The Love Books E-Book

Ovid

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

'The Love Books of Ovid' is a combination of four books of the Roman poet's verse translated into prose. This volume includes 'Amores' or 'The Loves', 'Ars Amatoria' or 'The Art of Love', 'Remedia Amoris' or 'Love's Cure', and 'Medicamina Faciei Feminae' or 'The Art of Beauty'. Considered to be a master of the elegy form of poetry, Ovid, is faithfully represented here in this English prose translation. Students of classical literature and fans of romantic poetry will both delight in this volume of works by Ovid. This is Julian May's translation of Ovid's 'erotic' works: The Amores (the Loves), Ars Amatoria (the Art of Love), Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love) and the fragmentary Medicamina Faciei Feminae (Women's Facial Cosmetics). This version was published in 1930 in a 'limited' edition with sensual art deco illustrations by Jean de Bosschere. In the Amores, published about 18 BCE, Ovid portrays the evolution of an affair with a married woman named Corinna. It is unclear as to whether this is fictional or autobiographical, but it is obviously based on the experiences of a sophisticated lover. The Ars Amatoria, published about 1 BCE, is a guidebook for seduction; it includes many tips and tricks which would not be out of place in a modern dating manual, while giving intimate vignettes of daily life in Ancient Rome. The first two books are written from a male point of view; the last book, which was probably written at a later date, is addressed to women. It is believed that this work, which celebrates extramarital sex, was one of the reasons that Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus, who was attempting to promote a more austere morality.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Introduction 2

Introduction 3

Introduction 4

Epigram

Elegy 1. The Poet Explains How It Is He Comes To Sing Of Love Instead Of Battles

Elegy 2. The Triumph Of Love

Elegy 3. He Commends Himself ToHis Mistress By The Merits Of His Poetry, The Purity Of His Morals, And By The Vow Of His Unchangeable Fidelity

Elegy 4. Ovid, His Mistress And Her Husband Are All Bidden To The Same Supper. He Gives His Mistress, A Code By Which They Can Testify Their Love For Each Other, Beneath Her Husband's Very Eyes

Elegy 5. His Delight At Having Obtained Corinna's Favours

Elegy 6. He Conjures The Porter To Open The Door Of His Mistress's House

Elegy 7. He Curses Himself For Having Maltreated His Mistress

Elegy 8. He Curses A Certain Old Woman Of The Town Whom He Overhears Instructing His Mistress In The Arts Of A Courtesan

Elegy 9. He Compareth Love With War

Elegy 10. He Endeavours To Dissuade His Mistress From Becoming A Courtesan

Elegy 11. He Asks Nape To Deliver A Love-Letter To Her Mistress

Elegy 12. He Calls Down Curses On The Tablets Which Bring Him Word Of His Mistress's Refusal

Elegy 13. He Entreats The Dawn To Hasten Not Her Coming

Elegy 14. To His Mistress, Who, Contrary To His Counsel, Dyed Her Hair With Noxious Compositions, And Has Nearly Become Bald

Elegy 15. The Poets Alone Are Immortal

Elegy 1. He Tells Wherefore, Instead Of The Wars Of The Giants, Which He Had Commenced, He Is Constrained To Sing Of Love

Elegy 2. To The Eunuch Bagoas, Begging Him To Give Him Access ToThe Fair One Committed To His Charge

Elegy 3. He Appeals Once More To Bagoas, Who Had Proved Inflexible

Elegy 4. He Confesses His Inclination For Love And His Admiration For All Manner Of Women

Elegy 5. He Upbraids His Mistress Whom He His Detected Acting Falsely Towards Him

Elegy 6. He Laments The Death Of The Parrot He Had Given To His Mistress

Elegy 7. He Assures Corinna That He Has Never Had Any Guilty Commerce With Cypassis, Her Maid

Elegy 8. He Asks Cypassis How In The World Corinna CouldHave Found Them Out

Elegy 9. He Beseeches Cupid Not To Discharge All His Arrows At Him Alone

Elegy 10. He Tells Græcinus How, Despite What He Says To The Contrary, It Is Possible To Be In Love With Two Women At The Same Time

Elegy 11. He Seeks To Dissuade Corinna From Going To Baiæ

Elegy 12. He Rejoices At Having At Last WonThe Favours Of Corinna

Elegy 13. He Beseeches Isis To Come To The Aid Of Corinna In Her Confinement

Elegy 14. On Corinna's Recovery He Writes To Her Again Concerning Her Attempt At Abortion And Tells Her How Naughty She Has Been

