Latin Love Poetry

  The narrators of the Heroides frequently reference the process of writing in ways that draw attention to the complexities of language as well as the letters themselves as material objects. In the opening of her letter to Achilles, Briseis, for example, refers to her halting ability in Greek (3.1–2), a conceit containing no little irony given that the letter itself, of course, is written in Latin. She then professes that her tears may have blotted the letter, but that they, too, have the ‘weight of words’ (3–4). Such blurring of corporeal functions with the materiality of writing is provocative, and eventually Ovid gives similar expression to his own language deficiency and physical erosion as he writes of his experiences in exile; the many connections between the Heroides and Ovid’s writings from exile are explored later in Chapter 6.72 Finally, the epistolary format allows the writers in the Heroides to allude to the precarious lines between love poetry’s multiple readers, at times playfully juxtaposing – even blurring – the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ audiences. When Oenone’s letter emphatically begins with the word perlegis (5.1) – ‘are you reading this through?’ – she thus seems to address not only the letter’s presumed recipient, Paris, but also us as ‘outside’ readers, since we are ‘eavesdropping’ on the exchange and so also caught in the act of reading her letter.

  But does such an elision of readers suggest that Ovid’s literary letters seek not to align the reader with the narrating ego (a bond commonly constructed by love poetry), but rather to create a kind of disturbing collaboration between the ‘external’ reader and the abandoning male lover? ‌73 Perhaps, but as Erfossini Spentzou notes, while a reader might find her- or himself unconsciously aligned with the absent man and against the writer, the potentially disruptive nature of the letters ‘is also open to rescue by readings which refuse to cooperate’.74 Taking a different approach, Laurel Fulkerson has explored the ways in which the Heroides function as ‘intratextual’ and not just ‘intertextual’, in the sense that the letters and their female authors respond to one another as a community and not merely to their male lovers or external literary sources.75 In this way, the work of Fulkerson and others places important emphasis on understanding the women of the Heroides as active readers and not merely writers.‌76

  In interrogating the specific consequences of Ovid’s appropriation of the female voice, it is worth considering Sappho’s letter to Phaon (Heroides 15), a clear anomaly among the letters. For one, Sappho is the only letter writer associated with a real woman as opposed to a mythological one; so, too, she is the only figure explicitly associated with poetic authorship in her own right.77

  Taking Sappho’s Pen

  Given its unique position within the collection, scholars have split over whether the Sappho letter should be considered authentic. It is mentioned in a passage from Ovid’s Amores (2.18.26), which lists many, but not all, of the writers in his Heroides; however, Richard Tarrant, deeming the Sappho letter spurious, has argued that these lines were merely inserted later into the work.78 Surviving manuscripts show that the Sappho letter was itself added belatedly to the collection we have today, but whether that means it was restored to Ovid’s text at that time – having been removed previously for unknown reasons – or was an entirely new addition lies at the heart of the debate.79

  Sappho’s letter has many interesting qualities, including the explicit juxtaposition of lyric poetry and elegy, opening a conversation with Sappho’s original poetry that allows commentary on two distinct metres of ancient poetry. Perhaps most notoriously, Sappho, a poet well-known for her ardent desire for other women, writes her letter to a male lover, Phaon. The character of Phaon appears briefly in the limited fragments of Sappho’s work, and also in Greek New Comedy, but this letter introduces an entirely new premise to their relationship, for, in appealing to Phaon, the Sappho of the Heroides explicitly repudiates her ‘earlier’ mode of same-sex passion (15.15–20).80

  Such a major turnabout in Sappho’s erotic object choice has caused considerable comment by classical scholars. One interpretation proposes that Sappho’s newfound desire serves simply to make her consonant with other conventions in Ovid’s text.81 Other scholars, however, have suggested that an overt homophobia is evident by the Roman period, especially in relation to female homosexuality, and that this led Ovid (or the later author) to make a radical change to Sappho’s professed desires.82 The important question of homosexuality (albeit primarily male) and its place in Roman love poetry will be addressed in the next chapter. What is of interest here is a much more targeted issue: how perceptions of female same-sex desire may have informed the construction of Sappho’s ego in the Heroides. In other words, given the reader’s knowledge of Sappho’s self-presentation in her original poetry, is there an even more intricate game in Sappho’s letter pertaining to gender, desire and voice?

