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Women reading men: the female audience of the Ars amatoria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Sharon L. James
Sharon L. James
Affiliation:
Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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The female readership of the Ars amatoria has been for two millennia a subject fraught with problems both historical and theoretical. For example: in antiquity, did respectable women read the poem? Almost certainly, and they were almost certainly expected to. Were they intended to? Here less certainty is possible, not only because of the problem of divining authorial intention. Did non-respectable women, the real life analogues to the poem's fictive courtesans, read the Ars? Some of them – the elite ones – must have, but lower-level courtesans would have had less opportunity to acquire copies of the poem. On the textual, rather than historical, level, other questions remain, most of them unanswerable, such as the sincerity of the poem's disclaimers to matronae, the No-Wives-Allowed signs. The deliberate textual confusion between matrona and meretrix in Ars 3 blurs clear distinctions and makes it impossible to tell if the praeceptor Amoris anticipates or seeks respectable, elite women, in addition to his declared readers, the courtesans.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 54 , 2008 , pp. 136 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2008

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