Elegy 15. To The Ring Which He Is Sending To His Mistress

Elegy 16. To Corinna, Beseeching Her To Visit Him In His Country Home At Sulmo

Elegy 17. He Complains To Corinna That She Is Too Conceited About Her Good Looks

Elegy 18. To Macer: To Whom He Excuses Himself For Giving Himself Up Wholly To Erotic Verse

Elegy 19. To A Man With Whose Wife He Was In Love

Elegy 1. The Tragic And The Elegiac Muse Strive For The Possession Of Ovid

Elegy 2. The Circus

Elegy 3.To His Mistress, Whom He Has Found To Be Forsworn

Elegy 4. He Urges A Husband Not To Keep So Strict A Watch On His Wife

Elegy 5. A Dream

Elegy 6. To A River Which Has Overflowed Its Banks And Hindered The Poet, Who Was Hastening To His Mistress

Elegy 7. The Poet Reproaches Himself For Having Failed In His Duty Towards His Mistress

Elegy 8. To His Mistress, Complaining That She His Given Preference To A Wealthier Rival

Elegy 9. On The Death Of Tibullus

Elegy 10. He Complains To Ceres That, During Her Festival, He Is Not Suffered To Share His Mistress' Couch

Elegy 11. Weary At Length Of His Mistress' Infidelities, He Swears That He Will Love Her No Longer

Elegy 12. He Laments That His Poems Have Made His Mistress Too Well Known

Elegy 13. The Festival Of Juno At Falisci

Elegy 14. To His Mistress

Elegy 15. He Bids Farewell To His Wanton Muse, To CourtOne, More Austere

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Remedia Amoris (The Cures For Love)

The Art Of Beauty

The Love Books

Ovid

First digital edition 2018 by Anna Ruggieri

Introduction 1

PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO was born at Sulmo--the modern Sulmona--on March the 20th, 43 B.C. He was fortunate in his birthplace, and it may not perhaps be over fanciful to ascribe the airy charm, the delicate grace, which his Muse so plentifully displays, at least as much to his early environment as to heredity. Sulmo, indeed, lies amid a region of great natural beauty. Its pastures, as Ovid himself tells us, were cool and rich, it produced abundant crops of corn, and yet so light and fine was the soil that the vine and the olive flourished there in profusion. It was a land of streams, of streams that hurried down from the mountains so clear and cold that the place is called by the poets"gelidus Sulmo." Even in the hottest of Italian summers, when the canicular is at its height, its meadows are fresh and green and its atmosphere sparkling and salubrious.

