In the Remedia amoris as in the Ars amatoria (See, e.g, Ars 2.99–107), Ovid distinguishes his erotic or antierotic strategies from the use of potions and spells as instruments for initiating, extending, or ending erotic engagements, and he warns his acolytes, “Ergo quisquis opem nostra tibi poscis ab arte, / Deme veneficiis carminibusque fidem [So if you're someone who wants my system to help you, then scrap any allegiance you may have to potions and spells]” (Rem 289–90). To explain his antipathy, the magister proposes a binary opposition between benign and potentially toxic regimens: “Ista veneficii vetus est via; noster Apollo / Innocuam sacro carmine monstrat opem [That's the old way of sorcerer's poisons; I'm allied to Apollo and embrace the harmless power of inspired poetry]” (Rem 251–52). I would interpret this binary differently, however, as yet another case of the magister's modern cultus—urbane skills and strategies perceived by insight and honed by experience—flaunting its superiority to traditional (what we would call folk) remedies inherited from a more primitive (rusticus) stage of civilization that sought the intervention of supernatural forces in human affairs (including affairs of the heart). Chuckling at such naivete, the magister promises,
Me duce non tumulo prodire iubebitur umbra,
Non anus infami carmine rumpet humum;
Non seges ex aliis alios transibit in agros,
Nec subito Phoebi pallidus orbis erit.
Ut solet, aequoreas ibit Tiberinus in undas:
Ut solet, in niveis Luna vehetur equis.
Nulla recantatas deponent pectora curas,
Nec fugiet vivo sulpure victus amor.
(My system doesn't invoke ghostly spirits to come out of their tombs, nor require old crones to split open the earth thanks to some profane incantation. Crops won't leap from one field to another, nor will the sun suddenly become pale. The Tiber will flow into the sea as usual, and as usual the moon will ride the sky in all her brightness. No hearts will have cares lifted from them by charms, nor will love be chased away by stinking fumes of sulphur.)
(Rem 253–60)
In addition, Ovid's attentiveness in his amatory poetry—indeed, all his poetry—to the psychological and emotional complexities of human desire would inevitably make him dubious of universally efficacious medicinal “cures” for any and all resultant crises. This skepticism registers in his persona's comment on the situation of Circe who, having fallen in love with Odysseus/Ulysses, is unable, despite her famous spells, either to prevent his departure or to suppress her own passion:
Omnia fecisti, ne callidus hospes abiret:
Ille dedit certae lintea plena fugae.
Omnia fecisti, ne te ferus ureret ignis:
Longus in invito pectore sedit amor.
(You did everything you could to keep your shrewd guest from getting away, but he sped away under full sail. You did everything to keep from being scorched by the fierce flames of desire, but love still took up residence, a squatter in your unwilling heart.)
(Rem 265–68)
The next couplet sums up the magister's (and, I believe, his creator's) scorn for seeking such magical antidotes to the human condition: “Vertere tu poteras homines in mille figuras, / Non poteras animi vertere iura tui [You could change men into a thousand shapes, but you couldn't change the laws governing your own soul]” (Rem 269–70) As we have seen, the magister recognizes (indeed, is forced to recognize) that the “laws of the soul” accommodate an enormous variety of people and situations, requiring flexible, protean strategies—not shape-changing potions—by those who would satisfy (or, in the Remedia, extinguish) desire.
The rivalry, then, seems absolute between two clashing forms of authority in matters of desire: a supposedly erotic (or antierotic) pharmacopaeia founded in timeless nature—animal, vegetable, or mineral—and a specifically “modern” and urban/e magisterium based on the observation and practice of an infinitely variable human pursuit of (or flight from) desire. Except, of course—a typically Ovidian comic codicil—for those aphrodisiac vegetables, such as onions or salax eruca (salacious arugula—does this account for its recent rise in popularity in trendy, erotomaniacal New York City?), which the magister advises his acolytes to consume (Ars 2.422) or avoid (Rem 795–802), depending on the circumstances. The latter passage, coming at the very end of the Remedia amoris, makes clear Ovid's parodic intent behind his magister's resort to diet counselling:
Ecce, cibos etiam, medicinae fungar ut omni
Munere, quos fugias quosque sequare, dabo.
Daunius, an Libycis bulbus ubi missus ab oris,
An veniat Megaris, noxius omnis erit.
