Charlotte Higgins - Latin Love Lessons: Put A Little Ovid In Your Life

uulpi carissimae

W hat can a bunch of 2,000-year-old poems in Latin teach us about love in the twenty-first century?

Actually, pretty much everything. The Romans didnt only build great cities, dominate the known world, and bring us straight roads. They were also the original, and best, Latin lovers.

Take this tiny, two-line poem, by Catullus.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?

nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior

I hate and love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask?

I dont know. But I feel its being done to me, and

the pain is crucifixion.

In fourteen words Catullus nails the feelings you have when youre in love with the wrong person. You hate them, you love them; you know you could, and should, wrench yourself away, but you cant. The pain is killing you.

When I first read poems like this as a teenager I marvelled at their frankness and immediacy. Now, two decades on, and having experienced rather more of life and break-ups than I had at fifteen, Im gripped more than ever: it seems miraculous that a stranger writing two millennia back could pin down an emotional state with such uncanny accuracy; but he did. Its like what Hectorthe marvellous old-buffer teacher in Alan Bennetts play The History Boys says:

The best moments in reading are when you come across somethinga thought, a feeling, a way of looking at thingswhich you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone elsesomeone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

To realise that strong and painful feelings are not particular, but sharedthat is the beginning of recovery. Unlikely as it may seem, Latin poetry can help mend a broken heart, I discovered.

Catullus is the tip of the iceberg. With Ovid (whose voice is so immediate, urbane and witty you feel you could bump into him at a party tonight) you can discover how to find a lover, cure yourself of love, and even pick up a few sex tips. With Virgil, you can be given an object lesson in how not to treat a girlfriend or boyfriend. With Propertius, experience the traumas of obsession, and encounter an almost Proustian determination to express precisely what being in love feels like. With Horace, learn how to grasp life by the balls and live it to the full.

By the way, you dont need to know Latin to appreciate these works. Throughout this book, Ive provided poems in the original language as well as in translation. If you know even a tiny bit of Latin, or even a smattering of French or Spanish, youll be able to piece together something of how the Latin works. Equally, the English translations on their own are an excellent way into this world of extraordinary writingsome of the most powerful poetry ever produced.

The Rome these people lived in is always there in the background of these poems, too: hugely wealthy, massively materialist, giddyingly cosmopolitan, and full of disposable but addictive pleasuresnot so far removed from the New York or London of our own times, in some ways. In fact we are probably better placed than readers from any other period in modern history to understand the preoccupations of these writers. Like the Romans of Horace and Ovids time, we live a life of conspicuous consumption while much of the rest of the world struggles for survival. The Romans wrote a great deal about their craving for luxuria , luxury they simultaneously indulged their gluttonous appetite for fabulous houses, expensive clothes and exotic foods while harking back nostalgically to the good old days when life had been simpler and we werent all on our way to hell in a hand-cart. The Romans heightened sense of the individual, and of personal ambition, seems uncannily familiar in these self-fulfilment-obsessed times. And were certainly one of the first generations to be able to connect comfortably with their frankness about sex (straight and gay), which has historically been a huge problem for readers coming from a Judaeo-Christian perspective, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Twenty-first-century New York and Rome in the first century BCnot as different as you might think

The Romans, then, have a great deal to teach us about love. Certainly more than the reams of depressing self-help books that populate the shelves of bookshops (the Latin poets, it hardly needs saying, are an infinitely classier read). Ovids poems the Ars Amatoria ( The Art of Love ) and the Remedia Amoris ( The Cures For Love ) are blatantly how-to bookshow to find and keep a lover; and how to get over love. There are plenty of books on this kind of thing in the Mind, Body, Spirit aisle, but, frankly, you wont get any funnier, wiser or more sophisticated than Ovid. Even Propertius, from the depths of his obsession, reckons his books are useful for modern lovers. Me legat assidue post haec neglectus amator,/et prosint illi cognita nostra mala , he writesLet neglected lovers read me assiduously in the future; and find help, understanding my troubles.

Most books written about these poems are academic, and occasionally unbelievably dry, works of literary criticism. No serious scholar would stoop to writing about them as if they were about actual emotions. And yet it seems abundantly clear to me, as I am sure it does to anyone else who reads them, that they arevividly so. That is really what this book is about.

Now for a little background history. All the poems in this book come from the period spanning the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire. It was a golden age for literature, and the most incredible, and turbulent, age in history. It didnt all turn on politics and war, either. Rome, as her empire grew bigger, and bigger, underwent huge socialand sexualchanges.

The citizens of the Roman Republic had traditionally been proud of their prudery. As far as moralists were concerned, the ideal Roman was tough, self-denying and ascetic. As for womenwell, divorcing your wife simply because she ventured out of doors without her head veiled was perfectly acceptable; in theory, she was expected to be at home, weaving wool for the family and raising model citizens: good soldiers, good politicians, good farmers.

But in the first century BC all those certaintiesthough they continued to be endlessly articulated by Roman writers and moralistswere thrown to the winds. By the lifetime of giants of history such as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian, contact with decadent Greeks and other fun-loving eastern Mediterranean types had brought an unstoppable craze for pleasure and luxury to Rome. I say contact with: I ought to say crushing of. The startling military success of the swiftly growing Empire was coupled with a ruthless stripping of defeated nations assets. Money flooded into Rome. After the great general Sulla put down a rebellion in Athens in 86 BC, to take but one example, he calmly shipped her movables back home: complete libraries, endless amounts of priceless sculpture, even living athletes were brought to Italy.

This wholesale pillaging, this forced transport of goods and ideas from the most cultured nation on earth, helped create the circumstances under which Roman poets really began to flourish. For the Greeks had more than high art going for them: their culture of elaborate dinner parties, or symposia , with delicious food and wine, music, and the company of gorgeous girls and boys, was already all the rage in Rome. Sulla himself, a highly successful, driven and at times chillingly cruel military leader, was said to enjoy wild parties and the company of singers, actors and tarts.

As this bullish little city brought to heel more and more foreign nations, it began to be shaken by political turbulence on a devastating scale at home. In 81 BC, Sulla became sole dictator, brutally overturning four centuries of proudly polished republican ideology. Even though he resigned his dictatorship in 79 BC, the door to absolute rule had been opened a chink.