Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  Our difficulty in pinning down the puella of love poetry, a feature we have already encountered in her uncertain social status, is made even more acute by the challenges the reader often faces in simply recognizing her in the work. For the poet’s act of giving his puella a name creates an expectation of presence and consistency that is not always actively maintained.21 Most obviously, the puella remains often unnamed in individual love poems, requiring a conscious decision on the part of the reader about whether to assume that, say, Corinna is meant even when Ovid avoids naming her.22 Moreover, Veyne characterizes Cynthia and Delia themselves as ‘so vague and so incoherent that we may draw nothing from them’;23 Corinna’s presence in Ovid’s poetry is equally tenuous,24 giving all three puellae a fluidity or ‘lightness’ (levitas) of character that serves to define them. Such inconsistency is enshrined in love poetry’s recurring reference to the puella as levis, a term often rendered as ‘fickle’, but potentially connoting more fundamental changeability.25 Not coincidentally, the levitas of the puella is set against the apparent solidity and consistency of the male ego.26 A powerful bond between reader and poet can thus be forged as the reader’s inability to grasp the puella with any confidence parallels ego’s frustrations with her sexual inconstancy.27 In short, the puella seems at times as impossible to read as she is to love.

  But what other demands or strategies – beyond her name and her at times exasperating indeterminacy – circumscribe the puella’s subjectivity in love poetry? We want to turn now to two other features vital to the ‘womanufacture’ of love poetry’s puella: the body and the voice.

  Reading the Body

  Because it is so often defined by its biological properties, it is tempting to see the body as a completely natural entity. Indeed, Propertius professes a strong preference for Cynthia in her ‘natural’ state, one in which her body is unmarred by cosmetics or elaborate adornment (cultus). Dismayed at the prospect of her carefully made-up hair and dress in 1.2, Propertius asks why she would ever ‘destroy the grace given by nature with purchased adornment’ (5).28 While Propertius’ predilection for an unadorned Cynthia might seem commendable, his puella’s elaborate preparations prove to be troubling in another poem precisely because they rouse his suspicions about her interest in attracting other men (1.15.5–8). Not surprisingly, Propertius turns out to have a very specific definition of ‘sophistication’: ‘if a girl is pleasing to one man,’ he proclaims, ‘she is refined enough’ (1.2.26). Although, as we shall see, Ovid later enthusiastically endorses the notion of cultus, Propertius in 1.2 exposes the tenuous lines separating nature and culture when he paradoxically uses artworks to illustrate nature’s beauty (1.2.21–22).29

  Gillian Rose has argued that ‘far from being natural […] bodies are “maps of power and identity”; or, rather, maps of the relation between power and identity’.30 The residents of Augustan Rome were witness to a very potent display of the female body when an effigy of Cleopatra, ‘opened and eroticized by the snakebite’, was displayed in Roman triumph in 29 BCE,31 a spectacle Propertius exploits in poem 3.11 (53–54). Traversed by an array of social anxieties, female bodies take on many meanings in Latin love poetry, even serving at times as ‘metaphors for the poetic projects and political interests of their authors’,32 an idea we shall return to. Here, we want to examine how gender and power intersect on the body in love poetry, including how male and female bodies are respectively imagined and represented.

  Corinna’s Abortion

  The female body is often distinguished specifically by its reproductive role, an emphasis that – despite its prominence in contemporary Roman thought – is actually quite rare in love poetry, given that the genre insists on the impossibility of permanent bonds between the lovers.33 Propertius in 2.7, as we have seen, explicitly denies any prospect of children with Cynthia. In another poem, he proclaims Cynthia’s childlessness a physical advantage (2.15.21–22). A pair of poems in Ovid’s Amores (2.13 and 2.14), however, goes further in actually acknowledging the risk of female pregnancy by responding to an action Corinna has allegedly undertaken without the poet’s knowledge: an abortion.

