Ovid: Ars Amatoria
Context - pro or anti Augustan?
- Ars was written during a time of peace under Augustus’ new Imperial role, it arguably
explores life within Rome when there was a new and secure period without war.
- The freedom he expresses within his poetry perhaps conveys a society that places
increasing importance on private life and decorum as a political issue.
- However, Victoria Rimmel argues that his poetry is set in a fictional lover’s sphere,
as the actions he mentions in the poetry are illegal in the metropolis, and that the
‘advice’ Ovid offers was not meant to be taken literally.
- Therefore, Rimmel puts forward that Ars Amatoria was not intended to go against
Augustus or Legas Julia, instead it even praises Rome under Augustus.
- Victoria Rimmel: ‘Often modern scholarship ‘reverse engineers’ the poem through
the crime and punishment scope and many scholars confuse how prevalent the
anti-Agustus notion really is within his poetry, instead this imperial/Augustan outlook
is central and perhaps even praised within the poem.’
- Victoria Rimmel: ‘Ovid infuses external imperial Roman colonisation into the internal
Roman society.’
- Rimmel argues that within Rome, the class/gender hierarchy allowed men to turn
love/desire into sexual conquest not unsimilar to Rome’s military actions.
- Ars 1. 171-228: Ovid mentions Rome’s military success in Germany/other regions
and relates this to sexual conquest. Rimmel sheds light on the fact that this may be
an element of Augustan propaganda, as he is praising military conquest. He also
mentions that the best place to pick up girls is celebrations of military conquest.
- Ars 3: ‘There was crude simplicity before: now Rome is golden, and owns the vast
wealth of the conquered world. Look what the Capitol is now, and what it was: you’d
say it belonged to a different Jove.T he Senate-House, now worthy of such debates,’
- arguably very appraising of Augustus, but also arguably satirising Rome, as the
shift from the Republic reduced the role of the Senate and ‘such debates’ likely refers
to the lack of political debate under Augustus’ dictatorship.
Ovid on Women, feminist or misogynist?
- Unclear if his audience is genuinely women
- In Ars 3, it mentions how women must be measured in gesture and dress, in the
same way that Cicero recommends in De Officiis, that woman should: ‘repeat what
they hear from marble stages’
- Henderson: ‘Book 1 and 2 are all about predation, assault, seduction and
sexploitation’
- Leach: argues that Ovid’s views are overall in line with the typical male, Roman view
on women, that they were wild, inferior and in need of being controlled. They argue
that this is revealed by Ovid’s language in Books 1 and 2, where he refers to women
as plants that need to be ‘cultivated’ and animals that need to be ‘tamed’. Therefore,
whilst the women of the first two books are wild and need to be hunted, the men are
hardworking farmers and hunters.
- Ars 3: ‘Add that the time of youth is shortened by childbirth: the field’s exhausted by
continual harvest.’
, - Ars 3: If girls of old didn’t cultivate their bodies in that way, well they had no
cultivated men in those days: if Andromache was dressed in healthy clothes, what
wonder? Her husband was a rough soldier?
- Eric Downey: agrees with Leach in that the Ars teaches us that women must be
tamed. However, he argues that this is seen through Ovid’s use of metaphorical
language in which he compares women to works of art and inanimate objects, and
through his use of myth.
- The myth about Pygmalion in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (the man who shunned
women so much that he sculpted his ideal women, fell in love with her, and Venus
brought her to life) is, in Downey’s opinion, the reversal of his writing in Ars. He turns
living, breathing women into artefacts and art through metaphor and language.
- This makes Ovid an anti-Pygmalion figure.
- Downey: ‘the Ars adds lifeless dabs of filler to transform individualising irregularities
into regulated de-individualised perfection’ - in other words, Ovid’s Ars 3 actively
seeks to transform women into socially acceptable/attractive to the male gaze
individuals through advice on makeup/dresses/hair in a way that actively
de-individualises and belittles them
- This is misogyny as Ovid believes the natural women needs to be perfected,
changed for the male gaze
- Ars 3: ‘choose, decisively: since all are not suitable for everyone. dark-grey suits
snow-white skin: dark-grey suited Briseis: when she was carried off, then she also
wore dark-grey. White suits the dark: you looked pleasing, Andromeda,’ - Reducing
individuality and objectifying women, links to lack of female agency with link to:
‘Briseis, when she was carried off’, not sure that her clothing colour was too
important to her when she was being kidnapped by the Greeks…?
- Ars 3: ‘That was rough marble, now it forms a famous statue’ - does Ars 3 really look
at human women or works of inanimate art? Women are changed from ‘rough’ to
‘art’, from human to object
- Ars 3: ‘Still, don’t let your lover find cosmetic bottles on your dressing table: art
delights in its hidden face.’ [...] many things that please when done, are ugly in the
doing’ [...] ‘The golden figures shining from the ornate theatre, examine them, you’ll
despise them: gilding hiding wood: but the crowd’s not allowed to approach them till
they’re done, and till your beauty’s ready banish men.’ - Women are like golden
figures that look great from afar but are ugly up close, so women must get ready in
private so that men can not see under their ‘art’. Again, metaphor comparing women
to artefacts and objects rather than living, breathing beings.
- Sharon Marshall: argues that Ars 1 and 2 has an eavesdropping female audience,
however the message they learn from these books is depressing. Perhaps their
presence is Ovid’s way of ‘arming’ them against the men by teaching them the sad
realities of men’s approach to love/seduction. She says he is ‘levelling the playing
field’
- Sharon Marshall: ‘Ars 1 and 2 teaches women to eye their suitors with suspicion. It
teaches her that she is thought of as a wild animal, she is replaceable, that her slave
girl will be forced into sex, that men make false promises, that men are excited by
women’s jealousy, that men think no means yes, that she must fake it in bed’
- However, women in Rome still had little agency, so how would they be able to take
up this advice and heed these warnings when men were more powerful than them
