allusive chatter of the poet with a smile, without ever being able to be quite certain how seriously he means any of it. The tension implicit in this uncommitted tone is reminiscent of a flirt, and in fact, the semi-serious, semi-ironic form is ideally suited to Ovid's subject matter.
It is striking that through all his ironic discourse, Ovid never becomes ribald or obscene. Of course 'embarrassing' matters can never be entirely excluded, for 'alma Dione praecipite nostrum est, quod pudet, inquit, opus' '..."what you blush to tell", says Venus, "is the most important part of the whole matter"'. Sexual matters in the narrower sense are only dealt with at the end of each book, so here again, form and content converge in a subtly ingenious way. Things, so to speak, always end up in bed. But here, too, Ovid retains his style and his discretion, avoiding any pornographic tinge. The end of the second book deals with the pleasures of simultaneous orgasm. Somewhat untypically for a Roman, the poet confesses, 'Odi concubitus, qui non utrumque resolvunt. Hoc est, cur pueri tangar amore minus' ('I abhor intercourse which does not relieve both. This is also why I find less pleasure in the love of boys').
At the end of the third part, as in the Kama Sutra, the sexual positions are 'declined', and from them women are exhorted to choose the most suitable, taking the proportions of their own bodies into careful consideration. Ovid's tongue is again discovered in his cheek when his recommendation that tall women should not straddle their lovers is exemplified at the expense of the tallest hero of the Trojan Wars: 'Quod erat longissima, numquam Thebais Hectoreo nupta resedit equo' ('Because she was very tall, the Theban bride (Andromache) never sat on her Hectorian horse').
The polysemous word ars in the title is not, then, to be translated coldly as 'technique', but here really means 'art' in the sense of civilized refinement.
The work was such a popular success that the poet wrote a sequel, Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love).
The assumption that the 'licentiousness' of the Ars amatoria was responsible in part for Ovid's relegation (banishment) by Augustus in AD 8 is dubious, and seems rather to reflect modern sensibilities than historical fact. For one thing, the Ars amatoria had been in circulation for eight years by the time of the relegation, and the book postdates the Julian Marriage Laws by eighteen years. Secondly, it is hardly likely that Augustus, after forty years unchallenged in the purple, felt the poetry of Ovid to be a serious threat or even embarrassment to his social policies. Thirdly, Ovid's own statement from his Black Sea exile that his relegation was because of 'carmen et error' ('a song and a mistake') is, for many reasons, hardly admissible.
It is more probable that Ovid was somehow caught up in factional politics connected with the succession: Postumus Agrippa, Augustus' adopted son, and Augustus' granddaughter, Vipsania Julilla, were both relegated at around the same time. This would also explain why Ovid was not reprieved when Augustus was succeeded by Agrippa's rival Tiberius. It is likely, then, that the Ars amatoria was used as an excuse for the relegation . This would be neither the first nor the last time a 'crackdown on immorality' disguised an uncomfortable political secret.
The Ars amatoria exerted considerable fascination from the start, and has remained a widely-read source of inspiration no doubt because of its literary brilliance and popular accessibility. A similar tone is struck on a smaller scale by the epigrams of Martial (late 1st-early 2nd cent. AD). The list of later manifestations of the poem's influence is immense: reference is made to the almost equally extensive literature on the subject. The Ars amatoria was included in the syllabuses of mediaeval schools from the second half of the 11th cent., and its influence on 12th and 13th cent. European literature was so great that the German mediaevalist and palaeographer Ludwig Traube dubbed the entire age 'aetas Ovidiana' ('the Ovidian epoch').
A