Free A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman Page A

matter how well you’ve concealed it, Though it is clear as the day, swear up and down it’s a lie.
Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive, That would establish your guilt far beyond anything else.
Wear yourself out if you must, and prove, in her bed, that you could not Posssibly be that good, coming from some other girl.
    It was Ovid’s bad luck to publish The Art of Love during the reign of Augustus, at a time when the emperor decided to get tough about the city’s plummeting birthrate. Rome’s formidable rates of sterility, miscarriages, and stillbirths were most likely the result of chronic lead poisoning. Each day, Romans unwittingly dosed themselves with lead through the pipes that carried drinking water, the lead-based face powder and other cosmetics women used, the cooking pots, and the syrup used to sweeten cheap wine. Another possibility is that the men’s perpetually coddled testicles rendered them sterile. Men and women both spent a lot of time stewing in the baths, and we now know that raising the temperature of the testicles in hot water can reduce the sperm count. Whatever the cause of this barrenness, in 18 B.C . Augustus tried to remedy it through a system of rewards and punishments. He imposed strict marriage laws to prevent illegitimate children (because they might be aborted or killed), encourage large families, and not waste any fertile woman’s womb. Adultery had been a private, family matter of grave importance. Augustus shoved it into the law courts and changed it from an act of infidelity to an act of sedition. Henceforth, he decreed, any man who discovered his wife’s adultery had to divorce her or be prosecuted himself. The wife and her lover would then be exiled (in different directions). Half their wealth would be confiscated, and they would be forbidden ever to marry each other. A husband could engage a prostitute, but not keep a mistress. Widows were obliged to remarry within two years, and divorcées within eighteen months. Childless couples were discriminated against, as were unmarried men. Parents with three or more children were rewarded. Promiscuity was chastised. Augustus meant to stabilize the family, but the opposite happened. The divorce rate skyrocketed, since divorce was the only nonprosecutable form of dalliance.
    All things considered, this was not the ideal climate in which to publish a guide to infidelity. But it was just the moment Ovid chose for his. Why? There’s an impish, swaggering quality to Ovid. I think he saw himself as a bawdy trafficker who lived on the edge, a purveyor of contraband morals. Anyway, he created a sensation in high society, had a brisk following, and became quite a famous rogue. This shocked and irritated Augustus, and was the excuse he gave for dealing harshly with him. But evidence points in another direction, indicating that Ovid became embroiled in some mysterious high-level scandal. No one knows exactly what happened—in part because Ovid was told to choose between silence and death—but clues in his writing suggest one of two possibilities. Either he dared to have an affair with the emperor’s wife, which the emperor discovered, or he was privy to an attempted coup d’état. If the empress fancied him, as well she might after reading his books, he would have been caught between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. He couldn’t have safely said yes or no. Whatever happened, it was serious enough for Augustus to banish him to a distant, uncivilized territory where he spent the remainder of his life longing for the sophistication and gaiety of Rome.
    Some classical scholars dismiss Ovid as a scoundrel and pornographer interested only in sexual conquest. It’s amusing that, all these years later, people are still scandalized by his candor. Some wince at his bravado. Like Shakespeare, Ovid promises his girlfriends that they will become immortal through his poems. But, you know, he was right. We still sigh over