The Praise of Cultus in Ovid's Medicamina Faciei Femineae: Ethical and Aesthetic Implications

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the complex relationship between ars and natura in the proem of Ovid’s Medicamina, which celebrates the value of cultus and serves to legitimate the art of self-adornment on the grounds of ethics. Our purpose is to point out the rhetorical and poetical ways by which the praeceptor revises received philosophical and ethical ideas about art and its proper uses in the service of his own art of cosmetics and, more broadly, of his own erotodidaxis.