{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0368532955350815, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004961020552799433, 'mean_word_length': 5.275555555555556, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Bluff Your Way in Didactic: Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

Ever since Augustus’ extraordinary public acknowledgement of Ovid’s didactic powers, the poet’s critics, adopting the role of defending him with, we can only assume, the best of intentions, have, to a quite remarkable degree, detracted from his achievement. Malcolm Heath (1985.254) bases his plea on a formal technicality: “Lucretius adopts the posture of one expounding and advocating the Epicurean philosophy, and that is precisely what he intends to achieve: philosophical persuasion. Ovid, equally, adopts in the Ars Amatoria the posture of one expounding and inculcating the principles of the art of seduction; but no one supposes that Ovid really wrote his poem in order to instruct the youth of Rome in that art.” Heath cites the examples of Lucretius and Ovid to illustrate a distinction he makes between “formal” didacticism (“purporting to be intended to instruct”) and “final” didacticism (“intended to instruct”). The subject of the Ars Amatoria is ostensibly amor, even arguably adulterium, but we are assured that the poem does not really, finally, intentionally teach it. Its very didactic form, apparently, may even act as a guarantee of that. Were the academic profession to apply this distinction with such disinterested rigour to its own activities, the result might—just conceivably—be somewhat disconcerting. However, the