Comment on Ovid's use of humour with respect to poetic metre in the following lines of Amores 1.1: "par erat inferior versus; risisse Cupid / dicitur atque unum suripuisse pedem."

This poem is written in elegiac couplets, as was customary for Latin love poetry, where the first line of a couplet has six feet and the second has five. This is unlike dactylic hexameter, where both lines of a couplet have six feet. The latter metre was more commonly used for epic poems. Ovid uses this fact to introduce humour in this poem by suggesting that Cupid has unum surripuisse pedem, 'stolen away one foot' from the second line of the couplet. This means that Ovid intended to write an epic in dactylic hexameter until Cupid, the god of love, forced him to change his metre to that of love poetry. This also reveals something about the way love was typically viewed in Latin love poetry: namely, that it overwhelmed the writer unexpectedly, until he was forced, like Ovid, to express his feelings in poetry.