The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  OVID, THE BEST KNOWN OF THE ROMAN LOVE POETS, PRESENTS amor as a kind of game that anyone can play as long as you know the rules. And he set out—somewhat tongue in cheek—to teach those rules in his Art of Love (Ars amatoria), which gained instant popularity in his day, became fashionable once again during the Middle Ages, and even today has a worldwide following through numerous translations—at least ten in English alone listed on Amazon.com.

  For Ovid love is a curious mixture of sex and sentiment, with an emphasis on the former. In fact, whenever he uses the word “heart” for a man, the reader should equate it with eros—sexual desire. Ovid’s heroes (himself, first of all) are warriors committed to “winning” and bedding a designated woman:

  Love is a warfare: sluggards be dismissed.

  No faint-heart ’neath this banner may enlist.

  Eros, according to Ovid, had no law outside itself, no greater morality binding the heart than its own passion. The poet had nothing but applause for the bold man who “shows a lover’s heart,” by which he meant a man willing to overcome daunting obstacles in pursuit of an irresistible woman. While he assumed that men will be the seducers and women the seduced, the women he knew were by no means passive players in the game of love.

  And what, then, of woman’s heart? Hers, too, was the home of Eros, but according to Ovid, it was girded by numerous other desires such as money, flattery, secrecy, and reputation. Ovid did not offer an attractive portrait of the women he lusted after. There was one area, however, where he gave woman her due, and that was the bedroom. Here he expected that she would be his match, that she too would enjoy sex as much as he. As he put it: “I hate a union that exhausts not both.” Somehow Ovid managed to describe the intimacies of lovemaking without sounding pornographic. Any woman, then or now, would appreciate his understanding of how erotic enjoyment can be shared equally, as expressed in the following lines:

  Love’s climax never should be rushed, I say,

  But worked up softly, lingering all the way.

  The parts a woman loves to have caressed

  Once found, caress.…

  But ne’er must you with fuller sail outpace

  Your consort, nor she beat you in the race:

  Together reach the goal; it’s rapture’s height

  When man and woman in collapse unite.

  This, then, is Ovid’s vision of a sated “heart.” Taking his cues from the love trysts of Venus, Mars, and other Greco-Roman gods, he pictured love in the form of two bodies wrapped together in mutual delight. There is nothing ethereal in this vision, none of the metaphysical idealism that Plato had espoused four centuries earlier, nor the religious connotations Dante would invest in love thirteen hundred years later, nor the overwrought emotional states of nineteenth-century Romantics. Ovidian love is embedded in the flesh, with the “heart” a lofty euphemism for the genitals.

  AMONG FREE ROMANS MARRIAGE HAD LESS TO DO WITH erotic love than with family ties, social position, property, and progeny. Yet the heart was still supposed to inspire tender feelings between husbands and wives. In fact, the wedding ring given to the bride to wear on her fourth finger was believed to have a special connection to the heart, as explained by the second-century Latin author and grammarian Aulus Gellius:

  When the human body is cut open as the Egyptians do… a very delicate nerve is found which starts from the [ring] finger and travels to the heart. It is, therefore, thought seemly to give to this finger in preference to all others the honor of the ring, on account of the loose connection which links it with the principal organ.

  What a fanciful notion! Although it has no basis whatsoever in our current knowledge of anatomy, the Roman belief that a small vein called the vena amoris (vein of love) ran from the fourth finger to the heart endured for centuries. It was still current in the fifth century CE, as evidenced by the Latin playwright Macrobius in his Saturnalia, and even appeared regularly in the Middle Ages as part of marriage ceremonies. In medieval Salisbury, England, the liturgy for the marriage service stated emphatically that the groom should place a ring on the bride’s fourth finger “because in that finger there is a certain vein, which runs from thence as far as the heart, and inward affection.” Thus the Romans established the practice of placing a ring on the bride’s finger to seal the wedding ceremony and strengthen the bride’s affection.

