I.  Why Read Roman Elegy?

 If our interest is naturally engaged by the remarkably lively longevity of these texts, it is even more naturally attracted by their subject matter. Although the poets presented here wrote also on other themes, their primary subject, and the topic with which this anthology is concerned, is Eros, Amor, Venus — terms which to the ancients signified something rather less than what we mean by love, and a great deal more than what we mean by sex. The poets themselves proudly boasted that, through the transforming and universalizing power of their poetic talent, their passionate affairs would become a paradigm by which future generations could recognize and understand what Eros is. Time has borne out their claim. The world of the Roman elegists was in many ways totally different from our own, yet no modern reader will fail to recognize in their works the whole range of emotions, from the happiest to the most bitter, from the profoundest to the most trivially sentimental, which make up the uniquely personal experience which we call falling into, and out of, love.

 The antiquity and vividness which commend these poems to our attention have also made them an influential element in the history of our world. They thus deserve to be studied not only for their intrinsic interest and value, but also as important documents in our literary and social history. For twenty centuries this poetry has served as a source for our concepts of love, sexuality, and the role of the poet in society. It might almost be said that the history of erotic poetry in the Western world, from the transcendent passion of the troubadours and the light-hearted dalliance of the Elizabethan lyricists, through the death-obsessed, tortuously compact broodings of Shakespeare and Donne, to the irony and alienation of Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, has been the history of the development of the most prominent themes and feelings in the work of the Roman elegists. Furthermore, these texts are essential evidence for all those who wish to study the origins of Western thought and literary expression. Our concept of “romantic” love, our assumptions about sex roles, our fascination with the relationship between love and war (or, as we would say today, sexuality and aggression), our special modern concern with poetry that makes a statement about poetry, and the recent revival of critical interest in the rhetorical and generic foundations of literature — all these themes and more find a classic expression in Roman erotic elegy.

 There is one further aspect of this poetry which, although it might seem primarily the concern of classical scholars, must in fact be taken into account by all those who wish to study Roman elegy for its own sake or in order to understand its subsequent influence. That is that these texts are part of a specific, very complex historical period. They illuminate the social, political, and moral issues of their day, and conversely they themselves need to be understood within their historical context. This constitutes a particularly difficult problem for the modern reader, who lives in a society in which the political and social significance of poetry, especially of love poetry, is less than minimal. Yet because of the way in which Roman poetry interacted with Roman society, these texts must be analyzed as historical documents in order for them to be fully appreciated as poetry. Let us consider, then, the world in which these poems were created.  

II.  The World of the Roman Elegists

 

 In 31 b.c, Rome saved her life but lost her freedom. Since the expulsion of her primitive kings five centuries earlier, Rome had been a Republic, governed by a constitution which entrusted the direction of the state primarily to the patrician upper class, but which also allowed significant powers to the plebeian commons and which included generally effective safeguards against one-man rule. By the middle of the third century b.c. this Republic had gained the leadership of Italy, and a century after that Rome’s hegemony had been established over most of the Mediterranean world. The people of Rome then faced the most crucial question in their history:  could the political, social, and moral traditions which had made Rome a great Republic continue to support Rome’s greatness as an imperial power? Three subsequent generations of constitutional crisis, political violence, dictatorship, and civil war answered in the negative, and finally, when Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Julius Caesar’s heir Octavian at Actium in 31 b.c., an exhausted Rome decided that autocracy was the only alternative to further bloody chaos. Reconciled to Octavian’s overlordship, Rome became once again, in all but the name, a monarchy.

 Yet names are important. Octavian shunned the name of king:  he was simply Rome’s “first citizen,” and he took — or rather, graciously accepted from the Senate — the titles “Father of His Country” and “Augustus,” appellations which conveyed a nearly royal dignity without suggesting regal arrogance. In fact, all of Augustus’s powers, in name, were freely granted him by the Senate and People of Rome, and his life’s great project, the establishment of the most effective and longest enduring system of autocratic government in human history, was officially deemed “the restoration of the Republic.”

 Augustus realized that, although his regime had been established by force of arms, it could evolve into a stable dynasty only with the genuine support of the Roman citizenry, and especially of the upper classes, from whose numbers the Empire’s administrative and military leaders must continue to be drawn. Accordingly, he exploited every possible opportunity to effect what historian Sir Ronald Syme has called the “organization of opinion” in support of his program. The term propaganda, with its connotation of coarse polemic, is not appropriate in this context:  no single part of Augustus’s program can be isolated and identified as propaganda. It was rather that through a wide range of decisions, including the kinds of religious cults he created or fostered, the sorts of titles he accepted from the Senate, the manner in which he allowed himself to be portrayed on coinage and in statuary, the mode of living which he and his family followed, and the type of literature which he encouraged, Augustus attempted to persuade his fellow Romans that his accession was the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the Republican tradition, and that all that was best in the old Roman ideal of duty to family, gods, and state could and must be brought into the service of the new order.

 Poetry played a uniquely important role in this organization of opinion, for three reasons. First, any powerful regime among the ancients (both Greeks and Romans) needed to have poets associated with it as a matter of prestige. Ancient governments considered poets an ornament, and not a trivial one:  it was as important to a great power’s image to be associated with fine poetry as it was to build magnificent public buildings or to hold impressive parades. Secondly, it was Rome’s poets (along with her historians) who were charged with expressing and transmitting the traditions of the Roman nation, their great conquests and the ideals which made those conquests possible. Augustus was anxious to establish a continuity between his own regime and these great Republican traditions, and it was through literature that such a continuity could most effectively be asserted. The third reason has to do with the Romans’ inferiority complex in regard to the Greeks. Roman art and literature was with few exceptions derived from Greek models, and Roman admiration for Greek cultural achievements was always mingled with envy and a sense of bitter frustration. Rome, the mistress of the world, seemed fated always to take second place to Greece in artistic and intellectual accomplishments. Augustus and his colleagues felt that the city which now ruled the world must be adorned with cultural achievements second to none: historians as good as Thucydides, epic poets as good as Homer, lyric poets as good as Sappho. In a word, Augustus needed poets in order to legitimize his place as leader of Rome and Rome’s place as ruler of the Mediterranean world.

