Ovid's Rationalization Of Love Analysis

We have read that the power of love seems to make people do crazy things for no reason other than a magical force somehow controls them. This magical force that seems to existing through all these poems, is known as love. Poets in all eras in history have tried to have a reasonable explanation for this occurrence but they never seem to be able to find an explanation. As we start to look at Roman poetry, the author Ovid’s rationalization of love seems to be a man’s attempt to overcome the love of a puella, which is not the case for the poems by the authors Catullus,, Propertius, and Tibullus. These three poets differ in their description of love, as Ovid would describe their love as weak and poor. The feelings the men are having for the women …show more content…
We see this in way the author’s sexual needs are expressed in their poetry. The men clearly care about their puella. The downside of this love is that the men are pathetically in love with women, who do not love them back as much as they do. This seemed to be central theme we have read about in Greek poetry, as It dealt with the idea of unrequited love. This unexplainable emotions, has a hold over the men who fall head over heels for their puella, who won’t love them back. Some of the author’s ways of describing this love include the torture they encounter with a woman’s cruelty in depriving him his sexual advances. In the poems by Propertius, we see the man come home to lay with his puella, only to be rejected by her. “Once, Cynthia, I took the leafy crown from own brow and plead the garland on your head, and then I played at forming curls, with your loose hair, than gave to you Some piffled apples, gifts “.(pg. 82) Propertius explains that he is so weak for Cynthia and that she is really in control of the relationship, which in the end she kicks him out of her house. The authors of this time thought that women were the most beautiful things at the time and that they were willing to do whatever they could to be with women, even if meant their hearts being broken. These men need to have a love but are so weak that the women really control what they …show more content…
As the forms explain this love are very different in nature, we can still see that one central ideas seems to be the focus in each poem, the idea that women played an important role in the writings of men. Even though we haven’t encountered as many women writers as male authors, I understand that Roman and Greek poems really liked to write about females, either as sexual ideas or the person themselves. We don’t seem to have a lot of strong women who really give us a clear example of their lives at the time, but have to use these male perspectives of them to understand who they were at this time. Its great to see the two sides that men felt about the role of women at this time. Either the men were madly in love with the females and feel head over heels and did whatever they could to attract the patella, or in Ovid’s case, go above the female and just enjoy life and sleep with as many women as they could. Both viewpoints, give us an example of how these male authors looked and dealt with women at the