  The Roman wife who lived up to expectations would sometimes be honored at her death with a nostalgic reference to her loving heart. In this vein an epitaph from the second century BCE reads, “Here is the unlovely grave of a lovely woman.… She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two sons.… She was graceful in her speech and elegant in her step. She kept the home.” These words praise the deceased wife as a mother, homemaker, graceful speaker, and possessor of a faithful heart.

  Men, too, were expected to harbor sweet feelings in their hearts for their wives. The great statesman Cicero began a letter to his first wife, Terentia, in 58 BCE: “Light of my life, my heart’s desire. To think that you, darling Terentia, are so tormented.” Cicero’s marriage to his “heart’s desire” lasted for more than thirty years, but the couple were frequently separated during that time, often by his choice. Eventually they divorced, which permitted him to marry Publilia, his very young ward, who came with a substantial dowry. The true love of Cicero’s life was his daughter, Tullia, who died only a month or so after his second marriage. Unable to stop crying, he experienced what we today would recognize as deep depression. Because the Romans disapproved of public displays of grief, especially regarding a woman, Cicero had to conceal his emotions, and shortly afterward he ended his short-lived marriage to Publilia.

  Catullus, when he was not writing about Lesbia, described the kind of heart considered appropriate for each half of a Roman couple. The husband: “Within his inmost heart a fire / Is flaming up of sweet desire.” The wife: “Submissive to her lord’s control / Around her heart love’s tendrils bind.” Would today’s young Americans find such hearts suitable, with the wife’s heart submissive to her husband’s? I don’t think so.

  And yet compared to many other countries yesterday and today, Roman women were often fairly independent. They were not confined to a woman’s section in their homes, and they could circulate with relative freedom outside the house. They probably had little say about the husbands their families selected for them, but in contrast to polygamous societies, the bride did not have to share her husband with other wives, as Roman law allowed a man only one spouse (at a time). If the dictates of her heart drove her beyond the marital bed into the arms of a lover, her husband had the right to divorce her but not to kill her, as he might have done with impunity in earlier times.

  Emperor Augustus, wishing to rein in married women’s sexual liberties, introduced the Lex Julia de adulteris in 18–17 BCE, which made adultery a serious crime. Ten years later he suddenly sent Ovid into exile and offered two causes for this radical judgment: a poem (presumably The Art of Love) and an unspecified “indiscretion.” In his battle against marital infidelity (which didn’t affect his personal behavior), Augustus did not spare members of his own family: both his daughter Julia and his granddaughter, the younger Julia, were banished for the same offense. Though Ovid was obliged to spend the last years of his life in exile on the distant shores of the Black Sea, he was not forgotten in Rome, where his works continued to be immensely popular.

  DID GREEKS AND ROMANS BELIEVE THAT ALL-POWERFUL gods on Mount Olympus initiated love between humans? Let’s leave the last word to Ovid: “Gods have their uses, let’s believe they’re there.” Many of Ovid’s contemporaries shared his skepticism. Some Greeks and Romans were probably fervent believers, whereas others—certainly as far back as Plato—understood the gods as allegorical figures, character types, or divine essences. In Greek and Roman myths the gods acted just like human beings: they made love and war, experienced jealousy and rage, committed adultery, lied, cheated, seduced male youths and female maids, and sometimes even stole babes
. They had no compunctions using their supernatural powers to conquer a love object for themselves or to cause a mortal to fall disastrously in love.

  Their powers, like forces of nature, were fundamentally amoral, and the sexual love they promoted in humans was frequently destructive. For example, Medea, who helped Jason acquire the Golden Fleece, ended up murdering their children in a fit of rage when he abandoned her for another woman. Phaedra, who fell in love with her stepson, Hyppolitus, ultimately caused his death as well as her own. Helen, joined to Paris by the machinations of Aphrodite, subsequently became responsible for the Trojan War—the playwright Aeschylus aptly called her “a heart-eating flower of love.” In these and other instances ancient male writers endowed mythological females with hearts capable of the most horrendous deeds. Rarely was the heart united harmoniously with another heart; instead, it was often “eaten,” pierced, conquered, invaded, ripped apart, destroyed.

