Gibson(R.K.), Green(S.), Sharrock(A.) (edd.) The Art of Love. Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Pp. xii + 375. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cased, £60. ISBN: 978-0-19-927777-3

• Published in: The Classical Review Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 129 - 131
• Main Author: INGLEHEART, JENNIFER
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.01.2008
• Subjects: Ovid (43 BC-17 AD); Reviews
• ISSN: 0009-840X; 1464-3561
• DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X07002144

John Henderson kicks o exploration of Erotics with a well-calculated glance at the bedroom scene at the end of Ars 2, and the issues for the structure and ethos of the poem raised by the apparent equality of male and female at this juncture; the appendix on Ovidian play with numbers oers many suggestive comments of wider poetic signicance. Sexual positions are given an explicitly Augustan twist by The Classical Review vol. 58 no. 1 The Classical Association 2008; all rights reserved 130 the classical review Alessandro Barchiesi, who probes the status of both women and Augustus in the Ars via the unusual approach of focussing on the meeting-places in the text between Livia (the sole historical Roman female named in this text, whose unprecedented role within the domus Augusta Ovid plays up) and Andromache (very much part of the mythological world of the Ars, yet out of place in an elegiac milieu, and presented in a sexually degrading position); he thus develops recent studies of polarisation of women in Augustan Rome.1 One of the main proponents of such work, Roy Gibson, provides valuable expansion in the next chapter on the related themes of moderation and excess in Ars 3 identied in his 2003 commentary. The complementary nature of these apparently radically opposed approaches is illustrated when both chapters conclude by exploring the reactions of readers, as Volk speculates about the gender imbalance in Roman-specic advice in the Ars for men (two books) and women (one book; or two if Ovids erotodidactic corpus should be broadened to include the Medicamina), and Myerowitz Levine closes with some remarks on the usefulness of the Ars as a means of reecting upon the modern discipline of Classics. According to M. the elegists treat Venus dierently, depending on their response to Augustus, which is diverse: