This may not seem to be news, or to be about art, but Ovid's verses offer an insight into the most worrying cultural news of 2010. But apparently they were far less macho than the Elizabethans, far more subtle in their attitudes to sex. The Romans are always being portrayed as imperialists, conquerors, crucifiers. He makes a disarming, and disarmed, poem into a crazed, misogynistic rant. But where Ovid says it was not the fault of his mistress, for "was the girl not shapely, did she not make herself lovely" (At non formosa est, at non ben culta puella), Marlowe blames his lover for his fault: "Either she was foul, or her attire was bad, / Or she was not the wench I wished t'have had."Throughout his version, Marlowe reverses the sense in which modern translators take Ovid's lines. It was translated by the spy and dramatist Christopher Marlowe into sixteenth-century English. In one of his poems, he writes about not being able to get an erection while lying with a beautiful woman – and he explores this sad episode in eloquent detail. He may be an old writer, but at times he is a new man. There is definitely something very special about Ovid's erotic poetry. I've recently been reading Ovid's poems the Amores, published a few years BC, and still able to capture modern readers. When it comes to writing about sex, ancient Romans do it in togas while feeding each other grapes.
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