 Augustus encouraged the sort of literature he wanted not directly, but through close associates such as Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and Gaius Maecenas, who became patrons to promising writers. We have only a sketchy knowledge of the relationship between these patrons and the poets who were their clients, but it seems clear that patrons would encourage their poets by bringing their work to the attention of other important Romans and of the public, and, in some cases at least, by direct financial subsidy. Furthermore, if the patron was a close associate of Augustus, that patron’s support would give the poet’s work a quasi-official approval. It is also obvious that such patrons would urge their poets to devote their talents to praising Augustus and his program, although, as we shall see, there is controversy over how effective this pressure was in the case of the elegists.

 Under this system of semi-official patronage Augustan poetry achieved great distinction in most of the traditional genres (with the notable exception of drama, an art form which seems rarely to flourish under despotism). In serious hexameter poetry — that is, poetry which was composed in the meter of the great Greek epics and which was not satirical or comical — the great name is that of Vergil, who wrote pastoral, didactic, and heroic works supportive of the new order. In lyric poetry, and in certain types of less formal hexameter poetry, Horace produced pieces of enduring value which also proclaimed the glories of the Augustan present and future. The third area of poetic activity, and the one with which this anthology is concerned, was elegy, and here the major figures were Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Elegy stood in a much more ambiguous relationship to the government than did the works of Vergil and Horace. The elegiac poets openly and repeatedly state their refusal to praise the stern Roman ideals promoted by Augustus, and in any case much of their subject matter was too private, too scandalous, or too trivial to reflect well on the regime. Yet all three of these elegiac poets received the encouragement of Messalla or Maecenas, the “official” patrons, so their work must have been considered valuable by the new establishment. This is a major problem in the interpretation of Roman elegy and will be considered further below.  

 

III.  The Elegiac Tradition

 In trying to understand why an ancient poet wrote as he or she did, there are three general factors which must be taken into account. First, the ancient poet, like any poet, was influenced by the current political and historical situation. What this situation was for the elegists has been described above, and it has been suggested that this factor is of special importance in the poetry of their time. The second factor is the poet’s own experiences, thoughts, feelings, and personality. This is certainly the most interesting and important factor and will be dealt with presently. There is also a third factor, however, which must be discussed before we can evaluate the uniqueness of the poets in this volume. Ancient Greek and Latin poetry was, to an extent beyond anything in modern experience, tradition bound. The literary conventions established by previous Greek and Latin writers determined to a great extent the meters which the Roman poet could employ, the subject matter he could choose, the poses and attitudes which he could take, and the diction he could use. The question “What sort of elegy did the Roman elegists write?” thus leads immediately to another question:  “What is elegy?”

 The simple answer to this question is that elegiac poetry is poetry composed in the elegiac meter, which consists of one six-beat line called a hexameter (the meter of the great Greek and Latin epics) followed by one five-beat line called a pentameter. (For a more detailed description of these meters, see section VIII of this Introduction, below.)  But this simple definition is inadequate, since the elegiac meter was not considered equally appropriate to all subjects, but tended to be associated with particular themes at various historical periods. The first elegies were written by Greeks around 700 b.c., and for the next several centuries the elegiac meter was most commonly used for drinking songs, military subjects, and laments and epitaphs. From these latter two uses of the meter we have inherited our modern use of the term “elegiac” to mean “sad.” Elegiac poems were also written in this period on a number of other themes, including erotic ones, but elegy had not yet become especially associated with love poetry. We first notice this association in a handful of elegiac epigrams, some of them stunningly beautiful, attributed (probably correctly) to Plato.  But we find a more extensive use of elegiac meter for erotic themes in the works of those poets whom scholars today call “Alexandrians.”

 As a result of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century b.c, the Greek world underwent massive and radical changes. The most important was the replacement of the old small, autonomous city-state by large empires as the basic Greek political unit. This political reorganization affected nearly every aspect of Greek life, including literature. The Greek poetry of this period (3rd-1st centuries b.c) is called Alexandrian, because Alexandria in Egypt was then the center of literary activity. Early Alexandrian poetry was dominated by the same question which the Augustans later had to ask themselves: What sort of literature is appropriate for the new social and political era in which we now find ourselves? The reconstruction of this controversy is one of the most difficult and complex problems in literary history, but a few general assertions can be made which are relevant to the present topic, and these concern the views of the greatest and most influential of the Alexandrian writers, Callimachus (3rd century b.c). Callimachus believed that the great tragic and epic manner of the past had to be rejected, or at least greatly modified. He argued that the new poetry should consist of relatively short pieces, rather than lengthy epics:  in a dictum which became famous, he decreed that “a big book is a big bore.” Callimachus further believed that the new literature should be characterized by a refined, elegant style rather than by the thunderous grandeur of Homer and Aeschylus. Moreover, whereas the previous works of Greek epic and drama may be termed public poetry, addressed to and meant to be understood by the entire political community, Callimachus championed private poetry, written for the select few who were educated and sensitive enough to appreciate it. Callimachus worked in a wide variety of meters, but he particularly favored elegy. He wrote his magnum opus, the Aetia, a collection of myths, in this meter, and he and other poets of the period made the elegiac epigram — short pieces consisting of from one to six or so elegiac couplets, usually on erotic themes — something of an Alexandrian specialty.

