Caput mundi: Female Hair as Symbolic Vehicle of Domination in Ovidian Love Elegy

Abstract

This paper suggests some far-reaching symbolic implications for women's hair in Latin love elegy. Hairdressing, hairdressers and hair loss provided a metaphorical vehicle by which Tibullus (1.8), Propertius (2.18), and above all Ovid (Ars Amatoria 3; Amores 1.11–12, 2.7–8, 1.7, and 1.14) interrogate the power relationships that underpin Roman society: between master and slave, women and men, Rome and her provinces. In my analysis, elegiac hair becomes an index to the socioeconomic realities of urban self-fashioning as well as a locus of anxiety about Rome's increasing reliance on imported labor and consumer goods.