Ars amatōria, poem in three books of elegiacs by Ovid, written not before 1 BC. Its title means ‘treatise on love’; it is in fact a mock-didactic poem on the art of seduction, written for a cultivated and pleasure-loving society where love is a game to be played with style and good humour. The first two books consist of instructions to men, the third of instructions to women on how to entice men. There are intriguing glimpses of Roman life and manners—the circus, the theatre, the banquet. The work was very popular, and quotations from it have been found on the walls of Pompeii. With its frivolous attitude to sexual morality it seems to have been one reason why the emperor Augustus banished the poet.

The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Copyright © 1993, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.