By these tears, by the hand you gave me—
They are all I have left, to-day, in my misery—I implore you,
And by our union of hearts, by our marriage hardly begun,
If I have ever helped you at all, if anything
About me pleases you, be sad for our broken home, forego
Your purpose, I beg you, unless it’s too late for prayers of mine!
Because of you, the Libyan tribes and the Nomad chieftains
Hate me, the Tyrians are hostile: because of you I have lost
My old reputation for faithfulness—the one thing that could have made me
Immortal. Oh, I am dying! To what, my guest, are you leaving me?
If even I might have conceived a child by you before
You went away, a little Aeneas to play in the palace
And, in spite of all this, to remind me of you by his looks, oh then
I should not feel so utterly finished and desolate.
When none of her pleas moves him, and it’s clear he’s really going to leave her, she becomes angry and wishes him ill fortune, bad seas, and misery. Then she takes the bed on which they made love, gathers some belongings that he hasn’t picked up yet—a sword she gave him as a present, various articles of clothing—and drags them to a courtyard, where she builds a bonfire. Climbing to the top, she falls upon Aeneas’ sword and dies, knowing that he’ll see her funeral pyre from his ship. Later in The Aeneid, Aeneas gets safe passage to the Underworld to visit his father, and there he sees the ghost of Dido wandering through the woods like marsh gas. Filled with pity, he begs her forgiveness, and swears that it wasn’t his will to abandon her but the iron edict of “Heaven’s commands.” He speaks tenderly to her, “trying to soften the wild-eyed/Passionate-hearted ghost” who remains “stubborn to his appeal” and finally rushes away, without forgiving him, “hating him still.”
THE FAMILY
The astringent rules of Roman life were set against such stories of unswerving passion and dizzying love. Hobbled by laws and social convention, its people praised monogamy, efficiency, and restraint, but indulged in carnality, intemperance, and other clandestine pleasures, much as the upper-class Victorians did centuries later. Strictness, stoicism, and denial of temptation were part of an ideal father’s image. His children addressed him as “Sir,” and he was expected to set a rigid model of deportment. How did one withstand the entreaties of vice? Through hard work. Virtue triumphs more easily in exhausted limbs. It fell to the mother to be lenient now and then. Women were expected to be emotional and occasionally go haywire.
Not only marriages, but adoptions, were used to seal loyalty and wealth between families. Children were chattels who could be swapped for money or power at any moment, and parents often left it to nursemaids and servants to dispense love. Raised by a nurse, tutored by a “pedagogue,” a boy would study mythology, Greek language and literature, rhetoric, and other high-toned subjects. Unlike the Greeks, who believed education should drench the whole body, Roman students didn’t spend half their time at sports. A man of quality was expected to know mythology, even if he didn’t believe it. And education was prized not for the openness of mind it allowed but for the prestige it bestowed. An educated man was a respected man. A girl of twelve didn’t need education, because at fourteen she would be declared a woman and promptly married off. After that, it fell to her husband to educate her, if he wished. Young men were free to enjoy male lovers, frequent prostitutes, or live with mistresses; but when they married, they were supposed to put all their high spirits and mischief behind them, and become the decorous head of the family. An odd element of the Roman legal system was that a male child of whatever age or marital status spent his life ruled by an omnipotent father. If the father judged the son harshly, he could condemn him to death. Adult sons were powerless in the eyes of society, and it must have been humiliating for a grown man to need his father’s consent to make business or legal contracts, have a decent career, or even marry. A son’s income belonged to his father, a father who could disinherit him at any moment. By law, a woman’s agreement was required when she married. But, on the other hand, she couldn’t reject her father’s wishes. So it is easy to understand why family squabbles too often turned vicious, and resulted in children disinherited or fathers murdered.
In the early days of Rome, slaves were not allowed to marry, and little is recorded about their lives. When respectable citizens of Rome married, they didn’t involve the state. There was plenty of ritual and ceremony, but nothing legal. No justice of the peace, no papers to sign. Yet inheritance laws required that children be “legitimate,” so everyone had to know that the couple was indeed married. Circumstantial evidence would do, but it was wise to have a wedding party or, at least, a couple of witnesses. Gifts were given, out of goodwill, and perhaps also to bind the guests to the marrying families. The groom gave the bride a ring, which she wore on the same finger she would today. Aulus Gellius explains why that finger was chosen:
When the human body is cut open as the Egyptians do and when dissections … are practised on it, a very delicate nerve is found which starts from the [ring] finger and travels to the heart. It is, therefore, thought seemly to give to this finger in preference to all others the honour of the ring, on account of the loose connection which links it with the principal organ.
