Latin Erotic Elegy by Miller Paul Allen

Author:Miller, Paul Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Ars Amatoria 1.61–228

This passage from Ovid’s manual of seduction [64] not only shows the praeceptor amoris at his best, but also prominently features those aspects of the Roman cityscape in which Augustus took particular pride. The Ars is in many ways a summation of the Amores. It takes the same themes and motifs and presents them in the guise of a systematic treatise on love. The Ars gives us elegiac love reduced to a method. The position of the lover is no longer outside norms of Roman life, but can itself be stated according to a set of rules. Those rules, however, are always parodic. The Ars is a tremendously funny poem whose sophisticated wit offers no place for the expressiveness of Catullus or Sulpicia, the nostalgia of Tibullus, or the political engagement of a Propertius, but rather marks the spot of the elegiac lover with endlessly self-consuming irony.

Moreover, just as the Amores may be read as a parody of the elegiac genre, so too the Ars is a parody of didactic poetry. The ancient world was filled with versified manuals of instruction. Aratus’s Phaenomena, a Greek poem on the ever-popular subject of astrology, received no fewer than three Latin translations, including one by Cicero himself. Some of these works achieved the status of great works of art in themselves, such as Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Vergil’s Georgics. The didactic form was tailor-made to be parodied by the praeceptor amoris. The opening lines of the Ars thus read:

Si quis in hoc artem populo non nouit amandi,

hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet.

arte citae ueloque rates remoque mouentur,

arte leues currus: arte regendus Amor.

[If anyone among the people does not know the art of loving, let him read this and, once he has been instructed by this poem, let him love. Swift ships are moved by sail or oar through art, as are swift chariots: Love too is ruled by art.]

Ovid’s send-up is all the more effective for his adopting the tone of the serious professor for the trivial subject of love.

The passage we have chosen instructs the reader on the best places to find a girl. Most of the buildings mentioned in it were erected by Augustus or his entourage and, as the Res Gestae (4.19–21) makes clear, the princeps regarded his building projects as a point of pride. He could not have looked favorably upon Ovid choosing those same buildings as the site for a program of seduction in direct contradiction to his own program of moral reform. It should be remembered that the Ars was one of the reasons cited for Ovid’s exile.

61–66. This section opens with Ovid assuring the reader that there are girls to fit every taste in Rome.

61–62. Primis et adhuc crescentibus = “young and still growing,” that is, pubescent. Vera puella = “a true girl,” that is, not a woman.

63–64. Iuuenem = “a young woman.”

Voti = “choice, wish.”

65–66. Hoc modifies agmen.

67–88. Ovid now lists the local hotspots.

67–68. Pompeia . . . umbra refers to the colonnade attached to Pompey’s theater built in 55 BCE.

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