The Cure for Love

This elegiac poem proposes a cure for the love Ovid teaches in the Ars Amatoria and is primarily addressed to men. The poem criticizes suicide as a means of escaping love and, invoking Apollo, goes on to tell lovers not to procrastinate and be lazy in dealing with love. Lovers are taught to avoid their partners, not perform magic, see their lovers unprepared, take other lovers, and never be jealous. Old letters should be burned, and the lover's family avoided.

The poem throughout presents Ovid as a doctor and utilizes medical imagery. Some have interpreted this poem as the close of Ovid's didactic cycle of love poetry and the end of his erotic elegiac project.