 The third great age of elegy was the Augustan erotic elegy written in Latin at Rome by Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as by other writers whose works are either inferior or no longer extant.  (It should be remembered that the following description of the Roman elegists’ aesthetic beliefs is applicable to these poets in their personae specifically as elegiac poet/lovers. All three of the major elegists, especially Ovid, wrote also on subjects other than love, and the Roman/Alexandrian views attributed to them here will not necessarily apply to the non-erotic segment of their work.)  Roman elegy was in many ways consciously based on Alexandrian literary principles, which had been introduced into the Latin tradition and to some extent adapted to Roman needs by Catullus and other poets of the previous generation. The Augustan elegists gave these principles a new form which reflected their own situation both as Romans and as Augustans. The basic difference between Roman Alexandrianism and its Callimachean original is that Callimachus’s program was based on a series of stylistic precepts, while the Roman elegists’ program also included precepts based on meter and subject matter. Callimachus approved of short, elegant poems rather than long heroic epics, but he did not believe that heroic subjects were in themselves inappropriate material for poetry; indeed, he wrote one of his own major works on a heroic subject. And while Callimachus often used the elegiac meter, he did not restrict himself to it, nor did he feel that elegiac was essentially more poetic than other meters. The Roman elegists accepted these stylistic precepts, but they added the principle that real poetry should not only be written in an elegant style, but should concern itself with elegant subjects, and above all with love. Moreover, they added the further principle that the elegiac couplet was the proper meter for this new, elegant poetry. In formulating this latter principle, they were influenced by Alexandrian elegiac epigram which, as has been mentioned, was the vehicle for the best Alexandrian erotic verse. The Alexandrians’ advocacy of private over public poetry had also been essentially a stylistic principle:  they favored poetry written in a mannered and erudite style which made it accessible only to the initiated elite. This too the Roman elegists transformed into a distinction of subject matter. For them, private poetry was love poetry, which could be appreciated only by the select band of sensitive lovers. And in rejecting “public” poetry, the elegists were rejecting the Roman poet’s traditional duty of praising Rome’s heroic ideals and their embodiment in Rome’s great warriors, past and present.

 Since it was an article of official belief that Rome’s greatest warrior was Augustus and that his colleagues, who were the poets’ patrons, ran a close second, the elegists had also to reject the duty of praising Augustus and their own patrons, the very men to whose influence they owed much of their success. In this anthology, for instance, among many other examples, Tibullus rejects war and wealth in T.I.1, although he points out in that same poem that his patron Messalla is a wealthy warrior; Propertius elaborately refuses to praise Maecenas and Augustus in P.II.1.17-42 and scornfully rejects the value of military prowess in P.II.15.41-48; and Ovid trivializes martial courage and endurance by flippantly comparing the soldier’s sufferings to the lover’s in O.I.9. Scholars have endlessly debated the elegists’ intentions in such passages. Some believe that such passages reflect the poet’s real views, and that the elegists’ occasional direct praise of their patrons and of Augustus (e.g. T.I.5.31-34, P.II.16.41-42, O.II.14.17-18) are mere flattery, designed to fool the Establishment into supporting poetry which was actually hostile to it. This view, which assumes that the elegists were part of an anti-Augustan opposition, seems open to serious objections. First, Augustus and his colleagues had an excellent appreciation of literature, as is proved by the fact that they identified and encouraged all the finest poets of their day. It is inconceivable that they could have been tricked into misunderstanding these poets’ intentions by a few scattered passages of flattery. And since the Augustan regime was so anxiously concerned with its public image, it would never have tolerated, let alone encouraged, poets whom they knew to be bent on tarnishing that image. A more sophisticated view is that the elegists usually did support the regime, and that their apparent criticisms of it were merely clever ways of expressing support for it. There is much to be said for this view:  it was a common technique in ancient rhetoric to praise someone under the guise of dispraise. For instance, Propertius’s refusal to praise Maecenas in P.II.1 amounts to the argument, “Maecenas, you and Augustus are great men, so very great that my poor powers could never praise you adequately, and so I must decline even to attempt it.” And while the elegists’ scorning of war may seem to reflect badly on the great warrior Augustus, it could also be taken as implying praise for him, since Augustus’s victory had finally ended the Civil Wars and brought peace to Rome. Yet, even after giving the greatest possible allowance for such rhetorical strategies, there still seems to be an irreducible minimum of real disaffection with official Augustan values in the work of these poets. This is not the place for a full consideration of this intractable problem, but some remarks by classical scholar Francis Cairns, although they appear in an article intended for specialists, furnish such a clear and reasonable perspective on the problem that it is worthwhile making them available to the interested general reader here. While emphasizing that the elegists had to write in a way which was basically favorable to the regime, Cairns admits that their poetry includes apparently anti-Augustan elements, which he explains as follows:   

   Maecenas and through him Augustus wanted to attach to himself writers who above all were of established merit and popularity. Their political views were of secondary importance. Indeed, if they had a history of opposition to the Caesarian party, capital could be made of this. It was good public relations for Augustus to be seen patronizing such men as . . . Propertius, who had lost a relative in the Perusine revolt against Augustus. ... Indeed, such ‘broadmindedness’ on Augustus’s part might give other former opponents grounds for hope of future preference in his service.

    In addition it is clear that Maecenas realized that his authors needed gentle handling if they were to find their true métiers. This is not to say that he did not try to influence them in their choice of subjects and literary forms — and sometimes successfully. But Augustus and Maecenas knew that only great literature would bring real distinction to their regime. Their aim was to promote the first in the hope that the second would follow.  [Francis Cairns, “Propertius on Augustus’s Marriage Law (II, 7),”  Grazer Beitraege 8 (1979) 202.]  

