Welcome back to Love Is a Rhythmical Art! (The syllabus started several lessons ago; you’re welcome to catch up via the archive.) Today’s issue is a short one. Ovid has been discussing the best places to find love in and around Rome — the theater, shrines, porticoes, law courts, sports games, and military parades — and he rounds out the catalogue with just a few more options: parties, beaches, and an obscure religious event. Part of the pleasure Ovid seems to take in creating these lists is to see how many elements of Rome he can turn into opportunities for love, and he boasts, not just in today’s material but throughout the poem, that he always has more to say. It may be time to turn to a new topic, but his poetic talent is unstoppable.

One note about translation. Ovid assumes that his readers are intimately familiar with Greek and Roman mythology and history. It’s a compliment, of course, both for himself and for you: he only includes abstruse material because he expects you’ll be able to appreciate just how nimbly he plays with it. Game recognizes game. Two millennia later, though, the game has changed, and many of those original references may not make much sense even to readers with some familiarity with the ancient world. Sure, Venus (or her Greek counterpart Aphrodite) is the famous goddess of love, and Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, is familiar as the god of wine. But what to do with names and places and stories that most people have never heard of?

Well, one solution is to bring things up to date — and Ovid would approve, because that’s exactly what he does himself. The epics of Homer describe a world many centuries before Ovid’s own, but our poet treats heroes and heroines from the Iliad and Odyssey as if they were his contemporaries. (Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, and others will all have extended cameos in upcoming issues.) So why not engage in a bit of time travel in the other direction and bring in characters from our own world? Nireus and Hylas were two famously good-looking men of Greek myth; I’ve replaced them in a later episode with James Dean and Paul Newman. In today’s account, Ovid refers to an area south of Rome known as Baiae that was famous for its beautiful beaches and flexible morality; Hawai’i is not a perfect stunt double for the Roman original, but I trust it brings across some of the same flavor. (Or should I have turned it into a new episode of Baiae-watch?)

Transhistorical translation has a long and distinguished pedigree. There’s a 14^th-century French version of the Ars amatoria that turns ancient Rome into medieval France (look for girls in churches!), and Henry Fielding’s 1747 translation of the first book of the Ars recreates Ovid’s world in 18^th-century London. Ovid would surely approve of the continuing fame of his work, especially in the hands of those whose knack for anachronism matched his own.

(For those of you following along in the original Latin, here are lines 229-262 of Book 1.)

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Now, apply these next precepts of mine
To the times when you sit down to dine.
   The waiter may serve
   Some tasteful hors d’oeuvre,
But try more than the food and the wine.

When liquor and love start to wrestle,
Then Cupid will conquer the vessel.
   But as soon as he flings
   The drops from his wings,
Then deep in your heart will they nestle.

For it’s wine that enables your spirit
To feel passion (or something quite near it).
   If your heart ever burns
   With anxious concerns,
Then wine will undoubtedly cheer it.

Is your forehead a map of the tracks
Left by pain and by panic attacks?
   Dionysus’s drink’ll
   Remove every wrinkle
And teach you to laugh and relax.

’Tis the gift to be simple and frank
And to chat without drawing a blank.
   Although candor today
   Is not much on display,
When it is, you have Bacchus to thank.

But at parties, keep hold of your sense,
Or the ladies will level the gents.
   When women and wine
   Are what you combine,
The heat becomes twice as intense.

And those lamps have been dimmed on the terrace,
The better your mind to embarrass.
   You’ll make no mistake
   If the sun is awake;
So Venus was chosen by Paris.

At night, women borrow false graces,
And the jokers look just like the aces.
   In a moonlit locale you
   Should not put a value
On gems or on clothes or on faces.

There are hotbeds of women galore,
And I’ve got more locations in store,
   But I’ll stop for now – i.e.
   The sands of Hawai’i
Are famous enough to ignore.

A man who returned from vacation
Gave this rueful and heartsick oration:
   “Pay heed to my speech!
   For love is a beach
And a bad place to look for salvation.”

At the shrine of Diana the maid,
Kings fight in a fatal charade.
   Does the fact she’s a virgin
   Account for the surge in
The wounds we receive in her glade?

(Ovid’s point is acutely arcane;
It would take far too long to explain.
   Suffice it to say
   That the Appian Way
Is the way you’ll have someone to gain.)

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In the next issue: How to become a confidence man. Stay tuned.