What have the Romans ever done for us? For one thing, taught us the art of seduction

I have always wondered where the Romans went to find love. As with the other great civilisations, their interest in the subject bordered on obsession. Catullus implored his beloved to give him 1,000 kisses and then 100 more; Hadrian demanded that his lover, Antinous, be deified after he drowned in the Nile; and the Empress Messalina once allegedly bedded more men in 24 hours than could Rome’s most prolific prostitute. Yet information about where the Romans might first have encountered their lovers remains scarce. What little we know, we glean from Ovid: for the upper echelons, flirting was confined to banquets, the theatre and the races. ‘The spacious Circus holds many opportunities,’ he wrote in Ars Amatoria, an early tract on love that would serve as a blueprint for those of medieval Europe. ‘Sit next to your lady,’ he advised, as ‘by the conditions of space, [she] must be touched.’

Perhaps it was repression that made the Romans so raunchy. Their society was rigid, classist and, on the face of it, contained. Nonetheless, adultery ran rife. ‘Affairs were idealised,’ explains Honor Cargill-Martin, a classical historian and the author of Messalina: The Life and Times of Rome’s Most Scandalous Empress. ‘It was through these, not through marriage, that the Romans found love.’

Marriage, among the elite, was little more than a contract designed to ensure continuity of wealth, rank and appearances. It was perfectly normal for both husband and wife to take lovers, although only he was allowed to do so publicly. Ovid’s romantic edicts, by and large, were equally permissive. When giving advice on how to court a lady, his text suggests winning over her maid and wooing her if need be. ‘You will ask whether it profits to seduce the maid herself,’ Ovid muses. ‘It may turn out well or ill.’

By modern-day standards, Ars Amatoria reads like a cad’s handbook. Ovid tells male lovers to promise more than they can give, ply their lady with gold and practice their smooth-talk: ‘A woman, no less than populace… will surrender, defeated, to eloquence.’ Yet such a guide ultimately benefited the Romans, given that their window for romantic exploration was so narrow. Constraint might have nurtured their profligacy, but modern-day lovers seem to suffer the opposite problem: a paradox of choice. Although one may now flirt at a bar, a nightclub, an exercise class or even online (it is estimated that one in 10 Britons uses a dating app), there seems to be a discrepancy between our contemporary access to love and our ability to follow it through. In the UK, more people are currently single, unmarried or living alone than at any other time in recent history.

Several reasons have been offered for this phenomenon. Some believe a rising divorce rate over successive decades has created a generation of marriage sceptics. From a cultural perspective, the declining rate of relationships might be explained by a growing refusal to settle. Once more, our eyes turn to online dating: its entire business model is predicated on the idea that someone better is just around the corner. One could point the finger to Hollywood, too: several generations of filmmakers, our most popular storytellers by market share after video-game designers, have urged us to wait until we’ve found ‘the one’ to marry. Love, as seen through the eyes of Tinseltown, is all-encompassing and inescapable. One need only glance at the film titles: Crazy, Stupid, Love; Love & Other Drugs; Truly, Madly, Deeply…

It would be wrong, however, to suggest the concept of ‘the one’ didn’t exist before Titanic — not to mention Romeo and Juliet. The Middle Ages had such a figure in the form of the white knight, who faced death-defying exploits in order to prove his loyalty to a lady. As in Rome, extramarital affairs were seen as the truest form of love. A lady was wed to a lord, but she was the knight’s to woo.

‘It’s important to note,’ says Emma Cavell, a researcher at University College London and a specialist in medieval French and English literature, ‘that these extramarital affairs were rarely, if ever, consummated’. The knight was a fantasy, ordered by his lady to slay dragons; if either of them were to go too far (think of Lancelot and Guinevere), chaos would ensue. Modern love, meanwhile, has its own demons to contend with. If the diktats outlined in Ars Amatoria sound parochial, today’s lovers are forced to navigate a dating landscape in which freedom has created confusion. ‘I don’t enjoy it when a man pays for my meal,’ says a close female friend. ‘I feel it puts me on the back foot.’ Another disagrees: ‘If a man suggests going Dutch at any point, I’ll dump him.’ Both are 27.

Courtship in the 21st century requires its participants to be highly adaptive; our white knights, in other words, must know when to pick up their lance as much as when to put it down. A 2022 report revealed that single Britons had outnumbered those in marriages or civil partnerships for the first time, suggesting that we are perhaps short of a white knight or two. Today’s iteration of the chivalric archetype is undoubtedly the gentleman — although, unhelpfully for today’s pretendants, no one can agree quite what a gentleman is. When Country Life updated its own gentlemanly bylaws last November, a dozen articles appeared in different papers the next day offering wildly different takes.

To make matters more interesting, one also ought to ask ‘what of the gentlewoman?’, as the very concept of modern love is predicated on that of equal footing. Dating, its primary vector, arose in the late 19th century when women were finally allowed to meet men unchaperoned. (The first contemporary usage of the word ‘dating’ was recorded in 1896.) This, by and large, is the reason we now view marriage as the ultimate expression of romance — not affairs. Coupled with the radical transformation of the class system in the mid 20th century, dating allowed both men and women to choose life partners for reasons other than land or rank.

At the most essential level, dating introduced choice. Yet with that came complications not even Ovid could have anticipated. ‘I’ve been dating since I was 15, I’m exhausted, where is he?’ asks Charlotte York, Sex And The City’s resident Pollyanna, in an episode from June 2000. ‘Who? The white knight?’ queries the pragmatic Miranda. ‘That only happens in fairy tales,’ says their friend Samantha, who has just lived out a different kind of fantasy with a fireman named Ricky. Charlotte, who claims that ‘women just want to be rescued’, is flung into quite a different landscape than Guinevere’s Camelot: New York in the early 2000s, crawling with cheats, charlatans and bad kissers. Freedom to date, she and her peers find, does not guarantee that a date will go well.

Over time, Sex And The City and its ilk have etched out some key dating cornerstones: communicate clearly, kiss well and clean up after yourself. Call it Ars Amatoria Moderna, if you like — as Valentine’s Day beckons, these bedrocks are worth remembering. Although February 14 is often cited as the most romantic day of the year, it is also estimated that 36% of relationships will expire in the run-up. The Tuesday before Valentine’s Day consistently ranks as one of the top dates each year for break-ups, as the pressure mounts on unhappy couples to be joyous in time for the big day and often ends up precipitating their demise.

Even for those in happy relationships, the occasion often proves perilous. Do you take your partner out for dinner or stay in? (At the risk of playing Ovid, I’d proffer: stay in and cook your amour's favourite meal.) What present do you get for your beloved? (Answer: jewellery, concert tickets or something handmade and beautiful, delivered with a handwritten letter.) Is tonight the night to take a leaf out of the back pages of the Kama Sutra in a bid to keep the relationship interesting? (Answer: your call — this is beyond my pay grade.)

Against these contemporary anxieties, I wish to return once more to the Romans. In AD270, they executed St Valentine, a priest who defied Claudius II by secretly marrying soldiers to their sweethearts even after the Emperor had expressly forbidden it. (Claudius had deemed the young soldiers too fit to settle down, and wanted them for war instead.) By positioning marriage as the ultimate expression of romance, St Valentine was something of a forefather to the kind of love we aspire to today. David Bowie may have admitted to struggling with modern love in 1983, but if a 3rd-century priest believed in it so much that he was martyred for the cause, I think we would do well to have a little more faith in it.

This feature originally appeared in the January 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.