This chapter investigates how Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines make cultural use of Amores 1.5 and 3.7. Framing the analysis through articulations of power and impotence, we see how literary representations of sexual performance or failure reveal covert engagements with questions of politicised myth-making and story-telling. Sex is read here as a vocabulary which has a potent place in the support and subversion of the Augustan and Elizabethan regimes.