Nec minus erucas aptum vitare salaces,
Et quicquid Veneri corpora nostra parat.
Utilius sumas acuentes lumina rutas,
Et quidquid Veneri corpora nostra negat.
(Look, I'll even tell you which foods to eat and which to avoid, in order to fulfill all my medical obligations to you. Onions, whether the Libyan or Megaran variety, are all bad for you. It's just as important to avoid aphrodisiac arugula, and anything else that gets us up for lovemaking. It's better to eat bitter herbs that sharpen your eyesight, and everything else that douses our desire to do it.)
(Rem 795–802)
The wonderful miscellaneousness and too-neat, near-echo opposition of “et quicquid Veneri corpora nostra parat” and “et quidquid Veneri corpora nostra negat” constitutes not only an implicit dismissal of what we might call gardenvariety strategies of advice to the lovelorn (or love-stuffed), but also the poet's final wink to his audience acknowledging the comic intent of his rhetorical strategy in constructing an Ars- backward Remedia amoris—a wink reinforced by the nudge within the same passage in the further advice to the escaping lover, “Utilius sumas acuentes lumina rutas,” a dietary supplement designed to overcome the proverbial blindness attributed to love, as well, doubtless, to sharpen the recovering erotic addict's perception of the shortcomings (certainly present in abundance, the magister has already suggested) in the soon-to-be-former object of desire.
Ovid's poetry, a triumph of serious play, takes the measure of the tensions between public and private imperatives, between glorifying a mythical past and fully grasping and enjoying the opportunities for pleasure afforded by an opulent present, between quantitative (or materialistic) and qualitative (or talent-based) pursuits of that pleasure. The result is a comedy that both celebrates and sends up human ingenuity in its struggles against the passions that would defeat it and the economic and political power that would crush it. The comic mirror that Ovid holds up to his adopted city reveals important truths about urban values and behavior and about the inevitable contradictions between political and personal agendas. As we stare into that mirror, past its many depictions of laughable presumption and deceit, misjudgment and folly, stunningly self-interested argumentation and self-inflicted damage, we discover keen and often disturbing insights about the power and limits of authority and, above all, about the strength of our desires and the fragility of the structures by which we seek to control or satisfy them.
This is part of the paradox of Ovid's comic poetry: like that of the other elegists, it not only acknowledges but revels in its inferiority in theme, genre, and dignity to the poets of the classical pantheon and to texts that take war, history, or (in Lucretius's case) the universe itself as their subject. Yet it also manages to suggest that the wit, irony, and sense of incongruity or excess that collaborate in the fabrication of a comic vision of one's personal situation, city, and world are at least as deserving of respect, and at least as likely to tell truths both enjoyable and uncomfortable, as are utterances traditionally held to be culturally significant because of the seriousness of their subject and mien. Such an assumption is at once outrageous, ridiculous, and dangerously attractive, as much to us today as I must assume it was to Ovid's first audiences.50
The section on the Amores contains passages borrowed from or closely paraphrasing my essay “Always Hopeless, Never Serious: Wit and Wordplay in Ovid's Amores,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition, ed. Barbara Boyd and Cora Fox (New York: Modern Language Association, 2010), in press (copyright Modern Language Association; used by permission).
1. See Boyd, Ovid's Literary Loves, and Ginsberg, “The Idea of Character in Ovid,” on this double persona.
2. See Tarrant, “Ovid and Ancient Literary History,” 13–14, for a brief chronology of Ovid's works, recognizing the uncertainties.
3. See Townend, “Literature and Society.”
4. Wheeler, in Ovid, Tristia, Ex Ponto, xviii.
5. Africa, Rome of the Caesars, 5–6; cf. Crook, “Political History,” 104, who describes the Princeps as reacting against “too much foreign blood in the citizen body and too many layabouts!”
6. See Treggiari, “Social Status,” esp. 886–87, “The Social Legislation of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians.”
