Why turn to The Rules when Ovid is so practical?

Ovid’s Art of Love seems so helpful at first, and full of plain common sense. Men, he says – by all means take care of your appearance, but don’t look like you’ve tried too hard. Women, put on your make-up, but don’t let anyone see you do it. If you’re so small you look like you’re sitting, stay sitting.

And who knew this? If you have halitosis, the best thing to do is to eat. Apparently your breath is less smelly when your stomach is digesting. There it is, in Latin elegiac couplets: you can tell at ten paces when someone’s on the Atkins diet.

When I was translating Ovid’s tips on love, and also on how to recover from it, I kept fighting the temptation to update things a little. Most of the time I held back. Just when he seems to sound like Dr Alex Comfort, or Nora Ephron, he comes out with something startling. What about that make-up for example? He gleefully reminds his readers that the lanolin women so eagerly apply to their faces is sebum from Greek sheep. The rouge he recommends come from “an Egyptian fish”.

An Egyptian fish? Textual scholars are stumped by that one, too. Most of them think it’s a reference to crocodile dung. Did they just say, crocodile dung? Yes: the Greek physician Galen wrote a chapter about the uses of crocodile dung, and also starling pooh. The former is used for lightening dark complexions. It makes you realise that for the ancients, halitosis was the least of your problems.

But it makes you realise, too, how good it is that the ancients wrote everything down. It’s what makes The Art of Love so splendidly about love, and also about life. His tips on how to find a lover, how to keep a lover, how women should keep their looks and their dignity (or what passed in Rome for dignity), and then, what to do if it all goes wrong – do seem to speak directly to us. We could do worse, at any rate. Why turn to The Rules when Ovid is so practical?

And yet, there are hints throughout that it’s the setting of ancient Rome that makes Ovid’s love what it is. Try pulling at a chariot race: it turns out that the Circus Maximus is the one place you can find mixed seating – and so usefully cramped. Or at a gladiator fight. No mixed seating this time, but what a metaphor: if you fall in love during a scrap to the death, Ovid calls you “part of the show”.

I love how Auden calls love the urge “to make / Some other kind of otherness your own”. Ovid uses a similar line, although by “other” he might mean somebody else’s lover. (That’s something else that’s alarming about Augustan Rome: adultery was illegal – not just immoral, illegal.) It’s true of men and women, but I can’t help thinking it’s true of Rome, too, and Ovid. He’s certainly “other”, but often enough, he’s ours.

Tom Payne, translator of the new edition of The Art of Love