  Reviewing earlier theories about Sappho’s role in the Heroides, Pamela Gordon argues that the voice of the letter ‘fits a pattern that emerges when we view the treatment of female homoeroticism in Roman literature in general’; more succinctly, she proposes that Sappho in the letter writes ‘like a man’.83 As Gordon recognizes, it is crucial not to discount the potentially negative connotations of such a trope – she discusses modern stereotypes of ‘mannish lesbians’ and the Roman poet Horace’s own reference to ‘masculine’ Sappho suggests that questions about Sappho’s gender identity in relation to her desires went far beyond the Heroides (Epistles 1.19.28). Yet, in the Heroides, ‘writing like a man’ seems to accord with Sappho’s ability to seize an active rather than passive role in pursuing Phaon, a stance that generally sets her apart from the other female writers in the Heroides, and it is a role Gordon finds parallel to that of male narrators throughout Ovid’s writing.84

  Sappho’s letter thus reminds us of the manifest complexity of the experiment Ovid has undertaken with the female voice; as Victoria Rimell dramatically expresses it, Heroides 15 ‘stag[es] a power struggle between Ovid and Sappho, whose poetic voices wrestle for visibility in a vacillating hierarchy’,85 and in the end it may be impossible to determine the precise gains made here or in the work overall – that is, who or what eventually emerges from the melee. For one, it remains difficult to determine whether the text ultimately seeks to explore the relationship between female subjectivity and female authorship or rather the capacities and limits of Ovid as an author. In other words, do the women of the Heroides exercise anything akin to an independent voice or are they merely vehicles for Ovid’s literary play? Is it indeed the case that, as one critic memorably phrased it, ‘although Ovid for the time being succeeded in disguising himself in silken petticoats, he did not succeed in ceasing to be Ovid’?86

  Sarah Lindheim has gone further in suggesting that Ovid’s narrative appropriation may in fact be driven by an anxiety or fear of women’s ‘uncontrollable, indefinable diversity and otherness’. In this view, Ovid’s narrative cross-dressing becomes an attempt to tame the threatening nature of women by making all of his female narrators conform to a single type. Lindheim writes: ‘The self-representations of the heroines demonstrate the powerful drive to circumscribe women by means of a single, universal definition, to achieve some sort of control over women by turning them into Woman’.87 If Woman (or in love poetry, the puella) is a kind of threatening chaos, can order be imposed on her by making her write in a specific way? Can her threatening difference be contained within letters that make her subject to both earlier literary traditions and the hand of a male author? In seeking to understand the intricacies of such dynamics more fully, it is time to undertake a broader investigation of gender and power in Latin love poetry.

  ‌

  ‌III

  ‌Power and Play

  The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard.

  W.H. Auden

  ALTHOUGH LATIN LOVE POETRY centres around the exploits of the male ego, it remains predicated on the erotic failures of that narrating subject: Latin love poetry is emphatically n
ot a genre of ‘happily ever after’.1 Despite the fact that the male ego rarely – or only briefly – ‘gets the girl’, Paul Veyne insists nonetheless on the carefree nature of elegy, its status as a ‘pleasing falsehood’.2 Ovid, in particular, seems to reinforce the image of love as a blithe game; in Amores 1.4, for example, he instructs a married woman as to how she and Ovid can use special gestures to communicate secretly with one another (18). In his Ars, he goes even further with this conceit of love as a set of signs or learned behaviours, outlining at considerable length the appropriate methods for pursuing love, as we shall see in chapters 4 and 6.

  However, other scholars have taken Latin love poetry much more seriously. Noting the popularity of Catullus’ tenth poem – a poem in which Catullus is caught out by a friend’s girlfriend when he brags about the alleged wealth he has brought home from Bithynia – Marilyn Skinner calls attention to the hostile language Catullus levies against the young woman when she exposes him, proposing that Catullus’ humour and aggression are actually vehicles of power and control.‌3 So when Catullus seeks to put the woman ‘in her place’ (a phrase that reveals well the hierarchy Catullus attempts to reassert), ‘she becomes a point of convergence for a variety of other tensions provoked by class and gender difference.’‌4 Augustan elegy also ‘presents gender roles and constructs as revolving around a power struggle’,‌5 so we attempt in this chapter to unveil more fully the role of gender and female subjectivity in Latin love poetry.