7. See Wallace-Hadrill, “The Imperial Court,” and Treggiari, “Social Status.”
8. Habinek, “Invention of Sexuality”; cf. note 10.
9. Africa, Rome of the Caesars, 8–9.
10. For Ovid's comic sense of residential hierarchy within this exalted social sphere, see Metamorphoses, 1.163–64, where Jupiter calls a celestial council to deal with a crisis on earth, and the gods move obediently along the Milky Way toward his palace, which is flanked by the equally posh dwellings of major deities, while, as Humphries felicitously puts it in his translation, “the lesser gods live in a meaner section, / An area not reserved, as this one is, / For the illustrious Great Wheels of Heaven/(Their Palatine Hill, if I might call it so)” (8).
11. See Gibson's introduction in Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 27–35, on the wide reach of the law. Habinek, “Invention of Sexuality,” following Cohen, sees as the lex Julia's main intention the imposition of state power over the family—an invasion of the res privata of the paterfamilias—as part of the totalitarian program of Augustus, and he sees Ovid's amatory poetry as a reflection of and response to this legislation that “disembedded sexual behavior from its traditional familial context, where it had been regulated by forces of honor and shame, and instead described it as a freely chosen activity between legal persons, one subject to scrutiny and regulation in the public sphere” (29). His thesis is that since, “during the course of the Roman Cultural Revolution, that is the period in which the Roman elites came to terms with their status as rulers of an empire, the city of Rome was itself transformed from an overgrown Italian town to a world capital,” accordingly, “during one discrete historical period Rome experienced the swift change and dislocation of the individual that [Don] Milligan [Sex-Life (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1993)] and others describe as the permanent condition of modern cities” (26). “The breakdown of traditional ties of loyalty and community, the atomization of the individual, and the rationalization and commodification of human relationships are all features of the world-city, in antiquity as in the modern era” (42), features fundamentally at odds with “a social system in which sex is closely associated with issues of legitimacy, alliances between clans, and male privilege” (27).
Habinek does not consider the possible impact of Ovid's comic perspective on the poet's representations of sexuality, nor does he appear to grant the possibility of irony in the positions taken by the Ovidian narrators. See further McGinn, “Concubinage,” and Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law; Treggiari, “Social Status,” and Roman Marriage; and Wallace-Hadrill, “Mutatio morum”
12. See Horace's Carmen saeculare, written in response to the Secular Games of 17 B.C.E., organized by Augustus ostensibly in honor the founding of Rome but actually as another way of glorifying himself and his reign. In this poem, Horace specifically lauds Augustus's marriage legislation (17–24); cf. Horace, Carmina 4.5.20–24 for a similar praise of the legislation against adultery. In other poems (e.g., Carmina 4.15.9–20), he celebrates Augustus's devotion to and revival of the discipline and virtue of the old Republic. According to Crook, “Augustus shared with Cicero the belief in a superior early and middle Republic, whose victories had been based on better morals and solider family virtues, and he strove to recreate that idealized past” (“Augustus,” 132,). Treggiari, comments, “The decade after 23 BC saw concentrated legislation in several areas. Augustus himself claimed that his laws re-introduced old standards and set an example to posterity. Like Horace, he harks back to a mythical past” (“Social Status,” 886). I remain dubious of the emperor's moral sincerity.
13. See Merriam, Love and Propaganda: “Devoting oneself entirely to literary and intellectual pursuits, especially to the exclusion of a political or military career, would seem suspect to many Roman aristocrats, as we learn from Cicero: ‘Because of the tranquility of that life, and the pleasure of the knowledge itself, than which nothing is more pleasant to people, more men devoted themselves to this than was beneficial to the republic. And as men with excellent talents gave themselves to the pursuit, because of that great faculty of vacant and free time, more by far than was necessary men affluent in too much free time and abundant talent dedicated themselves to caring and seeking and investigating it’ “ (6, quoting Cicero's De oratore 3, 15, 56–57).