IV.  The Love Story

 Although the major Roman elegists differ markedly in their personalities and their treatment of erotic themes, the themes themselves vary little from poet to poet. Since an understanding of what is conventional in a poem is a necessary condition for understanding what is unique in it, it will be useful to describe the conventional elegiac love story with its standard cast of characters and stock situations.

 The protagonist is the poet (poeta, vates) or lover (amator) — for it is a prime tenet of the elegiac credo that the two are one. His age is left vague, but he seems to be a young man, certainly under forty and probably under thirty. He comes from a good family and thus could have entered public life as a soldier or politician if he had wished, but he prefers (as he is constantly proclaiming) the private agonies and ecstasies of love. He complains of poverty, but a closer examination of his situation shows this to be an exaggeration:  he has enough resources to live comfortably, but he is not rich enough to buy his mistress the lavish presents she demands, and it is primarily in this context that he speaks of himself as being poor.

 The poet/lover’s co-star is the woman he loves, whom he calls his mistress (domina), girl (puella), or girl-friend (amica). She is always, of course, beautiful, and she is also, as a rule, vain, overemotional, fickle, greedy, and intellectually shallow (although Propertius’s Cynthia is a notable exception to this last characteristic). She seems to delight equally in driving the poet mad with frustration by refusing him, mad with jealousy by taking other lovers, and (but alas! less often) mad with delight by granting him a night with her. The mistress’s emotional nature is reflected in her religious practices. She is usually a devotee of Isis, an exotic Egyptian deity whose mysterious cult was considered orgiastic and disreputable by the Roman Establishment, although her worship was quite popular in certain quarters at Rome. One aspect of this cult which the elegiac lover finds particularly irritating is its requirement that its devotees periodically undertake vigils of a specified length (Propertius mentions ten days) during which they must abstain from sex. The fact that a cult with such a feature attracted women who either were prostitutes in the strict sense or at least derived most of their income from their lovers will be of particular interest to the psychologist. The poet himself, of course, feels that the old Roman gods which were good enough for his forefathers are good enough for him; yet occasionally, under the duress of his own or his mistress’s illness, he will deign to address a prayer to Isis, apparently feeling with truly Roman pragmatism that it could not hurt.

 The relationship between poet and mistress assumes various forms during the course of the affair. On a few supremely happy occasions, they are presented as lovers pure and simple, totally in accord physically and emotionally: P.II.15 and O.I.5 are examples. Surprisingly often, the lovers are presented in situations which unmistakably suggest a marital relationship. The scene of drunken homecoming and subsequent nagging in P.I.3, for instance, could not be more domestic, and the image of Delia spinning among her handmaids in T.I.3.83-88 would have been intensely suggestive of wife and home to the Roman mind. Such scenes are of considerable psychological interest. Western literature, and especially ancient Greek and Latin literature, has always tended to split womankind into the chaste, respectable matron and the bold, sexually independent temptress. The Roman elegists seem to have been intrigued by the possibility of combining these images into one.

 The aspect of the love relationship most frequently emphasized, however, is the inequality between the haughty girl and the wretched poet. This inequality is usually expressed through the metaphor of slavery:  the poet/lover serves his mistress, waits at her door, and uncomplainingly bears all her cruelty, just as a slave would do. The Latin word  domina, which we translate as “mistress,” did not in its original meaning have for the Romans the overtones of “kept woman” which “mistress” has for us, although it is largely due to the Roman elegists’ work that “mistress” now has that connotation.  Domina is simply the feminine form of dominus, a word which indicates the master of a household and thus also means the owner of a slave. This notion of love’s servitude (servitium amoris) was a central part of the elegiac lover’s persona and became an important topos in later European poetry. To understand the meaning of this idea, which for the elegists had both a psychological and a rhetorical significance, we must remember that the ancients were generally not what we would call egalitarian. With the exception of a few philosophers, most Romans took it for granted that the free male Roman citizen was superior to all other types of human beings, and that the slave was inferior to all. Psychologically, the fact that Eros could turn the world upside down by making the noblest human creature act like the most worthless was a compelling example of Love’s divine might. To assert the servitude of love was thus to acknowledge and praise the power of Venus and Amor. Rhetorically, and much more cynically, love’s servitude was a clever ploy:  here was a free, male Roman citizen, the pinnacle of creation, making himself a slave to, of all things, a girl, and a girl who was often not even of respectable Roman family at that! Surely no girl could refuse the man who did such great honor to her beauty’s power.

 Finally, a grimmer and coarser aspect of this relationship appears in passages such as T.I.5.67-68 and T.II.4.21-22, where Tibullus laments that his mistress’s favors are granted strictly on a cash-and-carry basis, or P.III.24 and 25, where the poet looks at the girl he loved and sees only a selfish, avaricious old woman. Here the relationship between poet and mistress is implicitly compared to the relationship between customer and whore.

 There are two men other than the poet who occasionally assume importance in this affair. One is the rich lover  (dives amator), who appears as a dangerous rival to the poor poet. This fellow is usually a self-made man who has become immensely wealthy through war or graft. He is also, if we are to believe the poet, a coarse, vulgar, baseborn oaf who is no gentleman and no poet. The other figure presents us with a problem:  he is a man who is always referred to by words  (vir, conjunx) which ordinarily mean “husband,” and yet there are good reasons for believing that the elegiac mistress is not supposed to be married, or, to put it more precisely, that she is not conceived of as having the same legal and social status as a respectable Roman married woman. This problem will be considered further below. At any rate this “husband,” whether he is an official spouse or merely the man who is currently keeping the poet’s beloved, is portrayed as a dull, stolid fellow who is so negligent in guarding his precious jewel that the poet seems completely justified in furtively enjoying her himself:  if he doesn’t do it, someone else will.

