Ovid’s Art of Life

This chapter reads Ovid’s erotodidactic poems, the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, as philosophical texts, arguing, first, that these poems are very much like philosophy, in that they are influenced by philosophical doctrines and discourses popular in Ovid’s time; and second and more controversially, that they are philosophical in their own right, putting forth and promoting their own theories of anthropology, psychology, and ethics. While ancient philosophy promotes an “art of life” that enables its practitioners to beate uiuere, Ovid lays out an art of love whose goal is sapienter amare. In doing so, he employs “techniques of the self” similar to those found in philosophical texts, stressing the importance of rational control of the emotions and suggesting forms of behavioral conditioning to achieve the envisaged goal. The erodidatic corpus thus presents a solution to the problem of romantic love, as Ovid combats and deconstructs the dreary elegiac worldview of love as passive suffering, substituting his own cheerful vision of love as rational mastery. For all his rationality, however, he does not follow philosophers in their neurotic fear of the passions, which leads them either to sideline love entirely or to replace it with mechanical sexual gratification. Like the philosophical uita beata, which must be perfect in all its aspects and ideally last a lifetime, Ovid’s envisages amatory flourishing as a holistic concept, in which art is brought to bear on every detail.