Ovid's family was of hereditary equestrian rank and possessed a sufficiency if not anabundance of wealth. The poet was proud of his ancestry and his family traditions, and he is careful to impress upon us that he is no upstart, no parvenu, emphatically not one of the postwar rich, as we are wont to say nowadays. At an early age he and hisonly brother--his elder by exactly a year--brought up in their father's house with the care and attention that would naturally be bestowed on the sons of well-to-do and aristocratic parents, were sent to continue their education in Rome. It was their father's intention that they should both follow the profession of advocate, and with this purpose in view they were sent to study rhetoric under two of the most celebrated professors of that art--Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus. For in the Rome of Ovid's time, though the days of the great political orators were gone for ever, oratory, the lucrative and harmless oratory of the schools or the bar, was a highly popular pursuit. The elder brother, Lucius, appears to have devoted himself to his studies with a will. Ovid's tastes, however, lay in a very different direction. He tried hard to follow the parental injunctions and to make himself an effective advocate, but he achieved only indifferent success. The elder Seneca tells us that he once heard Ovid deliveringa speech before his master Fuscus, and he gives us to understand that the effort was more remarkable for the beauty of its phrasing than for its argumentative power. Indeed he describes the speech as nothing more or less than poetry without metre. Ovid himself confesses that, try as he would to declaim in prose, he constantly found himself gliding into poetry. He "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." His heart was with the Muses. He wanted to be, not a barrister, but a poet. One can imagine the paternal chagrin when the boy made known his ambitions. A country gentleman with family traditions, and not too much money to throw away, could hardly be expected to look with favour on poetry. As a pastime, well enough perhaps, but rather effeminate. As a profession, mere starvation. Naso père seems to have entertained the typical country squire's contempt for "those writing fellows" and to have given expression to it in no ambiguous terms. So for a time, at least, our poet had to stick to his declamatory exercises and turn his back on the Muses. It is clear that had his father remained obdurate, Ovid might well have achieved no more than mediocrityas a professional barrister, have filled with tolerable credit a few minor offices of State and, in course of time,have gone back to Sulmo to wear out the evening of his days in such innocent pursuits as usually fall to the lot of retired Civil servants with landed interests and a private income. The prudent and level-headed father would have had his way; the world would have lost one of its most delightful poets, and the literatures of Italy, France and England would have been immeasurably the poorer. But when Ovid had attained the age of nineteen or thereabouts, an event occurred which averted the threatened triumph of parental common-sense. That event was the death of Ovid's elder brother Lucius. His removal from the scene, though we have no reason to doubt that Ovid sincerely regretted it, went a long way to disarm the parental opposition, which had always been basedon practical grounds of finance, for obviously what would have provided a bare sufficiency for two would furnish an easy if not abundant competence for one. Ovid doubtless returned to the charge and pressed his suit with the persuasive eloquence which hisgenius and his training would have placed at his command. His father, realising, like the good sensible man he was, that it is useless trying to drive a nail where it won't go, and wisely concluding that a willing poet is better than a reluctant advocate,"sealed his hard consent." Whether Ovid would have gone to Athens had he followed the forensic career designed for him by his father is perhaps doubtful, but, for the man of letters, and above all for the poet, such a crown to his education was in the highest degree desirable; so to Athens he went, much in the same way that a public school boy of to-day goes up to Oxford or Cambridge. What he did there we do not know. He himself, usually so communicative about his own affairs, contents himself with informing us that he went there for purposes of study. He would, at all events, have learned to read Homer, Euripides and Sophocles. A knowledge of Greek was in those days a mark of a superior education, and Greek he certainly acquired; but whatever he learned ordid not learn--and we can scarcely picture this child of the Muses as a fort-en-thème, a determined reading man--we may be quite sure that he was not insensible to the beauty of the incomparable city to which his good fortune had sent him, or to the charmof the region in which it was set, and Attica, with its delicate and brilliant atmosphere, with its soil so favourable to the vine and olive, may well have reminded him of his native Sulmo.

His sojourn in Athens was followed by a tour which he made in company with Pompeius Macer, another youthful aspirant to poetic fame. In the course of these leisurely wanderings the two young men visited Sicily and the famous Greek cities of Western Asia Minor, bathing their spirits in the perennial springs from which Anacreon and Theocritus derived their inspiration. Altogether Ovid was away from Rome about three years. When he returned he sought, probably at his father's instigation, and obtained, certain public appointments, which, though not in themselves of great importance, were stepping-stones to the quæstor-ship, an office which, under the Empire, was shorn of much of its ancient importance, notably the care of the treasury, but which nevertheless carried with it the right to a seat in the Senate. He successively discharged the duties of Triumvir Capitalis, whose functions largely corresponded with those of a modern police magistrate, and Decemvir Stlitibus Judicandis, a member of a tribunal for the trial of private causes, representing the prætor. If, however, thefather had entertainedthe hope that the fulfilment of these offices would divert his son from his poetic ambitions, that hope was doomed to disappointment, for, though Ovid appears to have filled these preliminary positions with credit, he made what his father at least must have considered il gran rifiuto. He declined the quæstorship, and exchanged the broad purple band which he had worn as a future member of the Senate for the narrower stripe to which he was entitled as a member of the equestrian order. In other words, he decided to retire into private life, preferring, it would seem, to indulge his dilettantism and to enjoy the distractions of society, as the fancy took him, rather than to incur the diminution of his freedom which the adoption of a publiccareer would have necessarily involved.

