Warwick Teachers’ Day, November 2020 Classical Civilisation A Level, Love & Relationships

Victoria Rimell, Professor of Latin Language and Literature, Warwick

Doubleness and reversibility: reading Ovid Ars Amatoria III

4 issues for discussion:

1. Approaches to reading this text ‘in’ its socio-political ‘context’; the problems we
encounter in reading the Ars through the crime and punishment narrative of Ovidian
exile.
2. What do keywords amor and ars mean? How can we engage with their
paradoxicality, or with the slippage between one and the other? How does this relate
to genre and form? How does it relate to the political work the poem can be seen to
do?
3. The ‘double audience’ conundrum of Ars 3: is this just about Ovid ‘spiking’ his text
for an eavesdropping male audience? Is this a misogynistic text?
4. Ars 3, 1-56: doubleness and reversibility in practice.

Point 1

OCR textbook, p.63: ‘the poem… provides a fascinating insight into women’s lives and
loves’; p.66, ‘the clear flaunting of Augustus’ Julian laws in Ovid’s writing could well have
contributed to his exile’.

Passages to discuss: Ars 1.171-228, with A.S. Hollis Ovid Ars Amatoria I (intro and
commentary) Clarendon Press Oxford 1977; Ars 3.58 (O women, whom propriety and the
laws and your own rights permit); Ars 3.101-128, with Gibson’s 2003 Cambridge
commentary; on ‘golden Rome’, compare Virgil Georgics 2.532-40, Ovid Amores 3.8.35ff..

Further reading:
 Thomas Habinek on the ‘internalisation of the imperial project’ in Ovidian elegy
(‘Ovid and Empire’ in Hardie ed. 2002, 46-60, provided to you in pdf).
 Sergio Casali on Ovid’s own construction of his relationship with Augustan imperial
power (‘The art of making oneself hated: rethinking (anti-)Augustanism in Ovid’s Ars
Amatoria’ in Gibson-Green-Sharrock ed. 2006, 216-234, provided to you in pdf).

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Point 2

OCR textbook, p.64 ‘To Ovid, love is a game to be played … if love is a game, it can be
taught like any other. To become master at a sport you need ars (‘art’ or ‘skill’).

The elegiac couplet, Amores 1.1.1-6:

Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound forth,1
In weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure.
The lower verse was equal to the first, but Cupid, they say,
Laughed and stole away one foot.
Who gave you, cruel boy, this right over poetry?

Amores 1.1.17-18
My new page of song rose well with first verse in lofty rhythm,
but that next one thins out the vigour of my work

Acting the role of the lover, and being caught out:

Ars I 611: You must play the role of the lover, and fake heartache with words.

Ars I 615-16: But often the pretender begins to love truly after all, and becomes what he has
feigned to be.

Remedia 497-502:
Feign what you are not, and fake diminished passion;
in this way you will do for real what you have practised.
Often I have wanted to seem to sleep, to avoid drinking wine:
and while seeming, I have surrendered conquered eyes to slumber.
I have laughed at one deceived who faked being in love,
only to fall like a bird-catcher into his own snare.

Ars 3.155: ‘art counterfeits chance’ (ars casum simulat).

Further reading:
 Donna Zuckerberg, Not all Dead White Men. Classics and Misogyny in the Digital
Age. Cambridge Mass, 2018 (‘The Ovid method’ 89-142), provided to you in pdf.
 Alison Sharrock, ‘Ovid and the discourse of love: the amatory works’ in Hardie ed.
2002, The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 150-162, provided to you in pdf.

1
arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam; cf. Virgil Aen. 1.1 (arma virumque cano…); Ars 3.1 (arma
dedi in Amazonas; arma supersunt).

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Point 3

OCR textbook, p.65: ‘If Ovid is writing for a male audience as well as a female one, then this
poem takes on a new flavour. The tone of the book changes and becomes more of a parody of
didactic poetry, and almost, a joke at the expense of women’.

Men eavesdropping on women receiving lessons in seduction: cf. Plautus Most. 157-312,
Poen. 210-332, Propertius 4.5; Ovid Amores 1.8

Male not female addresses? See Ars 3. 5-6 (sic etiam … viri)

Penthesilea (Ars 3. 2): an icon for male conquest? See Propertius 3.15, cf. Ovid Remedia
676. The scene in which Achilles falls for Penthesilea when he stabs her fatally and sees her
face was popular in both Greek and Roman visual art: a famous black-figure amphora signed
by Exekias (540-30BCE) in the British Museum (GR 1836.2-24.127 Vase B210) depicts
Achilles and Penthesilea looking into each others’ eyes as she dies, as does the Attic red-
figure kylix (470-60BCE) attributed to the ‘Penthesilea painter’, in the Staatliche Antiken
Sammlungen, Munich.

Further reading:
 Roy Gibson, Ovid Ars Amatoria Book 3. Cambridge Classical Texts and
Commentaries, Cambridge 2003, Introduction.
 David Sider, ‘Didactic poetry: the Hellenistic invention of a pre-existing genre’ in
Hunter, Rengakos, Sistakou eds. Hellenistic Studies at a Crossroads. Trends in
Classics Suppl. 25, Berlin 2014. Provided for you in pdf.

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Point 4

Who gets laughed at?

Ars 3, 7-8: Some guy or other will say to me ‘Why do you add poison to snakes, and betray
the sheep to the rabid she-wolf [lupa]?’

Looking back at Ars 1 and 2: see Ars 3, 9-40, esp. 9 (Don’t charge all women with the
crimes of a few). Compare Ars 1, 645 (Deceive the deceivers: women are all a wicked sort).

Satirical brevity in mythological allusion:

e.g. Ars 3, 31-4:
Often do men deceive; tender girls not often;
Should you inquire, they are rarely charged with deceit.
Treacherous Jason sent away the Phasian;
Another bride came to the lap of Aeson’s son.

Teaching decorum: see Gibson 2007, with e.g. Ars 3.123-134 (and look for the Latin verb
decet, ‘it is proper/seemly’, e.g. at 3.145, 153)

Further reading:
 Roy Gibson, Excess and restraint: Propertius, Horace and Ovid's Ars Amatoria,
BICS Suppl. 89, London 2007. Provided for you in pdf.
 Victoria Rimell, ‘Double vision: Ars Amatoria 1, 2 and 3’ in Ovid’s Lovers. Desire,
Difference and the Poetic Imagination. Cambridge 2006, 70-103. Provided for you in
pdf.