 Various additional characters make up the love story’s supporting cast. The mistress usually has one or more guardians  (custodes), whose task is to keep the poet/lover from getting what he wants. In O.I.6, this guardian takes the form of a doorkeeper (ianitor) who stubbornly refuses to grant the poet entry. This poem is a fine example of a very common type of ancient love poem, the complaint of the excluded lover standing in the street before the unyielding door of his beloved. (The technical term for this type of poem is paraklausithyron.) This situation was such a favorite topic of ancient love poets that the mistress’s closed door almost deserves to be counted as a “character” in the love story, and it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that whenever we encounter the word “door” in erotic elegy, we are meant to recall on some level the conventional excluded lover. A less savory associate of the mistress is the lena, a Latin term for which there is no precise English equivalent. It is usually translated as “bawd.” This bawd, conventionally portrayed as a bibulous hag, is part confidante, part pimp, part witch, and generally a corrupter of beautiful women, whom she teaches to ensnare the affections of hapless young men by wiles, sex, and magic, and then to take them for all they have. Tibullus, in T.5.48-56, curses the bawd who he believes must have taught his Delia to prefer rich lovers to poor poets.

 Other characters are associated more with the poet/lover than with the mistress. He has friends (amici) who usually criticize or mock his passion and try to bring him back to his senses. The poet’s patron and Augustus himself (who is usually called “Caesar” when he is directly named) are given brief but flattering parts; one might say that these distinguished men have “cameo roles.”  The least frequently appearing stock character (in this collection we see him only in T.I.4) is the fancy-boy (puer delicatus), a youth with whom the poet amuses himself sexually in his spare time. This rather crass way of putting it is nevertheless accurate. In the Roman view, pederasty was considered unobjectionable only as an occasional indulgence of young gentlemen, and Roman upper class men saw nothing wrong with sexual relationships with boys only if the boy involved was not a free Roman citizen of good family and if the man involved did not have a wife and family he should be paying attention to. For young single men, such activities were considered harmless, if rather decadent, fun. In Roman literature, and apparently in Roman life as well, this sort of pederasty was due to Greek influence. It was never as popular at Rome as it was in Greece: of the three major elegiac poets, only Tibullus writes about it at any length.

 Finally, there are the gods, who laugh at lovers’ oaths when the lovers in question are poets, but who seem to take the oaths of poets’ girlfriends very seriously indeed. Most prominent among them, of course, are Venus, the goddess of love, and her son, usually called Amor (“Love”), but sometimes given the name more familiar to us, Cupido (“desire”). We do not get a very detailed picture of Venus as a personality from the elegists, but Love, the fluttering winged boy with his deadly arrows, is a figure who remains instantly recognizable to this day. Usually Love is a single deity, but sometimes he is cloned into a whole squadron of little Loves, as in P.II.28 and P.III.1.11.  

 

V.  Poetry and Life

 

 These, then, are the conventional characters and situations of the love affairs described in Roman erotic elegy. What is their relationship to reality? Along with the elegists’ political feelings, this is one of the greatest problems of interpretation presented by this poetry. The controversy involves two separate but related questions: whether the typical elegiac love story is drawn from contemporary Roman life or from the love stories told by previous Greek and Latin writers, and whether the elegists’ mistresses are entirely fictional creations or are modeled upon real women.

 As to the first question, some scholars believe that these situations and characters are largely mere literary conventions. These scholars point out that many of the conventions of Roman elegy are also found in earlier literature, notably Alexandrian epigram, the Greek New Comedy written by Menander and others, and the Roman Comedy which Plautus and Terence wrote in Latin on the model of the Greek New Comedy. Against this view it may be argued that many of Roman elegy’s important elements have no clear literary models. For instance, the figure of the elegiac mistress and the idea of the servitude of love as they are portrayed by the Roman elegists are essentially new inventions. Furthermore, merely because a character or situation appears in earlier literature does not mean that it could not have been part of real life in the elegists’ time. Menander may have written about greedy courtesans in fourth-century b.c Athens, but that does not mean that there were no real greedy courtesans in Augustan Rome. Common sense, too, tells us that a great many of the scenes presented in elegy must have been drawn at least in a general way from life. We cannot say that the party described in P.IV.8 actually took place, but certainly the Romans had parties like it; nor that Ovid’s mistress actually had the abortion which he describes in O.II.13, but certainly Roman women had abortions. This problem need not be a major concern for the general reader, but he or she should be aware that, while Roman elegy presents a view of certain aspects of Augustan life which generally, and often specifically, corresponds to reality, the pictures which it offers us should not be credited with photographic accuracy.

 The second question, however, will be of major concern to many modern readers, since it needs to be answered in order for us to determine to what extent we may rely upon these poems as evidence for the position of women in Roman society. Who, then, were the elegists’ mistresses? Were they real or merely fictional characters? Were they free Roman citizen women or were they of some inferior status? And were they married or not?

 As to their reality, we can begin by saying that the names which the elegists give their mistresses are certainly fictional ones, chosen for their elegant poetic overtones. The name of “Delia,” Tibullus’s mistress, is the feminine of the Greek “Delios,” and Propertius’s “Cynthia” is the feminine of the Greek “Cynthios.” “Delios” and “Cynthios” were epithets of Apollo, the god of poetry; thus “Delia” and “Cynthia” are appropriate names for women who are loved and celebrated by poets. (It is interesting that “Delia” and “Cynthia” are also epithets of Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, the Latin Diana, who is the patron goddess of virginity. Do we see here again the elegists’ fascination with the virginal temptress?) The name of Ovid’s mistress, “Corinna”, is also Greek and may allude to a famous Greek woman poet of the same name. Ovid himself tells us in one of his later poems that the name was a fictional one. “Nemesis,” Tibullus’s second love, is Greek for “divine vengeance.” “Nemesis” was in fact sometimes used as a woman’s name in real life, but the word’s ominous associations make it a poetically appropriate choice as a name for the unpleasant lady who figures in Tibullus’s later poems.

