The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

388 Pages·2007·3.36 MB·English

by  Roy Gibson

T H E A R T O F L O V E
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THE ART OF
LOVE
BIMILLENNIAL ESSAYS ON OVID’S ARS
AMATORIA AND REMEDIA AMORIS
Editedby
ROY GIBSON, STEVEN GREEN AND
ALISON SHARROCK
1
3
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Preface
Setsofrulesandpreceptsonloveandrelationshipsretainthecapacity
to oVend. An American bestseller of the 1990s by Ellen Fein and
Sherrie Schneider—The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the
Heart of Mr Right—dedicated to marrying oV its female readers to
suitable prospects, might appear to have little obvious connection
withthepoemthatAugustusfoundguiltyofteaching‘fouladultery’
(Tr. 2. 212). But, in Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners
and Morals from Locke to Austen, Jenny Davidson devotes a coda
(‘PolitenessanditsCosts’)totakingissuewithTheRulesongrounds
thatmayseemfamiliartoreadersofOvid’sArsAmatoria:1
The advice for women who want husbands that is given in the notorious
bestseller The Rules is relentlessly pragmatic....The book puts forward a
practicalthesisaboutthepayoVsofdelayedgratiWcationandself-restraintin
the form of ‘simple working sets of behaviors and reactions’: concealing
one’s feelings and withholding sex with the goal of receiving a marriage
proposal....ThepragmatismofFeinandSchneider’slanguage,anditsrelent-
less orientation towards a single goal, suggests a patently self-interested
brand of self-control whose extension into other social arenas would be
quitesinister.
We can perhaps grasp or relive something of the shock of the
Ars Amatoria by taking on board the open hostility expressed
here towards the very notion of pragmatic advice on ‘love’, learned
behaviours, and concealment of feelings, and the evident anxiety
expressed about the leakage of the principles of The Rules into
cognate areas. But self-interest in matters of love is not all that
worries Davidson. She goes on to argue that ‘The authors of The
Rules articulate many of our culture’s most disturbing assumptions
about women...that women are more manipulative and cynical
thanmen,thattheyaredeeplyhypocritical,indeedthatallwomen’s
relationships with men are colored by levels of self-interest and
1 J. Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Mannersand Morals from
LocketoAusten(Cambridge,2004),176–7.
vi Preface
opportunismthatarematchedonlybythoseofthemenwhohopeto
tradeguaranteesofWnancialsupportforthepromiseofsex.’2Again,
readers of the Ars and Remedia will Wnd much that is familiar
here,althoughtheymayalsobestruckbythewayinwhichOvidunder-
minesthiscommonandancientcalumnyagainstwomen,bypresent-
ing his aspiring male lover as precisely the kind of self-interested,
manipulative cynic who is well matched by his tricksy partner—as
perhapsDavidsonhintsalsoinher(Ovidian)sting-in-the-tail.
Do a modern self-help manual and a scholarly work on the
eighteenthcenturynovelhaveanythingtodowithanancientdidac-
tic poem? Is ‘love’ universal or culturally speciWc? Why—or rather
how—do we read Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris in the
21stcentury?Whatsortofpoemsarethey?
It was to address these and otherquestions that a conference was
held in September 2002, funded by the British Academy and the
UniversityofManchester,whichprovidedthegenesisforthisvolume
ofessays.Magicnumbersgaveanexcuseforaparty:thepurposeof
theconferencewas to celebrate thebimillennium of Ovid’s erotodi-
dacticcycleofpoems,traditionallyassumedtohavebeenbroughtto
completion around ad 2. The aim of the present volume, which
oVers a mixture of revised papers from the conference and other
specially commissioned pieces, is to galvanize current—and to
stimulatenew—researchontheArsAmatoriaandRemediaAmoris.
It is conventional in a preface to a book on Ovid to claim that
one’s particular bit of Ovid has been uniquely neglected in recent
decades, and to look mournfully towards a past golden age (often
manyhundredsofyearsago)whenitallegedlyenjoyedaratherdiVer-
ent status amongst readers of the poet. We are unable to claim any
overwhelmingcontemporaryneglect(ortrulyconvincingpastgolden
age)forthesepoems.Ontheotherhand,asSteveGreenpointsoutin
theintroductorychapter,therateofproductionofscholarshiponthe
ArsandRemediaremainsratherslow,atleastintheAnglophoneworld.
Ifourvolumeactsinanywayasastimulanttonewresearch,itisour
hopethatcriticswillbeencouragedtolookatallfourbooksofOvid’s
