Meanwhile (possibly it was arranged by his anxious father) he had married a girl whom he not long after divorced: she was, in Ovid’s single, scathing reference to her, “neither worthy nor useful.” A second marriage was also short-lived; when or why it ended, and whether there was a child, we do not know; Ovid only vouchsafes that his wife “had nothing against” her predecessor. His last marriage, to a well-connected widow with a daughter, was happy, and it was to her and about her that he wrote some of his most touching poetry in exile.
In A.D. 8, almost a decade after the appearance of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid was abruptly banished by edict of the Emperor Augustus. (An irony of history is that he learnt of his fate while he was visiting an island famous in the annals of banishment: Elba.) It was not the harshest form of that particular punishment, which was exsilium, but relegatio, whereby he retained his civic rights and property; all the same he had to leave Rome for a place of Augustus’ choice (this was Tomis, on the Black Sea) and his books were removed from the public libraries. Ovid says the grounds for his sentence were “a poem” and “a blunder” and to the end of his life presented himself as an astonished innocent; but if we look at the background to the Emperor’s decision we may feel less surprise than Ovid professed to have felt.
As Octavian, Augustus had come to power after a period of civil war and disorder. Part of his programme of reform was to revive the stricter moral standards of the previous generation, to which end he passed a number of laws, notably one against adultery. In 2 B.C., on discovering that his daughter Julia was a multiple adulteress, he banished her and her known lovers. Ten years later he also banished his grand-daughter, another Julia, for the same offence. He was clearly in earnest. Between these two banishments Ovid had published his Ars Amatoria to the applause of educated Rome. This was the guilty “poem.” Ovid, riding high, must have been so blinded by success that he failed to see that it was bound to displease the Emperor deeply. Although he always protested that the available girls in his poem were exclusively freedwomen—unattached demi-mondaines—his text doesn’t bear him out; adultery is more than hinted at. And how could he have hoped that Augustus would tolerate his recommending as the two best hunting-grounds for casual sex the patriotic mock naval battle which the Emperor himself staged and the porticos which Augustus and his sister had dedicated in honour of his consort?
The “blunder” has puzzled historians. “Repertus ego,” says Ovid, suggesting that he was “discovered” as an unwilling or unwitting witness or minor accessory to some scene or plot offensive to the Emperor. He may have known too much about Julia’s love-life, or he may have been too friendly with members of the political opposition. He insists that the “blunder” was in no sense a “crime,” but it was certainly a fatal indiscretion. Augustus, having long stayed his hand, struck.
What were conditions like for an exile in Tomis? When Franco banished the philosopher Unamuno to a remote island in the Canaries, he had his books, local wine and an agreeable climate—what more, a cynic might ask, could a true philosopher desire? Ovid had none of these amenities: imported wine, it’s true, was available, but, as he complains, it was often iced over and could be drunk “not by the draught but only by the chunk.” Delacroix’s painting in the National Gallery, Ovid Among the Scythians, is charming but misleading: it shows the poet lounging, lightly clad, on a bank in front of a pleasant-looking stretch of water, enjoying the sight of a picturesque tribesman milking a mare. In fact, Tomis (now Constanta in Romania) was a god-forsaken, run-down, self-governing Roman frontier outpost, continually harassed by barbarian horsemen from the steppes. The inhabitants spoke not a word of Latin, only a garbled form of Greek. The climate was vile (a prevailing north-east wind), he was without his wife (she had begged him to let her accompany him, but they had decided it was wisest for her to stay behind, look after their property and work for his recall), he was without his library and without skilled doctors, the posts to and from Rome took several months, privacy was hard to come by, and he had no one with whom he could share his love of poetry: as he poignantly put it, “To write a poem you can’t read to anyone else is like dancing in the dark.” Yet he didn’t collapse, as Oscar Wilde did, with less excuse, in Dieppe. He buckled down to learn the local language, Getic, and, as a middle-aged man in a community living in fear of raids (“we pick up poisoned arrows in the street”), he joined the citizen militia. And during his eight or nine years of exile he continued to write poetry, nearly six thousand lines of it, sometimes grovelling in hopeful flattery of Augustus, sometimes whingeing, sometimes aggressive (his Ibis is a savage attack on some, to us, unknown enemy in Rome, whom he blames for his misfortunes), sometimes deeply moving (the autobiographical parts of the Tristia), but always glitteringly accomplished. He ended up honoured in Tomis, crowned with a municipal wreath and exempted from taxation. A statue of him stands in Constanza today. By the time he died, at the age of fifty-nine, another emperor, Tiberius, was the ruler of the Roman world, and the question of the poet’s exile was not high on his agenda.
What sort of man was Ovid? The Romans were not given to self-portraiture—Horace has left us a few sentences, Virgil nothing—so we must be grateful that Ovid occasionally spoke of himself in his poetry, especially in exile, though he was at all times speaking through the poet’s mask, or persona. I get the impression of an affectionate nature: his expressed love for his parents, his brother and his last wife, his unjealous friendships with fellow poets, even his sexual teasing in the Ars strike me as the mark of a warm, not a cold person. He was entirely heterosexual in a society that was tolerantly not, but he thought some “gays” fair target for mockery. If he had a tendency to self-pity, he also had humour as well as wit, as is demonstrated (as I read it) by a story of Seneca’s. Knowing and disapproving of Ovid’s weakness for verbal extravagance, three of his friends proposed to him that they should, in committee, select three of his lines that ought to be excised from his work. He agreed, but only on condition that he could select three lines that on no account should be sacrificed. The lines on each list were identical.