  Abortion was a complex issue both medically and ethically in antiquity, just as it is today,34 and even though Ovid’s poems are often taken as an important source for discerning ancient attitudes about the act, his viewpoint remains subject to his own designs as author and ego.35 Ovid begins by informing us that Corinna is dangerously close to death following an abortion (2.13.3–4). In a malicious jab, he casts his own paternity as mere speculation, professing that ‘nonetheless either she conceived from me, or so I believe it, for often I take as fact that which is possible’ (5–6). The bulk of the poem then presents a prayer for Corinna’s recovery to Isis and Ilithyia, the latter a goddess of childbirth invoked with perhaps intentional awkwardness. In the following poem, Ovid ‘treats abortion as an abstract question, denouncing the practice in the persona of a stern satirist’.36 Utilizing the recurrent imagery of warfare, Ovid begins by asking why, when women are not made to participate in warfare, they choose to ‘suffer wounds from their own weapons’ (2.14.3–4). He then bitterly charges that ‘she who first instituted the plucking out of tender foetuses deserves to die in the battle of her making’ (5–6). Ovid finally concludes the poem by requesting that although such women often pay with their lives – a punishment, he notes, that is approved by observers – Corinna should be spared for now, albeit punished if she tries again (43–44).

  This pair of poems has presented many obstacles to interpretation, not least because Ovid’s overall tone seems highly inappropriate given the seriousness of Corinna’s condition;37 so, too, a general ‘asymmetry’ of male and female viewpoints pervades the poems. For one, Ovid fails to present Corinna’s side of the story; not once does he reveal the considerations essential to any understanding of her act, such as her reasons for undertaking the abortion or even her actual methods.38 Pointing out Ovid’s relentless ‘attempts to keep the focus on himself’, Mary-Kay Gamel proposes that Ovid’s treatment ultimately betrays an anxiety about women’s power, including the fact that ‘it is they who take action, while he only talks’.39 We seem, then, to encounter a significant conundrum, for although Corinna’s actions ostensibly drive the poem, her own perspective remains out of reach as Ovid invites us to experience the episode entirely from his point of view. So how are we, as readers, invited to witness such events; or to phrase it another way, how do things come into focus in love poetry?

  The Gaze

  Just as the puella’s body is often the source of poetic composition, it is continually offered up in patently visual terms for the reader’s consumption; we do not merely hear about issues that pertain to the puella’s physical self – such as the role of adornment or her dangerous abortion – but are invited quite explicitly to look upon her. Many debates about the distribution of power in Latin love poetry therefore centre around the ‘gaze’, a concept that highlights the difference between who is doing the looking and who is being looked at in various forms of story-telling.40 Latin love poetry often calls attention to the role of the eyes and vision (e.g. Propertius 1.1.1), and many different physical features of the puella are designated as the source of her beauty.41 Taken together, such passages seem to support the proposition that men always take the active role and ‘see’, while women, conversely, are passively ‘seen’. Yet just as the love poets undercut other terminology that defines Roman gender roles, they at times purposely refuse to adhere to a stringent distinction in acts related to viewing, and so it might be better to envision love poetry as both interrogating and reinforcing such a dynamic.42

  In her reading of Propertius 2.15, Barbara Flaschenriem argues that ‘insofar as she is associated with narrativity, Cynthia either eludes spectacle or subverts it’. On the other hand, in Ovid’s Amores 1.5 – a poem Flaschenriem calls a ‘reductive but revealing parody’ of Propertius’ poem – she finds something very different: ‘a more purely fetishistic use of the female bo
dy’.43 Ovid’s description of Corinna’s body in 1.5 is, indeed, infamous both for what it displays and where it abruptly stops.44 The poem begins with Ovid calling attention to the time of day (around noon) and the attendant lighting of his bedroom. Next Corinna arrives only to have Ovid quickly tear away her clothing (13–16) and scan her body from the top down (17–22). When he reaches the thigh, however, he suddenly stops, asking coyly, ‘why should I detail each part? Everything I saw deserved praise’ (23–24). Soon after, Ovid announces: ‘who does not know the rest? Exhausted we both lay quiet. Would that midday often turn out this way for me!’ (25–26).

