IV. Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

Abstract

If the Heroides are an adaptation of the elegiac tradition to the epistolary form, then the Ars and Remedia are an adaptation to the didactic, with the crucial difference that, unlike the poetic epistle, the didactic poem had a clearly defined tradition and (in Virgil) a distinguished recent practitioner. The Hesiodic tradition had been enlarged by the Alexandrians to include the learned scientific, and had more recently been debased by the inclusion of the trivial (Tr. 2. 471 ff.), and it is important to see where Ovid stands. Superficially, the Ars Amatoria is on a par with practical poems like that of Ovid’s contemporary Grattius on hunting, and the Remedia Amoris has affinities with medical works like Macer’s on the cures for snake-bites; but the use of the didactic form for such an untraditional subject as love creates ‘a pleasing atmosphere of burlesque’.