Wine also helps the woman who wishes to be beloved. She must be careful how she drinks it, however:

Turpe iacens mulier multo madefacta Lyaeo:

  Digna est concubitus quoslibet illa pati.

A woman lying soused in wine is an ugly sight;

  She deserves to suffer any union whatever.

Rather, for the woman, wine is not so much a drink as a piece of symbolic advice on the unremitting discipline she must follow if she wishes to make herself lovely:

Ordior a cultu; cultis bene Liber ab uvis

  Provenit, et cultu stat seges alta solo.

I begin with the body's care; wine comes from well — tended vines,

  And on well — tilled soil the corn stands tall.

"Don't let yourself go" is not the message that our health fascists tend to see in a bottle of wine, but nevertheless it is one that Ovid can find there.

Ovid, like Macbeth's porter, also understood that wine can be a false friend to lovers — but only if they either shun or abuse it. It is therefore useful to those who wish to fall out of love. The great enemy of love is business and occupation: Cedit amor rebus: res age, tutus eris, love gives way to business — be busy, and you will be safe. Wine, therefore, which unfits us for serious occupations, can (as Ovid has explained in the Artis Amatoriae) open the door to love, which slips into undefended hearts, Adfluit incautis insidiosus Amor. "Wine prepares the heart for love," Ovid says towards the end of the Remedia Amoris, "unless you over-indulge, and dull and drown your spirits in too much wine." So for those who wish to kill love, there are two courses available — either sobriety or stupefaction.

It is the abstainers and the drunks who are the enemies of Venus. But her true admirer is the moderate drinker, whose disposition is prepared for love by wine, and to whom wine is a faithful ally through all the various phases of desire.