"Underneath the moonlight you'd like me even more / because I'd have a jet pack"

Ah, the rose-colored glasses of love poetry:

Not to the rich these rules of love I preach:
He who can give needs nothing I can teach.
"Here's something for you" is the soul of wit,
And all my arts of pleasing yield to it.

— The Art of Love, ii, 161–4, trans. Moore/Melville

This, suddenly, in a passage of Ovid explaining how, once you've got a woman, you'll need to be a smooth talker to keep her -- and I'm just the man to tell you how. On the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism, he may not have slid as far over as 1984 or Watchmen, but he'd sit quite comfortably next to Austen. Though she might not be comfortable with Ovid.

---L.