ADVERTISING: When in Rome

About 2 B.C., Roman Poet Ovid, the Oscar Wilde of his day, told in his Art of Love how to woo a lady:

Let exercise your body brown:

Don’t slobber: see your teeth are clean:

Your hair well cut and brushed quite

down:

Your cheeks close shaved with razor

keen:

Your toga spotless, white, and neat:

Your sandals fitting to your feet.

Remember too your nails to pare:

Bathe well your body to be sure,

Pluck from your nostrils every hair,

A noisome breath with citron cure—

And that is all you need to know:

The rest the girls you may allow.

Last week the Lambert Pharmacal Co., makers of Listerine—which contains no citron—reprinted 17 stanzas of Ovid’s advice and crowed: “You had the right idea, Ovid, but the wrong remedy.” It was a long literary reach, but it undoubtedly trapped some readers who had never read a Listerine ad before.