  Readers of love poetry have long been intrigued by the genre’s ostensible willingness to grant power to the puella, for she exercises, at least on the surface, an autonomy and control over her male pursuer that makes her role distinctive among female characters in Roman literature. It is the puella, after all, who seems to dictate the terms and longevity of her love affairs. Yet in weighing power and its possessors, we might want to distinguish two distinct, albeit related forms: ‘power to’ and ‘power over’. The first suggests the ‘power of an individual or group to affect their outward environment’, a capacity that at times overlaps with the second, which is a form of power expressed against others, allowing a person ‘to manipulate, to persuade, or in extreme cases to force’.‌6 In the case of the puella, then, we should assess not only whether she indeed exercises ‘power over’ her lover, as the poets would have it, but also whether she possesses the ‘power to’ affect her environment, including the ability to influence the situations in which she appears or even the storylines themselves. As this latter criterion suggests, power in love poetry remains entangled in questions of narrative and authorship; indeed, Auden’s wry quotation which serves as our chapter epigraph reminds us from the outset to be constantly on the alert when it comes to the puella and her literary representation.

  Just as questions of biography have attended the interpretation of love poetry’s ego, the representation of the puella has also been subjected to speculation about its connections to Roman ‘reality’.

  The Puella at Rome

  In trying to assess the transformations in Roman society wrought by the chaos of the civil wars and the rise of Augustus, historians have sought to determine whether the relations between Roman men and women, including what was expected of each group, were substantially influenced and, if so, how. J.P. Sullivan, for one, sees in Propertius’ Cynthia the reflection of new opportunities for women’s empowerment in this turbulent era. Relying primarily on literary evidence, Sullivan proposes that ‘in the last century of the Republic and beyond, it is evident, there were women of strong character who did not follow the traditional pattern of dutiful daughter and patriotic wife’, concluding that ‘the social turmoil of the civil wars had for some its compensations’.7 For Sullivan and other like-minded critics, such changes specifically entailed ‘the growth of a recognizable demi-monde’, one in which ‘ex-slaves, lower-class free (or freed) women, actresses […] [and] even women of some family and independent means’ were able to engage in ‘concubinatus or more casual liaisons’.8

  While appealing at first glance, such theories of female ‘emancipation’ in the first century are often problematic, not least because they rely so heavily on literary sources and derive almost exclusively from speculation about Roman women’s sexual activities.‌9 Indeed, in the latter case, as Maria Wyke points out, reconstructions of ancient female sexuality often themselves draw precariously on ‘elements of moral turpitude transferred wholesale from the writings of the Roman moralists’.‌10 In other words, modern critics often infer the increasing sexual liberation of Roman women from contemporary accusations of their sexual promiscuity.‌11

  The women of Latin love poetry share one main feature when it comes to their sexual activities: their inability to enter into permanent relationships with the poets who pursue them.12 Thus, the love poets generally present their puellae as either already married, making the relationship pursued adulterous (adultery being an act not without considerable social stigma and legal risk in the Roman world), or as courtesans, a pact that is presumably more formal and longer-lasting than the one-night arrangement between a Roman prostitute and her client, but that nonetheless presumes an economic foundation and difference in social class. Further underlining the elusive status of the puella, some of the love poets depict their lovers alternating between the roles of Roman wife (matrona) and courtesan (meretrix).13

  Given such indeterminacy, any concrete attempt to link the puella to social attitudes or social revolutions outside the text remains a thorny proposition, and we shall return at the end of this chapter to the pressing question of love poetry’s treatment of gender and its possible relation to contemporary Rome. For now, we want to explore what Alison Sharrock has called ‘womanufacture’, meaning the process by which love poetry ‘creates its own object, calls her Woman, and falls in love with her – or rather, with the artist’s own act of creating her’.14 Setting aside for now the desires attached to her, how is it that love poetry creates Woman, and, for our starting point, is Woman (or the puella) ever constructed as a subject in her own right?