14. Conte, Latin Literature, 324. Cf. 334, on Propertius's “rejection of the mos maiorum [ancestral values], of the primary values of the civitas, in favor of an existence totally dedicated to love (1.6.27–30).” See Merriam, Love and Propaganda, 5–11, for a useful, sharply delineated summary of elegist attitudes. “The major Latin love elegists all lived and worked during the Augustan age and all, to a greater or lesser extent, resisted the demands of conformity which the age imposed upon Roman citizens…. The forces which the elegists resisted, the pressures toward military and political careers, were the common forces which had always worked upon the Roman aristocracy and equestrian class [Ovid's]; but we can also see their attitudes as more specific to their time. For in their time a new pressure was added to those of class and family, as Augustus established himself as the champion of traditional Roman morals, and aspired to a regeneration of such tradition. Such was the reason for the moral legislation, the Julian laws he passed and attempted to pass, in order to promote marriage and support Roman families. And it is in this context that the elegists take their stand against convention…. [I]t is clear that the very act of writing love poetry, personal and irresponsible poetry, can be interpreted as an act of resistance against a regime that encourages conformity and respectability” (5–6). “Marrying well and establishing large families to serve the princeps' Rome into the future would seem to be the last thing that would appeal to the Latin elegists, for it would demonstrate conformity and a sense of responsibility. This sense of responsibility was so closely tied as to be inextricable from the military demands of Roman life, and the love elegists were united in their opposition to living the soldier's life…. The three elegists expressed their resistance to the regime in different ways…. Ovid tended to ridicule the leader, and treat the entire regime as a huge and incomprehensible joke” (10–11). Cf. Davis, “Praeceptor amoris”: “I think it fair to say that Ovid consistently treats Augustan themes, the moral legislation, the building program, military policy, the promotion of antique values and so on, with a flippancy which suggests indifference to the emperor's program” (194). Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, summarizes elegantly: “All Ovidian love poetry is sensitive to the ways in which elegy draws on, yet seeks to neutralize, history” (127–28).
15. See Harrison, “Ovid and Genre.”
16. Cf. Fyler, “Omnia vincit amor”: “The asymmetrical lines of the elegiac couplet suggest a comically hobbled genre. Elegy personified has one foot longer than the other (Amores 3.1.8), and Thalia rides on a lopsided chariot (Ars 1.264–65). Indeed, it is likely that the epigraph to the Amores, which notes a change from five libelli to three, is more than a foreword to a revised edition: it confirms, as a structural analogue, Ovid's self-proclaimed insufficiency” (198).
17. In Metamorphoses 5, Cupid enacts just such a “massive power grab” at the insistence of his mother, Venus, who urges him to shoot an arrow at Hades, god of the underworld, in order to enflame the latter with desire for Proserpina, and thus establish Love's dominion over the only realm of the universe not yet under his (and Venus's) control. See Metamorphoses 5.360–84. As Venus exhorts her son (in Humphries's translation): “Take your all-conquering weapons, O my son,… / And let the speeding arrows find the heart/Of the god on whom the final lot bestowed/The world below the world. You rule the others, / Even great Jove, you rule the great sea-gods, / And their great monarch. Why should Hell alone/Hold out against us? Let our empire spread!” (365–72).
18. “Nervus” was a common euphemism for the male member; see Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 38.
19. “Opus,” in addition to its literal meaning, task, was slang in Ovid's Latin for the sex act (Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 156–57).
20. Treggiari, “Social Status,” 890.
21. On this poem see Habinek, “Ovid and Empire,” 47–48.
22. Cf. Gibson's introduction in Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 20–21, 35–36.
23. On the evolution of a textual culture of “expertise” in the late Republic, replacing the traditional, orally transmitted, control of the Senatorial elite over large areas of public performance and commemoration, see Wallace-Hadrill, “Mutatio morum,” who stresses Augustus's appropriation of expertise and moral as well as political authority, formerly the collective property of Rome's Senatorial class. See further the section on “The Didactic Tradition and Ars 3” in Gibson's introduction to Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 7–13.
24. See especially Fyler, “Omnia vincit amor,” and Leicester, “Ovid Enclosed,” on this aspect of Ovid's amatory poetry.
25. Leach relates this episode and many other “georgic” aspects of the Ars to Ovid's programmatic parody of the subjects and style of Vergil's Georgics, and, through Vergil's poem, of “the great number of didactic (and patriotic?) poems produced under Augustus” (“Georgic Imagery,” 154n. 15).
