Not All Dead White Men by Donna Zuckerberg

Author:Donna Zuckerberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Von Markovik’s original name for “The Mystery Method” was “The Venusian Arts.”114 This name is programmatic because the idea that humans are designed to survive and replicate is foundational to his worldview. The skills that help aid your survival are the martial arts, named for Mars, the Roman god of war, while skills that help aid your replication are the Venusian arts, named for Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

Ovid also thought of his work as a conflict between Mars and Venus. He begins the Amores by claiming that he intended to write about war, but Cupid stole one of the feet from his dactylic hexameter and turned it into elegiac couplets (Amores 1.1.1–4). In the Ars, it becomes clear that for Ovid’s narrator, love itself is a battlefield: male lovers are often compared to the heroes of the Trojan War, and female lovers are compared to Amazons (Ars 3.1–2).115 When, in the Remedia Amoris, Ovid teaches men and women how to recover from love, he imagines Cupid looking at the title of his book and assuming that Ovid is “preparing battles” against him (Remedia 2; Bella mihi, video, bella parantur!).

Following this war theme, over the course of Ars 3, Ovid’s narrator admits to worrying that, by giving advice to women on how to seduce men, he’s effectively arming the enemy: “Let’s hand everything over (we’ve opened the gate to the enemy) / and, in our faithless betrayal, let’s keep faith” (Ars 3.577–578). After Venus demands that he write a book of instruction for women on how to seduce men, Ovid agonizes,

What am I doing—am I crazy? Why meet the enemy with chest

exposed and give evidence to betray myself?

The bird doesn’t show the bird-catcher the best place to catch it;

the doe doesn’t teach the hated dogs to run. (Ars 3.667–670)

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