  Joan Booth has called this poem ‘a near-cinematic sex scene’,45 but although it offers an unabashed view of Corinna’s body, Ovid’s poem constructs power relations that are not entirely straightforward. For one, the poem seems to pit Ovid’s sexual desires against those of the reader rather than Corinna. Building our anticipation as he approaches her midsection, Ovid plays with the reader’s desire to see her body fully exposed, including what modern editors often primly call her pudenda, the very site at which he brusquely halts. But does Ovid set out to feed the reader’s voyeurism or to parody it, purposely leaving the reader’s desire to see Corinna unsatisfied in contrast to his own exhausted sexual state? Of course, Ovid’s attempts to vie with the reader do not discount the fact that the relationship between poet and reader has been articulated through varied access to Corinna’s body. So is Ovid himself all talk and no body? Does he ever open his own physique to similar scrutiny?

  The Male Body

  As we have seen, the male body remains an important site for illustrating the degradation of the figure of the servitium amoris, slave bodies being manifestly open to physical penetration and punishment. On the other hand, protection of the male citizen body was a major tenet in Roman law,46 making it both a site of authority and one closed to incursion of any kind. Ovid, like many of the love poets, seems to take this prerogative for granted, holding his own body mostly above the fray. When he laments Corinna’s love for a former soldier over himself, in fact, Ovid evokes a mind and body hierarchy by pointedly using the soldier’s reliance on his body as a sign of his inferiority: ‘look at the scars,’ he says with scorn, ‘the remains of old battle. Whatever he has, has been attained with his body’ (3.8.19–20).47 Yet in the poem immediately preceding, Ovid calls attention to his own body by revealing its moment of shameful failure: his impotence.48 Sharrock calls Ovid ‘a poet renowned for his self-esteem’ and 3.7 ‘a poem about power and manhood’.49 How, then, can we account for this apparent revelation of his own physical shortcomings? The answer may lie in the demands of authorship itself, meaning that the poem provides ‘a reflection on the nature of elegy, doomed as it must be to perpetual “failure” through which it achieves success’.50 Ovid’s poem thus exposes a paradox: he becomes a good elegiac poet precisely in his failures as a lover.51

  Propertius seems even more willing to place his body before the reader’s gaze. From the very outset, Propertius cites Milanion, an emphatically wounded figure, as his model (1.1.9–16), and he subsequently exposes his own body to both examination and punishment. In 1.5, for example, Propertius advises his friend Gallus that when Gallus falls in love he will no longer be surprised by Propertius’ pale colour, or ‘that I am nothing when it comes to my whole body’ (21–22). On the other hand, Propertius confronts an interlocutor who thinks his limbs are emaciated, urging him to consult with a puella who has experienced Propertius’ ability ‘to do his duty the whole night through’ (2.22b.21–24). Other love poets likewise draw on the idea of physical performance as a sign of power. Despite claims to impotence in 3.7, Ovid gives an accounting in the same poem of the number of times he was able to make love to various women in a single night, culminating with the claim that Corinna once demanded it nine times (3.7.23–26), a seeming echo of Catullus 32, where Catullus, playing on the idea of a dinner party, asks Ipsithilla for ‘nine courses of sex’ (8).52

  Aggression and Assault

  Despite such boasts and ribaldry, Latin love poetry markedly avoids any description of the actual sexual acts between the ego and the puella. Indeed, Kirk Ormand makes a useful distinction between the sexual and the erotic in Catullus’ poetry, noting that while ‘eroticism […] suggests a mutual give-and-take and the apparent elevation of the beloved to a position of power’, ‘sex is nearly always an expression, not of love, but of physical and political domination’.53 We have already seen the use of such terminology in Catullus’ attacks on his friend’s girlfriend in poem 10; similarly, in poem 41 he ridicules the mistress of Caesar’s colleague Mamurra, who, he says, offered to sell herself to him for ten thousand sesterces.54 Such poems display a distinct nastiness directed at other women, but many of Catullus’ attacks on Lesbia herself, as well as his various male associates, are even more shocking in their coarseness and use of obscenity.55

