Entre o circus e o forum: poder, amor e amantes na Ars Amatoria de Ovídio (Séc. I a.C.- l d.C.)

Abstract

In this dissertation, we investigate the relations of love and power in the Augustan Urbs protagonized by the women depicted by the latin poet Publius Ovidius Naso, commonly known as Ovid. To that end, we take as our source Ars Amatoria, the elegy series written by this author between the years of I BC and I AD which teaches relationship skills to the citizens of imperial Rome. The temporal fragment under consideration in our study spans the second half of the first BC century and the first quarter of the following century, period wherein August founded the Principate and imposed to Roman society a program of Moral Reform. In this context, our main objective is to comprehend, in the light of Ars Amatoria, the poet's support of and tensions again the emperor's dictates. Hence we analyze the romantic relationships experienced by Ovid's female characters and examine how he conceived and utilized the spaces of Augustus's city in the scope of such relationships. The theoretical framework adopted in this work is that of Cultural History, guided by the concepts of representation, gender, city, body and coquetry. Furthermore, we employ the research methodology of Content Analysis. Lastly, we reason that Ovid devised writing strategies to express his conceptions of love in Ars Amatoria, without necessarily being punished by the emperor. Accordingly, we demonstrate that the poet did not confront, publicly and explicitly, the ruler's power and his program of Moral Reform, but, at the same time, that he proposed advices that promoted conflicting behaviors to the reformulation of social norms designed by Augustus