from The Art of Love

OVID

Knowing my penchant for long-deceased authors and moldering books, I am occasionally asked who I would like to have been and what I would most like to have written. Few authors of truly great works lived enviable lives: Who would want to be Milton, the supremely cantankerous self-proclaimed “church of one,” or the miasmic Plotinus, rotting publicly from the inside out, or, even worse, to be burned at the stake, like Julian of Norwich when she dared suggest that God’s love was universal? It’s a commonplace that authors live meager and brutish lives, so much so that one wonders if it’s worth it to be a Dostoevsky in order to write a Brothers K.

But then there is that lucky group of writers whose lives were as extraordinary as their work. Rimbaud set poetry on its heels before he was twenty, then got bored and started running guns in North Africa. Marlowe was the jewel of the pre-Shakespearean stage and his generation’s preeminent rake and ladies’ man. The earl of Rochester was so charming and handsome that for more than a century after his death popular drama in England was still modeling characters after him.

It is not, however, from among these fortunates that I would pick my dream life. No, without a moment’s hesitation, I would choose to be Ovid, the Roman poet born forty years before Christ, author of, among other works, the Metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria (The Art of Love). These two texts bespeak the glory of both the literary and personal halves of Ovid’s life, set in perfect harmony. The former work is one of the great acts of imagination in the history of literature and has been a deserved best-seller for two millennia. The latter is a raucous love manual from someone who clearly knew women, loved women and spent his life figuring out how to snare them. Though predominantly for men, The Art of Love concludes with a section for the ladies, on how to behave when caught. Elsewhere Ovid gives makeup tips and rules of conduct, but here he advises on the vagaries of bedroom performance in what reads like a head-on challenge to Cynthia Heimel.

We must come to the heart of the matter, so that my weary keel reaches the haven at last . . . In our last lesson we deal with matters peculiarly secret; Venus reminds us that here lies her most intimate care. What a girl ought to know is herself, adapting her method, taking advantage of the methods nature has equipped her to use. Lie on your back if your face and all your features are pretty; if your posterior is cute, better be seen from behind. Milanion used to bear Atalanta’s legs on his shoulders; if you have beautiful legs, let them be lifted like hers. Little girls do all right if they sit on top, riding horseback; Hector’s Andromache knew she could not do this: too tall! Press the couch with your knees and bend your neck backward a little if your view, full-length, seems what a lover should crave. If the breasts and the thighs are youthful and lovely to look at, let the man stand and the girl lie on a slant on the bed. Let your hair come down, in the Laodamian fashion. If your belly is lined, better be seen from behind. There are a thousand ways: a simple one, never too tiring, is to lie on your back, turning a bit to the right. My muse can give you the truth, more truth than Apollo or Ammon; take it from me, what I know took many lessons to learn.

Let the woman feel the act of love to her marrow, let the performance bring equal delight to the two. Coax and flatter and tease, with inarticulate murmurs, even with sexual words, in the excitement of play, and if nature, alas, denies you the final sensation cry out as if you had come, do your best to pretend. Really I pity the girl whose place, let us say, cannot give her pleasure it gives to the man, pleasure she ought to enjoy. So, if you have to pretend, be sure the pretense is effective, do your best to convince, prove it by rolling your eyes, prove by your motions, your moans, your sighs, what a pleasure it gives you.

So our sport has an end: our swans are tired of their harness. Time for their labors to rest, time to step down from our car. As the young men did, now let the girls, my disciples, write on the votive spoil, “Ovid showed us the way.”

—translated by Rolfe Humphries