Francis Meres, a contemporary of Shakespeare, hit on a happy phrase—“the sweet witty soul of Ovid.” In the language of the nineteenth-century clubman, Macaulay tries to sum him up: “He seems to have been a very good fellow; rather too fond of women; a flatterer and a coward; but kind and generous, and free from envy, though a man of letters sufficiently vain of his literary performance.” I see no evidence for “coward,” I do not know where being fond of women should properly stop, and as for flattery (that old Whig obsession), what other weapon could Ovid have laid hands on in trying to get his sentence repealed? For me, he is a more complicated character—imaginative, self-indulgent, histrionic, but also tough, responsible and adaptable, as the facts prove. Above all, he was persistently, dedicatedly, a poet, with a superb ear, a genius for both compression and digression, and an exceptionally rich memory, enabling him to retell innumerable myths and legends that were part of his cultural heritage, if not of his, or any other sophisticated Roman’s, religious belief.
The Ars Amatoria is a mock-didactic poem. The traditional didactic poem—Virgil’s Georgics are its supreme culmination—was a practical versified guide to such prosaic subjects as bee-keeping or antidotes to poison. Ovid himself wrote a short one, at about this time, on facial cosmetics. What he now did was entirely original: he built a joke around the genre. From his self-appointed professorial podium he delivered a tongue-in-cheek verse lecture on the science of seduction, not in the expected hexameters, but in a metre associated with erotic poetry, elegiac couplets. New, too, was the tone of voice—here was no conventional, passive, melancholy love poet, but an unorthodox, positive ringmaster, exhibiting his tricks, totally in charge of the show. The first two books give advice to men on how to find a mistress, how to seduce her, and how to keep her. The third book, added later and perhaps at the request of female friends (of which, one feels, Ovid was never short), purports to be an equivalen
t guide for women; but in it, although he pretends to be betraying male secrets and weaknesses to the other sex, he is really compounding the macho joke by giving away very little that matters. The poem is riddled with metaphors of war and the chase. It is also embroidered with illustrations from legend, set-pieces which teasingly delay the business in hand but without which we would be the poorer—the rape of the Sabine women, the princess Pasiphaë turned into a cow and mad with love for a white bull, Bacchus in his tiger-drawn chariot rescuing Ariadne from her desert island, and, best of all, the tragedy of the first aeronauts, Daedalus and Icarus. These bravura passages contrast amusingly with the sexual tips they interrupt. Contrast, ironic or parodic, between a lofty manner and down-to-earth concerns is at the heart of Ovid’s method. Nowhere is it more outrageously employed than when he borrows Virgil’s solemn phrase referring to the difficulty Aeneas will have in retracing his steps back from the Underworld, “hoc opus, hic labor est” (“herein lies the task, the great labour”) and finishes the line in his own way—“primo sine munere iungi” (“to part with nothing before she’s given herself”).
Ovid was a survivor, and so it’s fitting that his work too should have survived, not only in the manuscripts which the celibate monks, to whom we are smilingly grateful, preserved in monastery libraries, but in the judgment of posterity. He was Martial’s favourite poet after Catullus. Touchstone in As You Like It calls him, with intent to praise, “the most capricious poet,” and Marlowe, who translated the Amores while he was at university, brilliantly transferred his lover’s prayer into the mouth of Dr. Faustus desperately close to the stroke of midnight: “O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!” Milton admired his erotic poems. Macaulay read his entire works in Calcutta and pronounced the Ars Amatoria “decidedly his best.” For the next hundred years a Victorian reaction prevailed, at least publicly, and the Ars was described as “a shameless compendium in profligacy” and as “l’art d’aimer sans amour.” How odd! It may be “naughty” but by no stretch of imagination is it pornographic and, as for “true love,” Ovid makes it clear that he is not dealing with that. In 1993 readers will find it easy, despite what is lost in translation, to enjoy it as they would Pope’s Rape of the Lock—as a sparklingly clever, gorgeously decorated, serio-comic masterpiece.
A word about this translation. Having just compared Ovid with Pope, I agree with Peter Green’s opinion that “Ovid has suffered more than most Roman poets from over-close association with the eighteenth century.” Put him into rhyming couplets and not only do you lose a great deal through forced compression, but you also turn, willy-nilly, a young Roman into a middle-aged gentleman, complete with wig, in Twickenham. Mr. Green’s excellent translation of the Ars Amatoria, published in the Penguin Classics, while still keeping to the couplet concept, uses lines of irregular length, with as many as seven or as few as two stresses. I have followed in his path, but feeling that the two primary elements in Ovid’s poetry, wit and technical virtuosity, had to be reflected somehow, I have added rhyme. If there is gain, it is in chic, a very Ovidian quality; if there is loss, it is that I am sometimes cheating the reader of the awareness that after every couplet there is in the original a definite pause. But the test of all translations is simple: is this what the author wrote, and do I enjoy what I’m reading? I can only guarantee you the first.
