The Amorous Heart

Chapter 1

The Amorous Heart in Antiquity

LONG BEFORE THE AMOROUS HEART FIRST APPEARED VISUALLY, a connection between the heart and love had been firmly established in speech and writing. As far back as the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry already identified the heart with love in verbal conceits that would not find their visual equivalents for almost two thousand years. Among the earliest known Greek examples the poet Sappho agonized over her own “mad heart” quaking with love. Sappho lived during the seventh century BCE on the island of Lesbos surrounded by female disciples for whom she wrote passionate poems, now known only in fragments, like the following:

Sappho’s heart was never still. It was constantly agitated against her will by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She pleaded with Aphrodite: “Don’t shatter my heart with fierce pain.” Yet in old age Sappho bemoaned her “heavy heart,” no longer vulnerable to the transports caused by youthful love.

Sappho’s voice echoes down through the ages, as generation upon generation of men and women experienced love as a sort of divine madness invading their hearts. The Greek biographer Plutarch, some six hundred years after Sappho, recognized this malady in the person of King Antiochus. When Antiochus fell in love with his stepmother, Stratonice, he manifested “all Sappho’s famous symptoms—his voice faltered, his face flushed up, his eyes glanced stealthily, a sudden sweat broke out on his skin, the beatings of his heart were irregular and violent.” Love was understood to be a bodily experience lodged primarily in the heart and affecting the entire soma. It was often portrayed as a painful affliction, visited upon mortals by capricious gods.

THE STORY OF JASON AND MEDEA, AS TOLD BY APOLLONIUS of Rhodes around 250 BCE in his Voyage of the Argo, gives a good example of how the Greek gods imposed love upon humans. Prompted by the goddesses Hera and Athena, Aphrodite prevailed upon her young son Eros to make Medea fall in love with Jason so as to enable him to capture the Golden Fleece.

Eros with his bow and arrow was hardly a benign figure as he would become much later in the cuddly form of Cupid. Here he is clearly a dangerous, inhuman force, inflicting sexual desire upon an innocent maid and filling her heart with fierce passion that will ultimately prove destructive.

Ancient Greek philosophers agreed, more or less, that the heart was somehow linked to our strongest emotions, including love. Plato argued not only for the dominant role of the chest in the experience of love but also for the negative emotions of fear, anger, rage, and pain. In his Timaeus he established the reign of the heart over the body’s entire emotional life.

Aristotle expanded the role of the heart even further and granted it supremacy in all human processes. Not only was it the source of pleasure and pain, but it was also the central location for the immortal soul, the psuchê, or psyche. Aristotle’s differences with Plato and, afterward, with the Greek physician Galen (130 CE–circa 200) would be debated endlessly by successive philosophers and scientists into the seventeenth century.

BY THE TIME OF THE ROMANS THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the heart and love was already commonplace. Venus, the goddess of love, was credited—or blamed—for setting hearts on fire with the aid of her son Cupid, whose love darts aimed at the human heart were always overpowering. Hearts enflamed by Venus or pierced by Cupid’s arrows regularly appeared in the works of such poets as Catullus (87–54 BCE), Horace (65–8 BCE), Propertius (circa 50–15 BCE), and Ovid (43–17/18 BCE).

These poets commonly employed a pseudonym for the loved one—“Lesbia” for Catullus, “Cynthia” for Propertius, “Corinna” for Ovid—but we cannot be sure there was always a living counterpart behind the name. Still, they wrote convincingly of their love experiences centered on the figure of the domina—the woman who had taken hold of their hearts, obsessed their thoughts, and forced them into emotional servitude.

In Catullus’s case, at least, Lesbia is known to have been a pseudonym for Clodia, the wife of a Roman politician. The other poets’ mistresses were probably either married women or demimondaines—free women (as opposed to slaves) who attended private dinners in mixed company and circulated in public venues like the circus and races. It was to a woman of this sort that the poet dedicated his heart, despite her reputed unfaithfulness.

Catullus also has a curious connection to the visual image of the heart shape on the ancient coin pictured in Figure 3. This coin, stamped with the outline of the seed from the silphium plant, a now-extinct species of giant fennel, looks exactly like our present-day heart icon , which has symbolized love since the Middle Ages. In one of his poems Catullus specifically mentioned Cyrene in ancient Libya as the city producing silphium—a city that had, in fact, grown so rich from the export of silphium that Cyrenians put it on their coins.

Why would Catullus mention silphium in a love poem? The most common explanation today is that silphium was highly prized in the ancient world as a form of contraception. Another Cyrenian coin even carried the image of a woman touching a silphium plant with one hand and pointing to her genitals with the other. The second-century Greek physician Soranus suggested that taking a small dose of silphium once a month would not only prevent conception but also, when necessary, induce abortion.

It is unlikely that the shape of the silphium seed had anything to do with the heart icon created in Europe more than a millennium later. Still, Catullus’s reference to silphium in a love poem does remind us that women have always had to worry about the possible consequences of their sexual relationships; pregnancy was not something to be wished for by Catullus or his mistress. He ends the poem deriding the evil-tongued “busybodies” who are outraged by Lesbia’s kisses, more numerous than the sands from silphium-bearing Africa.

Whatever the significance of silphium for Catullus, the fact remains that its seed pod, as pictured in Figure 3, is the oldest known image of the shape that will become, in time, the world’s most ubiquitous symbol of love.

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:

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:

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:

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.