Women's travels in Latin elegy*

Abstract

This chapter explores women’s travel in Latin love elegy and in the epigraphic record, finding evidence in these sources for both voluntary and coerced movement of women around the Roman empire. Keith first surveys the anxieties that the Latin love elegists Cornelius Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid express about their puellae traveling in and out of Rome and, thus, in and out of the grasp of the amator. These poetic representations of travel interact with inscriptional evidence for enslaved and freedwomen who bear the names of elegiac puellae. Keith’s discussion reveals how the poetics of travel in elegy, though highly aestheticized, nonetheless hint at the historical contexts of human mobility and trafficking in which both elite literature and the epigraphic record were composed.