Abstract

The concept of an ‘art of love’ has been popularised for all time by the naughty masterpiece of Ovid. A good deal of critical attention has been devoted to this work in recent times, including some to his possible sources, but under this latter rubric attention has chiefly been directed rather to his parody of more serious types of handbook, such as an ars medica, an ars grammatica, or an ars rhetorica, than to the possibility of his having predecessors in the actual ‘art’ of love.