During his encounter with Lethaeus Amor in the Remedia amoris, in which he discusses techniques to forget a former lover, Ovid writes the following:

This passage has been discussed in Hardie's treatment of Lethaeus Amor, and, while he directly addresses Ovid's use of loci in this passage as I shall below, his focus is on the rich intertextuality – textual remembrances – within the Remedia rather than the use of loci in the ars memoriae proper.Footnote ¹ Hardie points out numerous intertexts in the Remedia, using the character of Lethaeus Amor to highlight the paradox of a learned reader of love poetry being unable to forget the poetry he has read, despite this specific oblivion being a precondition for curing oneself of love (as clearly directed at Rem. am. 755–66). In this case, the loca sola Ovid warns against are ‘topics of solitude’ which ‘conjure up for the experienced reader scenes of erotic despair’, thus calling to mind the lover's own lovelorn state.Footnote ²

Beyond serving to remind the reader of the potential danger of the poetry he has already read, here Ovid uses loci to instruct his lovelorn pupil to do exactly the opposite of the mnemotechnic lesson contained in the Rhetorica ad Herennium. The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium provides the most detailed extant ancient discussion of the ars memoriae, wherein he distinguishes two types of memory, one naturally occurring and the other a product of ars. The latter type consists of two elements, images (imagines) of the thing to be remembered and backgrounds (loci) into which the imagines are set (3.29). Backgrounds are likened to wax tablets or papyrus, and images to letters imprinted on them, allowing the memories to be ‘read’ as if from a script (3.30).Footnote ³ The author devotes considerable space to discussing the proper selection of backgrounds and the disposition of images therein, including the admonition to situate one's loci in a deserted rather than a populous spot, item commodius est in derelicta quam in celebri regione locos conparare. The presence of extraneous people in a locus will confuse and weaken the imagines contained therein with their coming and going; emptiness preserves the image's outlines, solitudo conservat integras simulacrorum figuras (3.31). If one wants to remember something clearly, one must first ensure that the image of what is to be remembered is salient, that it stands out from its background.

In order to forget a lover, Ovid tells his reader exactly the contrary: flee empty – and therefore mnemotechnically suitable – loca and seek succour in the crowd. The pupil is to clutter his loci deliberately so that recall of a vivid imago, the former lover in this case (here both their image and the memory of them), is more difficult. Ovid plays up this reversal by crowding the hexameters with the double repetition of loca sola and secreta (579, 581). Therefore, if one wants to forget, Ovid's source, Lethaeus Amor, would suggest that one should first forget the ars memoriae.

Ovid concludes his brief lesson in forgetting with a pointed remembrance of the Amores. By forgetting one's mnemotechnic loci, the image of the mistress will not stand ante oculos tuos (Rem. am. 584) as Corinna stood before his very eyes in her first appearance at Am. 1.5.17, ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros. This phrase, ante oculos, is also found in rhetorical handbooks in discussions of various figures related to vivid description.Footnote ⁴ Not only does Ovid use a phrase common from discussions of vivid description, but he also reinforces this idea with the inclusion of ut ipsa: her imago appears as if she is there in the flesh – exactly the outcome an orator expects through his use of such devices.Footnote ⁵

As so often, Ovid repeats and further complicates his lesson on forgetting at Rem. am. 723–8.Footnote ⁶ Ovid now directs his student to remove wax portraits of the mistress, ceras remove, before asking rhetorically what benefit is gained from a mute picture, quid imagine muta | carperis (723–4). It was, after all, the fixation on mute images of the absent beloved that doomed Laodamia.Footnote ⁷ After discounting images, he proceeds to forbid his student to revisit loca, specifically the spots of previous amorous encounters. Here actual places are imbued with memories of the beloved and, moreover, when combined with previously mute images, are productive of speech, as evidenced by the direct quote at 727–8 (itself crowded with the deictic hic).Footnote ⁸ Both the juxtaposition of imagines and loca and the fact that their combination produces speech suggest that Ovid is, once again, telling us to discard the constituent parts of the ars memoriae in order to forget a lover. Returning again to the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the author makes explicit the connection between mnemonic imagines and letters written in a tablet: nam imagines, sicuti litterae, delentur ubi nihil utimur; loci, tamquam cera, remanere debent (3.31). The author suggests that mnemonic imagines can be deleted from their loci when they are no longer needed, but the loci remain intact, ready to accept a new set of imagines, in the same way a wax tablet can be erased and reused. At Rem. am. 723, the play on cera as both waxen image and writing tablet, the more common use of the word (and a synecdoche common in Ovid) is pointed: both waxes are imagines, whether literally in the case of cera-cum-portrait, or figuratively in the case of cera-cum-mnemonic, and both must be discarded to help the lover forget.Footnote ⁹ Whereas the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium would have us keep the loca after obliterating the imagines, Ovid has us avoid the loca altogether and discard the tablet, as it were.

Finally, to Hardie's detailed survey we may add another literary locus pointedly recalled in Ovid's passage on forgetting: Propertius 1.18, in which the poet flees to the woods for solace.Footnote ¹⁰ The deserta loca (1) to which he flees to release freely his hidden sorrow turn out to be anything but deserta and, indeed, serve only as a forceful reminder of Cynthia's presence. Despite the place being emphatically empty and quiet (deserta, taciturna, vacuum, 1–2), the curious fourth line hints at the eventual failure of this refuge: si modo sola queant saxa tenere fidem. Of course mute rocks should be worthy confidants, but as we see in the poem's final line, the deserta saxa are granted the power of speech and are filled with ‘Cynthia’. Not only was Propertius right to question the rocks' trustworthiness, but the final line (32) returns us to the first: the deserta loca which should have spared him grief with their silence now resound with Cynthia's name, despite still being deserta. Not only are the rocks capable of echoing Cynthia's name, but the trees too resound with Propertius' poetry (resonant mea verba, 21; resonent mihi ‘Cynthia’ silvae, 31), and even serve as poetic text itself as ‘Cynthia’, the titular mistress, is carved into their bark (22). Ovid's reminiscence of Propertius becomes an intertextual mise en abîme, because this elegy is itself a reminiscence of Eclogue 10, Virgil's own account of Gallus' pining in the forest: non canimus surdis, respondent omnia silvae (Ecl. 10.8).Footnote ¹¹ By fleeing loca sola – as both poetic intertexts and elements of mnemotechnics – Ovid's student can avoid ending up like Propertius or Gallus before him. Those two did not realize, as Ovid does, that a spot that provides isolation from the cruel mistress is also a breeding ground for memories of her. If fleeing to the woods did not help his predecessors, then the obvious course of action is not to do as they did, just as the obvious way to forget a lover is to forget to remember, whether by undoing the ars memoriae or un-remembering erotic poetry.Footnote ¹² In demonstrating the path to health, however, Ovid relies on the learned reader remembering the very thing he is to forget.

As so often, Ovid undercuts or overturns tradition, in this case a schoolboy's lesson in rhetoric like those at which he was reportedly quite skilled, or even his own poetry.Footnote ¹³ In so doing, he paradoxically reminds us to forget both the art of memory and love poetry while using mnemotechnic lessons and his predecessors' poetry to do so.