Roman Love Elegy Research Articles

Prudentius’ Agnes and the Elegiac puella

Abstract In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius’ classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius’ Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella.

Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23-5, 31). (1) The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and 12, however, thematize the poet's sexual impotence and his disgust during encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes is unmistakably that of harsh invective, and the virulent targeting of the mulieres' revolting bodies is precisely in line with Archilochean poetics that uses sexually-explicit, graphic obscenities as well as animal comparisons for the sake of a poetic attack. Epodes 8 and 12 may, in fact, offer Roman culture's most overtly misogynistic tone. (2) In spite of the vehemence in the speaker's verbal assaults, he is reacting to his own perceived sexual weakness. In fact, Horatian iambic continually notes the unmartial status and weakness of the speaker's body. He is programmatically imbellis acfirmas parum (Epod. 1.16) and his final appearance is that of enervated old man: he is jaundiced, breathless, feverish, and aged on account of Canidia's powers (Epod. 17.21-6, 31-4). (3) Accordingly, I posit here that bodily invective in Epodes 8 and 12 functions metapoetically. I call attention to the repetition of stylistic terms--mollitia, inertia, and rabies--within Epodes 8 and 12, and show how these two poems can be seen as part of Horace's ongoing project to distinguish his own emerging iambic project from the incipient genre of Roman love elegy. (4) To these two elegiac terms, mollitia and inertia, the Horatian iambic speaker adds the quintessentially iambic rabies, a term that the poet Horace himself will later call the emotion that first generated iambic poetry. My reading thus suggests that Horace was well aware not only of the tropes and topoi of Roman love elegy, (5) but also of its vocabulary of style that routinely associates the human bodies of its characters with the central stylistic qualities of the poetic genre. While critics have disputed the chronology, (6) most agree that Horace's Epodes were published soon after Actium, in approximately 31/30 BCE, and were followed by the publication of Propertius's Monobiblos and Tibullus's Book 1 in 28 and 27 BCE, respectively. (7) We thus have evidence in the intergeneric dialogue that I draw out of Epocies 8 and 12 for the existence of two-way influence between the poets of Roman iambic and elegiac erotic poetry, what Peter Heslin (2011, 60) has aptly called an extended process in which each poet defined himself against the other[s]. Furthermore, Horace's poems articulate iambic refusal to valorize these terms that generally characterized effeminacy or other failings of normative Roman masculinity in broader Roman discourses of gender and sexuality. Iambos, despite its transgressively obscene content, thus serves to uphold and reinforce the status quo in a period where elite Roman masculinity was challenged through social forces, upset by the political instability of the Triumviral period, and was witness to the emergence of alternative masculinities in the sartorial self-expression of Roman elites like Caesar and Maecenas and in the poetic aesthetics of Roman love elegy. (8) For many decades, Epodes 8 and 12 were considered so obscene that they were censored from publication and ignored by critics of Horadan iambic. (9) By the late 1980s, however, these Epodes began to be re-evaluated as integral part of Horace's first lyric collection. (10) William Fitzgerald's groundbreaking study (1988) argued for the interrelation between the political, invective, and erotic poems of the Epodes, and has laid the foundation for much later criticism focused on the sociopolitical context of the Epodes' production and on Roman sexuality. …

Book review: The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy, written by Caston, R.R.

Book review: The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy, written by Caston, R.R.

The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy by Ruth Rothaus Caston (review)

