Narrative and Duality in Ovid’s ‘Medicamina Faciei Femineae’
This post is an adapted and condensed excerpt from an essay I recently submitted for my MPhil.
Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae, (‘Cosmetics for the Female Face’) is an unusual work, to say the least. The poem falls at the beginning of Ovid’s erotodidactic corpus, and was probably composed just before the third book of the Ars Amatoria.[1] The first fifty lines focus on cultus (broadly defined as adornment or cultivation), while the next fifty consist of intricate recipes for ointments written in a ‘Nicandrian’ style, before the extant lines of this poem abruptly end.[2] Women are promised that the praeceptor amoris’ (Ovid’s role as teacher) instructions will enhance and preserve their beauty:
Discite quae faciem commendet cura, puellae,
Et quo sit vobis forma tuenda modo.
Learn, O women, what pains can enhance your looks, and how your beauty may be preserved — (Ovid, Med. 1–2).[3]
Wilkinson’s view that the Medicamina’s fragmentary state is ‘hardly a matter of regret’ has been rightly taken to task, most recently by Rimell, Watson, and Johnson, to name a few.[4]
But, how do we construe the Medicamina in the grand scheme of didactic poetry? Comparisons have been drawn with Virgil’s Georgics, but, as discussed by Johnson, the Medicamina values ingenuity, and tackles a more ‘trivial’ didactic subject than the practical content of Virgil’s pastoral didactic.[5] This has even led Watson to construe the Medicamina as a didactic parody. Discussions of parody are based in the ambiguous definition of cultus. For the Sabine women mentioned in the praeceptor’s aetiological description in lines 11–16, cultus refers to pastoral cultivation, as in the Georgics. However, for Ovid’s Augustan audience cultus refers to beautification. The concept of cultus forms the cornerstone of the Medicamina. While the other Augustan poets tended to perpetuate the view that cultus, or beautification and adornment, was for meretrices, Ovid subversively encourages it, in a way which opposes the ‘Augustan precept’ of modesty, and the poet later champions the idea that female cultus can be practised without ‘rejecting traditional societal values and respectability.’[6]
While a didactic interpretation presents Ovid as knowledgeable and well researched, and provides a rich historicist reading, which indicates what recipes for cosmeceuticals might have looked like, Ovid’s advice, as Toohey remarks, cannot be taken entirely seriously.[7] It is clear already from the poem’s interaction with extant didactic poetry that the Medicamina is most richly received when not read as purely didactic. After all, a genuinely didactic reading would arguably isolate Ovid’s male audience. The Ars Amatoria, which is often paired with the Medicamina, is addressed to women, but has Ovid’s male audience at its core. Its advice centres around men’s actions, and how women should respond to them.[8]
Volk argues that didactic poetry retains a narrative — the ‘didactic plot’ — which conveys the development of the poet’s instructions and the poem itself.[9] Alison Sharrock takes this a step further, and has argued that a quasi-narrative can be read in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria out of the implied action of the central characters, which is manifested through the ‘directly instructional parts of the text’.[10] She seeks to read instruction as narrative, and to read narrative back into instruction.[11] This method might also be transferred to the Medicamina.
Upon attempting to read a narrative into the Medicamina, I believe that two contradictory ones are in fact uncovered. The first of these strips women of their beauty regimes before Ovid’s readership. Despite enabling female cultus and adornment through his instruction, the praeceptor amoris maintains a level of transparency which undermines female agency, so as not to disadvantage his male audience. The second narrative is one of chronology and age. By tracing women’s lifetimes, both aetiologically and chronologically, the praeceptor implements elegy’s topos of fading beauty. It is made clear that these beautification rituals are necessary to counter the ravages of age — a hypocrisy which is mirrored in our modern beauty standards.[12]
Narrative #1: An Exposé
The Medicamina reads more comfortably as an exposé of women’s beauty rituals than as a rigidly didactic poem.[13] Ovid’s intended audience is arguably so unrecognisable that the addressee naturally becomes an external one instead. Despite first addressing puellae specifically (1), the praeceptor amoris addresses women of all social standings in its prooemium.[14] He includes the young puella (17) and a respectable, married matrona (nupta, 26) adjacent to the traditional use of cultus by meretrices.[15] Sharrock views the lack of a named addressee in the Ars Amatoria as a means to slip between “Reader” and “reader”, or primary and external audience respectively.[16] In the same way that Farrell argues that we, a secondary audience, are the interceptors of the Heroides, the Medicamina might resemble an intercepted piece of didaxis, and hence Rimell identifies the poem as an ‘anti-seduction’.[17] Her reading is founded in the idea that the process of beautification must not be seen, and that the reader has interrupted a woman at her dressing table.[18] This, and an uncertain addressee, points towards an external audience.[19] The praeceptor strips away the layers of female cultus before his readership, forming a narrative which culminates in transparency.
