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Hello and welcome to literature in history.

Episode 60, How to Make Love to a Roman.

In this episode we're going to talk about three instructional poems by the Roman writer

Ovid, instructional poems on the subject of love and romance.

The main text will look at in this show will be the Arse Amatoria, or The Art of Love,

a three-book-long manual on seduction and courtship, the first two books addressed to men and the last one to women that

Ovid finished around 4 b.C. we'll also look at Ovid's medicamine

of Vakiaeae fimine, or women's facial cosmetics, a fragment that survives from what was once

a longer poem instructing women on how to prepare their makeup.

And finally we'll read off its R Ramedia Amoris, or Cure for Love.

Much of the poetry Ovid writes on the subject of Love explains how to find love and enjoy

it.

But the Ramedia Amoris, or again the cure for love, illustrates how to recover and move

on after a heartbreak.

We're going to need a term up front to describe all the content we'll cover in this episode as it will be clunky to say the

ours amatoria medicaminov aqueae fiminee and a remediya amorous again and again and

again so let's call the subject of today's show, Ovid's didactic love poetry, his love poetry that

aims to instruct readers on the best means of courtship, lovemaking, and bouncing back after a breakup.

Ovid's didactic love poetry wasn't the only love poetry, he wrote.

Last time we looked at his Amoris, a three- long collection of about 50 poems generally addressed to a mistress called Karina.

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