Medicamina Faciei Femineae - Form

Form

The poem is Ovid's first attempt at didactic elegy. This poetic genre, perfected by Ovid in his Ars Amatoria, was a curious amalgam of the moralizing and pedagogical tone of didactic poetry and the frivolous subject matter common to Latin elegiac. In the earliest known example of didactic poetry, Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod admonishes a dissolute brother to lead a life of honest labor. Centuries later in 29 BC, the Roman poet Vergil, writing in Latin while taking his inspiration in part from Hesiod, published the Georgics, a work whose ostensible purpose was to provide advice on agriculture. Ovid, writing a generation later for an audience to whom the Georgics were well known, used Vergil's sober language to instruct girls on "what care can enhance your looks, and how your beauty may be preserved". Rather than using the dactylic hexameters of Hesiod and Vergil, Ovid casts his advice in elegiac couplets, the traditional meter of love poetry. The contrast of serious tone and light-hearted meter transforms the Medicamina Faciei Femineae into a parody of Vergil's Georgics.