The praeceptor’s recipes in the Medicamina, unlike the didaxis of the Ars Amatoria, have a clinical style, with no explicit mythological allusion. For example:
Sextantemque trahat gummi cum semine Tusco:
Huc novies tanto plus tibi mellis eat.
Let gum and Tuscan seed weigh a sixth part of a pound, and let nine times as much honey go to that. — (Ovid, Med. 65–6)
While on one hand, the clinical recipes are the greatest hurdle in the search for a ‘narrative’, the praeceptor’s measurements, ingredients, and periphrastic directions have the precision of forensic evidence for these beautification rituals. I read circumstantial, periphrastic descriptions as equivalent to legal eye-witness testimony, rather than rigid instruction. In the last extant lines of the poem, for example, the praeceptor provides an account via autopsy of a woman blushing her cheeks:
vidi quae gelida madefacta papavera lympha
contereret, teneris illineretque genis.
I have seen one who pounded poppies moistened with cool water, and rubbed them on her tender cheeks — (Ovid, Med. 99–100)
The idea that the praeceptor himself has seen this technique offers an element of certainty, and, in the perfect tense, suggests a one-off incident. Accompanied by a form of ipse, the verb videre is commonly attested in Cicero to denote an eye-witness account. [20] This perpetuates a relatively linear narrative of transparency and, recipe by recipe, the praeceptor peels back the façade created by female cultus.
This narrative of transparency and undressing is easier to conceptualise using Gamel’s theory of performance: that elegiac poems are open to more interpretations when viewed as ‘scripts for performance’. One might imagine the Medicamina being performed with an ironic, mocking exaggeration of didactic elements, as if the praeceptor were walking his audience through the exposé.[21]
Narrative #2: Anti-Ageing
Then why advise? Why not just write as a narrative or exposé? This question introduces us to a second narrative. The praeceptor amoris, while uncovering these women’s secrets, implies that they are necessary nonetheless, and implements an anti-age rhetoric throughout. The praeceptor journeys with his subjects from tenerae…puellae (17), to young women (18–24), to nuptae (25–6), to old age (formam populabitur aetas, 45) and then, using his recipes, back to their youth. This final warning, that age will ruin beauty, recalls the elegiac topos of fading beauty and encapsulates the aim of this second narrative: to prevent the ravages of age.[22] The praeceptor even introduces his first recipe with the claim that it will make faces ‘shine fresh and fair’ (discite age…candida quo possint ora nitere modo, 51–2)– a description which implies renewed youth, and a glowing complexion.[23]
Ovid reassures that character is also important (ingenio facies conciliante placet, 44). This is picked up in Cokayne’s rejection of the idea that a woman’s status would decline as she aged. The worth of matronae stemmed from motherhood and housekeeping skills. [24] However, this advice does not detract from the anti-age rhetoric concerning physical appearance. The stated aim is to preserve beauty (forma tueri), from deterioration, one assumes, rather than uplift it. As Cokayne adds, poets ‘made it abundantly clear that only the young and beautiful were seen as love objects’, citing Propertius’ assertion that ‘girls must be in the right season for love’ (Prop. 2.15.21).[25] The implication from the praeceptor’s chronological narrative, is that, through cultus, these women can pass as being in the ‘right season for love’. Yet, Ovid simultaneously lifts the veil on these very processes.