Reviewed by: The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy by Ruth Rothaus Caston Ed Sanders Ruth Rothaus Caston. The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy. Emotions of the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x, 176. $74.00. ISBN 978–0–19–992590–2. This book begins from the observation that elegy regularly depicts love triangles involving poet, mistress and a rival—a situation ripe for jealousy, which Caston sees as a “central theme” (5) of the genre. Since the Latin vocabulary of jealousy is inadequate, and in any case avoided by poets, an analysis must necessarily go beyond terminology. Caston takes a cognitive approach, seeing emotions primarily as beliefs that might also have associated physiological responses. In the introduction, she sketches the outlines of various ancient philosophical positions on emotions and argues that elegists demonstrably wrote with some awareness of these views. She outlines a universal scenario for (sexual) jealousy, involving a bond to another, a danger of losing that bond, and a desire to deprive or punish the rival; all these can be elaborated, though differently in specific cultures, periods, or genres. While jealousy has no typical Latin signifier, components such as anger or fear, or words such as livor or laedere, may be explicitly present, along with perceptions of infidelity and symptoms of suffering. Elegy uniquely provides first-person depictions of the process. Chapter 1 compares Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Lucretius’ views on love with those of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Caston notes similarities, particularly regarding “the plight of the lover, the description of love as an illness, and the emphasis on finding a cure” (22). The two genres diverge, since philosophers look to philosophical argumentation for a cure, while elegists prefer other remedies, including ultimately setting their feelings to verse. Chapter 2 examines examples of male and female jealousy in elegy, considering why and how jealousy is provoked, what it feels like to the sufferer, how it is expressed (to reader and/or lover), how others react, and how jealous feelings might be resolved. Chapter 3 explores further the sensory—especially visual and auditory—triggers of jealousy and their interpretation, arguing that women are initially skeptical of evidence and only eventually persuaded of infidelity, while men rush quickly to judgment. Chapter 4’s focus is on both genders’ reactions to jealous feelings: in “traditional misogynistic” (94) fashion, elegy portrays jealous women as uncontrollably aggressive, but men—or at least poets—as generally attempting self-control, even if not always successfully. The final two chapters turn from the jealousy scenario to jealousy’s wider place in Propertius’ poetry. Chapter 5 examines the reader’s role, both “internal” rival poets named in the text, whom the poet comes to sympathize with and even be drawn to, and “external” readers to whom the first-person portrayal common in elegy might suggest parallels in their own love affairs, and so cause them too to feel jealousy. In the final chapter, Caston reads several poems as advising external readers how they should manage their jealousy, through recommending a skeptical approach to jealousy triggers and stressing “the importance of fides” (143). She argues that Propertius extends this advice [End Page 409] to nonerotic types of relationship too, including “marriage, politics, religion, even the relationship between narrator and audience” (158). Caston’s book has two major strengths, containing both a detailed examination of a Roman emotion (or emotion scenario), and a well-argued case for necessarily reading love elegy with this emotion in mind. This reviewer would have preferred to see a deeper engagement with modern multidisciplinary research on jealousy, including S. L. Hart and M. Legerstee (eds.), Handbook of Jealousy: Theory, Research, and Multidisciplinary Approaches (Malden, Mass. and Oxford 2010); L. Wurmser and H. Jarass (eds.) Jealousy and Envy: New Views about Two Powerful Feelings (New York and London 2008); and P. Salovey, P. (ed.), The Psychology of Jealousy and Envy (New York 1991). For example, while jealousy is regularly seen as a complex involving such emotions as anger, fear, or envy, love is rarely included (the inverse of Caston’s premise on page 21). Some hold that jealousy stems primarily not from love, but from the...

Hunting in Seneca’s Phaedra

Seneca, in his tragedy Phaedra, created an elegiac character using, among other elegiac conventions, the amorous hunting. His Phaedra turns into an aggressive erotic predator who wants to “hunt” Hippolytus whom she is in love with. The prologue of Phaedra connects the play with elegiac poetry through the extensive use of venery description, because it highlights Hippolytus’ attitude to love: the young man sees the forest as a place of reclusive solitude where he can hide from frenetic passion. The prologue to Phaedra is also important from a spatial point of view, for Seneca associates his two main characters with a fundamental difference in locale that recalls the roman elegiac paraclausithyron, where the lover tries, without success, to penetrate into his beloved’s intimate space, the house. Furthermore, Seneca reverses the relationship between the lovers: Hippolytus becomes the beloved, Phaedra, the lover, thus inverting the gender roles of normal erotic elegy. At the same time, he amplifies this convention, making it the main theme of his tragedy, for Phaedra has a fundamental impact on the play’s action through her desperate attempts to conquer her stepson. Roman love elegy often associates the lover, the feeble man, with the hunter, while representing the beloved, the dominant woman, as his prey. Seneca goes further, because Hippolytus, the true hunter, becomes the erotic prey, while the female character takes on the role of the erotic predator. In this way, Seneca justifies the reversal of the male and the female characters’ roles in his use of the elegiac theme of hunting.

