Love Elegy Research Articles

The Economics of Roman Elegy: Voluntary Poverty, the Recusatio , and the Greedy Girl

ROMAN LOVE ELEGY PRESENTS sexual relationships between elite men and women of lower status in apparently reversed gender and power positions, so that the male is enslaved to his beloved domina. This meta- phorical reversal, however, actually retains standard Roman social struc- tures, suggesting an inequity even within a private love affair: rather than sharing goals and desires, lover and beloved stand in a gendered opposi- tion. Historically, elegy has been interpreted from the perspective of its male speakers, and much scholarship has focused on the characteriza- tions of those speakers. But as it is legitimate to study the male elegiac speakers' viewpoint, it is likewise appropriate to consider that of his preferred love object and frequent addressee, the elegiac docta puella. Since much of elegy is directed at a fictive, if named, woman, 1 such an approach may illuminate some of its rhetorical strategies and gender values, particularly as they derive from and relate to Roman gendered power constructs. Since elegy in particular generically anticipates the perspective of the docta puella, 2 and makes it a structural element of the

Lesbia, the poet, and the two faces of Sappho: ‘womanufacture’ in Catullus

Our understanding of ancient erotic poetry has, in my opinion, been greatly furthered in recent years by the shift from an approach which sees the poetic world of Roman love elegy as the creation of mimesis to one which reads it as semiosis. The elegiac poet portrays neither experienced reality nor conditions at least conceivable as such, but constructs a fictional situation using certain literary motifs provided by generic tradition, and thus challenges the reader to a game of semiotics. The latter, conversant with the ‘sign language’ of the motifs – for example ofservitium amoris– will appreciate the poet's playful variations on a familiar theme and decipher the new meaning it has been given. Particularly significant here is, I find, the new perception of the two central characters in the elegiac world: the first-personpoetalamatorand hispuellaare both part of this fiction. The poet assumes the mask of an elegiac lover, playing the part as an actor would; he does not, then, re-enact his own experiences for an audience. In addition to this he designs the figureof the puella, who appears less as a character with its own personal profile and more as a typified representation, contrived in the main to reflect the poeticego'sthoughts. Women such as Cynthia, Delia, and Corinna are, to use Alison Sharrock's very apt definition, the product of ‘womanufacture’, and their names therefore cannot be read as pseudonyms for real-life women.

Propercijeva elegija in Avgustova moralna država

V mnogih stoletjih se je zvrstilo že nešteto ugibanj o tem, kdo so pravzaprav bile elegične ljubimke. Te skrivnostne opevane ženske so se v rimski elegiji razkrivale v najrazličnejših podobah, ki pa so praviloma dovolj zabrisane in zastrte, včasih celo kontradiktorne, da s svojo neprepoznavnostjo burijo bralčevo domišljijo. So bile junakinje rimske ljubezenske elegije resnično le meretrices, osvobojenke, ženske nižjega rodu, kot kažejo nekateri namigi v posameznih elegičnih pesmih, ali pa je bila ta krinka le običajen, tako rekoč predpisan pesniški obrazec, ki naj bi po eni strani bralce in poslušalce ljubezenske poezije pritegnil z vznemirljivostjo prepovedanega sadu, po drugi pa pesnike, ki so morda kršili uveljavljene moraine norme ali pa kot ljubljenci rimskega občinstva k takim kršitvam spodbujali, zavaroval pred ostrimi sankcijami Avgustove zakonodaje?

I Am Dressed, Therefore I Am?: Vertumnus in Propertius 4.2 and in Metamorphoses 14.622-771

Recent interpretations of Propertius 4.2 see in Vertumnus' shifting costumes a programmatic statement about the new poetics of Propertius' fourth book of elegy. The statue's ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change mirrors the poet's desire to challenge the traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. No doubt this is so. And yet, more generally, recent criticism finds elegy as a genre hospitable to interpretations that focus on issues of gender and identity. Indeed, as Marilyn Skinner has succinctly summarised, ‘texts of the late first century BCE are notorious for the phenomenon of “gender dissonance”…boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as essential categories of psychosexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down.’ Propertius' fourth and final poetic collection provides fertile territory for an interrogation of gender, since it both highlights female voices—for example Arethusa, Cynthia or Cornelia—and explores moments of transvestism—for example Vertumnus and Hercules. I argue that when Propertius cloaks the speaking statue, Vertumnus, alternately in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes, he lays bare not simply poetics, but, further, he questions the very constitution of gender. In other words, Propertius probes the relationship between self-representation and identity and reveals that both are fluid and, more surprisingly perhaps, that the former gives rise to the latter.