JAMES MICHIE, 1993
THE ART OF LOVE
[ENGLISH].
BOOK ONE
[LATIN: Siquis in hoc…]
If any Roman knows nothing about love-making, please
Read this poem and graduate in expertise.
Ships and chariots with sails, oars, wheels, reins,
Speed through technique and control, and the same obtains
For love. As Automedon was Achilles’ charioteer
And Tiphys earned the right to steer
The Argo on Jason’s expedition,
So I am appointed by Venus as the technician
Of her art—my name will live on
As Love’s Tiphys, Love’s Automedon.
Love often fights against me, for he’s wild,
Yet he’s also controllable, for he’s still a child.
Chiron made Achilles expert with the lyre,
His cool tuition quenched youth’s primitive fire,
So that the boy who later became
A terror to friends and foes alike stood tame
In front of his aged teacher, so they say,
And the hand that Hector would feel one day
Was held out meekly to be rapped
At his schoolmaster’s bidding. Achilles was the apt
Pupil of Chiron, Love is mine—
Wild boys both, and both born of divine
Mothers; yet the heavy plough will make
Even the bull’s neck docile, and the friskiest colt will take
The bit in his teeth. Love shall be tamed under my hand,
Though his arrows riddle me, though his flaming brand
Is waved in my face. The worse the wounds, the fiercer the burn,
The prompter I’ll be to punish him in return.
I won’t pretend that I’m inspired by you, Apollo:
The hoot of an owl, the flight of a swallow,
Have taught me nothing; awake or asleep,
I never had a vision of the Muses tending sheep
In pastoral valleys. This poem springs
From experience. Listen, your poet sings
Of what he knows, he tells no lies.
Venus, mother of Love, assist my enterprise!
But you with headbands and ankle-length robes, staid matrons,
Stay well clear—you are not my patrons.
My theme is safe and licit love, stolen joys which women’ll
Condone; I’ll mention nothing criminal.
[LATIN: Principio, quod amare…]
Your first job, then, love’s volunteer recruit,
Is to find the object of your pursuit;
Next comes the work of wooing and winning; and, last, ensuring
That the love you’ve won is enduring.
These are the limits of the ground my wheeled
Chariot will rapidly cover, my chosen field.
[LATIN: Dum licet, et…]
While you’re still unharnessed and can wander fancy-free,
Pick a girl and tell her, “You’re the only girl for me.”
A mistress, though, doesn’t float down from the sky:
You have to seek out the one who’s caught your eye.
A hunter has to work,
Know where to spread his stag-nets, in which glens boars lurk,
A fowler’s familiar with copses, fishermen learn
Which streams are the most rewarding, and you, if you yearn
For a long-term affair, won’t have one till you’ve found
The places where girls are thick on the ground.
Though Perseus brought back Andromeda from the Syrian coast
And Paris stole Helen from his foreign host,
You can achieve your ambition
More easily. I’m not recommending an expedition
Overseas or a gruelling march; look nearer home
And you’ll say, “The prettiest girls in the world are in Rome”—
They’re thicker than wheatsheaves on Gargara, grapes in Lesbos, birds in the trees,
Stars in the sky, fish in the seas,
For Venus is a strong presence
In the city her son founded. If you fancy adolescents,
One stunner out of plenty
Will emerge and dazzle you; if you like them over twenty,
The range of available talent is so rich
That your only problem will be which;
And if you prefer mature, experienced women,
Believe me, they’re as common
As blackberries.
[LATIN: Tu modo Pompeia…]
When the sun’s on the back of Hercules’
Lion, in high su
mmer, just stroll at your ease
Down Pompey’s shady colonnade,
Or Octavia’s (which she made
More beautiful, when her son died,
With rich marblework on the outside),
Or the one that’s named
After its founder, Livia, famed
For its antique paintings. Don’t forget to go
To the Danaids’ portico
Where the fifty sculptured virgins meditate
Their luckless cousins’ fate—
The multiple murder planned
By their fierce father Belus (here shown sword in hand).
And don’t miss the shrine where Venus weeps
For Adonis, the synagogue where Syrian Jewry keeps
The sabbath sacred, or the Memphian temple
Of the linen-clad heifer Io, whose example
Has taught many a courtesan
To offer her body to a man
As she did hers to Jove.
The law-courts, too, are fertile grounds for love,
Believe it or not—yes, desire
From dry forensic tinder can catch fire.
There where the Appian nymph tosses her water-jets
High from beneath the marble shrine, Venus’s nets
Trap even lawyers. The man who knows how to lend
His eloquence to defend others can’t defend
Himself, words fail him, he has to look after
A new case now—his own. Meanwhile the goddess’s laughter
Tinkles from her nearby temple at the sight
Of the advocate turned client overnight.
[LATIN: Sed tu praecipue…]
Above all, comb the curved theatre—that’s the place
Richest in spoils of the sexual chase.