Ars Amatoria - Reception

Reception

The work was such a popular success that the poet wrote a sequel, Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love). At an early recitatio, however, S. Vivianus Rhesus is noted as having walked out in disgust.

The assumption that the 'licentiousness' of the Ars amatoria was responsible in part for Ovid's relegation (banishment) by Augustus in AD 8 is dubious, and seems rather to reflect modern sensibilities than historical fact. For one thing, the Ars amatoria had been in circulation for eight years by the time of the relegation, and the book postdates the Julian Marriage Laws by eighteen years. Secondly, it is hardly likely that Augustus, after forty years unchallenged in the purple, felt the poetry of Ovid to be a serious threat or even embarrassment to his social policies. Thirdly, Ovid's own statement from his Black Sea exile that his relegation was because of 'carmen et error' ('a song and a mistake') is, for many reasons, hardly admissible.

It is more probable that Ovid was somehow caught up in factional politics connected with the succession: Postumus Agrippa, Augustus' adopted son, and Augustus' granddaughter, Vipsania Julilla, were both relegated at around the same time. This would also explain why Ovid was not reprieved when Augustus was succeeded by Agrippa's rival Tiberius. It is likely, then, that the Ars amatoria was used as an excuse for the relegation. This would be neither the first nor the last time a 'crackdown on immorality' disguised an uncomfortable political secret.