  Still, Greeks and Romans looked to marriage as a possible incubator for tender, mutually loving hearts. Starting with Penelope and Odysseus in the Odyssey, Greek literature offered the picture of man and wife bound together by affection, family ties, and loyalty to one another. Whatever the daily life of Greek and Roman couples might have been—contentious, miserable, sweet, peaceful, or a mosaic of many possible emotional states—they at least paid lip service to an ideal vision of conjugal love. Flaming romantic love, such as we know it today, was to be feared rather than embraced.

  While the heart was the part of the body most frequently associated with love, the classical world did not ignore the genitalia: Greek vases featured scenes of copulation in every possible position, and ancient Athenians even erected large-scale monuments to the phallus. Nude statues of Roman gods and goddesses did not cover up the penis or female breasts, and Ovid made daring verbal allusions to “the parts a woman loves to have caressed.” Still, only the most cynical Greek or Roman would have argued that love resided solely between one’s legs.

  Chapter 2

  Arabic Songs from the Heart

  AFTER THE FALL OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE (in 476 CE) secular love left few written traces in Europe but found oral and written expression across the Mediterranean in North Africa. There, as in ancient Greece and Rome, language linked the heart to love. Arabic bards known as rawis memorized and recited heartfelt love poems, which ranged from risky heterosexual trysts within nomadic tents and “male-male passion” to the chaste adoration of a wellborn married lady. Collected in writing during the eighth and ninth centuries, these poems give us a glimpse of love among nomadic Bedouins before the death of Muhammed in 632. Afterward religion supplanted amorous love as the dominant subject of Arabic poetry.

  The pre-Islamic lover’s heart was often sad and filled with longing for a specific woman. Among nomads meetings were often temporary and partings an occasion for sorrow. Thus, one poet, Ka’b Bin Zuhair, cried out, “Su’ad is gone, and today my heart is love-sick.” Another poet, Umar Ibn Abi Rabi’ah, asked his comrades to sympathize with his one-sided love for Zaynab, who had gained total possession of his heart. A third, al-Aswad Bin Yafur, bemoaned his wasted state as an older man and wistfully looked back to a time when he had savored the pleasures of women who could “shoot the hearts of men (with their eyes).”

  If some of these themes sound familiar, that’s because the lovesick poet wounded in his heart is by now such a stereotype. We have already seen him in antiquity, and we’ll see him again both in the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. But what is different about these early Arabic lovers was the truly perilous world they inhabited and the bravado they demonstrated in carrying out their adventures. The lover was constantly on the move, surrounded by vast expanses of desert, battered by winds, beholden to his camel, and relieved by the sight of tents in the distance. The women they loved, with their flowing robes and smell of musk, represented a kind of paradise, though poets often depicted them as capricious, like water in the desert. Many desired women had families or husbands or guardians to be avoided. It took reckless courage to carry out the amorous exploits described by these pre-Islamic Bedouins.

  Still, there were always a few audacious women who did not let their husbands and children put an end to their love trysts. Imru’ al-Qays, once a lover of many women, remembered those he had visited at night and one in particular whom he had “diverted from the care of her yearling.” He explicitly described how the mother managed to attend to her infant without putting an end to making love. “When the suckling behind her cried, she turned round to him with half her body, but half of it, pressed beneath my embrace, was not turned from me.”

  Whew! These lines are “among the most licentious in classical Arabic poetry,” according to a knowledgeable scholar. Imru’ al-Qays evoked several such conquests as examples of his youthful swagger and ability to please the ladies.

  But at the time of writing this poem he was in the midst of an all-encompassing love affair and bemoaned the state of his heart under the sway of one Fatima. No longer free to roam from woman to woman, he complained that his heart had been “wounded” by her eyes, broken to pieces, and could never be restored.

  Imru’ al-Qays was one of roughly a hundred poets from the pre-Islamic period whose passionate and vivid love poems allow us to enter into the hearts and minds of Bedouin men living in nomadic tribes, where lovers took pride in their daring exploits, sometimes catching love on the run, sometimes—like any other would-be lover in any era—gripped by melancholy for the one person they could not have.

