??????There are many I rank above myself,
??????But others rank me with them,
??????And I
the best-seller.
No wonder that he was; no Roman writer, and few later ones, wrote as stylishly about sexual intrigue as Ovid. Here he is giving his advice to a girlfriend:
??????And once you get to the bedroom
??????Fill it with every delight; let’s have no modesty there.
??????Once you are out of there, though, abandon abandonment, darling—
??????Bed is the only place where you can act as you please.
??????There it is no disgrace to fling your dress in a corner,
??????There it is no disgrace lying with thigh under thigh,
??????There it is proper for tongues, as well as for lips, to be kissing,
??????There let passion employ all the inventions of love.
??????There use all of the words, the helpful cries, and the whispers,
??????There let the squeak of the bed appear to be keeping in time.
And husbands, particularly older ones, are there to be cuckolded by their lovelorn, randy wives:
??????Tacticians recommend the night attack,
??????Use of the spearhead, catching the foe asleep,
??????Lovers use them too—to exploit a sleeping husband,
??????Thrusting hard while the enemy snores.
Such cheerful promiscuity did not conform to the standards of “family values” that Augustus was determined to reinforce in Rome. Augustus believed in restraint; Ovid did not. Anyone who has ever had hot sex on a hot afternoon is his co-conspirator. In comes his Corinna:
??????Sheer though it was, I pulled the dress away;
she resisted, more or less.
??????It offered little cover, I must say,
??????And why put up a fight to save a dress?
??????So soon she stood there naked, and I saw,
??????Not only saw, but felt, perfection there,
??????Hands moving over beauty without flaw,
??????The breasts, the thighs, the triangle of hair.
Ovid’s free sexuality certainly contributed to his popularity, and is one of the reasons he is still read today, but the main reason for his influence in Roman times—which rivaled that of Virgil—was that his verse became Rome’s main source for Greek mythology. The divinities of Roman religion tended to be nature spirits—Fortuna, Mens Bona—without personalities. It was Ovid who gave the Roman gods faces—and genitals to go with them. He did most to invent the idea of mythology as entertainment, a comedy of manners, full of dramatic or scandalous stories about the gods’ doings on Olympus: as Richard Jenkyns observed, “Ovid is nearer to Offenbach than to Homer.” He became the favorite and most imitated Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance and was often rendered into English, especially by Chaucer and Spenser. Echoes of him appear in Shakespeare, and one of the greatest lines in Christopher Marlowe’s plays, uttered by Dr. Faustus as he awaits damnation, is quoted directly from Ovid:
We know little about Augustus’ own sexual predilections. But we do know about some of his tastes in other areas, particularly architecture and city planning. Literature would ensure some part of his cultural survival, but marble would do so even more solidly.
Augustus had a great enthusiasm for building. He wanted to make Rome unsurpassably beautiful. For that reason, it had to become Greek; but bigger. His famous declaration that he had found a city of mud brick and left it marble was, to a surprising extent, true. The marble was more often a thick facing veneer over common brick than solid masonry blocks, but not always. Much of it was of an intimidating, or inspiring, solidity, of which the extreme example was the enormous Forum of Augustus itself. He fulfilled Julius Caesar’s plans for a monumental rebuilding—a creation, really—of the architecturally diffuse heart of Rome, which had been left undone by his murder.
To say Augustus mobilized the Roman building industry is to understate it. He declared he had built (or restored) eighty-two Roman temples alone in one year—many gods, many temples—apart from other structures, and this was no mere boast.
The show material was marble, the best available, from the Luna quarries in Carrara, in the north. Luna marble was the finest available if you wanted perfect whiteness, which Augustus and his builders did. Its whiteness rivaled that of the moon, from which it took its name. Luna marble tended to be very homogeneous and, to the extent that any sedimentary and metamorphic rock can be, free of internal veins and cracks. This reduced the risk that unexpected disfigurements would appear in the whiteness of an architrave or, worse, in the cheek of a Venus or a general. On buildings it was combined with other marbles, whose variety of origins symbolized the vast spread of
