Abstract
In this paper I analyse and compare the representations (or self-representations) of poets in the underworld in elegiac and lyric Roman poetry. I focus especially on five poems: Tibullus I.3; Propertius II. 34; Ovid, Amores II.6 (birds as poets) and III.9; Horace, Odes II.13. It is not my intention to give a detailed interpretation of the whole poems; my principal aim is to analyse how dead poets are pictured in two different genres, the elegiac and the lyric, which share certain features (for instance, we can have in some lyric poems the poetic persona of a lover, the amator, which characterizes erotic elegy discourse, and some similar topics, as the metaphor of love as illness, etc.). At the end of this paper, I will point to the images of dead poets that are (I think) the most representative of the difference between elegiac and lyric genres. In the footnotes I provide some bibliographical references on studies and commentaries about each of the poems I treat here.
Highlights
In this paper I analyse and compare the representations of poets in the underworld in elegiac and lyric Roman poetry
Concluding the section dedicated to Elysium, Tibullus says that all lovers will inhabit this region in the underworld: illic est cuicumque rapax Mors uenit amanti, et gerit insigni myrtea serta coma. (65-66)
I think Cairns (1979, p. 50) eludes the essential when he says “Elysium is the recompense which Tibullus deserves for enduring the suffering and death of a world deprived of its Golden Age”
Summary
In elegy I. 3,2 Tibullus, having fallen ill in Phaeacia, begs Death not to seize him in that unknown place, where his funeral would be unattended by his mother, his sister and the beloved Delia (1-10). 44), commenting on the catalogue of poets in Propertius II., says about the disthic I have analyzed: “The list ends with the image of Gallus who washes in the infernal waters the love wounds received from Lycoris, held responsible for his death: here is the elegiac universe in a single disthic”. Elegy III. on the death of Tibullus, and II. are the only examples of epicedium in Ovid’s Amores, but there are other similarities between them: as we have seen, there are catalogues in both, and they celebrate the perpetuation of poetry in the afterlife of poets. Ovid places Tibullus in an underworld among poets (two neoterics and the elegiac Gallus) who have celebrated love and to whom we could apply the Tibullian line illic est cuicumque rapax Mors uenit amanti (I.3, 65), if we interpret amanti, as I do, as ambiguous and metapoetical. I decided not to analyse here the odes in which Horace foresees his immortality as a poet, because this theme has been extensively treated by scholars; I limit myself to noting that, for the lyric poet, what matters in the afterlife is the image of the poet as an artist, not the persona expressed, for instance, in love, symposiastic or imprecatory poems, the exception being the elegiac Sappho in II.
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