foreign [Music] Valentine's Day is upon us a time for overrated restaurants ribbon be decked boxes of underwhelming chocolates and other desperate attempts to foist romance upon an otherwise dismal time of year beneath its mercenary trimmings Valentine's Day is about love and so is this video the love as we'll see may be too strong a word to the Greeks and Romans love was a god Eros to the Greeks Cupid or Amor to the Romans he has personified in the myths love is an unprepossessing little wretch who flits about in afflicting affection upon mismatched pairs of gods
and Mortals eventually Zeus got fed up with this but not before Cupid became a fixture of Roman art who often multiplied into those little arotes who Frolic on the fringes of so many mosaics the precursors of those vast flocks of cherubs on Baroque Church ceilings the most famous classical discussion of Love is Plato's Symposium a dialogue that presents six Splendid speeches on the power of Eros which range from Fairly typical rhetorical tinsel 2A madcap fantasy put into the mouth of Aristophanes which imagines that men and women were formed from creatures with two minds but a
single body leaving them forever Longing To Be whole but the showstopper as usual in a platonic dialogue is a speech delivered by Socrates who claims that love is ultimately a longing for beauty wherewith the Mind ascends to contemplation of all good things the original definition of photonic love in general however classical Greek literature has little good to say about romantic love with the partial and distressing exception of affection directed toward hairless adolescent boys heterosexual love gets a somewhat better rap inhalenistic and Imperial Greek literature an atmosphere of earnest fumbling romance for example pervades the Greek
novel the Romans as usual paired at the Greeks in their literature Latin allergic poetry by the likes of catellus and papers revolves obsessively around the figure of The elusive mistress and would seem to be some deeply unhealthy relationships but it was Avid who was the great Latin love poet while still a very young man avad produced the Amores a series of poems grappling with various Affairs of the heart and loins is next and much more distinctive work was ARS amatorya the art of Love whose two books claimed to instruct Men first how to woo women
and second how to hold the affections of women already wooed and won an additional book composed later advised women on the best ways to find a man much more on Avid in a moment first a brief PSA about the new toldenstone only fans page just kidding the brief words actually about this video's current corporate partner foreo Sweden be aware of the bear the forayo bear if you're looking for a gift for your significant other look no further than foreo a world leader in skin care and beauty products one of froyo's Best Selling devices is the
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foreo bear and the Art of Loving of its tips for picking up chicks in a swinging August in Rome make four interesting reading eligible ladies he tells us are sure to be found strolling in Shady porticos watching plays at the theater and cheering chariots at the circus at the circus incidentally I would suggest starting with small talk about horses dinner parties are also good places to mingle though of it observes that if you are trying to seduce a married lady you should be sure to befriend her husband first if all else fails you can try
sleeping with a ladies maid though this normally backfires love letters and compliments dripping with sincerity or some approximation thereof are much safer and a prayer or two to the proper God never hurts in general Avid advises would be lovers that if they keep their togus clean Nails trimmed and chins up Fortune will favor the Bold the poems of solpisha one of the few female Roman poets whose work has survived provide a whiplash inducingly different perspective on The Dating Game writing in the allergic mode so Pisha describes a passionate relationship with a man named cyrinthus whom
she is forced to meet in secret at night cerenthus repays her devotion by having an affair with a prostitute in petronius's satiricon two men compete for the affections of a wayward adolescent boy in a love triangle that frankly has not aged well the courtship if it can be called that involves the seat a great deal of wine and an orgy honoring the felic God priapus that I was certainly never assigned in high school Latin the real dimension of all this is visible in the graffiti of Pompeii a famous series of messages for example was scratched
on the wall of a bar by two men named Severus and successes who were both interested in a bar maid named Iris Severus wrote first claiming that Iris loved him and they actually talked to successes because she felt sorry for him successes replied below claiming that he was more handsome than Severus and wickedly Charming besides Severus unimpressed wrote again telling successes to leave Iris alone sadly we don't have iris's side of the story although Love and Marriage are not necessarily found together they often live in the same neighborhood that was certainly so in the Roman
world where the goal of love was always supposed to be wedded bliss or at least Mutual resignation within the bounds of matrimony the ultimate object of marriage of course was generally deemed to be the more or less efficient production of legitimate children not all marriages were arranged but quite a few were especially on the loftier rungs of the social ladder amid the gritty politics of late Republic politicians matched their matrimonial alliances to their political ties which resulted in some men changing wives about as often as their togas the wife swapping was less frenetic in the
Imperial era since politics didn't matter much anymore but since money never went out of style Elite family is considered very carefully whom their sons and daughters would wed sometimes arranging matches when the future bride and groom were still hapless infants the Potter families of a Roman family was not legally permitted to compel his sons and daughters to accept the match she had chosen but since it was socially and financially unwise to ignore his wishes father usually knew best it was especially hard for a woman to refuse an arranged match both because women had less legal
agency and because most Roman girls married when they were very young lower on the social scale matters were often more organic if not necessarily more harmonious middle-class families were of course just as concerned about the suitability of potential sons and daughters-in-law and just as willing to arrange marriages as their Elite counterparts but a judge from Egyptian papyri a fair number of middle-class marriages were at least initially love matches among the more stable marriages in Egypt were those between brothers and sisters who at least knew each other well Roman soldiers were forbidden to marry until the
reign of septimius Severus but many established long-term relationships with local women during their terms of service which might be made official after they were discharged tombstones confirm that some women followed soldiers from one end of the Empire to the other as they were transferred for soldiers as for free men of all classes the world's oldest profession provided the most efficient means of finding love prostitution was legal acknowledged and gratefully taxed in the Roman world in Pompeii a city of about twelve thousand some 40 places have been associated with prostitution from back rooms and taverns to
the famous purpose-built lupinar beloved of modern tour groups whose frescoes are a little too hot for YouTube and on that note while you search for those images I'll close with my customary plugs I have two other YouTube channels which you statistically speaking have never watched told in stone footnotes presents my podcast and Q and A's scenic route to the Past follow us my historical quests why not give your significant other my book naked statues theft Gladiators and war elephants thanks for watching
