The Art of Love celebrates the bi-millennium of Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love, traditionally assumed to have been brought to completion around AD 2. Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), which purport to teach young Roman men and women how to be good lovers, were partly responsible for the poet's exile from Rome under the emperor Augustus. None the less they exerted great influence over ancient and later love poetry. This is the first collection in English devoted to the poems, and brings together many of the leading figures in the field of Latin literature and Ovidian studies from the British Isles, Germany, Italy, and the United States. It offers a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems, beginning with a critical survey of recent research, and concluding with papers on the ancient, medieval, and modern reception of the poems.

Roy Gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester.
Steven Green is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Leeds.
Alison Sharrock is Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester.

• 1: Steven J. Green: Lessons in Love: Fifty Years of Scholarship on the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris


• I. Poetics


• 2: Alison Sharrock: Love in Parentheses: Digression and Narrative Hierarchy in Ovid's Erotodidactic Poems


• 3: Niklas Holzberg: Staging the Reader Response: Ovid and his `Contemporary Audience' in Ars and Remedia


• 4: Duncan F. Kennedy: Vixisset Phyllis, si me foret usa magistro: Erotodidaxis and Intertextuality


• II. Erotics


• 5: John Henderson: In Ovid with Bed (Ars 2 and 3)


• 6: Alessandro Barchiesi: Women on Top: Livia and Andromache


• 7: Roy K. Gibson: Ovid, Augustus, and the Politics of Moderation in Ars Amatoria 3


• 8: Gianpiero Rosati: The Art of Remedia Amoris: Unlearning to Love?


• 9: Philip Hardie: Lethaeus Amor: The Art of Forgetting


• III. Politics


• 10: Mario Labate: Erotic Aetiology: Romulus, Augustus, and the Rape of the Sabine Women


• 11: Sergio Casali: The Art of Making Onself Hated: Rethinking (Anti-)Augustanism in Ovid's Ars Amatoria


• 12: Katharina Volk: Ara Amatoria Romana: Ovid on Love as a Cultural Construct


• 13: M. Myerowitz Levine: Ovid's Evolution


• IV. Reception


• 14: Markus Janka: Paelignus, puto, dixerat poeta (Mart.2.41.2): Martial's Intertexual Dialogue with Ovid's Erotodidactic Poems


• 15: Ralph Hexter: Sex Education: Ovidian Erotodidactic in the Classroom


• 16: Genevieve Liveley: Ovid in Defeat? On the Reception of Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris