Ars amatoria: the seduction manual that cost Ovid his exile

In the years spanning the end of the first century BC and the start of the next, Ovid published a didactic poem in elegiac couplets that parodied the technical treatises of his day: the Ars amatoria, the art of love. The poet presents himself as a teacher, «praeceptor amoris», and promises to teach methodically what others leave to chance. The exact date is debated, but the work falls roughly between 2 BC and AD 2.

Three books, two audiences

The first two books are addressed to men: the first explains where to find a woman and how to win her, the second how to keep her love. The third, perhaps added later, is dedicated to women and offers them matching advice. This structure, unusual for the time, allows Ovid to look at the game of love from both sides and to turn it into a comedy of manners.

The manual is full of Rome. Ovid points to the porticoes, the temples, the circus and above all the theatres, where women, he writes, «spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae», come to see and to be seen. The advice concerns how to dress, how to converse, how to write letters, how to pretend and how to forgive, in a refined city that knew its own social rituals well.

Myth as example

Alongside the precepts, the Ars amatoria inserts mythological tales that serve as examples. The rape of the Sabine women is presented, ironically, as the first seduction to take place in a Roman theatre; the story of Daedalus and Icarus interrupts the second book with an episode of great narrative elegance; Ariadne abandoned on Naxos is consoled by Bacchus. Myth thus becomes material for fashionable conversation.

After the Ars, Ovid composed the Remedia amoris, a poem that teaches instead how to free oneself from an unhappy passion. The reversal is deliberate: the same master who explained how to kindle love now explains how to put it out, advising readers to keep busy, to travel, to avoid places full of memories. The intent remains literary and playful, not moral, and the reader recognises the author's smile in every line.

Exile on the Black Sea

In AD 8 Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis, modern Constanța in Romania, at the edge of the empire. The poet himself, in the Tristia, attributes the sentence to two faults, «carmen et error», a poem and a mistake. The poem was almost certainly the Ars amatoria, judged contrary to the Augustan laws on marriage and adultery; the mistake remains mysterious and has fuelled many hypotheses, none confirmed.

Ovid never returned to Rome and died at Tomis around AD 17 or 18. From exile he wrote sorrowful elegies defending his work, arguing that a poet's life can be decent even when his verses are licentious, an argument that would enjoy a long career in the history of literary censorship and its controversies.

The Middle Ages, in spite of everything, read the Ars amatoria with passion. In the schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Ovid was studied so intensely that the period has been called the age of Ovid. His precepts flowed into the treatises on courtly love, beginning with that of Andreas Capellanus, and into the poetry of clerics, who turned the Roman game into a genuine doctrine of feeling.