If one doubts this, consider Ovid's most overly scathing prose is served for Caesar and contemporary politics. Even better than at plays, one can pick up women witnessing spectacles and triumphs: "When, lately, Caesar, in mock naval battle, / exhibited the Greek and Persian fleets, / surely young men and girls came from either coast, / and all the peoples of the world were in the City? / Who did not find one he might love in that crowd?
Ah, how many were tortured by an alien love! (I.4)
The implication is that while Caesar believes people flock to triumphs to see him, really the average man or woman is seeking to press his leg close to an attractive girl, using the press of the crowd as an excuse for his friendliness. Although this may not sound very scandalous, Ovid's implication is that while Caesar may believe people flock into public spaces to celebrate Roman glory, history, and the leadership of Caesar himself, really people are looking for the same thing -- personal affection rather than public spirited displays of affection for the Empire.
Thus it has always been so, Ovid suggests -- even in Homeric myth, Achilles sought instruction in love, not just military valour, and Roman empirical control, as generated by Romulus, resulted in rape as well as more territory in a glorious fashion for the nation. The attempt at the young Caesar to emulate the supposedly...
/ Divine genius grows faster than its years, / and suffers as harmful evils the cowardly delays.../How old were you, Bacchus, who are still a boy, / when conquered India trembled to your rod?" Of course, Bacchus was the
god of revelry and wine and misrule, not the image Caesar was attempting to cultivate for the empire, and in his public relations displays of triumphs. (I.4)
Ovid thus does not write his poem merely as a way to improve his reader's sex life, although this may be an unintentional consequence. He wrote at a time when public morals and displays of belief in an emerging empire and state were considered paramount by the leadership of
Rome. By asserting that love, rather than
war is an art, and that the public displays of Roman excellence merely provided venues for individuals to launch their sexual explorations of willing Roman women, he also suggested that the personal feelings of the body, and the life-generating aspect of
human sexuality was more important than the death-generating and cold impulses of war and the military might of Rome. This was not a new phenomenon, the poet suggests in his textual approach of connecting modern
history to the world of the past and the world of myth, but the virulence with which Ovid expressed it, was new and bracing to the eyes and ears of his readership, however eager they may have been to laugh at his wit.
Works Cited
Ovid. "The Art of Love." Translated by a.S. Kline. 2001. Available online in complete form from Free serve at 28 October 2004…
