The neglect of the art of love has not been a universal phenomenon; it is more especially characteristic of Christendom.  The spirit of ancient Rome undoubtedly predisposed Europe to such a neglect, for with their rough cultivation of the military virtues and their inaptitude for the finer aspects of civilization the Romans were willing to regard love as a permissible indulgence, but they were not, as a people, prepared to cultivate it as an art.  Their poets do not, in this matter, represent the moral feeling of their best people.  It is indeed a highly significant fact that Ovid, the most distinguished Latin poet who concerned himself much with the art of love, associated that art not so much with morality as with immorality.  As he viewed it, the art of love was less the art of retaining a woman in her home than the art of winning her away from it; it was the adulterer’s art rather than the husband’s art.  Such a conception would be impossible out of Europe, but it proved very favorable to the growth of the Christian attitude towards the art of love.

Love as an art, as well as a passion, seems to have received considerable study in antiquity, though the results of that study have perished.  Cadmus Milesius, says Suidas, wrote fourteen great volumes on the passion of love, but they are not now to be found.  Rohde (Das Griechische Roman, p. 55) has a brief section on the Greek philosophic writers on love.  Bloch (Beitraege zur Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 191) enumerates the ancient women writers who dealt with the art of love.  Montaigne (Essais, liv. ii, Ch.  V) gives a list of ancient classical lost books on love.  Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, Bell’s edition, vol. iii, p. 2) also gives a list of lost books on love.  Burton himself dealt at length with the manifold signs of love and its grievous symptoms.  Boissier de Sauvages, early in the eighteenth century, published a Latin thesis, De Amore, discussing love somewhat in the same spirit as Burton, as a psychic disease to be treated and cured.

The breath of Christian asceticism had passed over love; it was no longer, as in classic days, an art to be cultivated, but only a malady to be cured.  The true inheritor of the classic spirit in this, as in many other matters, was not the Christian world, but the world of Islam. The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzaoui was probably written in the city of Tunis early in the sixteenth century by an author who belonged to the south of Tunis.  Its opening invocation clearly indicates that it departs widely from the conception of love as a disease:  “Praise be to God who has placed man’s greatest pleasures in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyments to woman.”  The Arabic book, El Ktab, or “The Secret Laws of Love,” is a modern work, by Omer Haleby Abu Othman, who was born in Algiers of a Moorish mother and a Turkish father.