This is a new translation by Tom Payne. Are you a sought-after dreamboat forever turning down invitations from attractive admirers? Is your life filled with passionate escapades and fashionable parties? And do you look and feel fantastic all the time? If not, then perhaps there is something you can learn from Ovid, the best teacher on the subject of love in all of history. This little book may have been written in the days of chariot races, gladiators and emperors, but the advice within its covers is enduringly useful and entertaining. "The Art of Love" contains all men need to know about the best places to pick up girls, how to handle illicit affairs, how to look after a girlfriend when she has a cold, how to dress suavely and how to make women jealous. It also has plenty of tips for women ranging from how to create a beguiling hairstyle to how to seduce men at parties and show off your best attributes while frolicking in bed. It even contains the companion volume "The Cure for Love" to help you through the hard times if things go wrong. This delightfully witty handbook was found so shocking on its first publication that poor Ovid was sent into exile in disgrace. Since the Emperor Augustus had it taken off the shelves of Rome's libraries in 8 AD it has also been banned by the Vatican and the US Customs Office at various points in its illustrious career. It includes an introduction by Hephzibah Anderson.

About the Author

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Italy on 20 March 43 BC. He was educated in Rome and worked as a public official before taking up poetry full-time. His earliest surviving work is the collection of love poems called the Amores, which was followed by the Heroides. The Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and the Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love) were probably written between 2 BC and 2 AD. These were followed by his two epic poems the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. In 8 AD Ovid fell out of favour with the Emperor Augustus due to a 'carmen et error' ('a poem and a mistake') and was banished to what is now Romania. While in exile he wrote Tristia, Ibis and the Epistulae ex Ponto which consists of letters appealing for help in his efforts to be recalled to Rome. Ovid died in exile in 18 AD. Tom Payne was born in 1971. He read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. For four years he was deputy literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Dorset, and teaches English and Classics at Sherborne School.

Prizes

'Any man who shows, with such poetic readability, that what is happening between the sexes today was happening two thousand years ago - and that, therefore, the beating out of one's guilt-ridden, female brains is something of a waste of time - has to be a hero' Independent