The permanence of Cupid's metamorphosis in the Aeneid

Cupid morphs into Ascanius in Aeneid 1 and I argue that this transformation invests Ascanius with erotic qualities that are essential to understanding the boy's role in the Aeneid. Vergil deliberately blurs the distinction between Ascanius and Cupid, inviting the readers to draw a parallel between Aeneas' son and Aeneas' brother. Ascanius' Cupid-like features generically enrich Vergil's epic with the language and motifs of elegiac poetry. The intrusion of Cupid, the patron deity of Roman love elegy, into Vergil's epic opens an intriguing dialogue between two genres that are supposedly mutually exclusive.

Law and Love: Legal Terminology in Roman Elegy

This paper analyses the use of legal terminology in Roman love elegy of the 1st century BCE. Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid all employ this seemingly strange vocabulary in their love poetry for different ends, while also sharing some specific similarities. This legal vocabulary does not make these love poems stilted, dry, nor unemotional, but is used deftly and rather indicates an interesting layer of Roman concern and preoccupation.

Überlegungen zur Genese der römischen Liebeselegie aus der hellenistischen Dichtung

This paper tries to develop the characteristics of Roman love elegy from the scanty remains of Greek Hellenistic elegy. The most important Hellenistic predecessors of love elegy are poems mourning a deceased partner, like the Lyde of Antimachos of Kolophon and the Epikedeion Aretes of Parthenios of Nikaia. These poems seem to have contained at least some subjective passages, even if they are difficult to verify in the fragmentary tradition. The novelty of Roman love elegy seems to consist not only in the intensivation of such subjective elements, but mainly in a change of direction of the mourning element still present there: the love elegist mourns not a beloved partner's external death, but his own death-like desolation because of the partner's infidelity. The motive of mourning death used literally in Hellenistic Elegy is metaphorized in Roman love elegy.

Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. By Sharon L. James. Berkeley‐Los Angeles‐London: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. [xv] + 365. $55.00 (cloth).

Previous article No AccessBook ReviewLearned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. By Sharon L. James. Berkeley‐Los Angeles‐London: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. [xv] + 365. $55.00 (cloth).Marilyn B. SkinnerMarilyn B. SkinnerUniversity of Arizona Search for more articles by this author University of ArizonaPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 98, Number 4October 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/422377 Views: 12Total views on this site Permission to reprint a review in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Learned girls and male persuasion: gender and reading in Roman love elegy

This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed--the docta puella, or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers--as plaint and confession--but rather from the viewpoint of the women--thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation--James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.

Her Turn to Cry: The Politics of Weeping in Roman Love Elegy

Roman love elegy presents its male speakers as weeping helplessly for a cruel mistress, the dura puella. Though this image has dominated the reception of elegy, Ovid's Ars amatoria and Amores deviate strikingly: in these works the lover seeks to see his mistress weep. Further review demonstrates the same desire, well hidden, in the elegies of Propertius and Tibullus. This paper argues that Ovid shows the resentment underlying the elegiac lover's tears, along with the desire for revenge in the form of his beloved's compensatory tears.

Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy by Sharon L. James (review)

Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy by Sharon L. James (review)

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?

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.

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.

Drink, suspicion and comedy in Propertius 1.3

Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find hispuellaCynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situation has been pointed out in previous accounts of the poem; this treatment takes a closer look at the text, especially at the mythical analogues for Cynthia applied at the beginning of the poem, and argues that part of the wit and amusement of the poem derives from its articulation of the poet's suspicions of Cynthia's infidelity. This is not a tragic or dramatic effect, but rather a clever and amusing comedy; the amusing self-characterisation of the poet as a drunken bumbler racked with lust and suspicion is fully consistent with the kind of elegist envisaged by Paul Veyne, who rightly stresses that Roman love-elegy has much more to do with literary entertainment than with the intense analysis of passion. The scene is being narrated by the poet with retrospective wit and irony against himself; to use the convenient terms employed by Winkler in his book on Apuleius, the poet asauctor(writer of the poem) provides an entertaining view of the poet asactor(character in the poem's story).

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