  Actual acts of violence against women, including rape, recur throughout ancient myth and Roman literature.56 The rape of women or boys – ‘intercourse by force’ or per vim stuprum – was punishable by law in Rome,57 and the prospect is present in love poetry, albeit generally relegated to the mythic past or treated as unfulfilled fantasy in the present. This does not mean the idea of rape does not hold serious repercussions in love poetry; indeed, it would be difficult to find a more savage and repugnant justification for rape than that articulated by Ovid in the Ars Amatoria, ‘advice’ that can be summarized in modern parlance as ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and, even more, that a woman’s feelings will be hurt if she is not taken by force (1.673–680; see Chapter 6). Critics, however, have varied in their response to the tone of such sentiments; Ovid, after all, is the poet who seemed to show such compassion for rape victims in his Metamorphoses.58

  Yet although love poetry deliberates the potential for violence in intimate settings, rape does not generally seem like the most appropriate framework for interpreting such acts. More often, the Augustan elegists describe physical altercations with their puellae, encounters that pointedly leave marks on the surface of the body, suggesting that, for some love poets, violence is beneficial precisely because of its ability to enter private passion into the public record.59

  Bruises and Blows

  The representation of the puella’s body alternates between an emphasis on its perfection – or beauty – and its degradation.60 When weighing the intensity of physical violence in love poetry, however, Sharon James advocates distinguishing between rixae (quarrels), ‘a form of sexual play’, and outright assault.61 In 1.1, as Tibullus outlines the features of his modest life, he registers his expectation that ‘quarrels’ are central to love affairs when he proclaims that since old age will come, now is his time to pursue levis venus (‘light sex’), that is, while it is not shameful to ‘break down doors’ and is pleasing to ‘enter into quarrels’ (71–74). Even as the elegists allude to physical fights with their lovers, they frequently seek to define its ‘appropriate’ limits. In 1.10, Tibullus describes the actions of the rusticus, meaning a man of the countryside (a more pejorative term in Propertius and Ovid), who ‘barely sober’ goes home where the ‘battles of love heat up’ (51–53). Having recorded the brutality of the scene and its impact on the man’s wife, Tibullus offers his own commentary, calling anyone who would beat his puella ‘stone and iron’, since this is like ‘ripping the gods from heaven’ (59–60). He then proposes that it is enough to tear the puella’s garment and disarrange her hair, making her cry (61–62), since ‘four times blessed is he, who in his anger, can make a puella cry’ (63–64). But the one who is fierce with his hands, Tibullus urges, should go to war and stay far away from ‘tender Venus’ (65–66).62

  In 2.15, Propertius excitedly recounts the rixa he and Cynthia once had. Delighting in the initiative she seems to take (5–6), Propertius nevertheless threatens at one point that if she will not disrobe, she will experience his hands and a ripped gown; perhaps even ‘show bruised arms’ to her mother (17–20).
Yet, in an earlier poem, Propertius pointedly disavows such violence (2.5.21–24). ‘Let some rusticus,’ he says, ‘seek these disgraceful battles’: one who does not, like the poet, have ivy on his brow (25–26). Reaffirming his own status as poet, Propertius makes his attack instead in verse, threatening his puella with a damning epitaph: ‘Cynthia, mighty in form, Cynthia, light in word’ (27–28).63

  Scenes of violence against the puella draw at times on the figure of militia amoris, and Leslie Cahoon proposes that ‘the love of the Amores is inherently violent and linked with the Roman libido dominandi’; it is this ‘appetite for domination’ that provides ‘a domestic manifestation of the same impulses that have motivated both civil war and military aggression abroad’.64 Ovid references the injury of his puella in a number of poems (e.g. 2.5.45–46), but it is his full-out assault on her in 1.7 that best illustrates this correlation between imperialism abroad and control at home. Ovid begins 1.7 by proclaiming his furor (‘madness’) in attacking his mistress; his wounded puella cries and her tears no longer seem a virtue.65 Ovid later decries his deed, noting that he would have been punished if he had struck the least of Roman citizens. ‘The one I professed to love has been wounded by me,’ he concedes (33–34). He imagines Corinna in the context of an imagined triumph, one in which she would be paraded as a captive and he, he sarcastically notes, would be celebrated as her victor (35–40); later, Ovid urges her to attack him back, or, at the very least, to hide the signs of his assault (63–68).