Free A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman

kept an effigy of the god in their bedrooms. On her wedding day, a bride was to sit on the effigy, giving up her virginity as a sacred offering.
    But, despite the banquets and spectacles and phallic gods, Romans were ruled by many puritanical prohibitions. Adultery and incest were taboo. So was sex with a naked woman. A prostitute might take off all of her clothes; a nice girl left on at least her bra, * for discretion’s sake. Oral sex was tolerated between homosexual men or women, enjoyed by men at the hands of courtesans, but it was considered repulsive and degrading for a man to pleasure a woman with his mouth. The essence of this degradation lay in the idea of a man being servile to a woman. Roman men were obsessed with machismo. In homosexual affairs, this meant pitching rather than catching. With men or women, the key was to be active rather than passive, to be served rather than do the serving. Above all, they wished never to act like a slave to anyone or anything—including love. The ultimate class consciousness doesn’t just involve one’s rank with other people—but also with ideas. Passion enslaves, however willingly we may wear its shackles. Because love lured one away from the concerns of the populace, it was a kind of social treason. Because it involved dependence on a woman—a moral inferior—it lessened a man’s stature. Because it made one lose control in a culture obsessed with domination, it showed bad character.
    But love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny. Writers have always relished being its revolutionary scribes. In T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom , on which the movie Lawrence of Arabia was based, an Arab chieftain proclaims: “I am a river to my people.” In every era, poets become rivers flowing with emotion, connecting the farmhands and the city dwellers, nourishing the lovers. In ancient Greece it was Sappho, sinewy and ripe, who wrote so deliciously about female lovers that the term “lesbian” was coined from her hometown of Lesbos. Rome had many love poets, each with a slightly different complexion: the saucily neurotic Catullus, the romantics Tibullus and Propertius, the epic Virgil, and Ovid, love’s scribe and laborer.
    OVID AND THE ART OF LOVE
    Born in the provinces to an equestrian family, Ovid moved to Rome in his teens and spent most of his life there writing frisky, sensuous poetry that reflected the raucous morals of Roman high society, which was waging an all-out war against boredom. Women had more freedom and confidence than before, but no access to a public life. As one scholar notes wryly: “They were permitted to do a great deal—as long as they did nothing constructive.” So they focused much of their creative energies on beauty treatments, adornments, dinner parties, and romantic intrigues. Ovid, who was married three times, had a great many affairs, and wrote from experience about the torrents of love. From the evidence in his poems, he seems to have been in a perpetual snit. He yearned, he leered, he ached, he flirted, he bad-mouthed, he laughed, he taunted, he wooed—all in bright, rambunctious poetry. In a style personal and introspective enough to have been written today, he talks gamely about his spell of impotence, his occasional fetishism, or his jealousy. He exposes the full anatomy of his lust. His “erotic commonplaces” were often quoted by others, but when he wrote The Art of Love , a skillfully crafted “seducer’s manual,” he became the wicked darling of Rome. Here’s a glimpse into it:
Love is a kind of war, and no assignment for cowards. Where those banners fly, heroes are always on guard.
Soft, those barracks? They know long marches, terrible weather, Night and winter and storm, grief and excessive fatigue.
Often the rain pelts down from the drenching cloudbursts of heaven, Often you lie on the ground, wrapped in a mantle of cold.

If you are ever caught, no