Ovid heralds his theme in the three opening words of the poem: militat omnis amans ("Every Lover is a Soldier"). However, he takes an unusual, humorous approach to a literary commonplace that plays a minor role in the work of his Love Elegy poet-friends, Propertius and Tibullus.

Stung by the accusation of one Atticus that lovers are lazy (we can reconstruct this from the poet's responses at the beginning and end of the poem), the poet-lover develops a long, clever series of proofs that argues the opposite by comparing the actions of a man who loves (amans) to those of a man who soldiers (militat).

This poem exhibits to a high degree those rhetorical characteristics which encourage readers to doubt the poet's sincerity of feeling: exaggeration, extended argument, abstraction, literary allusion, irony, witty expression, and obsession with style. His art is so artful that the reader finds it hard to believe that Ovid's lover feels anything.

Lines 1-6:
While the Romans claimed the gods Mars, the father of Romulus and Remus, and Venus, the mother of Aeneas, as the founders of their race, Ovid's first line (militat amans...Cupido) suggests neither patriotic nor military fervor. In fact, for most of Roman Republican history, the lover was the scorned antithesis of the model Roman.

MILITAT AMANS: By Ovid's time, the metaphor of love and war was a poetic convention. Nevertheless, it is startling to hear a love poem open with militat ("he soldiers"). Recall how, similarly, arma, in Amores 1.1, introduced the poet's explanation of his choice of elegy over epic poetry. Here the oppositional actors of epic and elegiac poetry are placed side by side. This and Ovid's use of verbs to refer to them rather than nouns (miles and amator), alert the reader to his special purpose.
The repetition of the phrase militat omnis amans in the first couplet increases the force of the statement and sets militat and amans in the most important positions in the Latin sentence--at the beginning and end.

ATTICE: The poem earnestly (crede mihi) addresses someone named Atticus. Is he a friend? Not known beyond his name, he may represent the traditional Roman--he who considers the lover an idler (see line 31, where he may reappear as quicumque). His silent presence gives the long monologue the impression of a dialogue (see lines 30 and 45, where he may be the person addressed by neges and vides).

QUAE: the antecedent follows (aetas). Here begins a series of parallel statements that link the soldier and the lover. Note, however, that the syntax is carefully not balanced and the expression of ideas always unanticipated.

SENEX: the enemy of soldier and lover, old age is turpe in both.

QUOS: the antecedent follows (animos) as does the correlative hos, which parallel the duces and the puella.

Lines 7-12

AMBO...UTERQUE: in this line the soldier and the lover share the same activities.

ILLE: the same demonstrative is applied to each; their identity emerges from the context. The lover has occasion to "stand watch" at his girlfriend's door on the nights when he is closed out by her because her guardian is at home or she has an appointment with another lover.

MITTE: translate "send off" or "send away;" the imperative is more vivid than the expected conditional clause.

EXEMPTO FINE: equivalent here to sine fine

IBIT: no subject is named, but the immediately preceding word is amans. Since one normally associates these obstacles with the lot of a soldier (officium longa est via) and not the lover, the poet is probably intending us to understand the persistent (strenuus) lover as subject..

Lines 13-18

FRETA PRESSURUS: an inflated expression for "setting sail"or "going to sea" (remember to translate the tense). This couplet seems to be a parodic invocation of the tortured style of the lesser epic poets.

VERRENDIS...AQUIS: a similarly bombastic expression referring to the simple act of rowing.

MILES VEL AMANS: the two are rejoined as being singular for their dedication to their vocations: who else would venture out into a freezing, stormy night? Note the varieties of parallel statement that Ovid has employed thus far: repetition, demonstratives, correlatives, relative pronouns (watch for others).

Lines 19-24

OBSIDET: the correspondence here is pleasing in its cleverness: the soldier lays seige to a city as the locked-out lover (exclusus amator) lays seige to his obdurate girlfriend's home.

SOPORATOS ... HOSTES: Educated Romans would immediately be reminded of the night raid by Odysseus and Diomedes in Book 10 of the Iliad, not notably heroic in Homer's telling.

ARMATA VULGUS INERME MANU: an interesting example of artful word order. The adjectives and nouns are alternated (synchysis or interlocking word order) and emphasize the unequal situation (armata and inerme); the noun-adjective agreement are inverted (chiasmus), thus surrounding the helpless victims with the powerful attackers. Taken together, they paint a word picture of confusion and conflict.

RHESI: The poet is in fact, as we suspected, making reference to the brutal slaughter of sleeping Rhesus and his troops. It is a jarring image. The poet offers it as a military parallel to-- and perhaps legitimization of-- the lover's duping of the sleeping husband, a scene more appropriate to comic farce. The description undercuts the heroism of the soldier while it prepares the reader for the lover's sneak attack on his girlfriend's home.

DESERUISTIS EQUI: this sad apostrophe to Rhesus' horses is probably intended to echo Achilles' rebuke to his horses after the death of Patroclos in Book 19 of the Iliad.

Lines 25-30

SOMNIS: this is the slim connection between the lover duping sleeping husbands and the tragic-epic episode above. That the girlfriend was married and her husband was the target of the lover's strategies was a violation of contemporary Augustan legislation.

NEC CERTA: employing a rhetorical device called "litotes" (denial of the opposite), the poet repeats the meaning of dubius with a slightly different emphasis. Through Mars and Venus, the divine counterparts of the soldier and the lover, he moves to a generalization about the outcome of love and war: it's uncertain and never what you expect.

Lines 31-35

DESIDIAM: Here perhaps at last is the rationale for the poem: it is a response to the accusation that love is mereidleness.

QUICUMQUE: Perhaps the charge of idleness was made by Atticus (see line 2), who may now be understood to be not a friend but a critic.

INGENII..EXPERIENTIS: the poet's counter-claim to desidiam is evidenced by four vignettes, each a couplet long, about epic warriors from the Trojan Cycle who experienced love. Ironically, these are not really illustrative of his point, as will be seen.

ARDET: The reference is at once to the love of Achilles for Briseis and Achilles' anger at Agamemnon for taking her from him, the theme announced in Book 1 of Homer's Iliad. The consequence of his love-anger is Achilles' total withdrawal from the fighting. The poet encourages the Trojans to take advantage of his inactivity in the next line.

CONPLEXIBUS: the reference is to Hector's leave-taking of Andromache before battle. While Homer describes this scene in Book 6 of the Iliad, she neither gives him his helmet nor does his love for her impel him onto the battlefield.

OBSTIPUISSE: Agamemnon, who receives the priestess of Apollo, Cassandra, as his war prize, is described here as stupified (with love?) at the sight of her hair, unbound in the manner of a maenad. This story does not survive in Homer.

Lines 36-40

DEPRENSUS: Mars was captured in a net (along with Venus, during their lovemaking), which rendered him motionless, by Vulcan, to the amusement of all the gods who had been invited to watch. This story is sung by the bard Demodocus in Book 8 of the Odyssey.

IPSE: one is hard-pressed to see the consonance between the mythological examples and the poet's situation.

Lines 41-46

SEGNIS: In the last 6 lines, the poet offers himself as an example of the transformation that love can bring about. He confesses to natural and habitual laziness (lectus et umbra) until love (cura puellae) changed him. He describes his pre-love state in deprecatory terms more commonly used for the lover: segnis, discincta otia, mollis, ignavus.

IGNAVUM: understand me.

AGILEM: understand me.

GERENTEM: understand me.

DESIDIOSUS AMET: the poet's closing word of advice.