 But were there real women behind these fictional names? Apuleius, a Latin author of the second century A.D., records that Delia and Cynthia were real persons, whose names were respectively Plania and Hostia. Until relatively recently, scholars have tended to accept this tradition and have assumed that Delia, Cynthia, and other elegiac mistresses were based on real women and that the stories which the elegists tell about them were true. Such “biographical criticism” is currently in disfavor, and many scholars now believe that these mistresses are fictional or composite characters. The truth, perhaps, lies somewhere between these views. It is fair at least to say that most readers’ subjective impressions will lead them to suspect that the rather insipidly portrayed Corinna is a fiction, that the somewhat more vividly presented Delia and Nemesis are probably modeled to some extent on real persons, and that Cynthia, who is one of the great characterizations in the history of literature, was drawn from life.

 Whether these women were real or fictional, the fact remains that they are presented as if they were actual members of Roman society, and thus we may ask how we are meant to envision their legal and social status within that society. To put this tangled issue simply, there are three possibilities: 1) they were  ingenuae, or the legitimate daughters of free-born Roman citizens; 2) they were matronae, or the wives of free-born Roman citizens; 3) they were of some status inferior to the preceding, such as ex-slaves, officially recognized prostitutes, or non-citizen foreigners. There is good evidence both for and against 1) and 2). We know that Sulpicia, who did not hesitate to write candidly of her own love affair, was an  ingenua of very high social standing. On the other hand, Tibullus in T.I.6 applies the word “husband” to the man who is currently in possession of his mistress, as does Ovid in poems not included in this collection. This would seem to indicate that these women were matronae, and in fact we know that at least some  matronae in the late Republic and early Empire acted in sexual matters with a freedom and aggressiveness which would raise eyebrows even in our own permissive age. But Tibullus states specifically that Delia is not a matrona (see T.I.6.66-67 and note), and Ovid, in poems written towards the end of his life, insists repeatedly that respectable Roman married women played no part in his earlier love poetry. And there is at least one serious objection to considering these women either as  ingenuae or as matronae: the Augustan regime’s concern with morality would have made it impolitic, to say the least, for poets to portray the wives or daughters of respectable Roman citizens engaging in illicit love affairs. In view of these difficulties, most scholars believe that the third possibility is the most likely, especially since the poets’ recurrent complaints about their mistresses’ greed support the hypothesis that these women were prostitutes. Under this third interpretation, the elegiac poets conventionally use the word “husband” to refer to a rival who is currently keeping the poet’s beloved, but it is to be understood that this “husband” is not the mistress’s legal spouse. There is, however, a fourth possibility which perhaps deserves consideration:  that the inconsistent nature of the evidence on this point is the result of hypocrisy. If premarital or extramarital affairs were common among the Roman upper classes, it would have been natural for this to have been reflected in love poetry, but it would also have been expedient for love poets to pay lip service to public morality by claiming that the sexually independent women of whom they wrote were all only lower class prostitutes. In other words it may be that, if we could ask a Roman elegist, “Are the women in your poems courtesans rather than the wives and daughters of respectable citizens?”, the poet would reply, “Of course!”, — but with a wink.

 

VI.  Myth, Rhetoric, and Genre

 

 Poetry, like all forms of discourse, is more than a matter of words.  A poet’s readers will always share a set of assumptions and expectations about poetry and about life, and a significant part of the poet’s art consists in playing upon these assumptions and expectations to create particular effects.  This aspect of poetry poses a major obstacle for the reader from another culture and another era, who must laboriously, and often uncertainly, reconstruct the attitudes of the original readers in order fully to appreciate the poetry which was written for them. Roman elegy (and Roman poetry in general) has three characteristics which are likely to be particularly puzzling to the modern reader who has not reached an understanding of what the ancient audience expected from poetry. These are the elegists’ use of myth, the rhetorical posture of much of their verse, and the ancient concept of genre.  Many scholarly studies have been written on each of these topics, which will here be considered only briefly in order to give the reader a basic idea of the sort of problems they pose for interpretation.

 Practically the first thing one notices on encountering ancient poetry is the profusion of mythological references.  Such references are not as a rule mere decoration or displays of erudition:  in the hands of a good poet they serve as a sort of short-hand or code which can give an extra dimension of meaning to the text.  Consider, for example, the opening of P.I.3: Cynthia is compared to Ariadne, Andromeda, and a maenad (a female devotee of Dionysus). The immediate purpose of these comparisons is to compliment Cynthia by comparing her appearance in sleep to that of famous beauties of myth whose stories included an occasion on which they fell asleep. If, however, we examine these figures more carefully, we can see that they have other things in common with each other and thus by implication with Cynthia. All of these women, for example, have been abandoned: Ariadne was left stranded by Theseus as she lay sleeping on the isle of Naxos; Andromeda was left chained to a rock to be a sacrifice to a sea monster; the maenad, the god’s possessing frenzy having at last left her, has sunk into an exhausted sleep; and Cynthia has been abandoned for the better part of the night by Propertius. Another point in the comparison is that at least two of these mythical figures are associated with Dionysus, the god of wine: the maenad, who is by definition a worshipper of Dionysus and is often portrayed in art in the company of the god, and Ariadne, who became the bride of Dionysus after Theseus had abandoned her. In comparing Cynthia to these figures, Propertius is also comparing himself to their traditional associate, the wine god — a comparison which is wittily apt, since Propertius is drunk. Yet another significant element in these comparisons is the idea of rescue: Ariadne was rescued by Dionysus on Naxos, and Andromeda was rescued from the sea monster by the hero Perseus. This aspect of the myths gives an ironic overtone to Propertius’s situation: although the myths invoked implicitly place him in the role of a rescuer approaching a damsel in distress, we find at the end of the poem that it is Cynthia who, at least in her own eyes, is rescuing him from the dark streets after he has been spurned by another woman.

