{"id":1346,"date":"2018-01-17T14:53:27","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T14:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2018-01-17T14:53:27","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T14:53:27","slug":"ovids-cure-for-pimples-and-other-adventures-in-practical-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1346","title":{"rendered":"Ovid’s cure for pimples (and other adventures in ‘Practical Classics’)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alison Daniels is an OU student working towards the Q85 BA in Classical Studies. This autumn, she was awarded the \u2018highly commended\u2019 prize for her submission to the John Stephen Kassman Memorial Essay competition: an essay entitled \u2018Practical Classics: Reflections on the attempted recreation of the ancient Roman skincare and cosmetic products described by Ovid in his Medicamina Faciei Femineae<\/em>\u2019.<\/span> Alison attempted to recreate some of the lotions and potions that Ovid recommended to his Roman readers. It\u2019s safe to say that this is the first student essay to arrive in the OU Classical Studies mailbox complete with pots of cosmetic samples! <\/strong><\/p>\n

In this blog post, she tells us a bit more about the process of researching and writing the essay, and her plans for future work in the field of Classical Studies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

Hello Alison, congratulations on your prize! Please could you introduce yourself to our blog readers, and tell us about your OU learning journey so far?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is my second degree with the OU. The first was an Open Honours degree which ended up as a weird mixture of cognitive psychology and Romans. I just chose what interested me. My love for the Romans was rekindled by the sight of James Purefoy\u2019s backside in HBO\u2019s Rome on TV. It\u2019s not the greatest reason for studying, is it? This time I\u2019m taking another honours degree in Classical Studies. Last year I had to exert some discipline to learn all those Latin endings and declensions for A276. I\u2019m now taking A330 looking at Greek and Roman Myth. I can\u2019t quite get my head round the Greeks, they seem to have quite an alien mind set to me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to go on and take a PhD part time by distance learning, but funding it would be an issue. Building on A330, I\u2019m fascinated by how Roman cults functioned as businesses, so that would be my subject.\u00a0 How cults competed, attracted new members and got the money to operate, how they entered a new market, how you spread the message about your \u201cnew\u201d god, why people would join a new cult and what it offered, how they sought out high profile converts, the economics and business aspects of creating and buying votives \u2013 that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

Other than that, I\u2019ve always had way too much curiosity and a bad habit of going, \u201cWhat if\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

You chose to write your Kassman essay about\u00a0Ovid\u2019s Medicamina Faciei Femineae<\/em>. Can you give us some background to this text?\u00a0How much of it survives, and what is it about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What remains of the Medicamina<\/em> is just a fragment of about 100 lines long. The first half is Ovid\u2019s usual poetics, but the second half changes quite abruptly to a series of five recipes for skincare and cosmetic products. At first sight, it didn\u2019t seem to fit with the bits of Ovid I\u2019d encountered on the module [A276]]. It was as if, say, Hamlet broke off in the middle of \u201cTo be or not to be\u201d to give you his recipe for Danish Pastries.<\/p>\n

Why you decide to recreate the recipes, rather than just read about them? And what did you expect to find out when you started your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I started my research, I thought I\u2019d find that lots of people had recreated Ovid\u2019s recipes. It seemed such an obvious approach, but although there were lots of references to the recipes, no what seemed to have actually tried them out. Even where people had written books on Roman cosmetics, they didn\u2019t seem to have made them, so I decided I\u2019d give it a go as my topic for the Kassman essay prize.<\/p>\n

How many recipes did you recreate?\u00a0What were the main challenges you encountered?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I chose to recreate four recipes out of the five. The one I omitted involved nitre, which I thought at the time I\u2019d have to make by following a medieval process. Since it involved digging a metre cubed pit and filling it with alternate layers of lime and chicken poo, I passed on that.<\/p>\n

There were two main challenges. I soon discovered why no one appeared to have recreated Ovid\u2019s recipes before! The first was the translations themselves, which varied enormously and unexpectedly. Take lines 78-80. Mahoney (Perseus.tufts.edu) renders them as:<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo ounces next of gum, and thural seed,
\nThat for the gracious gods does incense breed,
\nAnd let a double share of honey last succeed\u201d.<\/p>\n

This differs significantly from the prose translation offered by May in the Loeb,<\/p>\n

\u201cThere should also be added two ounces of gum and Tuscan spelt, and nine times as much honey.\u201d (www.sacred-texts.com\/cla\/ovid\/lboo\/lboo62.htm).<\/p>\n

