but I’d swear my books produced her fame.

And so it is: my Muse spread wide her name.

I earned this! Why did I proclaim her form and face

Until my verse became her marketplace?

(Amores III.12.5–10)

As in English heroic couplets, where rhyme packages blank verse into compact but malleable pairs of lines (like Pope’s “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man”), elegiac verse lends itself to pithiness as well as rhetorical or narrative flow. Typical lyric meters dictate a stanza of a special form, and if the number of stanzas is not limited by the character of the genre (as in a Greek choral ode or a sonnet), the sheer difficulty of a stanza’s components is likely to intervene. Eugene Onegin aside, it’s just about impossible to rattle on and on in sonnets.

But in elegiac couplets, that hybrid form between lyric and epic, you could rattle on and on—and at the same time easily draw attention away from the subject matter and to yourself, particularly to your processes of thinking and writing. The pairs of lines, moving forward in measured but unlimited sequence, invite all kinds of play with words and ideas both within and across the pairs. The meter is an ideal form for narrative that comments on itself, like the vignettes in Ovid’s Amores. It is also good for lively didactic poetry like Ars Amatoria. More traditional didactic poems in hexameter date back to Hesiod, mythology and legend and fable being natural concomitants of advice for success in life or in a particular calling, but the didacticism of worldly sophistication needed a framework on which it was easier to hang qualifications, quips, irony, sneers, self-deprecation, and many other kinds of writerly performance.

It was through the elegiac form that Ovid took ancient erotic poetry to its logical conclusion. In our culture, that conclusion would have been of the opposite type, familiar in certain pop phenomena: the flourishes of music and literature have been cut down further and further, from thoughts to emotions to physical sensations and even mere physiological responses: fight, flight, or pursuit. But in Imperial Rome, as a triumph of a poet’s pride and will, the personal is pared away more and more severely—under the guise of play—until there is nothing left but his knowledge, skill, and adaptability.

He begins by parodying the investment scene of the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus, who reports that, when as a child he had started to compose epic poetry, Apollo swooped down and forced him to rethink his vocation. Ovid at the start of his poetic career writes one hexameter line of epic—and Cupid steals the final foot of the second line! The poet is annoyed—he doesn’t even have a girlfriend. Cupid obligingly shoots him, but doesn’t provide an object for his passion. (Corinna, named after a poetaster from Boetia, a Greek land notorious for stupidity, appears only in Poem 3.) Throughout the collection, the lover’s stances continue to appear contrarian or trivializing in comparison even to those of his mannered predecessors in love elegy, and he ventures into distinctly unromantic territory in quest of novelty and fun.

Propertius’s and Tibullus’s beloveds are loveliest when dressed simply and naturally; Ovid writes that he used to rail against Corinna dying her hair, but that’s no longer necessary, because one potion caused it all to fall out (I.14). His persona lectures Corinna in lofty philosophical terms as she recovers from a traumatic abortion (II.14). On and on he goes, treating the mere idea of a love affair as a purely intellectual exercise, and lampooning his poetic colleagues who have seemed to take the matter more seriously. Quip by quip, antithesis by mutually annihilating antithesis, he mows his way through sensation, sentiment, and sentimentality, leaving nothing behind but the magic show itself.

Ars Amatoria and its later companion Remedia Amoris (Remedy for Love, or how to fall out of it) take ancient love elegy to the brink of destruction and push it over—and Ovid did kill off the genre by making it impossible for any would-be literary swain to take himself at all seriously. There were in fact no more love poets of any significance, working in any meter, during antiquity, and though the entire Ovidian corpus was exuberantly popular during the Middle Ages, courtly love was built up as a separate edifice on a Christian model: worshipful, self-sacrificing, and tragic.

I think Ovid’s final blow to eroticism was his use of the didactic form. Didactic poetry was a lofty undertaking; the greatest Roman example was Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, a scientific and philosophical account of the world’s workings and life’s purposes. For didacticism to address love affairs, which for Roman men were supposed to be no more than physical and cultural pleasures, and which for freedwomen were largely a commercial business they understood well enough already, was absurd—and offensive? Not the latter, I think.

Ovid never asserts that he is a serious teacher; as he sets it out, the “successful” sort of “love” is a con game on both sides, which—despite his protests to the contrary—does not even have to be well executed. There is nothing important at stake, and real aptitude would deprive the parties to a love affair—and all the onlookers—of winsome entertainment from the slip-ups he seems to judge inevitable, as they are part of human nature. In one of the funniest passages of ancient literature, Ars Amatoris (I.289ff.) illustrates women’s innate depravity by showing the mythological queen Pasiphaë, wife of Minos—who in previous accounts was fated through a divine curse to mate with a bull and produce the Minotaur—losing her head for an attractive animal, murderously jealous of her rivals the cows, and scolded by a poet in the voice of an exasperated friend:

And why a mirror here, where hillside cattle stray?

Why rearrange your hair five times a day?

Believe instead the glass that says you’re not a cow.

Oh, how you’ve wished for horns to crown that brow!

But think of Minos; why begin some mad beguine?

At least pick out a man; don’t be obscene. (I.305–310)

For Ovid, the ideal of control inhabits another sphere, the sphere of thought and language, and this, in my view, is the chief reason—besides, of course, sheer pleasure—to read him. The Amores are, in their essence, a dramatization of undying infatuation with writing, and The Art of Love is an instruction book for judging, pursuing, and possessing the art of words.