[Based on How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On, by Ovid, translated by Michael Fontaine. Full book series here.]

What do you think are the most stressful things you may experience in your life? Psychologists measure the stress induced by different kinds of events on something called the Holmes and Rahe scale. The scale is based on the rankings of 43 potential sources of stress, the kind that may cause illness. As usual in psychology, there is debate about the actual usefulness of the method, but it is interesting that the most stressful event, right at the top of the scale, is the death of one’s spouse. At number two and three, respectively, are divorce and marital separation. (Fourth and fifth are imprisonment and the death of a close family member.) In other words, a negative turn in the relationship with our significant other is the most impactful thing we can experience.

That’s why we have psychotherapy. In modern fashion, psychotherapy emerged in the late 19th century with Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis, which emphasized unconscious processes and childhood experiences, and which today is largely considered a pseudoscience. The 1950s saw the onset of the humanistic approach, with Carl Rogers’s client-centered therapy and Abraham Maslow’s focus on self-actualization. Finally, cognitive therapy, pioneered by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck in the 1960s (on the basis of Stoic philosophy), addressed thought patterns underlying psychological distress and later merged with behavioral techniques to form cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Nevertheless, the idea of talk therapy is actually very old, tracing back at least to a contemporary of Socrates, Antiphon of Rhamnus (480–411 BCE):

“Antiphon devised an art of relieving distress, as physicians treat people who are sick. In Corinth, he set up shop in a small building near the market square and advertised his ability to treat people in distress with talk therapy (dia logōn therapeuein). After learning the causes, he would talk patients out of feeling bad. […] He also announced a series of ‘antidepressant lectures,’ which would show how no heartache was so great that he couldn’t banish it from the mind.” (Quoted in M. Fontaine, How to get Over a Breakup, Introduction)

Another practitioner of the art of psychotherapy emerged four centuries later: Ovid, whose full name was Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-17 CE). He is most famous for his Metamorphoses, a history of the world from the beginnings until the deification of the assassinated Julius Caesar in 44 BCE (the year before Ovid was born). The title of the book, which means “changes of shape,” comes from the fact that many of the stories told by the author end with some kind of transformation, usually triggered by sexual attraction or revulsion.

Although he was born in Sulmo (modern Sulmona, about one hundred miles east of Rome), Ovid moved to Rome and fell in love with it. There he wrote Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), where he dispenses pretty good advice, to both men and women, on how to seduce and then keep the person they are attracted to. However, as we all know, sometimes falling in love is followed by a breakup, which can be traumatic. So Ovid wrote a sequel to his book on love, entitled Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love), which has now been translated by Michael Fontaine for Princeton University Press and published under the title How to Get Over a Breakup.

As Fontaine puts it in the Introduction: “Ovid, our poet, poses as a relationship counselor no different from his counterparts today, citing case histories and dispensing lightly medicalized advice to help cure us of unrequited love.”

If we consider together Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris we get a full appreciation for the fact that love can be both the source of joy (and that’s why we so desperately want it) and a source of anguish or despair (which is why breakups are so hard). Ovid maintains that love can be both a physical and psychological disease, and that in some cases it shows the symptoms of what we would today call addiction. Hence the need, occasionally, for rather drastic remedies, as unpalatable as they may feel.