New Comedy, Callimachus, and Roman Poetry

Abstract

N 1895 Friedrich Leo,' observing thematic similarities between Roman comedy and Roman elegy, suggested the following scheme for the development of the latter genre: in the Hellenistic period a class of Greek love elegy came into being, a poetic form heavily influenced by Greek New Comedy (particularly noticeable in the parallel between the young lover of comedy and the elegiac poet/lover). This Hellenistic elegy then provided the direct model for the Roman elegists hence the parallels between Roman comedy and elegy. This thesis was severely weakened by the persuasive demonstration of F. Jacoby2 that in all probability a Hellenistic elegy, comparable to that produced in Augustan Rome, did not exist. E. Reitzenstein3 further damaged the theory by showing that Alexandrian and, more specifically, Callimachean influence on Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid was a stylistic, rather than a thematic one. The predominant critical view today, quite correctly, is that Roman love elegy, while it is indebted, like all Roman poetry, to previous poetic expression, is to be granted a greater degree of originality than Leo allowed.4 This article resurrects Leo's general pattern, but with important distinctions, and without the central fallacy of assuming a lost Hellenistic elegiac tradition. His theory, that there is a clear line of development from New Comedy to Alexandria, and subsequently to neoteric and