Fetters: As a classicist, how did you feel discovering these guys were reading Ovid in that way?

Zuckerberg: It was such a disturbing stew of feelings. On the one hand, I already felt on some level like the Ars Amatoria was a pretty disturbing text. So seeing people with ideas that I found disturbing reading it, that part wasn’t really a surprise. But some of the texts that they were interested in [in other subsections of the Red Pill community], I had a feeling of grief. Like, am I ever going to be able to just enjoy reading this text again, knowing how much white supremacists love to talk about it?

Fetters: What were the other texts or authors that you felt that kind of grief over, after seeing that they were popular on Red Pill sites?

Zuckerberg: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I’ve seen it used so many times by Red Pill men that now whenever I hear somebody quote Meditations, I feel a slight thrill of apprehension: Is this person secretly a Red Pill person? Which is sad, because it’s a fantastic text, really a model of healthy introspection in a lot of ways.

Fetters: One thing I was shocked to learn from the book was how pickup artists claim Ovid as one of their own, as this prototypical pickup artist. That’s … something of a mischaracterization of Ovid, right?

Zuckerberg: Yeah. The most obvious differences between Ovid and pickup artists have to do with the social position of the reader and the social position of the putative “target.” The audience of a pickup-artist manual is pretty well understood within the community: awkward guys who are completely lacking in confidence when it comes to how to interact with the other sex and who need a set of protocols to follow. That person already feels marginalized by society; they already feel that there are a lot of people who just seem to know this stuff automatically, and that there are people who might be more attractive than they are, or more professionally successful or whatever, who will have an easier time picking up women. And they might have some resentment toward those people.

I don’t think that that was an audience that Ovid was writing for. Ovid is writing for a sophisticated literary audience, and a very elite audience. Extremely educated, probably extremely wealthy—books in that time were somewhat difficult to come by. They were possibly reading the text at face value as a seduction manual, but also reading it as a literary text that is participating in several different genres at the same time. The Ars Amatoria is sort of mocking the form of didactic poetry, and there are also a lot of tropes from comedy in there. The young man who’s hopelessly in love with a meretrix, or an expensive sex worker—that trope is common in Roman comedy. There are places in the text where it almost seems like he’s writing a manual on how to be this kind of sitcom character. So it’s extremely literary in that way, and I don’t think you see pickup-artist texts working on all those levels in the same way. There’s an underlying sense in pickup-artist manuals that they are validating the reader’s fear that he is being sidelined in our society. Ovid’s text does the opposite: It assumes the reader is, if not on top of the world, very close to it.