When he was very young, scarcely more than a boy, Ovid was married, to a wife who was probably chosen for him by his parents. All we know about this union is that it was speedily dissolved. Another wife was promptlydiscovered, the bride on this occasion being a native of Falisci in Etruria and a woman of some social standing. Ovid's attitude towards her appears to have been dictated by respect rather than affection--he confesses that her conduct gave him nothing tocomplain of, yet the second marriage lasted but little, if any, longer than the first. All his devotion, in those early days, seems to have been reserved for the mistress whom he celebrates in his earliest poem, "The Loves," under the name of Corinna. WhoCorinna was we do not know. That she was not Julia, as Sidonius Apollinaris would have us believe, is as certain as that she was a real and not an imaginary personage. How long Corinna continued to reign supreme in Ovid's heart is a matter of conjecture. Her dominion had probably come to an end some considerable time before his marriage with his third wife, to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached. Since his daughter, Perilla, the fruit of this third union, had attained the age of twenty and was herself married when Ovid was banished., A.D. 8, the marriage could scarcely have taken place later than 12 B.C. Until his fiftieth year Ovid lived at Rome in a house near the Capitol, whence, from time to time, he would go to seek refreshment and repose onhis country estate at Sulmo. It seemed as though everything had combined to make Ovid's lot a happy one. Endowed with talents that shone with special lustre even among the brilliant society of the day, blest with sufficient but not burdensome wealth, popular with the men, idolized by the women, smiled on by Augustus himself, Ovid seemed to be indeed a favourite of the gods. But suddenly, when the barometer of his fortune was at its height, this brilliant and fascinating child of the age, this refined and delicate voluptuary, was commanded by an Imperial edict to quit Rome and to take himself to Tomi, a town on the Euxine, by the mouths of the Danube and on the very confines of the Empire. Though the sentence which thus fell upon him was harsh enough, it wasnot as terrible as it might have been. It was not an exsilium, but arelegatio. He did not lose his citizenship, he was permitted to enjoy the income of his property, to correspond with his friends and to indulge in the hope (alas, illusory!) of ultimatepardon. Still, even with all these mitigating circumstances, such a fate would have been hard enough on any man. On a man of Ovid's habits and disposition it was peculiarly so. The place of his banishment was surrounded and continually threatened by hostile and barbarous tribes. The cold was so intense that the snow would sometimes remain unmelted from one winter to another. The wine turned to ice in the jar; thebroad waters of the Danube were often frozen completely over, and afforded but too easy a viaduct to the men and horses of the barbarian foe, when they came to murder, outrage and destroy.

Probably Ovid exaggerated the horrors of his situation in the hopes of moving the Emperor's pity. Those hopes, to which he clung with despairing tenacity, were destined never to be fulfilled, and he died in exile, A.D. 18, in the sixtieth year of his age.

What was the real cause of his banishment is, and will probably always remain, a mystery, for the publication of the Ars Amatoria was obviously but a mere pretextand could have deceived nobody. It certainly did not deceive Ovid, for whenever he mentions the ostensible cause of his misfortune,, he darkly alludes to another which he never discloses. He is continually harping on a "Carmen" and an "Error." The "Carmen" was the Ars Amatoria; what the "Error" was he never reveals. It is commonly supposed that, in some way or another, he had given serious offence to Livia and that the poet's banishment was due to the machinations of that redoubtable woman.

It may have been so, or it may merely have been that Augustus, with the shadows of oncoming age descending upon him, viewed with misgiving the increasing licentiousness of the times, the growing corruption, which had not spared even the members of his own household, andwhich the sternest legislation seemed unable to repress, and that he therefore determined to make an example of those who were most conspicuously identified with the dissolute society he thought it his duty to castigate, foremost amongst whom was the unhappy Ovid. If, as is not improbable, Ovid was privy to the adulterous intercourse of the younger Julia with Silanus, he, as well as the erring lovers, would, by the lex de adulteriis, have been liable to the capital sentence, so that in suffering a mere relegatio, the milder form of exile, he may be considered to have got off lightly.

Introduction 2

The society into which Ovid was received after his refusal ofthe quæstorship, and in which he gained that intimateknowledge of women which make his love poemssuch masterpieces offeminine psychology, was one of the most brilliant that the worldhas ever known.

Out of the welter of conflicting forces and rival ambitionswhich had so long distracted the Roman State, the crafty andpatient Augustus had emerged triumphant. The era of bloodshed, ofpolitical strife and social insecurity was over. The shadow ofcivil conflict which had so long oppressed men's minds had atlength departed, and, even if the last vestiges of politicalfreedom had vanished with it, the loss was forgotten, at leasttemporarily, in the joyfulness with which the dawning of whatpromised, and indeed proved, to be a long era of peace and settledgovernment was universally acclaimed.