  3.1 ‌Pygmalion and Galatea IV: The Soul Attains (1878) by Edward Burne-Jones.

  The Puella as Subject

  One way of probing the puella’s subjectivity is through the dichotomy of active versus passive: does the puella take shape through the actions that she herself performs or through those that are performed on her? In her study of female subjectivity in Homer’s Odyssey, Ingrid Holmberg adopts a slightly different emphasis by positing desire – a term that charts not merely a character’s sexual urges, but also her capacity for constituting a will of her own more expansively – as a means for tracing subjectivity in literature.15 When Homer acknowledges the desires of women like Penelope in his epic poem, for example, Holmberg argues that he also attributes to them a form of independent subjectivity. Yet Holmberg also observes that such female desires are generally presented negatively, often as a serious threat or obstruction to the overall narrative.16 While Homer may open the possibility of female subjectivity, then, any self-sufficiency the female characters attain is ultimately repudiated and their desires are forfeited to larger narrative forces, forces often explicitly dedicated to the ongoing development and eventual ‘success’ of the male hero.17 Central to Holmberg’s argument is her assertion that the Odyssey ‘employs control over narrative production itself’ as a means of constructing gender difference.18

  Male alignment with narrative power remains a key feature of Latin love poetry, despite the occasional presence of a female ego. So we might add to our distinction of ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ a series of related questions suggested by Holmberg’s treatment of female subjectivity: does the puella possess her own mind, as it were, or is she simply a projection of the needs and desires of others, including the reader? If the puella does attain her own distinct subjectivity, can it withstand narrative pressures, even when they seem set against her? Finally, is the puella ever able to take control of the narrative or – as we might phrase it – do
es she ever have the ‘power to’ dictate the terms of her own participation in love poetry? We can begin to discern the puella’s capacity to be a subject by looking more closely at how she is actually constructed, including the problems raised by her very name.

  Naming Names

  Already in antiquity, many Roman writers identified individual love poets closely with their puellae, while also tracing a literary genealogy of the puella herself. Thus, in one poem, Propertius compares Cynthia directly to Catullus’ Lesbia, arguing that ‘Lesbia did all these things with impunity before her, surely she who follows is less to blame’ (2.32.45–46). Earlier, Propertius positions Cynthia among the women made famous by Roman love poetry, proclaiming in one poem that his books will make her beauty the most famous of all and asking only Calvus’ and Catullus’ pardon (2.25.3–4). In 2.34, Propertius defends his own choice to write love poetry by listing the poets who have previously been successful in such work; citing specifically the pairings of Catullus and Lesbia, Calvus and Quintilia, Gallus and Lycoris, he concludes: ‘Cynthia too will live, praised by the verse of Propertius, if fame wishes to place me among these poets’ (93–94). In Book 3 of Ars Amatoria, Ovid, in turn, connects the puella to literary reputation when he lists the number of women who have been made famous by poets, notably omitting Catullus’ Lesbia, while adding one of Tibullus’ girlfriends (535–538).

  In Amores 2.1, signalling his emphatic repudiation of epic for love poetry – an act of poetic self-definition that we shall consider more fully in the next chapter – Ovid bids farewell to ‘the distinguished names of heroes’, urging instead that puellae turn their beautiful faces towards his song (35–39). Through such phrasing, Ovid strongly implies that male heroes can be located by name, while puellae are identified instead through their physical appearance. Indeed, on closer inspection, the name of the puella proves to be elusive. For one, all the names of the puellae have strong roots in the Greek tradition: Catullus’ Lesbia, as we have seen, derives her name from Sappho’s island Lesbos, while the name of Ovid’s Corinna comes directly from an early Greek poetess. Both Cynthia and Delia’s names can be linked to the Greek god Apollo (as well as, in the case of Cynthia, Apollo’s twin, Diana), and Nemesis is itself a Greek word, one often personified as the goddess of retribution.19 Moreover, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the name of the puella is often presumed to be a pseudonym, a cover for some ‘real’ woman outside the work. So we might say that the name of the puella both focuses our attention and, at the same time, deflects it elsewhere.20