26. Ovid may have been onto something about the important role mimicry plays in successful wooing. An article in the New York Times of 12 February 2008 (Benedict Carey, “You Remind Me of Me: Decoding the Subtle Cues That Lead to Human Rapport, Scientists Train Their Focus on Mimicry”) reports that “researchers have begun to decode the unspoken, subtle elements that come into play when people click… [and] have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of goodwill between two people.” For students of the magister, there will of course be nothing unconscious about the process, and with Ovidian precision, the article notes that “by understanding exactly how this process works, researchers say, people can better catch themselves when falling for an artful pitch [Remedia amoris?], and even sharpen their own social skills in ways they may not have tried before [if they haven't read Ars amatoria]!” Much of the article explores the difference between social mimicry that happens unconsciously and that which reflects a specific agenda: “It is one thing to move like a naturally synchronized swimmer through the pools of everyday conversation without thinking, however. It is another to deliberately employ mimicry to persuade or seduce,” whether the aim is commercial or sexual gain. Some people are intuitive mimics, while others “have developed ways to engage their skills indirectly,” that is, for profit of one kind or another. The whole article, and the subject on which it reports, would, I believe, have been catnip for Ovid.
27. See Ramage, Urbanitas.
28. See Habinek, “Invention of Sexuality,” 31–38, on Ovid's heterosexuality and resistance to feminized maleness.
29. Cf. Habinek, “Ovid and Empire,” 50–51; Africa, Rome of the Caesars, 19, records anxieties within Rome about its exploitation of rest of empire, and hatred of Rome among the colonies because of it.
30. Connors, “Field and Forum,” notes that while rusticus and rusticitas were pejorative concepts in Roman rhetorical theory—based on the idea that country folk lacked training in oratory and therefore could not speak well, that is, persuasively, in public legal or political fora—a rhetorical style that avoided the extremes of hick-like rusticity and overblown, effeminate theatricality was considered properly cultivated—a metaphor itself drawn from the rural world of agriculture. She explains the apparent paradox by documenting the strong association within elite Roman culture between a simple (that is, idealized) country life and traditional Roman virtues, an association Ovid takes obvious delight in skewering. To describe effective Roman rhetoric as cultus thus placed behind a patriotic smokescreen the fact that it owed an enormous debt to the rhetorical practice of the supposedly decadent Greeks. As Connors, puts it, “The fact that rhetorical expertise was imported to Rome from Greece is implicitly played down when the work of rhetoric is figured as the native work of farming…. [T]he image [of cultivation] serves to ‘naturalize’ the artificial acculturation of the élite through imported rhetorical education” (77). Ovid, ever the rhetorician, adapted this trickery to his own needs.
31. On Roman sumptuary laws, see, e.g., Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 19–22.
32. Note the contrasting tone of Vergil's analogous lines, Aeneid 8. 347–50, Evander leading Aeneas on a tour of “pre-Rome”:
Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,
aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.
Iam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestis
dira loci, iam tum silvam saxumque tremebant.
(Hence he leads him to the Tarpeian house, and the Capitol—golden now, once bristling with woodland thickets. Even then the dread sanctity of the region awed the trembling rustics; even then they shuddered at the forest and the rock.)
33. With respect to the latter disavowal, see Ramage, Urbanitas, 88: “It's important to notice that as the poet [through his alter ego, the magister amoris] speaks he is careful to dissociate himself and his desires completely from the contemporary pursuit of wealth and luxury, for it is too easy to ignore his assertion that he is not interested in gold and all it brings.” Cf. the magister's scornful comment (Ars 2.277–78) about the relative worth of poetry and wealth as gateways to a woman's heart: “Aurea sunt vere nunc saecula: plurimus auro/Venit honos: auro conciliatur amor [This is really a golden age; many honors, and even love, can be gotten with gold].”
34. Cf. Ars 1.113, of the theatrical performance that was the occasion for the rape of the Sabine women: “plausus tunc arte carebant [in those days, applause was artless].” By implication, even applause can be made polished, cultus, as it is nowadays.
35. Indeed, deceit, in the form of pretense, can even make lovemaking more exciting: The magister advises his female acolytes:
Quae venit ex tuto, minus est accepta voluptas:
Ut sis liberior Thaide, finge metus.
Cum melius foribus possis, admitte finestra,
Inque tuo vultu signa timentis habe.
Callida prosiliat dicatque ancilla “perimus!”
Tu iuvenem trepidum quolibet abde loco.
(Safe lovemaking doesn't cut it; even if you're as carefree as Paris Hilton, pretend to be terrified. Sure, entering by the front door is easier—but make him climb in through a window, and while he does it, have fear written all over your face. Then let that smart little maid of yours come rushing in, screaming, “We're as good as dead!” and you shove the guy [who's quaking by now] into some hiding place or other.)
