Welcome back to Love Is a Rhythmical Art! (For previous issues, check the archive.) Today’s issue—unlike the one that will follow it—is relatively short, but it’s pivotal: Ovid turns from where to look for a date to how to look for a date, and that new topic will be his focus for the rest of Book 1. He starts, however, with a remarkable and unnerving claim, and it’s this: men should be confident of success, because women—far more so than men—are naturally prone to desire. All of them.

The twentieth-century scholar Gilbert Highet once remarked that Ovid had the ability “to say the most outrageous things in words as pure as sunlight,” and today’s material offers several prime examples. (More are definitely on the way.) “Men never desire beyond what the law code allows:” No one, in Ovid’s time or ours, could read this with a straight face. Greek and Roman myth and history are full of men forcing themselves on others (mostly women, sometimes boys), and Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses, written only a handful of years after the Ars amatoria, catalogs dozens of rapes and rapists, from Jupiter on down. And it was only a few issues ago in Love Is a Rhythmical Art that Ovid recounted the Rape of the Sabine Women, when the men of ancient Rome assaulted and abducted their neighbors. Our poet expects his readers to know and appreciate his mythological and historical materials, so how can he also expect us to take him seriously?

Which is not to say it’s just a joke. Anyone who says “It’s just a joke” is trying, and failing, to control the narrative, to pretend that it’s not something else as well—but of course it is something else. It’s a joke with consequences; even if you find Ovid’s outrageousness funny, his humor undermines his whole narrative. Sure, it might help a male student to imagine that all women are interested in hooking up. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know! But Ovid supports his point with a catalog of mythological women who are famous not for simple desire—whatever that might be—but for incest (Byblis desired her brother; Myrrha desired her father), bestiality, deception, and murder. The catalog starts in today’s material and continues through the rest of the following issue, and by the end of it, what masculine reader would be in the mood to follow up?

(For those of you following along in the original Latin, here are lines 263-288 of Book 1.)

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My doggerel spirit has shown
Where to hunt for a girl of your own.
   My topic is now
   To elucidate how
You can catch her—an art little known.

If you listen with care to my spiel
And you’re men, you may learn a good deal.
   I don’t care where you’re from;
   You’re welcome to come
And enjoy what I’m going to reveal.

First, be confident; never despair
That you won’t be one half of a pair.
   Just savor the thought
   That they all can be caught:
You’ll catch one, so set out your snare.

You’d as soon see a fox chase a hound
Or a songbird who sings without sound
   Or a cricket in June
   Who’s bereft of a tune
As a woman who won’t come around.

Though they quench their concupiscent moans,
Even ice queens feel fire in their bones.
   Men’s hankerings tend
   To come clear in the end;
Women’s lusts every woman disowns.

Just think: if we men had a goal
Of giving the women control
   Over asking for dates,
   In their passionate states
They’d be taking the masculine role.

It’s always the mares and the cows
Whom Love chooses first to arouse.
   With our healthier fire
   We men never desire
Beyond what the law code allows.

You know Byblis’s story, of course:
She was seized by Love’s barbarous force.
   When her brother objected,
   She bravely connected
Her neck to a noose in remorse.

Myrrha’s fatherly love was so flagrant
That she fled as an impious vagrant.
   Now the shrub that possesses her
   Subtly expresses her
Teardrops both stylish and fragrant.

(Her incestuous passion for Pappy
Made Myrrha—whence myrrh—most unhappy.
   She soon would become
   A resinous gum;
Some love can be overly sappy.

Stay tuned. Our smooth-talking artiste,
Aphrodite’s arch-eyebrowed archpriest,
   Will raise the alarm
   About love on a farm
Where the Beauty is also the Beast.)

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In the next issue: If you don’t know where the Minotaur comes from, well, I don’t know what to say. But Ovid does.