 This passage, then, is an example of how an ancient poet could employ mythical allusions to give special overtones or reverberations to his work. It also serves to illustrate two approaches to the use of myth which were especially characteristic of the Alexandrians and of their inheritors the Roman elegists. The first of these is the poet’s playfulness in handling mythical material. It will be noticed that Propertius’s allusions do not form a tidy system. He is not saying, “Ariadne, Andromeda, a maenad, and Cynthia all have in common A, B, and C, and this means such and such;” rather, the comparisons are tentative, shifting, and elusive. To use a metaphor, it is as if each comparison were a candle in a dark room, and their combined varied lights threw the shifting multiple shadows of Cynthia and Propertius on the background of the poem. A second point to note in this passage is Propertius’s reference to Andromeda’s sleep. The story of Perseus and Andromeda was famous, but no version which has come down to us includes an episode in which Andromeda fell asleep. Propertius here must be alluding to some little known variant of the myth which would be familiar only to erudite readers. This fondness for obscure, learned allusions was another aspect of the Alexandrian principle that poetry should be written for the select few who could really understand it.

 Another characteristic of Roman elegy which may puzzle the modern reader is its tendency to sound like a speech: the poet will set forth a principle, support it by arguments and examples drawn from myth or history, attempt to demolish an opposing position, inveigh against the evils of his time, and often end with a summary of his main points and an emotional appeal to the gods, his patron, or his mistress. We do not expect love poetry to sound like public oratory. The Romans, however, saw nothing incongruous about the connection between the two. To understand why, it is necessary to understand the importance of rhetoric in Roman life and education. In the ancient world the study of rhetoric was considered to be the central part of what we would call a liberal education, because at most periods in ancient history the ability to persuade through oratory was the key to success. When Augustus replaced the Republic with an Empire, rhetoric came to have much less practical importance, since decisions were then made autonomously by rulers and their advisors rather than by public governing bodies which might be swayed by an orator. Yet liberal education had become so solidly based on rhetoric that the central importance of this topic in education persisted to the very end of the ancient world. It should not be surprising, then, that the central role of rhetoric in the Roman educational tradition should be reflected in the writings of the men who had been educated in that tradition: not just orators, but also historians, philosophers, and poets — even love poets.  In the elegists, the influence of rhetoric is seen in their inclination for structuring their poems like speeches (a good example is O.II.7, which reads like a courtroom summary for the defense), for employing a variety of standard rhetorical devices such as rhetorical questions (examples include T.I.6.3-4, P.II.16.2-4, 15, 31-32), apostrophe (e.g., P.I.1.19-20, 25-26) and the adducing of examples from Roman history (e.g., O.II.14.15-18), for heaping open and extreme abuse on an opponent (e.g., T.II.3.59-60, P.II.16.27-28), for driving home a point with a brief, pithy expression (examples everywhere), and for making strongly emotional appeals at the conclusion (as in T.I.1.75-78, P.II.1.71-78, O.II.14.43-44).

 A third difficulty for the modern reader, and perhaps the most subtle one, arises from the ancient concept of genre. Genre in this context might be defined as a set of traditionally agreed upon rules, known to both the poet and his audience, which determine the poem’s rhetorical strategies. For example, one common genre was that usually called recusatio, which means “refusal” or “counter-plea.” As a brief and particularly clear example of this genre, we may look at a poem by Sappho, which in prose paraphrase reads as follows:   

Some say a troop of cavalry or infantry or a fleet of warships is the most beautiful thing on earth, but I say it is the one that you love. It is easy to prove this, for Helen, who was the most beautiful woman in the world, left her home and family and husband to follow a stranger to a foreign land, and all because of Love. . . . and so I would rather see my darling’s lovely walk and the radiance of her face than Lydian charioteers or full-armed soldiers.   

The structure of Sappho’s poem provides a convenient brief example of the genre’s rules: first, a survey of what other people believe is valuable, followed by a counter-statement of what the poet believes is valuable; second, a demonstration, using arguments and/or examples, of why the poet’s values are superior to the others; and third, an affirmation that the poet embodies the values in question in his or her own life. The underlying pattern may of course be varied: in the examples of  recusatio included in this anthology (T.I.1, P.II.1, P.III.1, P.III.2, P.III.3, O.I.1, O.II.1, O.III.1), none follows the prescribed strategy in as straightforward a manner as does the piece by Sappho, yet each would have been immediately recognized as an example of this genre by the ancient reader, who would thus be in a position to appreciate how the poet was adapting the conventional generic pattern for the purposes of making a particular poetic statement. It will be noticed that all examples of recusatio included in this anthology are introductory poems. This is because the elegiac poets regularly introduced their books with a defense of elegy, and this defense was typically cast in the form of a  recusatio. Classical scholars and literary critics have only recently become aware of the importance of genre in ancient poetry. The topic is complex and controversial, and the general reader will find that the available literature on it is fairly technical in nature. Those who nevertheless wish to explore the subject further should consult the works by E. Bundy and F. Cairns listed in the bibliography.  