  EVERY CIVILIZATION HAS ITS LEGENDARY LOVERS: ANTHONY and Cleopatra for the Romans, Abélard and Héloïse for the French, Tristan and Isolde for the French and Germans, Lancelot and Guinevere for the English and French, Romeo and Juliet for the English. Whether based on real people or totally fictional, they offer an indelible portrayal of fervent love. Each of these couples experienced the joys of erotic passion rendered more intense by obstacles coming from their families, countries, the Church, husbands, and the like. Most had sad or tragic ends.

  Arab culture has its legendary lovers in the figures of Jamil and Buthayna, Majnun and Layla, Kuthayyir and Azza. Created by three different poets, these couples interest us not only because they demonstrate fidelity to an amatory ideal but also because they have been recognized as sowing the seeds for “courtly love”—the kind of love that would assert its sway in Europe during the Middle Ages.

  Consider the case of the poet Jamil (circa 660–701), who offered a new archetype for the Bedouin lover—one who was gallant, faithful, and, unlike his predecessors, chaste. Reflecting the values of Islam, which established itself during Jamil’s lifetime, this new ideal allowed a lover to adore an Arab woman from afar and remain faithful to her in his heart, even though their emotional bond would never be physically consummated.

  Jamil’s story follows his infatuation with a young woman from his tribe named Buthayna. At first she responded to his overtures and they managed to meet occasionally, far from the eyes of guardians and gossips. But Buthayna was careful to keep Jamil’s attentions limited to conversation and an occasional kiss; any other indiscretion, if discovered, could prove fatal to a Bedouin woman.

  It did not take long for Jamil to ask for Buthayna’s hand in marriage. When it was denied him because her family had found a more advantageous match for their daughter, Jamil was despondent. Still, he continued to adore her, even in her married state. As he put it: “I loved single women when Buthayna was single / and when she married, she made me love wives.” Unlike pre-Islamic poets, Jamil held fast to his one, exclusive love, taking comfort from the thought that he would meet her in the afterlife. In this respect Jamil’s vision of love reflected Muslim beliefs: the love denied him on earth would ultimately be attained in paradise. Buthayna became something of a holy figure, the object of Jamil’s daily prayers. He and his fellow poets came to regard love like a religion, with the beloved installed as its reigning deity.

  IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY IBN HAZM, AN ARAB
THEOLOGIAN, jurist, and philosopher living in southern Spain, wrote a treatise on love that would become influential not only in the Arabic world but also in France during the following century. In On Love and Lovers Ibn Hazm set out to “describe love, its diverse meanings, its causes, accidents, vicissitudes, and the favorable circumstances that surround it.” He promised to base his work on his personal experiences and on those recounted by trustworthy parties. He started out by invoking religion and law: “Love is not condemned by religion, nor prohibited by law, because hearts are in the hand of Allah.” Hearts, then, are intimately linked to Allah, who insists on “a heart devoted to Him” (Quran 26:89).

  For all his adherence to the Quran, Ibn Hazm was no less a Platonist. Like Plato he agreed that love originated in an appreciation of physical beauty but that true love had to involve the soul. He recalled the words of an earlier poet: “When my eyes see a person dressed in red [like his beloved], my heart breaks and bursts with anxiety.” Eye, soul, and, of course, heart are words that reappear in Ibn Hazm’s treatise, like the refrain in a love song.

  Sometimes, during only a brief encounter “love attaches itself to the heart with a simple look.” Love at first sight, going straight to the heart, seems to be a stock trope in many cultures. But true love, Ibn Hazm insists, can occur only with time. He himself had never known love in his heart except after a long period of time. Many European writers after him would disagree and stick with the love-at-first-sight moment, which makes for better drama.

  But they would follow his lead in insisting that one cannot love two people at the same time. As he put it: “In the heart, there is no place for two loved ones… the heart is one [a unit] and can become enamored of only one person.… Any heart that acts differently is suspect in regard to the laws of love.” The belief that one’s heart can contain only one true love would become a pillar of Western romance.