Speaker addresses Ovid and love
Ovid's poem "Ars amatoria" cannot be used as a universal textbook on the art of making love, Katharina Volk told an audience in Reed Hall yesterday in her speech "Ovid on How to Make Love in Rome," hosted by the Classics department. Ovid's "Ars amatoria," or The Art of Love, professes to teach the techniques of dating to an audience of young male Roman students. "The book paradoxically professes to teach something that everyone already knows" Volk said. The focus of the work is not on the experience of love, but the rational act of carrying it out and the technique of dating, Volk said. Volk noted Ovid's play on the word "amor," or love, which can reference emotional love, sexual intercourse or the Roman god of love. The "Ars amatoria" suggests techniques for talking and conversing with women, as well as good places to meet women in Augustan Rome.