Ovid’s references to the pastoral bring together the two meanings to foster the anti-ageing, temporal narrative.[26] This interpretation is founded in Ovid’s approach to age and the pastoral more generally:
dum licet, et vernos etiamnum educitis annos,
ludite: eunt anni more fluentis aquae;
nec quae praeteriit, iterum revocabitur unda,
nec quae praeteriit, hora redire potest.
While you can, and still are in your spring-time, have your sport; for the years pass like flowing water; the wave that has gone by cannot be called back, the hour that has gone by cannot return. — (Ovid, Ars Am. 3.61–4)
The praeceptor amoris compares the stages of a woman’s life to the four seasons, here referring to her youth as ‘spring-time’.[27] His comparison of the years of a woman’s life (anni) to flowing water (fluentis aquae), or a wave (unda) suggests that age and the pastoral are inherently linked by their connection to nature and their reliance on time.[28] As Rimell points out, Ovid markets cultus to improve on nature. Rosati’s parallels with similar lines in Ars Am. 2.118 and Ex Ponto 1.4.2 evidence a strong connection between the pastoral and cultus, and time and age.[29] This also reaffirms that Ovid’s skincare advice is aimed at rejuvenation.
The praeceptor thereby proposes to solve the issue of age through cultus:
cultus humum sterilem Cerealia pendere iussit
munera, mordaces interiere rubi.
cultus et in pomis sucos emendat acerbo,
fissaque adoptivas accipit arbor opes.
By cultivation was the sterile ground bidden render bounty of wheat, and the devouring briars slain. Cultivation improves the bitter juice of fruit, and the cleft tree gains adopted richness. — (Ovid. Med. 3–6)
Wyke argues that nature, by analogy, demonstrates the legitimacy of the cultus of the female body, citing lines 3–4 as an example of this.[30] While this is indeed the case, I propose to extend the link between cultus and nature into the temporal narrative of age. Sterility is a result of, indeed, a lack of cultivation, but also of age. Virgil describes exhausted fields (effetos agros) in relation to sterile land, for example (Virgil, Georgics 1.81, 84). Acerbus, in terms of flavour, has links to immaturity, which might make this mean the exact opposite. However, when the adjective describes a person it implies strictness and severity — qualities which come with age, if we refer to the portraits of old women in Roman comedy — Cleostrata in Plautus’ Casina, for example.[31] From the prooemium, then the praeceptor makes a direct correlative link between both definitions of cultus, and the physical effects of age, and sets the addressee on a quest against age’s toll.
The anti-age anti-narrative runs through the Medicamina’s recipes. The praeceptor alludes to ingredients with properties of rejuvenation to continue his quest refers heavily to the myth of Narcissus in this recipe, as he instructs his subject to add twelve narcissus bulbs without their skin (adice narcissi bis sex sine cortice bulbos…, 63). Rimell construes this as a reference to the poem’s mirror motif.[32] She argues that the moral takeaway is that one cannot use a mirror without also being vulnerable to its powers. Reflection and age are intertwined in Ovid’s account of the myth in the Metamorphoses:
…de quo consultus, an esset
tempora maturae visurus longa senectae,
fatidicus vates “si se non noverit” inquit.
When asked whether this child would live to reach well-ripened age, the seer replied: “If he ne’er know himself.” — (Ovid, Met. 3.346–8)
Although this is treated as a cautionary tale, Narcissus’ succumbing to the mirror’s powers stopped him from reaching a ‘well-ripened age’ (matura senecta), and thus he is immortalised in his youth within this flower, which is now an ingredient in a woman’s face pack. The praeceptor’s inclusion of narcissus bulbs therefore has implications of perpetual youth. Similarly, eggs (85) and honey (98) are animal products which represent rebirth and springtime pollination, and are arguably also ingredients which symbolise youth. Ovid builds youth into the recipes themselves, which perpetuates his narrative of a quest against age.
