Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: August 11, 2024
It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; "arte regendus amor." Boccaccio made a wise teacher put Ovid's Ars Amatoria into the hands of the young.
It is a pity they are not extant. From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman levee, much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes' dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes, and pomades.
The best way to realise this out-of-door life, lazy and sociable, of the Augustan age, is to read the first book of Ovid's Ars Amatoria, a fascinating picture of a beautiful city and its pleasure-loving inhabitants. But with the Augustan age we are not here concerned. Yet the Roman house, like the Italian house in general, was in origin and essence really a home.
Finally, in 2 or 1 B.C., he published what is perhaps on the whole his most remarkable work, the three books De Arte Amatoria. Just about the time of the publication of the Art of Love, the exile of the elder Julia fell like a thunderbolt on Roman society.
The Ars Amatoria, full as it is of a not unkindly humour, of worldly wisdom and fine insight, is perhaps the most immoral poem ever written.
The elegies on subjects of love, particularly the Ars Amandi, or Ars Amatoria, though not all uniform in versification, possess the same general character, of warmth of passion, and luscious description, as the epistles. The Fasti were divided into twelve books, of which only the first six now remain.
His literary reputation far greater than it now seems to us gave distinction to his position as the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love. With Humanism and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had overlooked one side of life, Ovid's Ars Amatoria was placed on a pedestal it had not occupied before or since.
BOSWELL. The 'eloquent historian' was Gibbon. See Paley's Principles, ed. 1786, p. 395. See ante, i. 353, note 1. Ovid, Ars Amatoria, iii. 121. 'This facile temper of the beauteous sex Great Agamemnon, brave Pelides proved. These two lines follow the four which Boswell quotes. Agis, act iv. Agis, a tragedy, by John Home. See ante, p. 27. A misprint, I suppose, for designing.
In the impassioned rhetoric of the Heroides, the brilliant pictures of life and manners in the De Arte Amatoria, or the sparkling narratives of the Fasti, the same sure and swift touch is applied to widely diverse forms and moods.
An interesting proof of the same tendency is to be found in the first book of the Ars Amatoria of Ovid, though it belongs to the age of Augustus. In this book Ovid describes the various resorts in the city where the youth may look out for his girl; and when he comes to the theatre, draws a pretty picture of the ladies of taste and fashion crowding thither, but
Word Of The Day
Others Looking