Ovid on Cosmetics

This open access book examines the Medicamina Faciei Femineae, a didactic elegy that showcases an early example of Ovid’s trademark combination of poetic instruction and trivial subject matter. Exploring female beauty and cosmeceuticals, with particular emphasis on the concept of cultus, the poem presents five practical recipes for treatments for Roman women. Covering both didactic parody and pharmacological reality, this deceptively complex poem possesses wit and vivacity and provides an important insight into Roman social mores and day-to-day activities.

The first full study in English devoted to this little-researched but multi-faceted poem, Ovid on Cosmetics includes an introduction that situates the poem within its literary heritage of didactic and elegiac poetry, its place in Ovid’s oeuvre and its relevance to social values, personal aesthetics and attitudes to female beauty in Roman society. The Latin text is presented on parallel pages alongside a new translation, and all Latin words and phrases are translated for the non-specialist reader. Detailed commentary notes elucidate the text and individual phrases still further.

Ovid on Cosmetics presents and explicates this witty, subversive yet significant poem. Its attention to the technicalities of cosmeceuticals and cosmetics, including detailed analyses of individual ingredients and the effects of specific creams and makeup, make this work a significant contribution to the beauty industry in antiquity.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Knowledge Unlatched programme.

Author Biography

Marguerite Johnson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the co-author (with Terry Ryan) of Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook (2005), author of Sappho in this series (2006), and co-editor (with Harold Tarrant) of Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator, also published by Bristol Classical Press (2012). Terry Ryan is senior researcher for the 21st Century Learning Initiative. After receiving his Masters Degree in political economy in 1994, he worked with educational reformers and students in Poland, and co-authored a book on Polish history, The Shadows of the Past (2000), with former Solidarity leader Wiktor Kulerski. Ryan lives in Virginia, USA, with his wife and baby daughter.