The Art of Love (2 page)

At one moment he is leading us on a conducted tour of the city’s sights and monuments—with time out to comment on the usefulness of each as a pickup place. In the next he is playing knucklebones or spillikins, or recommending hairstyles or footwear or health resorts, or diverting us with old tales retold, of Pasiphae and her bull, of the birdman Daedalus, of Mars and Venus, Cephalus and Procris, and throwing out hints along the way to a whole company of poets and playwrights and novelists to come: to the school of English poets we call Metaphysical, who will find in his unexpected juxtapositions, his yoking together of disparate worlds and objects, the way to a new kind of imagery; to Molière for
Les précieuses ridicules
and
Les femmes savantes;
to the long line of eighteenth-century epistolary novelists; even perhaps, in his proposal that the safest way of transmitting a message is to write it on the back of the messenger, to a twentieth-century filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, for
The Pillow Book
.

It is the protean inclusiveness of the
Ars Amatoria
, its joy in the variousness and contrariety of things, their lovely capacity for surprise and paradox, that has made it such a treasure-house of literary tropes and genres, such a gallery of pictures that need only the stroke of a brush to make them actual paintings. Titian, Rubens, Poussin, and others had only to turn to the verbal pictures here—Bacchus
in a chariot drawn by tigers, a drunken Silenus falling sideways off his ass, Cephalus stretched out in a grassy clearing—to discover the program, down to the smallest detail, for some of the greatest Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

One of Ovid’s most sympathetic qualities for those who came later was his own sense of lateness—of being, as he must have seen it, postclassical. But what he also demonstrated, and by brilliant example, was that all we need to make old material new is freshness of invention and a previously unconsidered point of view.

Walking along the shore with Calypso, Ulysses maps the Trojan plain for her by drawing with a stick in the sand. So Ovid embarks, once again, on the well-known story. But Ulysses has barely got started on his “epic” when a wave sweeps up the beach and, in a wonderfully dramatic and affecting image, Troy and all the old world of gods and heroes is once more obliterated.

In the retelling of the Daedalus story, one of the most extended and fully imagined in the poem, an aerial view of the Greek islands Naxos, Paros, and Delos, in itself a remarkable piece of imagining, is momentarily suspended while Ovid shows us his two birdmen from another angle, through the eyes now of a supernumerary angler on the beach below. More than fifteen centuries later, Brueghel would appropriate this extraordinary image for a famous painting, and four centuries later again, W. H. Auden for an equally famous poem.

For the ancient reader, any suggestion of solemn intent would have been subverted by the poet’s choice of meter—not hexameters, as the didactic poem traditionally demanded, but elegiac couplets (hexameter followed by pentameter) of the sort used in the refined, playfully erotic poems Ovid had previously produced in his
Amores
. James Michie’s irregular couplets, with their unpredictable rhymes and quick-footed shifts of register and perspective, splendidly re-create the lightness of the original and its careless charm. We know this voice. It is the authentic voice of Ovid as it has been transmitted to us by a long line of English poets who, in localizing it, discovered their own:

or

or

Michie is able to evoke an Ovid who seems so immediately present, so racily up to date, because the persona he created has turned out, by a kind of miracle, to be timeless.

To the wandering scholars and minnesingers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to the authors of
The Romance of the Rose
, and to Chaucer in the fourteenth, Ovid seemed like a man of modern sensibility, a contemporary out of his time, and he appeared that way also to the poets of the English Renaissance. His dedication to what Chapman called “Ovid’s banquet of sense” made him a natural alternative to Petrarch and the Petrarchans. It was his joy in the senses, in color and action, most of all in the self, that he offered Marlowe, who translated the
Amores
while he was still a student at Oxford. For Francis Meres, writing in 1598, Shakespeare was the “sweet witty soul” of Ovid mellifluously reborn. Thomas Heywood and Thomas Lodge both made translations of the
Ars Amatoria
. In France it is what a rejuvenated Ronsard turned to in the second and third books of his
Amours
. And when Goethe, in the fifth of his
Roman Elegies
, taps out his hexameters on the back of a sleeping girl,
it is surely Ovid who is there in the shadows behind him, as it must have been Ovid, as much as any of the Italian painters, or Winckelmann with his promise of “classical ground,” who drew the great Northerner into that area of his nature that he called Italy.

Ovid represents the playful, irreverent element in our culture that, once a place has been made for it, we cannot do without. We have only to hear his voice in our own everyday language, as we do here in James Michie’s translation, to recognize a lost but living contemporary whose boldness is a challenge to our own, and the charm of whose companionship is, as it always was, irresistible.

D
AVID
M
ALOUF
is the author of fourteen books, including
An Imaginary Life
and the international bestseller
The Great World
. His work has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize, among other accolades. He lives in Tuscany and Australia.

Publius Ovidius Naso (the “Nose” no doubt reflects some distinguished ancestor) was born in 43
B.C.
of a long-standing equestrian family. Though his birthplace was ninety miles east of the city, he belonged therefore to the second highest social class in Rome. As a teenager he was sent to Rome for a suitable education, which at the time heavily stressed the art of rhetoric, or the sophisticated gift of the gab which could lead a clever lad to the lucrative profession of an advocate in law; that is what his father hoped for, and that was the example set by his talented elder brother. It soon became clear to Ovid that, though he enjoyed the literary and emotional side of rhetoric, sheer argumentation bored him. He was writing poetry, and wanted to be a poet. His father, as fathers usually are, was aghast, but Ovid had his way. At about twenty, he did the equivalent of the Grand Tour, studying in Athens and visiting Sicily and the cities of Asia Minor. Like Catullus, in the same year he both gazed at the ruins of Troy and lost a beloved brother.

After his return to Rome he held some minor public posts, but his passion remained poetry: he made friends with Horace and Propertius, he mourned the early death of Tibullus, he saw Virgil
but never spoke to him. Before long his verses were circulating and being publicly recited. First came the
Amores
, a series of clever love poems, most of them addressed to a probably fictional mistress, Corinna; next the
Heroides
, imaginary letters written by heroines of legend to their lovers or husbands; and then the
Ars Amatoria
, which brought him to the peak of popularity.

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.