Cover of Ars Amatoria

Ars Amatoria

by Ovid

Reading level
Plain English
Price
Free

About the book

"Ars Amatoria; or, The Art Of Love" by Ovid is an instructional elegy written in 2 AD. This three-book guide offers Romans practical advice on romance: men learn where to find women and how to keep them, while women discover strategies for winning and maintaining love. Written in elegant couplets and filled with mythology and everyday observations, Ovid's playful manual became so influential that medieval scholars dubbed the entire era the "Ovidian epoch," treating his tongue-in-cheek instructions as serious academic philosophy for centuries.

  • Latin poetry

Updated September 2026. Public domain in the USA. Text and summary from Project Gutenberg eBook #47677. Ars Amatoria on Wikipedia.

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