A Natural History of Love (9 page)

Love is a kind of war, and no assignment for cowards. Where those banners fly, heroes are always on guard.

Soft, those barracks? They know long marches, terrible weather, Night and winter and storm, grief and excessive fatigue.

Often the rain pelts down from the drenching cloudbursts of heaven, Often you lie on the ground, wrapped in a mantle of cold.

If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it, Though it is clear as the day, swear up and down it’s a lie.

Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive, That would establish your guilt far beyond anything else.

Wear yourself out if you must, and prove, in her bed, that you could not Posssibly be that good, coming from some other girl.

It was Ovid’s bad luck to publish
The Art of Love
during the reign of Augustus, at a time when the emperor decided to get tough about the city’s plummeting birthrate. Rome’s formidable rates of sterility, miscarriages, and stillbirths were most likely the result of chronic lead poisoning. Each day, Romans unwittingly dosed themselves with lead through the pipes that carried drinking water, the lead-based face powder and other cosmetics women used, the cooking pots, and the syrup used to sweeten cheap wine. Another possibility is that the men’s perpetually coddled testicles rendered them sterile. Men and women both spent a lot of time stewing in the baths, and we now know that raising the temperature of the testicles in hot water can reduce the sperm count. Whatever the cause of this barrenness, in 18
B.C
. Augustus tried to remedy it through a system of rewards and punishments. He imposed strict marriage laws to prevent illegitimate children (because they might be aborted or killed), encourage large families, and not waste any fertile woman’s womb. Adultery had been a private, family matter of grave importance. Augustus shoved it into the law courts and changed it from an act of infidelity to an act of sedition. Henceforth, he decreed, any man who discovered his wife’s adultery had to divorce her or be prosecuted himself. The wife and her lover would then be exiled (in different directions). Half their wealth would be confiscated, and they would be forbidden ever to marry each other. A husband could engage a prostitute, but not keep a mistress. Widows were obliged to remarry within two years, and divorcées within eighteen months. Childless couples were discriminated against, as were unmarried men. Parents with three or more children were rewarded. Promiscuity was chastised. Augustus meant to stabilize the family, but the opposite happened. The divorce rate skyrocketed, since divorce was the only nonprosecutable form of dalliance.

All things considered, this was not the ideal climate in which to publish a guide to infidelity. But it was just the moment Ovid chose for his. Why? There’s an impish, swaggering quality to Ovid. I think he saw himself as a bawdy trafficker who lived on the edge, a purveyor of contraband morals. Anyway, he created a sensation in high society, had a brisk following, and became quite a famous rogue. This shocked and irritated Augustus, and was the excuse he gave for dealing harshly with him. But evidence points in another direction, indicating that Ovid became embroiled in some mysterious high-level scandal. No one knows exactly what happened—in part because Ovid was told to choose between silence and death—but clues in his writing suggest one of two possibilities. Either he dared to have an affair with the emperor’s wife, which the emperor discovered, or he was privy to an attempted coup d’état. If the empress fancied him, as well she might after reading his books, he would have been caught between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. He couldn’t have safely said yes or no. Whatever happened, it was serious enough for Augustus to banish him to a distant, uncivilized territory where he spent the remainder of his life longing for the sophistication and gaiety of Rome.

Some classical scholars dismiss Ovid as a scoundrel and pornographer interested only in sexual conquest. It’s amusing that, all these years later, people are still scandalized by his candor. Some wince at his bravado. Like Shakespeare, Ovid promises his girlfriends that they will become immortal through his poems. But, you know, he was right. We still sigh over his lover, Corinna, the heroine and temptress of his early
Loves
. Although we don’t know her real identity, she may have been his first wife. They were teenagers, “two adolescents, exploring a booby-trapped world of adult passions and temptations, and playing private games, first with their society, then—
liaisons dangereuses
—with one another….” In Ovid’s writings one finds a full catalog of love, from chaste worship to unregenerate conniving. Although Augustus banned
The Art of Love
, it has endured through the ages, as a brilliantly insightful meditation on love, vanity, and temptation.

DECORATING LEISURE TIME

As the city of Rome grew larger, extending itself in land, variety, and the imagination of its populace, the avenues for love multiplied. This happened in part because the quest for amusement became a kind of pastime. Where the Greeks sought to perfect the body through athletics, Romans perfected the leisure life. It could be bustling and avant-garde, provided it was ample. Roman women had more freedoms, and that brought a new confidence and self-respect. Greek women were so housebound that they had little chance to meet men with whom they might strike up a romance, even if they wished to. But Roman women had time and opportunity for intrigue, and morals were flexible enough that their affairs were found understandable, even if not officially condoned. Women of the right class were obsessed with their looks, spending the morning on coiffures, makeup, and choosing the perfect accessories for their outfits. In the afternoon, they lunched and shopped, organized the household, then tidied up their makeup and later prepared for a dinner party. Fashion has always been a badge of rank, as well as a creative outlet, but they were also obsessively refining and accentuating their physical appeal. Decoration can be a form of advertising, and the new commodity they had to offer was their worth and desirability.

A government thrives on order. Love is anarchic. Chaotic and emotional, we try so hard to impose what we aren’t on everything around us, and punish those who don’t live up to our ideals. On a walk this morning, I passed through the perfume of a honeysuckle bush so sweet and pleasing I turned around and followed it to its source. I did not mean to be diverted from my path by pleasure; I couldn’t help myself. In the same way, love distracts one from the tidiest plans, the narrowest course, the clearest goals. The Roman vision of social order grew, but so did the empire of love. Hard as Augustus tried to legislate morality, he was grappling with a seditious passion so natural for human beings that he was, essentially, warring with nature. To the Romans, love was not a good enough reason for marriage, but everyone understood its power and how, like a furious river, it could charge past hardship, law, or death.

*
In the first century B.C., sundials swept the imagination. Nobility and city folk were fascinated by them. But the earliest sundial can be traced to Egypt in 3500 B.C.; it consisted of a vertical stick arranged so that its shadow showed the sun’s progress across the sky. Berosus, the third-century B.C. Babylonian priest and astronomer, improved the sundial. And both Greeks and Romans had water clocks for days when the sun didn’t shine.

*
The seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas
, a magnificent, heart-wrenching opera, explores the tragedy in homespun melodies reminiscent of ballads and madrigals.

*
The word they used for brassiere was
mamillare
, and there was apparently a considerable need for them, because Latin includes two words for big-bosomed,
mammosa
and
mamme ata
.

THE MIDDLE AGES

THE BIRTH OF CHIVALRY

During the Middle Ages, France seethed with paradoxes. Plague, famine, and filth were Everyman’s constant companions. So-called witches were regularly burned at the stake, and heretics of all stripes were tortured and driven from their homes. Nobles played chess by waging war with one another, in the process destroying crops, terrorizing towns, and killing legions of innocent families. Gangs of outlaws scoured the countryside, looting and burning. No one felt safe from nature or from one another. But, at the same time, a modern-feeling civilization was starting to take hold in Europe. The population was growing, and new towns were being built, improved plows and other tools gave agriculture a boost, merchants had wares to sell, craftsmen busied themselves in the cities, and pilgrims traveled the roads and rivers. The world was in motion, and as Chaucer related so well, anyone could meet anyone on the crossroads to anywhere.

It’s no coincidence that spires began to appear on the churches. The entire era was gripped by the symbolism of the spire, which connected the earth and sky, the concrete with the abstract, the all-too-visible hovels—full of bodily functions, poverty, and fatigue—with the loftier realities of an invisible city. Could there be no relief from earth’s sweat and decay? Was it possible that a poor life led only downward to a carnal circus underground? People aspired toward heaven, which they depicted as pure, clean, deodorized, and brightly lit. (Throughout history, women have also been associated with cleanliness, that is, they’ve been held responsible for keeping things clean, and judged on the basis of how clean their house is, how well laundered their family. They’ve been required to be “pure” and “clean” sexually. Their virginity and virtue have been extended to the home.)

Etymologically speaking, a spire is the pointed head of a flower. The cathedral spires of the era, cast in stone and outlined in tiny stone buds, promise the resurrection of spring. I’ve often walked beside such churches in springtime and looked up at their spires through the identically budded branches of a tree. No doubt medieval strollers did the same, reassured by the symbolism. Records tell us that on holy days peasants thronged the churchyards in celebrations so lecherous and pagan that the clergymen reprimanded them. But people yearned for transcendence. In the heaven of their hopes, they abandoned the exhaustions of daily life. The times were infused with great spirituality.

In this atmosphere of the lofty and the mundane, a ritualized code of manners, called chivalry,
^*
arose to reconcile the worlds of warfare and religion by giving them a common enemy. “A moral gloss was needed that would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort.” By making the warriors knights of the lord, they supposedly fought for truth, goodness, piety, and the Church. In a solemn dedication ceremony, a knight would purify his soul through confession, receive communion, and take his sacred vows. Then he was free to slaughter for a holy cause.

It wasn’t easy being a knight, whose sole occupation was warfare, which meant hand-to-hand combat while wearing a suit of armor that wasn’t very flexible and weighed around fifty pounds. Lances, swords, and battle-axes were preferred weapons, and they were used during what amounted to traffic accidents—two riders galloping at each other at full speed. The ensuing crash usually hurled at least one rider to the ground, where getting up was like an overturned turtle’s efforts to right itself. Being a knight took immense strength and energy; and, if you didn’t exhibit plenty of what was called
prowess
, you were branded a sissy. Wounds were frequent, and they often became septic. Only the young could manage this lifestyle for long. Lest knights become unruly or psychopathic, chivalry’s code required that they be courteous and kind when dealing with civilians. Dandies in later eras, who spread their capes over puddles so that women might pass with unsullied ankles, inherited their sense of gallantry from the knights. A knight’s word was his bond; breaking it was an act of treason. This was the code, anyway. As often as not, the ideal differed from the reality. Soldiers were ruffians by trade, who settled disputes with violence, and they sometimes fought battles for lords whom they then murdered and robbed, or used the costume of chivalry to lure maidens whom they seduced or raped. According to one knight, La Tour Landry, he and his pals would ride into a village, lie like crazy to the local girls in order to bed them, then ride off like a band of armor-plated gigolos.