How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to Michael Fontaine and Princeton University Press for this exclusive excerpt from How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On.

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How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On

Breaking up is horrible. It is world-ending. All kinds of relationships come to an end or change, and futures we had dreamed of will never happen. Breakups can play games with our minds and bring on overwhelming feelings of grief. And practical problems ensue, too. Sometimes we need all new friends, or a new place to live. No wonder, then, that breakups are so often compared to “losing a loved one”; the expression itself evokes the analogy with death.

This is not just a subjective impression. In 1967, a pair of psychiatrists sought to quantify and rank the most stressful events in life. The result is the famous Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. In first place comes the death of a spouse. Tied for fourth are going to prison and the death of a close family member. Then come personal injury or illness, marriage, and getting fired. These are events so stressful, psychologists say, they can make us physically sick—and desperate for help. So, what’s in second and third place?

You guessed it. Divorce and marital separation.

With stakes like these, can anyone—much less a poet from ancient Rome two thousand years ago—really help us through it all?

That may sound absurd. Psychotherapy is surely not the first image that Greece or Rome brings to mind. The Colosseum, maybe, or the Parthenon or the Iliad. But a clinical psychologist?

If that’s jarring, then consider the case of Antiphon. A contemporary of the philosopher Socrates, Antiphon of Rhamnus (480–411 BCE) eventually became an influential statesman in classical Athens. His first career, however, had been different:

Antiphon devised an art of relieving distress, as physicians treat people who are sick. In Corinth, he set up shop in a small building near the market square and advertised his ability to treat people in distress with talk therapy (dia logōn therapeuein). After learning the causes, he would talk patients out of feeling bad. […] He also announced a series of “antidepressant lectures,” which would show how no heartache was so great that he couldn’t banish it from the mind.

The clinic, the clinician, the clientele, the claims, the cures: here is psychoanalysis in all but name, twenty-four hundred years before Sigmund Freud set up shop in Vienna.

The poem translated here as How to Get Over a Breakup suggests that two thousand years ago, practitioners like Antiphon and Freud were plying their trade under the archways of ancient Rome. As we shall see, Ovid, our poet, poses as a relationship counselor no different from his counterparts today, citing case histories and dispensing lightly medicalized advice to help cure us of unrequited love.

Ovid was born more than four centuries after Antiphon, in 43 BCE, and he died in 17 CE. And for him, Rome was the city of romance. Romeos were everywhere, and so were Rome-grown beauties. He’d insisted on that point in an important prequel to How to Get Over a Breakup. Titled Ars Amatoria—in English, The Art of Love—that prequel is a poem in three books. The first two books were intended to the teach the men of Rome how to find and keep a girlfriend, while the third teaches women strategies for finding a man. Posing as a “professor of love,” Ovid was semiseriously teaching his readers techniques and rules for seducing the opposite sex.

In 1 CE, Ovid published the sequel translated here. Titled Remedia Amoris—literally, Remedies for Love—the poem completes his systematic “treatise” on love, and it brings us full circle: from no relationship, to relationship, to no relationship. Even better, this time he addresses his book to women and men alike. Accordingly, he prescribes 38 practical strategies and suggestions for dealing with unrequited love. Some are insightful and valuable, while others strain credulity; they’re presumably effective, but unsavory or immoral or just plain evil. Trying to decide just how seriously Ovid means a word of this is one reason his poem remains so compelling and fun today.

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The idea that love is like an illness has been around a long time, and there’s obviously something to it: the infatuation, the fantasizing, the pounding pulse, the sweaty palms, the flush; and conversely—when love isn’t reciprocated—the heartache, the sleeplessness, the prayers, the anguish, the grief. We’ve all felt it.

Throughout antiquity, in Ovid’s time and as late as the fourth century CE, lovesickness was seen as a metaphorical illness. Physicians regarded it as a psychological problem, and they prescribed feel-good remedies like Ovid’s. Lovesick patients, recommended Galen (129–216)—who was a philosopher as well as a doctor—ought “to take frequent baths, to drink wine, to ride, and to see and hear everything pleasurable.”

With the fall of Rome in the West, something changed. By the year 1100, as science began to recover in Italy, lovesickness had been reinterpreted as an actual illness—specifically, a brain disease. Remedies for love became increasingly medicalized and, in some cases, pharmacological: that is, pills and drugs.

In the twenty-first century this view is gradually going away, and therapists are increasingly turning to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to heal broken hearts. Many find CBT highly effective for breakups. Innovative as it may sound, however, CBT is merely ancient Stoicism under a new name. And since Stoic talk therapy was a major source of Ovid’s recommendations in the first place, it seems we’re closing the circle.

With the onset of social media, moreover, Ovid’s advice has become relevant in a new way. Two thousand years ago, Ovid was writing for an audience based in the city of Rome. His readers couldn’t just up and leave town if a relationship went bad. They had to find a way to move on, while realizing they’d probably run into their ex again.

It’s the same in our hyperconnected world today. Twenty years ago, you could still up and leave town. Not anymore. You may unfriend your ex, but the algorithm ensures you’ll see reminders—and friends of “friends”—for a long time to come.

For anyone who finds our new reality painful, Ovid may have something to tell us yet.

Michael Fontaine is Professor of Classics at Cornell University, specializing in Latin literature from antiquity through the Enlightenment. His acclaimed books with Princeton University Press explore topics ranging from ancient breakup poetry to willpower and bullying, while upcoming projects examine free speech through the lens of Plato, Plutarch, and Enlightenment thinkers. Beyond academia, he teaches global executives leadership strategies drawn from ancient Rome and the effective use of humor—a subject that once landed him a parody on Saturday Night Live. A Thomas Szasz Award winner for civil liberties advocacy and (in lighter moments) a champion pizza eater, he brings scholarly rigor and wit to both the classroom and public discourse. His works include How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor and How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On. His forthcoming title is How to Have Willpower: An Ancient Guide to Not Giving In (Aug 12, 2025 Princeton University Press.