The man was said to receive “the hand” of his bride, and the ring symbolized that with her hand she gave her innermost self. Every time they touched hands, they touched hearts. The wedding ceremony was a combination of divine and human laws, a forging of the spiritual with the civic, in a total union of whole lives. The bride wore white, with a belt tied into the “knot of Hercules,” which the husband looked forward to untying in private after the wedding. Her hair was carefully arranged and covered with a bright orange veil that symbolized dawn. Guests threw grain to wish the pair a good harvest of children. After the ceremony there was a reception, with toasts to the newlyweds, and then the bride was carried over the threshold for good luck. If the wedding ceremony sounds remarkably familiar, it is because many of its rituals were adopted by the Christian church, which was wise about preserving traditional customs whenever possible. Except for sacrificing animals, little has changed. Then came the wedding night, which social historian Paul Veyne sums up as less than tender:
The wedding night took the form of a legal rape from which the woman emerged “offended with her husband” (who, accustomed to using his slave women as he pleased, found it difficult to distinguish between raping a woman and taking the initiative in sexual relations). It was customary for the groom to forego deflowering his wife on the first night, out of concern for her timidity; but he made up for his forbearance by sodomizing her.
This was not intended to be a love match. The purpose of marriage was to produce children, make favorable alliances, and establish a bloodline. But there was a new civility in marriage. It was hoped that husband and wife would be friends and get on amiably. Happiness was not part of the deal, nor was pleasure. Sex was for creating babies. Any extra kisses or touches were an extravagance, and Stoic philosophy didn’t condone wasted effort. Wives were still inferiors, but they warranted respect. In ancient Greece, it had been a man’s civic duty to marry. His role as citizen superseded his role as husband and head of the family. In Rome, it behooved a man to marry, but he was also expected to be a decent husband. In fact, a respectable man treated all his dependents justly—his servants, his children, his slaves, his wife. Was she cherished as an equal partner in a lifelong alliance of the heart? Did she and her husband socialize as a couple? When they made love, did they rejoice in each other’s sexuality? It’s highly doubtful. Romans praised harmony in the household as something precious and desirable, but it was a bonus. In exile, the poet Ovid once wrote of his tenderness for his wife and the “love that makes us partners.” But he knew how rare that affectionate union was. Ovid often sought and found love elsewhere; but to discover it at home, in and a
mong his errands and idle moments, when he awoke each morning, even when he ate or dressed—that was the luxury. Did he and his wife make love during the daylight hours? If so, they did it secretly and with the titillation that comes from breaking a taboo, because few things were thought lewder than daytime sex. Lovers were expected to be cat burglars, masked by nighttime, their flesh illuminated by the occasional shaft of moonlight.
OH, VICTORIA!
For some reason, we picture the Romans as sexual gladiators who did whatever, whenever, to whomever. Or as debauched drunkards enjoying one long fraternity party. The Romans found nothing shameful about the penis as an object of beauty or devotion. Phallic objects appear in their art as images of power, domination, and protection, as well as sex. The Latin fascinum, which meant “witchcraft,” was associated with the phallic god Fascinus. Parents would hang a penis-shaped amulet around a child’s neck to avert the evil eye. On Velia, one of the first hills of Rome, a temple was dedicated to the god Mutanus Tutunus, who was represented in the form of a penis. Priestesses and married women wreathed the god’s image with flowers, and newlyweds kept an effigy of the god in their bedrooms. On her wedding day, a bride was to sit on the effigy, giving up her virginity as a sacred offering.
But, despite the banquets and spectacles and phallic gods, Romans were ruled by many puritanical prohibitions. Adultery and incest were taboo. So was sex with a naked woman. A prostitute might take off all of her clothes; a nice girl left on at least her bra,* for discretion’s sake. Oral sex was tolerated between homosexual men or women, enjoyed by men at the hands of courtesans, but it was considered repulsive and degrading for a man to pleasure a woman with his mouth. The essence of this degradation lay in the idea of a man being servile to a woman. Roman men were obsessed with machismo. In homosexual affairs, this meant pitching rather than catching. With men or women, the key was to be active rather than passive, to be served rather than do the serving. Above all, they wished never to act like a slave to anyone or anything—including love. The ultimate class consciousness doesn’t just involve one’s rank with other people—but also with ideas. Passion enslaves, however willingly we may wear its shackles. Because love lured one away from the concerns of the populace, it was a kind of social treason. Because it involved dependence on a woman—a moral inferior—it lessened a man’s stature. Because it made one lose control in a culture obsessed with domination, it showed bad character.
But love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny. Writers have always relished being its revolutionary scribes. In T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, on which the movie Lawrence of Arabia was based, an Arab chieftain proclaims: “I am a river to my people.” In every era, poets become rivers flowing with emotion, connecting the farmhands and the city dwellers, nourishing the lovers. In ancient Greece it was Sappho, sinewy and ripe, who wrote so deliciously about female lovers that the term “lesbian” was coined from her hometown of Lesbos. Rome had many love poets, each with a slightly different complexion: the saucily neurotic Catullus, the romantics Tibullus and Propertius, the epic Virgil, and Ovid, love’s scribe and laborer.
