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      IT IS A STRANGE THOUGH CRITICAL IRONY THAT OVID (43 B.C.E.–17 C.E.), the ancient world’s greatest love poet, has a reputation for outstanding frivolity, particularly in his fundamental erotic works, the Amores (Loves) and Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Frivolity and romantic love don’t match up very well in our minds.

      But from one angle that characterization makes sense. Ovid is one of our richest sources on otium, literally “leisure,” and in Rome the word was particularly suggestive of things that are extra, ephemeral, disposable—such as the love affairs a young man might indulge in as long as they did not involve serious infatuation that might distract him from duties and prescribed ambitions. Every relationship Ovid depicts comes under the heading of dalliance: any assertion of real, lasting emotional involvement is canceled out by the poet’s satirical wit.

      His persona’s involvement with a woman whom he calls Corinna in the Amores amounts to little but a series of clichés brilliantly undercut: the lover constantly protests his helplessness, for example, but his superb rhetorical control in itself makes that protest ridiculous. He is far more interested in declaiming on stock themes such as the wickedness of sailing, and in creating dramatizations in which Corinna—or another woman, or more than one—is a mere prop. In Book II, Poem 11 of the Amores, Corinna is about to go to sea, and he protests her decision and prays for her safety in fifty-six allusive lines that would be absurdly pretentious if he meant a word of them.

      Ars Amatoria, for its part, is a parody in its very form, that of didactic verse. Two long, discursive books instruct men on the science of selecting a woman, flirting with her, handling her—then, briefly, how to please her in bed. A third book tells women how to handle their side of the romantic confidence game. Again, spicing up what by this time had become the pabulum of literary eroticism is Ovid’s prevailing technique.

      Ovid’s love poetry is therefore the antithesis of negotium and its literature. Negotium was almost the defining condition for respectable men of the citizen class. I prefer to translate the word according to its etymology, as “non-leisure” rather than “business,” because it covers everything someone would do to advance his interests in the public sphere. First, there were private commercial dealings, politics, and public administration, often jumbled together—all three were based on rhetoric, or the science of speaking and writing. Witness the orator Cicero’s mammoth yet exquisitely crafted personal correspondence that complements his published speeches and treatises. But negotium included even literary avocations such as writing history or poetry, a rather shocking example of which was Cicero’s (now mercifully lost) epic poem De consulatu suo (On His [Own] Consulship), celebrating his alleged heroism in Rome’s highest public office. The literature of negotium purported to show a man at his real, solid best.

      The literature of otium seems to have emerged only a generation or two before Ovid and is first extant in the work of the poet Catullus (who died, young, in the mid-fifties B.C.E.). Ovid’s erotic poetry represents—to my mind, anyway—the ancient world’s tightest combination of delight in the world with delight in writing. He is by far the keenest observer of early Imperial Rome’s details, and the wittiest confabulator to use this material, from the look and sound of public entertainments to the mechanics of recreational sex, and from the distant spectacles of large historical events to the moods in an apartment where a courtesan tries a new hairstyle to better suit the shape of her face or fights for her life after an abortion.

      But even though some of the topics are still customarily called “light,” the term “frivolous” is unfair: at this stage of his career (as opposed to his time of exile after 8 C.E., when loneliness, humiliation, and a campaign to be recalled produced what can look like real personal writing), Ovid is not concerned with anything so trivial as his own physical desires or emotional attachments, or even his own wider