(Ars 3.603–8)
The similarity of this advice to the plot of hundreds of medieval (and later) comic tales of adultery will not be lost on the reader familiar with them.
36. Habinek, “Invention of Sexuality,” 34–37.
37. See, from a somewhat different perspective, Solodow's brilliant analysis of the relationship among deceit, self-fashioning, and the work of the artist (“Ovid's Ars Amatoria,” 117–25).
38. See Eden, Hermeneutics, 17–18, 26–28: “decorum… in elocution or style… serves to accommodate the particular case” (27–28).
39. See the introduction to Seneca, Controversiae: “A ‘colour’… was a line of approach to the case [the controversia, a pseudolegal case containing difficulties and paradoxes to test the rhetorical skills of those who debated them], a method of interpreting the facts that was to the advantage of the speaker” (xviii).
40. On Castiglione, see chapter 3, pages 185, 239–40. Cf. Goffman's theorization of advantageous self-presentation (The Presentation of Self). Is the “non sanus… poeta” (Ars 2.508) Ovid's funhouse-mirror characterization of himself?
41. See Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 125.
42. See Toohey, “Eros and Eloquence,” 205: to Augustus “Ovid insists that there is no necessary relationship between his instruction and ‘real life.’” This clever, simultaneous exculpation of both Ovid and Augustus contains as well an implicit ironization by the poet of the traditional otium-negotium binary: since Caesar lacked the leisure time to read his poem carefully (or at all), the Ars has been improperly blamed, but judgment without full consideration of the facts is a dangerous mark of tyranny, which hides behind its imperial schemes to avoid taking the time to make judgments on one's subjects carefully and accurately. So Ovid in effect redefines otium, which, seen in this light, becomes a strategic withdrawal from the activity of the moment in order to make careful and just judgments based on deliberation, not rumor or misinformation.
43. If Ovid could not, in fact, resist making even his relegation an occasion for comic hyperbole, he has had at least one inheritor of this approach. When Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks updated in the year 2000 the comedy sketch of an interview with a 2,000-year-old man that they had originated for television in 1961, Brooks, playing the double millenarian, describes himself as “an avid Ovidian” and recalls the headline in the Roman Tribune (a parody of the famously lapidary headlines in the show business newspaper, Variety), on the occasion of the poet's relegation by the Princeps: “Ovid Ousted; Augustus Disgusted.”
44. Solodow puts it well: “[Ovid] often notably subverts central features of Roman political and cultural life, suggesting that they are really important only in so far as they serve the cause of the lover; ultimately, at least in Ovid's playful account, their final reference is to love, and love is therefore more important than they are” (“Ovid's Ars Amatoria,” 112).
45. Cf. Davis, “Praeceptor amoris,' 187: “At [Ars] 1.67–88, Ovid lists a number of places suitable for finding a girlfriend. Every single location has dynastic associations…. No doubt Augustus relished allusions to his monumental achievements in works of poetry, but can we really believe that he appreciated references like this?” In the thirteenth-century French adaptation of the Ars amatoria, the adaptor substitutes Parisian for Roman public places where women are to be sought. And in New York City today, in addition to myriad singles bars, there are public places and spaces well known to be sites for making social and sexual connections.
46. Cf. Leach, “Georgic Imagery,” 142: “The language and imagery of the poem celebrate the glories of urban civilization through numerous references to Roman artifacts—theatres, temples, cosmetics and gems. All of these objects acquire their highest value from their usefulness to the strategies of love.”
47. For more on this, see Davis, “Praeceptor amoris.”
48. On Phyllis, cf. Ars 3.37–38, and Ovid, The Art of Love, trans. Mozley and Goold, 121n. On this comic strategy, by which Ovid trivializes classical culture's canonic myths, cf. Fyler, “Omnia vincit amor,” 199.
49. Against this reading, see Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 34.
50. Cf. Solodow: “Play permits greater complexity [than seriousness tout court]: we must take a serious remark in a serious way; but a joking remark may be taken either seriously or not” (“Ovid's Ars Amatoria,” 110)—which is why barbed humor is so effective as a socio-verbal weapon: it has deniability but also earns respect for its wit from all but (perhaps) its butt. Solodow (110n. 8), quotes Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938; repr., Boston, 1955), 45: “The play-concept as such is of a higher order than seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.”
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