OVID AND THE ART OF LOVE
Born in the provinces to an equestrian family, Ovid moved to Rome in his teens and spent most of his life there writing frisky, sensuous poetry that reflected the raucous morals of Roman high society, which was waging an all-out war against boredom. Women had more freedom and confidence than before, but no access to a public life. As one scholar notes wryly: “They were permitted to do a great deal—as long as they did nothing constructive.” So they focused much of their creative energies on beauty treatments, adornments, dinner parties, and romantic intrigues. Ovid, who was married three times, had a great many affairs, and wrote from experience about the torrents of love. From the evidence in his poems, he seems to have been in a perpetual snit. He yearned, he leered, he ached, he flirted, he bad-mouthed, he laughed, he taunted, he wooed—all in bright, rambunctious poetry. In a style personal and introspective enough to have been written today, he talks gamely about his spell of impotence, his occasional fetishism, or his jealousy. He exposes the full anatomy of his lust. His “erotic commonplaces” were often quoted by others, but when he wrote The Art of Love, a skillfully crafted “seducer’s manual,” he became the wicked darling of Rome. Here’s a glimpse into it:
Love is a kind of war, and no assignment for cowards. Where those banners fly, heroes are always on guard.
Soft, those barracks? They know long marches, terrible weather, Night and winter and storm, grief and excessive fatigue.
Often the rain pelts down from the drenching cloudbursts of heaven, Often you lie on the ground, wrapped in a mantle of cold.
If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it, Though it is clear as the day, swear up and down it’s a lie.
Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive, That would establish your guilt far beyond anything else.
Wear yourself out if you must, and prove, in her bed, that you could not Posssibly be that good, coming from some other girl.
It was Ovid’s bad luck to publish The Art of Love during the reign of Augustus, at a time when the emperor decided to get tough about the city’s plummeting birthrate. Rome’s formidable rates of sterility, miscarriages, and stillbirths were most likely the result of chronic lead poisoning. Each day, Romans unwittingly dosed themselves with lead through the pipes that carried drinking water, the lead-based face powder and other cosmetics women used, the cooking pots, and the syrup used to sweeten cheap wine. Another possibility is that the men’s perpetually coddled testicles rendered them sterile. Men and women both spent a lot of time stewing in the baths, and we now know that raising the temperature of the testicles in hot water can reduce the sperm count. Whatever the cause of this barrenness, in 18 B.C. Augustus tried to remedy it through a system of rewards and punishments. He imposed strict marriage laws to prevent illegitimate children (because they might be aborted or killed), encourage large families, and not waste any fertile woman’s womb. Adultery had been a private, family matter of grave importance. Augustus shoved it into the law courts and changed it from an act of infidelity to an act of sedition. Henceforth, he decreed, any man who discovered his wife’s adultery had to divorce her or be prosecuted himself. The wife and her lover would then be exiled (in different directions). Half their wealth would be confiscated, and they would be forbidden ever to marry each other. A husband could engage a prostitute, but not keep a mistress. Widows were obliged to remarry within two years, and divorcées within eighteen months. Childless couples were discriminated against, as were unmarried men. Parents with three or more children were rewarded. Promiscuity was chastised. Augustus meant to stabilize the family, but the opposite happened. The divorce rate skyrocketed, since divorce was the only nonprosecutable form of dalliance.
All things considered, this was not the ideal climate in which to publish a guide to infidelity. But it was just the moment Ovid chose for his. Why? There’s an impish, swaggering quality to Ovid. I think he saw himself as a bawdy trafficker who lived on the edge, a purveyor of contraband morals. Anyway, he created a sensation in high society, had a brisk following, and became quite a famous rogue. This shocked and irritated Augustus, and was the excuse he gave for dealing harshly with him. But evidence points in another direction, indicating that Ovid became embroiled in some mysterious high-level scandal. No one knows exactly what happened—in part because Ovid was told to choose between silence and death—but clues in his writing suggest one of two possibilities. Either he dared to have an affair with the emperor’s wife, which the emperor discovered, or he was privy to an attempted coup d’état. If the empress fancied him, as well she might after reading his books, he would have been caught between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. He couldn’t have safely said yes or no. Whatever happened, it was serious enough for Augustus to banish him to a distant, uncivilized territory
where he spent the remainder of his life longing for the sophistication and gaiety of Rome.
Some classical scholars dismiss Ovid as a scoundrel and pornographer interested only in sexual conquest. It’s amusing that, all these years later, people are still scandalized by his candor. Some wince at his bravado. Like Shakespeare, Ovid promises his girlfriends that they will become immortal through his poems. But, you know, he was right. We still sigh over his lover, Corinna, the heroine and temptress of his early Loves. Although we don’t know her real identity, she may have been his first wife. They were teenagers, “two adolescents, exploring a booby-trapped world of adult passions and temptations, and playing private games, first with their society, then—liaisons dangereuses—with one another….” In Ovid’s writings one finds a full catalog of love, from chaste worship to unregenerate conniving. Although Augustus banned The Art of Love, it has endured through the ages, as a brilliantly insightful meditation on love, vanity, and temptation.