Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
Ars Amatoria
Seduction is a learnable technical skill, not a matter of fate or divine favor, and a didactic poem can teach it with the same systematic confidence Virgil brought to teaching farming.
- parody of didactic poetry applied to seduction
- urbane treatment of love as game, not moral duty
- collision with Augustus's marriage and adultery laws
- cited by Ovid himself as one cause of his exile
A mock-didactic poem in three books, the first two instructing men where to find women and how to win them, the third addressed to women with matching advice, parodying the serious didactic tradition of Hesiod and Virgil's Georgics by applying their systematic, instructional voice to seduction and adultery in fashionable Roman society. Its urbane, knowing tone, treating love as sophisticated game rather than either Catullan anguish or Augustan moral duty, sat directly athwart Augustus's marriage and adultery legislation, and ancient sources link the poem, alongside an unspecified personal offense, to Ovid's sudden banishment to Tomis in AD 8, a connection the poet himself asserted repeatedly in his exile poetry without ever fully explaining the second charge.
Commentary
Readers' notes on this work. No account needed - be scholarly, or at least civil.
Loading commentary…