The Poet and the Procuress: The Lena in Latin Love Elegy

This paper investigates the figure of the lena in the elegies of Tibullus (I.5; II.6), Propertius (IV.5), and Ovid (Amores I.8). While each poet treats the character of the lena in importantly different ways, each has in common a deep interest in contrasting his own position as both lover and poet with the activities of the lena, a bawd or procuress. All three poets curse the lena, denouncing primarily her malevolent magical powers, her carmina, which are directed against them and their carmina. The lena not only preaches an erotic code which in its emphasis on remuneration and the denigration of poetry directly opposes that of the poet-lover, she also usurps his role as instructor and constructor of the elegiac puella. It is the elegiac poet's prerogative to describe and construct the elegiac mistress. By usurping his role as praeceptor, the lena threatens the poet with both sexual and literary impotence. It is precisely because the lena challenges the male poet-lover's control over these terms that she is such a potent enemy; the woman with a pen, as Pollack writes in The Poetics of Sexual Myth, ‘threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim’. If the elegiac mistress can be said to play a more masterful role as domina in Roman love poetry than in conventional Roman ideology, it must nevertheless be qualified with the reminder that she only plays a role constructed for her by elegy's first-person narrator who demands complete control over the discourse of their relationship, of the rules of the amatory game.

How to win girlfriends and influence them: amicitia in Roman love elegy

It is often said that amicitia, so prominent in the love poetry of Catullus, plays a negligible role in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the elegists avoid the vocabulary of amicitia and prefer to describe the relationships with their beloveds in terms of militia and seruitium amoris. In this paper, however, I shall show that this is mistaken. While the elegists do not use the vocabulary of amicitia systematically, they clearly do continue to appeal to its protocols and moral code – Ovid above all. It will be seen that Catullus and the elegists share the use of the ideology of amicitia to pressurize their beloveds to accept or make a return on the benefacta which they as lovers bestow.

G. B. Conte: Genres and Readers. Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny's Encyclopedia. Translated by G. W. Most. With a Foreword by C. Segal. Pp. xxiii+185. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 (first published in Italian in 1991). Cased, £27.

G. B. Conte: Genres and Readers. Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny's Encyclopedia. Translated by G. W. Most. With a Foreword by C. Segal. Pp. xxiii+185. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 (first published in Italian in 1991). Cased, £27.

Latin literature: a history

This authoritative history of literature offers a comprehensive survey of the 1000-year period from the origins of as a written language to the early Middle Ages. Serving as a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written through Gregory of Tours in the 6th century and the Venerable Bede in the 7th, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major authors. Including names, dated, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopaedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte. Many of the entries those on Virgil and Petronius, for example - provide elegantly compact formulations of work on the very frontier of current study, and virtually all entries offer something of interest for the lay reader and expert alike. Gian Biagio Conte is the author of Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny's Encyclopedia, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Redressing Elegy'sPuella: Propertius IV and the Rhetoric of Fashion

Much recent criticism of Roman love elegy, especially Propertian love elegy, has been concerned with the exposure of elegy'segoandpuellaas poetic constructions whose ‘partially realistic’ characteristics and actions serve as metaphorical representations of the poet's writing practice and poetic ideals. As Duncan Kennedy has pointed out, however, this discourse of representation has already threatened to create its own limitations of applicability, as it privileges the ‘partial realism’ of love elegy's first-person narratives, in which an authorial male narrator (ego) writes of his female subject (puella), at the expense of the more openly unrealistic representational strategies of works such as Ovid'sHeroides and Fastior, the more immediate concern of this article, the fourth book of Propertius' elegies.

Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

Notes on Ovid, Heroides 20 and 21

Acontius argues that there was nothing wrong with the trick he played on Cydippe – the end justifies the means.Heinsius and Dilthey doubted the authenticity of this couplet, whilst Bornecque bracketed line 26 alone. Line 25, however, contains a familiar elegiac theme, and line 26, with one small emendation, is rhetorically sharp.All the MSS have uni in line 25, but many editors have found this unsatisfactory, preferring to read unum and punctuating the line in various ways: Burman prints ‘iungerer? unum’, Showerman, Goold and Palmer ‘iungerer, unum?’ Of these, the latter is the more attractive (Acontius wants one thing and one thing only – union with Cydippe; he is not interested in trying to cheat her financially, which is what fraus would most immediately suggest), ‘iungerer uni’, however, is perfectly good, and should be retained: uni means not ‘you alone (as opposed to several girls)’, but ‘you alone (as opposed to any other girl)’, cf. OLD s.v. unus 8 ‘one in particular, one above all others’. Acontius is paying Cydippe a compliment – she is the only girl for him, and nobody else will do. This is a common theme in Latin love elegy, cf. Prop. 2.7.19, [Tib.] 3.19.3–6, Ovid, Ars Am. 1.42: ‘elige cui dicas “tu mihi sola places”’.

Propertius' Horoscope: A Suggested Birthdate

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DiscussionsPropertius' Horoscope: A Suggested BirthdatePaul T. KeyserPaul T. Keyser Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 87, Number 4Oct., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/367326 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thea S. Thorsen The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, 7 (Dec 2013).https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139028288Michèle Lowrie Divided Voices and Imperial identity in Propertius 4.1 and Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other and Politics of Friendship*, Dictynna , no.88 (Dec 2011).https://doi.org/10.4000/dictynna.711

Womanufacture

Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women’, but of ‘images’, ‘representations’, ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion.This article will consider Ovid's version of the myth, the story of the artist who loved his own creation. I shall suggest that the story reflects on the eroto-artistic relationship between the poet and his puella explored in Latin love elegy. The Metamorphoses myth of the art-object which becomes a love-object mirrors the elegiac myth of love-object as art-object. The elegists represent the puella as both art and flesh. Pygmalion deconstructs the erotic realism of elegy and by its frankness about the power of the male artist discloses elegy's operations. It tells us how to read the puella — as a work of art; and the lover — as an artist obsessed with his own creation. Pygmalion reflects and exposes the self-absorption of elegy, the heroization of the lover, and the painted nature of the woman presented in eroto-elegiac texts, that is, the way in which she is to be seen as an art-object.