Conclusions
Two opposing narratives can be unearthed in Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae: one which sets the audience on a quest to allay the physical detriments of ageing; and one that, recipe by recipe, unveils female beautification processes to the rest of Ovid’s audience. The hypocrisy here does not amount to shaming women, but to exposing them. The praeceptor encourages women to use these strategies, but not to the detriment and deception of men. As Naomi Wolf puts it, ‘[T]he beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men and power.’[33] As modern consumers, we are often sold a narrative which simultaneously recommends a natural yet highly modified look. Women are held in a similar limbo in Ovid’s poem, between two hypocritical narratives. This is echoed in a recent paper by Rhode:
‘Yet even as the culture expects women to conform, they often face ridicule for their efforts…But neither should women “let themselves go,” nor look as if they were trying too hard not to. Beauty must seem natural — even, or especially, when it can only be accomplished through considerable unnatural effort.’ [34]
The ideals set out for women are unattainable, and therefore ‘their task is boundless’, as Rhode writes.[35] The praeceptor retains a monopoly on women’s bodily autonomy, which mirrors the marketing of our modern beauty industry. Rather than money, however, Ovid’s capital is poetic skill. The Medicamina is first and foremost an exercise in male power. Once again the poetic woman is contorted for the poet to showcase his skill, as Ovid maintains two opposing narratives simultaneously.
Endnotes
[1] Rosati, 1985, 42f; Watson, 2001, 457; Johnson, 2016, xii.
[2] Johnson, 2016, 78.
[3] Latin taken from Kenney’s Oxford Classical Text and all translations, as befits, are taken from Mozley’s Loeb, unless otherwise stated.
[4] Johnson, 2016; Rimell, 2006; Watson, 2001.
[5] Johnson, 2016, 25.
[6] Johnson, 2016, 19: Rosati, 1985, 30–32 & Gibson, 2003, 145.
[7] Toohey, 1996, 162.
[8] Ovid, Ars Am. 3.5–6: non erat armatis aequum concurrere nudas/ sic etiam vobis vincere turpe, viri (‘it were not just that defenceless maids should fight with armed men; such a victory, O men, would be shameful for you also’).
[9] Volk, 2002, 40; the term is taken from Fowler, 2000.
[10] Sharrock, 2006, 24; cf. Liveley, 2012 for an approach to narratology in Roman elegy.
[11] Sharrock, 2006, 25.
[12] Wolf, 1990; Rhode, 2016.
[13] Green, 1979, Balsdon, 1962 & Wilkinson, 1960 all view the second fifty lines as textbook-like and scientific.
[14] Toohey, 1996, 161: it is unclear whether puellae refers to slaves or freedwomen, which blurs the audience further; all Latin taken from Kenney’s Oxford Classical Text and all translations, as befits, are taken from Mozley’s Loeb, unless otherwise stated.
[15] Ovid, Med. 1, 17, 26; Watson, 2001, 461 discusses the associations of cultus with ‘whorish behaviour’; see Ziogas, 2014, 736 for Ovid’s ‘socially unrecognisable’ readership in the Ars Amatoria.
[16] Sharrock, 1994, 8.
[17] Rimell, 2006, 57ff.
[18] Ibid, 55: Ovid, Rem. Am. 351–6 is a commonly cited instance of this.
[19] Farrell, 1998, 315.
[20] Cic. Planc. 69; Div. Caec. 25; Ver. 2.1.64; cf. Ovid, Met. 3.569, Virgil, Aeneid 2.499.
[21] Gamel, 2012, 339, 353; Toohey, 1996, 162.
[22] Watson, 2001, 470; Nisbet-Hubbard, 1970, 289.
[23] Kenney gives dic, which is disputed in Rosati and Goold. I have elected to use discite to mirror the opening line of the poem, and introduce the didactic section.
[24] Cokayne, 2005, 138; cites Plut. Conj. Praec. 141.22: wives should rely on conversation, character, and comradeship, rather than beauty.
[25] Ibid, 136.
[26] Toohey, 1996, 162.
[27] Cf. Ovid, Met. 15.199–213: Pythagoras explicitly compares the four seasons to human life.
[28] Gibson, 2003, 113: ire is commonly used of the passage of time and water.
[29] Rosati, 1985, 103.
[30] Wyke, 1996, 145.
[31] Plautus, Casina, 153–63, for example.
[32] Rimell, 2006, 59.
[33] Wolf, 1990, 4.
[34] Rhode, 2016, 704; it should also be noted that this discussion intersects with issues of race and class, as rightly outlined by Rhode, 2016, 703.
[35] Rhode, 2016, 700: Wolf, 1990.
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