PAST IMPERFECT

A new translation grapples with sexual violence in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

- DANIEL MENDELSOHN

One day in the thirteenth century, James I of Aragon, not only a great conqueror but a king famous for his powers of memory, made a revealing slip. Having convened an assembly of lords and clerics, he tried to think of an appropriately authoritative quote with which to begin his address. What happened next is recorded in his “Book of Deeds,” the autobiographical chronicle that he later dictated to his scribes:

And we ordered the bishops and the nobles to our Court and we had them assembled in the church of the Preachers. . . . We got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam quaerere parta tueri.

“It takes no less talent to keep what you’ve got than to acquire it”: for a crusading medieval monarch, what more convenient justification for territorial consolidation could there be than “Sacred Scripture”?

The problem is that that line of Latin doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. It comes, rather, from a notoriously risqué book of poems, published during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, whose narrator doles out advice on how to seduce women—preferably married ones. (The first part is about where to find them; the second, about how to get them into bed; the third—the part that James quoted—about how to hold on to them.)

 The Spanish king was hardly alone in conflating this poet with a Higher Authority. The eleventh-century theologian and philosopher Abelard once cautioned against excessive harshness in monastic rule by observing that “we always chafe at restrictions and want what is forbidden”—sensible enough advice, except that the sentence in question was actually meant as a warning to married men that keeping too close an eye on their wives would only make them more eager to stray.