Among love scholars, the Roman poet of the ancient Roman Empire is well-known for his “Ars Amatoria” (The Art of Love), a three-volume instructional series of poems describing what love is and how to make love using the arts of seduction and intrigue.
The first two books of Ovid’s poems, “The Art of Love,” are addressed to men. They cover the topics of how to make love: “letting her miss you-but not for too long,” “not forgetting her birthday,” and “not asking about her age.”
His poetic words offer witty love advice to men and women in their love relationships. Some of his advice, I believe, is still relevant today and would be interesting to read.
I presented the poetic excerpts of Ovid’s advice to men in my earlier articles on this blog. Those beautiful verses talk about “How to Find Her” (Part 2), “Search for Love While Walking” (Part 3), “Search for Love while at the Theatre” (Part 4), “Search for Love at the Races or Circus” (Part 5), “Triumphs that Are Good to Attract a Woman” (Part 6), “Search for Love around the Dinner-Table and on the Beach” (Parts 7 and 8), “How to Win Her” (Part 9), “How to Know the Maid” (Part 10), “How to Be Attentive to Her” (Part 11), “How to Make Promises of Love to Her” (Part 12), “How to Woo and Seduce a Woman” (Parts 13 and 14), “How to Captivate a Woman at Dinner” (Part 15), “How to Make Promises and Deceive” (Part 16), and “How Tears, Kisses, Taking the Lead Can Help in Love Affairs” (Part 17).
Here it is Part 1 of Ovid’s Book II, teaching a man what his task is in a love relationship with a woman.
His Task
“Sing out the Paean: sing out the Paean twice!
The prize I searched for falls into my net.
Delighted lovers grant my songs the palm,
I’m preferred to Hesiod and old Homer.
So Paris the stranger sailed, from hostile Amyclae’s shore,
under white sheets, with his ravished bride:
such was Pelops who brought you home Hippodamia,
borne on the foreign wheels of his conquering car.
What’s your hurry, young man? Your boat’s mid ocean,
and the harbour I search for is far away.
It’s not enough the girl’s come to you, through me, the poet:
she’s captured by my art, she’s to be kept by my art too.
There’s no less virtue in keeping than in finding.
There’s chance in the latter: the first’s a work of art.
Now aid me, your follower, Venus, and the Boy,
and Erato, Muse, now you have love’s name too.
Great my task as I try to tell what arts can make Love stay:
that boy who wanders so, through the vast world.
And he’s flighty, and has two wings on which he vanishes:
it’s a tricky job to pin him down.
Minos blocked every road of flight for his guest:
but Daedalus devised a bold winged path.
When he’d imprisoned the offspring of its mother’s sin,
the man half-bull, the bull who was half-man,
he said: ‘Minos, the Just, let my exile end:
let my native land receive my ashes.
And since I couldn’t live in my own country,
driven from it by cruel fate, still let me die there.
Give my boy freedom, if the father’s service was worthless:
or if power will not spare the child, let it spare the old.’
He spoke the words, but they, and so many others, were in vain:
his freedom was still denied him by the king.
When he realised this, he said: ‘Now, now, O Daedalus,
you have an object for your skilfulness.
Minos rules the earth and the waves:
neither land or sea is open for my flight.
The sky road still remains: we’ll try the heavens.
Jupiter, on high, favour my plan:
I don’t aspire to touch the starry spheres:
there is no way to flee the king but this.
I’d swim the Stygian waves, if Styx offered me a path:
through my nature new laws are mine.’
Trouble often sharpens the wits: who would think
any man could travel by the air-roads?
He lays out oar-like wings with lines of feathers,
and ties the fragile work with fastenings of string,
and glues the ends with beeswax melted in the flames,
and now the work of this new art’s complete.
Laughing, his son handled the wax and feathers
not knowing they were being readied for his own shoulders.
His father said of them: ‘This is the art that will take us home,
by this creation we’ll escape from Minos.
Minos bars all other ways but cannot close the skies:
as is fitting, my invention cleaves the air.
But don’t gaze at the Bear, that Arcadian girl,
or Bootes’s companion, Orion with his sword:
Fly behind me with the wings I give you: I’ll go in front:
your job’s to follow: you’ll be safe where I lead.
For if we go near the sun through the airy aether,
the wax will not endure the heat:
if our humble wings glide close to ocean,
the breaking salt waves will drench our feathers.
Fly between the two: and fear the breeze as well,
spread your wings and follow, as the winds allow.’
As he warns, he fits the wings to his child, shows
how they move, as a bird teaches her young nestlings.
Then he fastened the wings he’d fashioned to his own shoulders,
and poised his anxious body for the strange path.
Now, about to fly, he gave the small boy a kiss,
and the tears ran down the father’s cheeks.
A small hill, no mountain, higher than the level plain:
there their two bodies were given to the luckless flight.
And Daedalus moved his wings, and watched his son’s,
and all the time kept to his own course.
Now Icarus delights in the strange journey,
and, fear forgotten, he flies more swiftly, with daring art.
A man catching fish, with quivering rod, saw them,
and the task he’d started dropped from his hand.
Now Samos was to the left (Naxos was far behind
and Paros, and Delos beloved by Phoebus the god)
Lebinthos lay to the right, and shady-wooded Calymne,
and Astypalaea ringed by rich fishing grounds,
when the boy, too rash, with youth’s carelessness,
soared higher, and left his father far behind.
The knots give way, and the wax melts near the sun,
his flailing arms can’t clutch at thin air.
Fearful, from heaven’s heights he gazes at the deep:
terrified, darkness, born of fear, clouds his eyes.
The wax dissolves: he thrashes with naked arms,
and flutters there with nothing to support him.
He falls, and falling cries: ‘Father, O father, I’m lost!’
the salt-green sea closes over his open lips.
But now the unhappy father, his father, calls, ‘Icarus!
Where are you Icarus, where under the sky?
Calling ‘Icarus’, he saw the feathers on the waves. Earth holds his bones: the waters take his name.”
Kline, A. S. (2001). Translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria: The Art of Love.