Ovid’s Love Poetry

Always brilliantly marshaling the rich resources of the art of literature, the love poetry of the great and prolific poet Ovid (43 bce–17/18 ce) displays a vigorous engagement with Rome and the human condition. Love permeates Ovid’s entire output. His epic masterpiece the Metamorphoses and his etiological Fasti are strongly marked by stories of love. And even in the exile to which Augustus condemned Ovid toward the end of his life, he insists, in his imaginary epitaph in Tristia 3.3.73 and his autobiography Tristia 4.10.1, that he is tenerorum lusor amorum, “the playful bard of tender loves.” Love is most conspicuously present in the earlier phase of Ovid’s career. Thus, in this poetry we find titles in which amor (love) features in various forms, such as the collection of elegies called Amores (Loves), which many think we now possess in the form of a second edition; the didactic manuals in elegiac couplets, the Ars amatoria (The art of love) 1–3; and the Remedia amoris (Cures for love). To these works belong also the fragments of the didactic Medicamina faciei femineae (Cosmetics for female beauty). Furthermore, the epistolary elegies known as the Heroides may be considered as a part of Ovid’s love poetry, since love is the common denominator of all the letters included. This work is commonly divided into two parts, the single Heroides 1–15 and the double Heroides 16–21, now frequently considered to have been composed at different times. In addition to the difficulties of establishing the chronological order of all the works of Ovid’s love poetry, the authenticity of a number of the Heroides has been questioned. Ovid’s love poetry, understood as these most conspicuously amorous works, displays a number of striking characteristics, such as sophisticated metapoetics and an innovative approach to established genres, especially that of Latin love elegy; a rich interplay with the preceding literature of both Greece and Rome and a striking interconnection of the various works by means of internal references (Ovidian loci similes, “similar passages”); a humorously playful and politically poignant engagement in the world of Augustus’s Rome and a particularly eager interest in human psychology. Finally, Ovid’s love poetry is strikingly crowded with female figures of great and varied significance.