Alternae Voces—Again

There is a persistent tradition of reading Propertius 1.10, according to which the Gallus addressed by the poem is the elegiac poet, and the poem itself is a description, not, or not only, of Gallus and his girl in bed but of Propertius reading Gallus’ love elegy.1 In CQ 39 (1989), 561–2, James O'Hara suggests that the phrase ‘in alternis vocibus’ in Prop. 1.10.10 is a hint at amoebean verse, and as such may refer to the amoebean elegiac experiments by Gallus which Fairweather argues are represented by the Qasr Ibrim papyrus. This may well be right. I suggest, however, that the primary metaphorical meaning of ‘in alternis vocibus’ is ‘in your elegiac verse’. Oblique hints at such a reading can be found in Ross (above n. 1), who describes 9f as ‘an extremely suggestive couplet’, and Hinds, in his discussion of alternus as a programmatic term in Ovid, Fasti 4.484.

Written Women: Propertius' Scripta Puella

The narrative organization of Propertius' first poetry-book seems to encourage a practice of reading the characters and events of his love elegy as real. The predominantly autobiographical mode allows the reader to equate the lover of the text with the author Propertius. Direct addresses to a beloved ‘Cynthia’ who is allocated physical and psychological characteristics suggest that the narrative's female subject has a life outside the text as Propertius' mistress. The illusion of a real world populated by real individuals is then sustained by various other formal mechanisms such as the regular deployment of addresses to the historically verifiable figure of Tullus or occasional references to the landscape of Baiae, Umbria and Rome. Having established a recognizable setting, the poetry-book seems even to account for its own existence as literary discourse with the claim that composition is a method of courtship. Writing is subsumed within and subordinated to an erotic scheme: Propertius writes to woo a woman.

Paulus Silentiarius, Ovid, and Propertius

In the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth thematic resemblances to the Roman elegists in Paulus Silentiarius (and other late epigrammatists) were explained as the result of the poets' reliance on a common Hellenistic source – usually this was identified as the so-called ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ – and this represented a departure from the views of earlier scholars such as Hertzberg and Postgate, who had maintained that Paulus knew and imitated the elegists. In recent years the pendulum has swung back (partly, perhaps, because the whole notion of a ‘subjective Alexandrian love elegy’ has been abandoned), and the prevailing opinion seems to be that the Roman elegists were known to Paulus. This is the view of, for instance, Giovanni Viansino in his edition of Paulus, of Elmar Schulz-Vanheyden in his important work on Propertius' relationship to Greek epigram, and of Hermann Beckby in his edition of the Greek Anthology. Recently, too, Gordon Williams has put forward a very strong case for earlier epigrammatists like Antipater and Crinagoras imitating the Augustan poets.

New Comedy, Callimachus, and Roman Poetry

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

Sick-Visiting in Roman Elegy

THE THEME of the girl's sickness occurs frequently in Roman Love Elegy.' The course of Cynthia's dangerous illness is charted by Propertius in 2.28; Cerinthus prays for Sulpicia's recovery in [Tib.] 3.10 [4.4.]; Corinna suffers the dangerous after-effects of an abortion in Ovid Am. 2.13. All three elegists also use the girl's sickness to illustrate the obsequium of the lover, who (in stark contrast to his rival) visits the sickbed of his beloved. The contention of this paper is that this use of the motif has its origins in Hellenistic philosophical treatises on friendship. Tibullus 1.5 opens with the statement that the poet arrogantly believed that he could bear separation from Delia, but that his efforts to do so were in vain (1-6). He begs Delia to spare him (7-8), and as a demonstration of his past devotion to her he refers to his attendance on her during an illness (9-16). He made vows for her recovery (9-10); he took charge of the sulphur in a purification ceremony with an old witch (11-12); he averted nightmares by sacrifices (13-14) and made vows to Trivia in the silence of the night (15-16). But despite such exemplary devotion on the poet's part, a rival has now supplanted him in Delia's affections (17), and we learn later that this rival is the dives amator (47). The first twenty-four lines of Propertius 2.9 contrast the faithfulness of two heroines (Penelope and Briseis) in difficult (Penelope) or impossible (Briseis) situations with the fickleness of Cynthia, who could not remain faithful to the poet for one day or night. Then a series of angry rhetorical questions are fired at Cynthia:

Catullus 76: Elegy or Epigram?

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DiscussionsCatullus 76: Elegy or Epigram?J. David BishopJ. David Bishop Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 67, Number 4Oct., 1972 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/365902 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1972 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thea S. Thorsen The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, 7 (Dec 2013).https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139028288

Two Problems in Roman Love Elegy

Two Problems in Roman Love Elegy