So I didn\u2019t really know whether to go with nine times as much honey or 4 ounces as the double share. Scale it up to fifty lines and it becomes even less consistent. In the end I opted for the Loeb translation throughout, cross-referencing as needed.<\/p>\n

The second challenge was rounding up the materials and trying to identify what species of plant or type of material Ovid actually meant. He was writing before scientific taxonomy and many of the translations seemed give priority to metre over product formulation. In one recipe he specifies windy beans, but even with research into ancient Roman recipes, it wasn\u2019t clear which variety was meant. Add in that commercial plant breeding and agriculture has changed the physical qualities of many species over time and I couldn\u2019t be sure that Ovid\u2019s opium poppy petals bore much resemblance to the ones from my neighbour\u2019s garden, or that the modern ingredients wouldn\u2019t result in a less efficacious product.<\/p>\n

I had to make some educated guesses and substitutions, so I used Scottish barley that a local farmer let me have rather than Libyan barley and my iris bulbs came from the garden centre rather than Illyria. Similarly, I used a high powered blender to grind and mix my ingredients since I had no access to strong-armed slaves or a donkey powered mill.<\/p>\n

Can you give us a taster of one of the\u00a0recipes \u2013 perhaps your favourite one?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although Ovid\u2019s fennel seed complexion cream smelt fabulous, I found his spot and pimple cream most interesting. At first, I thought it was maybe a later addition to the poem as the quantity of ingredients seemed pretty industrial, coming in at just over 4Kg.<\/p>\n

At Ovid\u2019s stated dose the batch contains six months\u2019 worth of daily treatment. In fact, Ovid\u2019s suggestion of \u00bd Roman ounce, or 14.35g per treatment, is 29 times higher than a recommended full face dose of a modern acne treatment. At that rate, Ovid\u2019s recipe provides almost six years of twice daily treatments. I thought Ovid was obliquely suggesting that those with spots should cake themselves in a thick layer of disguising cream for several years until the skin problems have passed.<\/p>\n

\"Ingredients<\/a><\/p>\n

Ingredients for Ovid\u2019s spot and pimple cure and the end result<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ovid's<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I tested the recipe, I found it resulted in a dark, flecked mixture. It didn\u2019t absorb into the skin, but sits on it until removed. Rubbing resulted in the honey component spreading into the skin, leaving dry farinaceous matter on top. It is exceptionally drying on the skin, but not sticky. If Ovid\u2019s suggested dose of an ounce were applied to the face, it would doubtless slide off. The wearer would not be able to apply this product then appear in public, but would have to stay secluded. Ovid often seemed to use a known allergen in this preparation. Lupin commonly causes skin rashes and breathing difficulties in around 1-2% of the population.<\/p>\n

You mention in the essay that some of your neighbours helped with sourcing the ingredients \u2013 what did they think when you told them about your project?!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Luckily for me, I live in quite a charmingly eccentric little village, where people are always helping each other out. My job writing for magazines and editing means my neighbours are quite used to me doing strange things, like walking over hot coals or trying twenty ice cream flavours in one afternoon for a food review! They didn\u2019t have a problem with letting me take some lupin seeds or stealing all the petals from their poppies once I had explained.<\/p>\n

And finally, what would you count as your most important or surprising discovery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though the project was pretty poor science and not very rigorous as classical research, I think it had value. It gave me an idea of the difficulties of primary research without proper funding, equipment and access to materials and secondary research. It was also fun to do and interesting to explore.<\/p>\n

In terms of the cosmetic formulae themselves, I came to the conclusion that Ovid gives us a series of cosmetics where each has the opposite effect to that promised. A cheek stain that gives the wearer the appearance of bruises rather than a healthy glow; a spot cream that needs to be layered on so thickly the wearer\u2019s entire visage is obscured and the user must avoid others; a cream that promises radiance but soon leaves the skin dull and grey and a brightening cream which blisters the skin.<\/p>\n

While this may have been Ovid\u2019s subtle comment on the futility of artificial beauty products, my own conclusion was that the recipes were, in effect, a series of practical jokes. By simply translating Ovid\u2019s words and failing to fully comprehend the sly implications of his recipes, I felt we may have missed out on a more practical aspect of Ovid\u2019s humour.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alison Daniels is an OU student working towards the Q85 BA in Classical Studies. This autumn, she was awarded the \u2018highly commended\u2019 prize for her submission to the John Stephen Kassman Memorial Essay competition: an essay entitled \u2018Practical Classics: Reflections on the attempted recreation of the ancient Roman skincare and cosmetic products described by Ovid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,46],"tags":[124,79],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","category-undergraduate","tag-a330","tag-ovid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1350,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions\/1350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}