erotodidactic cycle. Historically—again at least in the Anglophone
world—criticshavetendedtoconcentrateontheWrstbookoftheArs
2 Davidson,op.cit.,177.
Preface vii
Amatoria.ThisisinpartatestamenttotheexcellenceofAdrianHollis’s
Oxford commentary on that book, perhaps testimony also to the
perceived diYculty of tackling the other books of the Ars without a
moderncommentaryorstudy.Butitisalsosymptomaticofareading
practice in approaches to Ovid that shies away from his strategies of
repetition,andconverselylatchesontoanyavailablepegsofcontem-
poraryreference.
Threeofthecontributorstothecurrentvolumehaveprovidedthe
means for extending studies of the work beyond the Wrst book of
the Ars. Alison Sharrock’s 1994 monograph on the second book
ofthepoemwasjoinedin1997byMarkusJanka’sdetailedcommen-
taryonthesamebook.RoyGibson’scommentaryonthethirdbook
oftheArsappearedjustsixmonthsaftertheManchesterconference,
in early 2003. Together these works contribute to ‘joining the dots’
betweenArs1andtheRemedia—thelatteraworkwhichpossessesits
ownmoreorlessindependentcriticaltradition,havingattractedWve
commentaries in just three decades (Geisler 1969, Henderson 1979,
Lucke1982,Lazzarini1986,Pinotti1988).Manyofthecontributions
tothepresentvolumetakeadvantageofthisnewstateofaVairs,and
roam freely across the whole of the Ars and Remedia or adopt a
holisticperspectiveonthebooksofthiscycle.
The contributors between them also oVer a series of perspectives
on the issues that have dominated scholarship on the Ars in recent
decades. Questions of genre, intertextuality, narratology, and recep-
tion bulk large, as inevitably do Augustus and the historical and
socialcontextsforthepoem.Onequestionthatcontinuestofascin-
ate is that of the nature of ‘love’ in the Ars and Remedia: are the
poems predicated on behaviouralism or emotionalism? Can Ovid
actuallyteachusanything,sayanythingtousaboutthewaywerelate
aslovers?Asreaders?FollowingSteveGreen’sintroductorysurveyof
recent scholarship on the Ars and Remedia and some sample issues
thrownupbythisliterature,wehavearrangedthechaptersintofour
categories: Poetics, Erotics, Politics, and Reception. These divisions
aresomewhatartiWcial—somechaptersstraddleseveralcategories—
butneverthelesstheyprovideacriticallyconvenientplacetostart,by
alludingto themain areas thathavebeen atissue in Ovidian eroto-
didacticscholarship.
viii Preface
OneWnalaimofthepresentvolume(anditsoriginalconference)
is to bring together the important cultural or national traditions—
German, Italian, Anglophone (British, Irish, and American)—of
scholarship on the Ars and Remedia that have so far existed largely
in isolation. In particular, it is our aim to introduce to an Anglo-
phone readership the Italian tradition of scholarship on the Ars,
which perhaps has not so far received its proper critical due in the
English-speaking world. That Italian tradition is represented in this
volume by Alessandro Barchiesi, Sergio Casali, Mario Labate, and
Gianpiero Rosati. Whether or not the love preached by Ovid is
speciWc to a particular culture, our responses to its vehicle are
undoubtedly enhanced by the sharing, and the diVerence, of these
intellectualtraditions.
The editors would like to thank Jim McKeown and Stephen
Hinds, both of whom helped to make the original conference in
Manchesterasuccess,andRoberto Chiappiniellofor translatingthe
papers of Mario Labate and Gianpiero Rosati. The support of the
British Academy and the University of Manchester is gratefully
acknowledged.Finally,wewouldliketooffersincerethankstoHilary
O’Shea and all those at OUP who worked with our manuscript,
especially Sylvie Jaffrey, Catherine Macduff, Dorothy McCarthy,
KathleenMcLaughlin,andJennyWagstaffe.
R.K.G.
S.J.G.
A.R.S.
Manchester
September2006
Contents
ListofContributors xi
1. LessonsinLove:FiftyYearsofScholarshipontheArs
AmatoriaandRemediaAmoris 1
StevenJ.Green
PART I: POETICS
2. LoveinParentheses:DigressionandNarrativeHierarchy
inOvid’sErotodidacticPoems 23
AlisonSharrock
3. StagingtheReaderResponse:OvidandHis‘Contemporary
Audience’inArsandRemedia 40
NiklasHolzberg
4. VixissetPhyllis,simeforetusamagistro:Erotodidaxis
andIntertextuality 54
DuncanF.Kennedy
PART II: EROTICS
5. InOvidwithBed(Ars2and3) 77
JohnHenderson
6. WomenonTop:LiviaandAndromache 96
AlessandroBarchiesi
7. Ovid,Augustus,andthePoliticsofModeration
inArsAmatoria3 121
RoyK.Gibson
8. TheArtofRemediaAmoris:UnlearningtoLove? 143
GianpieroRosati
9. LethaeusAmor:TheArtofForgetting 166
PhilipHardie