Free A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman Page B

his lover, Corinna, the heroine and temptress of his early Loves . Although we don’t know her real identity, she may have been his first wife. They were teenagers, “two adolescents, exploring a booby-trapped world of adult passions and temptations, and playing private games, first with their society, then— liaisons dangereuses —with one another….” In Ovid’s writings one finds a full catalog of love, from chaste worship to unregenerate conniving. Although Augustus banned The Art of Love , it has endured through the ages, as a brilliantly insightful meditation on love, vanity, and temptation.
    DECORATING LEISURE TIME
    As the city of Rome grew larger, extending itself in land, variety, and the imagination of its populace, the avenues for love multiplied. This happened in part because the quest for amusement became a kind of pastime. Where the Greeks sought to perfect the body through athletics, Romans perfected the leisure life. It could be bustling and avant-garde, provided it was ample. Roman women had more freedoms, and that brought a new confidence and self-respect. Greek women were so housebound that they had little chance to meet men with whom they might strike up a romance, even if they wished to. But Roman women had time and opportunity for intrigue, and morals were flexible enough that their affairs were found understandable, even if not officially condoned. Women of the right class were obsessed with their looks, spending the morning on coiffures, makeup, and choosing the perfect accessories for their outfits. In the afternoon, they lunched and shopped, organized the household, then tidied up their makeup and later prepared for a dinner party. Fashion has always been a badge of rank, as well as a creative outlet, but they were also obsessively refining and accentuating their physical appeal. Decoration can be a form of advertising, and the new commodity they had to offer was their worth and desirability.
    A government thrives on order. Love is anarchic. Chaotic and emotional, we try so hard to impose what we aren’t on everything around us, and punish those who don’t live up to our ideals. On a walk this morning, I passed through the perfume of a honeysuckle bush so sweet and pleasing I turned around and followed it to its source. I did not mean to be diverted from my path by pleasure; I couldn’t help myself. In the same way, love distracts one from the tidiest plans, the narrowest course, the clearest goals. The Roman vision of social order grew, but so did the empire of love. Hard as Augustus tried to legislate morality, he was grappling with a seditious passion so natural for human beings that he was, essentially, warring with nature. To the Romans, love was not a good enough reason for marriage, but everyone understood its power and how, like a furious river, it could charge past hardship, law, or death.
* In the first century B.C., sundials swept the imagination. Nobility and city folk were fascinated by them. But the earliest sundial can be traced to Egypt in 3500 B.C.; it consisted of a vertical stick arranged so that its shadow showed the sun’s progress across the sky. Berosus, the third-century B.C. Babylonian priest and astronomer, improved the sundial. And both Greeks and Romans had water clocks for days when the sun didn’t shine.
* The seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas , a magnificent, heart-wrenching opera, explores the tragedy in homespun melodies reminiscent of ballads and madrigals.
* The word they used for brassiere was mamillare , and there was apparently a considerable need for them, because Latin includes two words for big-bosomed, mammosa and mamme ata .

THE MIDDLE AGES

    THE BIRTH OF CHIVALRY
    During the Middle Ages, France seethed with paradoxes. Plague, famine, and filth were Everyman’s constant companions. So-called witches were regularly burned at the stake, and heretics of all stripes were tortured and driven from their homes.