 

VII.  The Elegists in Western Literature

 

 Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid continued to be read throughout antiquity. Their work suffered from the general eclipse of all pagan literature in the Dark Ages. In the High Middle Ages and Renaissance, Ovid was the most popular poet of any language. His popularity was based primarily on his long mythological work, The Metamorphoses, and, among the erotic works, on  The Art of Love. Yet the Loves were also known, as is evidenced by occasional references to them by writers of these periods. In Elizabethan times Christopher Marlowe translated the Loves complete into English; this translation, a remarkable amalgam of the two most flamboyant geniuses in the history of Western literature, is well worth reading today. Subsequent to the Renaissance, interest in Ovid’s poetry, and especially in his erotic verse, declined:  he was too boisterous for the eighteenth century, too frank for the nineteenth, and too flippant for the twentieth. So much the worse for us. Ezra Pound remarked, in reference to Homer, that the hallmark of a classic is that it can be thousands of years old and still be fresh. By this standard at least, Ovid’s poems are the greatest classics which have come down to us from Latin antiquity.

 Tibullus and Propertius, especially the latter, were never as popular as Ovid until after the Renaissance. Tibullus’s great vogue was the eighteenth century:  his restrained elegance and keen sense of formal propriety appealed to the neoclassicism of that period. Since then Tibullus’s influence has been slight, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too often mistaking his surface simplicity for a lack of talent and originality. Recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in Tibullus’s verse among classical scholars who have learned to apply more sophisticated methods of literary criticism than were available to their predecessors, and Tibullus may yet regain his rightful place as one of the finest poets of antiquity.

 Until relatively recent times Propertius was the most neglected of the elegists, for two reasons: his complex, allusive style made him seem difficult, and the state of his text was a disaster. By the beginning of the twentieth century scholars had begun to bring a measure of coherence to Propertius’s text, and the anxious new world then being born found its own tensions and puzzlement mirrored in the nervousness and irony of his poetry. For this reason Propertius has been the most widely read of the elegists in our time. His popularity has been further increased by the interest aroused by Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, a work which was harshly condemned by classical scholars when it first appeared, but which is now generally recognized as presenting a valid interpretation of certain aspects of Propertius’s poetry. More recently, Robert Lowell has given us a free but very beautiful rendition of P.IV.7 under the title “The Ghost.”  

 

VIII.  About This Translation

 

 This translation is an attempt to make a representative sample of the Roman elegists’ erotic work accessible, in so far as this is possible, to non-specialist readers who do not know Latin. I have followed the literal meaning of the originals more closely than is typical of modern verse translations, usually translating image for image and sometimes word for word. Yet the reader should be advised that this is not a crib: I have chosen to translate connotation rather than denotation whenever it seemed to me necessary to choose between them, and I have sometimes modified the literal meaning of the text in order to bring out an overtone or implication which I felt was particularly important, or to make the poet’s meaning intelligible to the non-specialist.

 English verse is accentual. This means that English verse forms are based on the arrangement of syllables which are naturally stressed or unstressed into a recognizable and recurring pattern. Thus in 

Come my Celia, let us prove
While we can, the sports of love 

the pattern is  

DA da DA da DA da DA

DA da DA da DA da DA 

although a slight variation is introduced if we pronounce “Celia” as three syllables. Latin verse forms were based, not on syllabic stress, but on syllabic length. Every syllable in a Latin word was considered to be either long or short, long syllables being exactly twice as long as short syllables. The patterns of Latin verse were thus quantitative:  verses were written in recurrent patterns of long and short syllables. (This description also holds true of ancient Greek poetry, from which the Romans borrowed their poetic meters.) One such pattern was the dactylic hexameter, a meter composed of six units called “feet,” the first five of which consisted either of two long syllables (— —) or of one long syllable followed by two shorts (— oo), while the sixth consisted of either two long syllables (— — ) or of a long syllable followed by a short (— o). This was the meter of the great Greek and Roman epics. Elegiac poetry was written in elegiac couplets, which consisted of a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter. The pentameter was made up of two symmetrical halves, the first composed of two dactylic feet (— oo or— — ) followed by a single long syllable, the second composed of two dactylic feet followed by a single long or short syllable. There are further refinements in the rules, but roughly speaking the pattern of the elegiac couplet may be represented:

   

             hexameter    — oo/— oo/— oo/— oo/— oo/—  —

             pentameter    — oo/— oo/— /— oo/— oo/—     

with the note that in most positions /— — / may be substituted for /— oo/ and that the final syllable in both hexameter and pentameter may be either long or short. The great German poet Schiller cleverly composed a German quantitative elegiac couplet on the subject of the elegiac couplet, which was subsequently translated into English by Coleridge. Coleridge’s version gives about as good an example of what an elegiac couplet sounds like as can be put into English:   

 In the hexameter rises the fountains’ silvery column,

 In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.    

The Schiller/Coleridge attempt at writing quantitative verse in a modern language is basically an interesting trick which cannot be successfully sustained at any length, although ever since the Renaissance occasional attempts have been made.  Rather than trying to write elegiacs in English, or choosing, as most translators do, to use some standard English verse form such as blank verse or rhymed couplets, I decided that what was needed was a verse form which is suitable to English but which also to some extent reflected the sound of the original. In particular, it seemed to me desirable to translate Latin elegiacs into English couplets which, like elegiac couplets, were composed of two lines with contrasting lengths and rhythms. Accordingly, I have employed for this translation English couplets consisting of a six-beat line which wavers between dactyls and iambics (it is impossible to write straight dactyls in English without breaking into a jig) followed by a five-beat line which is basically iambic but metrically rather looser than is usual in English iambic pentameters.

 Besides the translations, this anthology includes additional materials to aid the non-specialist reader. These include a series of notes explaining social, political, and literary allusions and indicating certain passages where the text or translation is particularly controversial, a pronouncing glossary of most names appearing in the verse text, and an annotated bibliography which may serve as an introduction to further study. I have also included (for those who may find it of interest) a textual note indicating which alternatives I have chosen in cases where the text seems to be uncertain.