Table Of ContentOvid’s Erotic Poems
Ovid’s
Erotic Poems
Amores
and
Ars Amatoria
5
translated by
Len Krisak
introduction by
Sarah Ruden
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review
or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ovid, 43 b.c.–17 a.d. or 18 a.d.
[Amores. English]
Ovid’s erotic poems : “Amores” and “Ars amatoria” / translated by Len Krisak ;
introduction by Sarah Ruden. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
isbn 978-0-8122-4625-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Love poetry, Latin—Translations into English. 2. Erotic poetry, Latin—
Translations into English. I. Krisak, Len, 1948– II. Ovid, 43 b.c.–17 a.d.
or 18 a.d. Ars amatoria. English. III. Title: Ars amatoria.
pa6522.a3 2014b
871’.01—dc23
2014012364
contents
5
Introduction by Sarah Ruden 1
Translator’s Preface 17
Amores
Epigram of the Poet Himself 23
book i 25
book ii 52
book iii 80
Ars Amatoria
book i 113
book ii 139
book iii 164
Notes 191
Glossary 205
Acknowledgments 225
introduction
5
It is a strange though critical irony that Ovid
(43 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), the ancient world’s greatest love poet, has
a reputation for outstanding frivolity, particularly in his fun-
damental erotic works, the Amores (Loves) and Ars Amatoria (The
Art of Love). Frivolity and romantic love don’t match up very well in
our minds.
But from one angle that characterization makes sense. Ovid is
one of our richest sources on otium, literally “leisure,” and in Rome
the word was particularly suggestive of things that are extra, ephem-
eral, disposable—such as the love affairs a young man might indulge
in as long as they did not involve serious infatuation that might dis-
tract him from duties and prescribed ambitions. Every relationship
Ovid depicts comes under the heading of dalliance: any assertion
of real, lasting emotional involvement is canceled out by the poet’s
satirical wit.
His persona’s involvement with a woman whom he calls Corinna in
the Amores amounts to little but a series of clichés brilliantly under-
cut: the lover constantly protests his helplessness, for example, but his
superb rhetorical control in itself makes that protest ridiculous. He is
far more interested in declaiming on stock themes such as the wicked-
ness of sailing, and in creating dramatizations in which Corinna—or
another woman, or more than one—is a mere prop. In Book II, Poem
2 introduction
11 of the Amores, Corinna is about to go to sea, and he protests her
decision and prays for her safety in fifty-six allusive lines that would
be absurdly pretentious if he meant a word of them.
Ars Amatoria, for its part, is a parody in its very form, that of di-
dactic verse. Two long, discursive books instruct men on the science
of selecting a woman, flirting with her, handling her—then, briefly,
how to please her in bed. A third book tells women how to handle
their side of the romantic confidence game. Again, spicing up what
by this time had become the pabulum of literary eroticism is Ovid’s
prevailing technique.
Ovid’s love poetry is therefore the antithesis of negotium and its lit-
erature. Negotium was almost the defining condition for respectable
men of the citizen class. I prefer to translate the word according to its
etymology, as “non-leisure” rather than “business,” because it covers
everything someone would do to advance his interests in the public
sphere. First, there were private commercial dealings, politics, and
public administration, often jumbled together—all three were based
on rhetoric, or the science of speaking and writing. Witness the orator
Cicero’s mammoth yet exquisitely crafted personal correspondence
that complements his published speeches and treatises. But negotium
included even literary avocations such as writing history or poetry, a
rather shocking example of which was Cicero’s (now mercifully lost)
epic poem De consulatu suo (On His [Own] Consulship), celebrating
his alleged heroism in Rome’s highest public office. The literature of
negotium purported to show a man at his real, solid best.
The literature of otium seems to have emerged only a generation or
two before Ovid and is first extant in the work of the poet Catullus
(who died, young, in the mid-fifties B.c.e.). Ovid’s erotic poetry rep-
resents—to my mind, anyway—the ancient world’s tightest combi-
nation of delight in the world with delight in writing. He is by far the
keenest observer of early Imperial Rome’s details, and the wittiest
introduction 3
confabulator to use this material, from the look and sound of public
entertainments to the mechanics of recreational sex, and from the
distant spectacles of large historical events to the moods in an apart-
ment where a courtesan tries a new hairstyle to better suit the shape
of her face or fights for her life after an abortion.
But even though some of the topics are still customarily called
“light,” the term “frivolous” is unfair: at this stage of his career (as
opposed to his time of exile after 8 C.e., when loneliness, humilia-
tion, and a campaign to be recalled produced what can look like real
personal writing), Ovid is not concerned with anything so trivial as
his own physical desires or emotional attachments, or even his own
wider circumstances or experiences. Even his career as a roué may
have been fictional or brief, given what he writes in exile in the collec-
tions entitled Tristia (Sad Things) and Letters from Pontus (the Black
Sea, beside which he made his involuntary new home) about his lov-
ing, loyal, desperately missed third wife, whom he probably married
around the age of thirty, when many Roman men contracted their
first legal unions).
But in the texts of the Amores and Ars Amatoria themselves lies
the main evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was about itself, so that
his freedom and achievement there went far beyond the necessary
narrow limits of self-depiction or self-expression: it was creation in
a broader sense that concerned him, creation feeding on the infin-
ity of literary possibilities rather than the decidedly finite store of
individual human experience. The writing luxuriates in rhetorical
convolutions and send-ups of the love elegy genre that it technically
inhabits, and is obviously determined to use all its contents as mere
combustible material for verbal and dramatic fireworks.
But in a stunt such as this, the indispensable thing, the thing that
prevents the composition from being a mere pile of dry tiresome-
ness that over time will grow soggy and rot, is the spark of genius. If
