How To Get Over A Breakup: An Ancient Guide To Moving On, by Ovid. Translated and introduced by Michael Fontaine. Princeton University Press, 2024. Available in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook.

Ovid is the most famous of the amorous poets of Rome’s literary Golden Age.  What distinguishes him from his approximate contemporaries Tibullus and Propertius is his depth of insight, and this is why we still read him today. 

Publius Ovidius Naso was born near Rome in 43 B.C.  His wealthy father sent him to Rome to study law, but the impressionable young man soon found himself distracted by the allure of versification, and yearned to be a poet.  His despairing father pleaded with him to be practical, using the example of Homer, who died in penury, as a cautionary tale.  Ovid eventually rose to become a judge, but then abruptly resigned his position to pursue his poetic interests.  He traveled widely through Greece, Sicily, and the Near East, and presumably acquired extensive field experience in the art of venery.  His first verses, published in Rome in 14 B.C. under the unambiguous title Amores, brought him immediate fame. 

When he was about forty-six years of age, Ovid married a girl from a prominent family and tried to adapt to a more settled mode of life that might enhance his productivity.  His Heroides relates the loves stories of famous real and mythical women; and around 7 A.D. he achieved immortality with the Metamorphoses, a brilliant and original retelling of the classical mythological canon.  Yet he could not quite escape the whiff of scandal that his early reputation had engendered.  When he was fifty-one, the emperor Augustus issued a decree expelling him from Rome to the remote town of Tomi on the shores of the Black Sea.  Tomi was a miserable and isolated backwater; for a man of Ovid’s refinement and love of social intercourse, the sentence might as well have been a capital one. 

We do not know precisely why Augustus chose to banish Ovid, as the emperor discreetly chose to disclose no details.  He did, however, at the same time also eject from Rome his granddaughter Julia, and ordered that all of Ovid’s works be removed from the public libraries.  Apparently the dour emperor believed Ovid played some part in corrupting the girl, and had concluded that the poet’s continued presence in the capital was undermining public morals.  Condemned to the outer boundaries of the empire, Ovid died in bitter exile nine years later, never having been forgiven by Augustus. 

We are fortunate that a wonderful new translation of one of Ovid’s most fascinating poems has just been published by Dr. Michael Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University.  Fontaine has a knack for resurrecting forgotten literary gems, polishing them, and presenting their modern relevance to curious audiences.  His previous translations—namely The Pig War, How To Drink, and How To Grieve—have all followed this pattern.  He now turns his attention to Rome’s foremost apostle of love.  The Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love) first appeared around 2 A.D.  It contains just over 800 lines, but those lines pack an unrivaled density of practical insight.  The subject of the poem is how to recover from a failed love affair, and it turns out that there much more depth here than a casual reader might expect.  In his detailed Introduction, Fontaine explains how the Remedies for Love occupies a respectable place in the history of therapeutic literature. 

The Remedies for Love is no mere exercise in speculation.  As Fontaine explains, Ovid never would have achieved his popularity—or notoriety—unless he had provided his readers with specific and actionable advice.  And this is what we get out of this translation.  Fontaine has identified no less than thirty-eight actual techniques for recovering from a failed relationship.  Each of these “remedies” is culled for the reader in special headings and summarized in a separate section, a feature of the translation I found particularly helpful. Although a discreet reviewer will seek to maintain a tactful distance between himself and some of Ovid’s more candid and prurient pieces of advice, there is no doubt that any experienced traveler on love’s rough pathway will smile and nod in agreement as he works his way through Fontaine’s expertly translated pages.  Some of the more notable bits of counsel are as follows:  keep yourself active and busy, take a long journey, remember all that she cost you, don’t vent your grievances, get rid of pictures and writings about her, and many more.  The quote below gives the flavor of the whole: 

Avoid Places That Witness Encounters The Two Of You Had

Those trigger feelings of grief:  “Here’s where she lived…and here’s where she’d eat…that’s the bedroom we slept in…here, one adventurous night, we had incredible sex.”

Love recrudesces when chafed by reminders; they rub till the wound splits open all over again. Tiny mistakes harm the weak. Just as when embers are all but extinguished: you touch ’em with sulfur, fire comes roaring to life, going from nothing to huge—, so, unless you avoid those things that’ll bring love to life, love’s flame will flare up anew, though it was totally out. Greeks going home from Troy would have done better evading Caphereus and the revenge a bereaved father exacted with fires.

Painstaking sailors rejoice the moment they make it past Scylla. You must take pains to evade places you loved in the past. Treat them like danger zones to steer clear of, like shallows or rock reefs. That’s where Charybdis barfs up all the liquid she’s chugged.

When translating verse, especially ancient verse, the translator is always faced with hard decisions.  One of them is whether to attempt a verse translation, or opt for a prose rendition.  There are, of course, compelling arguments for either option.  Fontaine has preferred a prose translation, and that is the right choice for the Remedia Amoris.  A verse translation would inevitably have to be blank verse, and it is difficult to see how this would provide the reader with anything more that a prose translation could not provide.  The translation style is modern, colloquial, and fully annotated.  Readers desiring to refer to the original Latin text will be gratified to find it included in the second half of the book. 

Readers seeking to explore the dimly-lit alleys of classical literature will find this modern rendition of Remedies for Love entertaining, humorous, and, if we scratch beneath the surface, wise.  We do not expect wisdom from an antique poet who took such glee in ribaldry and mischief.  It is very easy to dismiss Ovid as a one-dimensional erotic poet whose goals were little more than manipulation and opportunism.  Certainly some critics have held this superficial view.  A deeper study of his work, however, reveals Ovid to have been a highly sensitive man, a gentle, sympathetic, and kind soul, entirely free of cynicism and malice.  He was, in fact, a true romantic who would have been entirely at home in the vivacious salons of the French philosophes.  Like many attention-seeking humorists and satirists, he occasionally enjoyed shocking others, and affected an undisciplined pen as a tonic for a tumescent personality.  And perhaps Ovid’s long acquaintance with the intoxications, and perturbations, of love had taught him that concealing his pearls behind a façade of impudence and mirth was, in fact, the best remedy of all. 

.