Miller argues, however, that this shift in Gallus’ object-choice is, in fact, part of ‘a complex yet consistent system of relations that on the manifest level substitute heteroerotic relations for homoerotic ones, while maintaining the affective and erotic valorization of the homoerotic subtexts’.144 In other words, just as the male community ‘shares’ in ego’s romantic plot, the ties between men, at times erotic, continue to ground love poetry, even if they are at times incompletely concealed behind heterosexual passions. To give just one prominent example, the opening of Propertius’ entire corpus (1.1.1–6) echoes an epigram by Meleager, an epigram that originally extolled the attractions of a male beloved and would presumably be known to Propertius’ Roman audience.145 And although Propertius does not himself openly pursue young men in his poetry, he does profess at one point that ‘if ever someone is an enemy to me, let him love girls, but let him delight in a boy [puer], if that one is a friend’ (2.4.17–18), a formulation that suggests hetero- and homosexual passions are equally conceivable to the poet, yet destined for different ends. So what role does same-sex desire play? How does the puer compare to the puella as an object of pursuit?
Love Poetry’s Puer
It is essential to historicize briefly the meaning of sexuality before we embark on any discussion of same-sex desire in Latin love poetry, for historians have drawn a series of important distinctions between modern and ancient notions of homosexuality.146 Most significantly, ancient thought did not classify people as ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’, but rather viewed individuals according to their presumed type of participation in sexual activities, primarily whether they assumed the active or passive role in any encounter (the active role understood as the one penetrating),147 a distinction that correlates closely with attitudes we witnessed about gender in Chapter 1. While Catullus’ ego may construct a sexual identity based on being the penetrator of others, then, ‘he does not have clear sexual orientation’ in the modern sense.148 Roman attitudes thus did not condemn sexual relations between men per se, but rather considered the passive male partner, like all women, less powerful than the penetrator, and therefore a role that a Roman male citizen should be unwilling to occupy.149 Hence, the only socially acceptable male same-sex relationship was one between a Roman citizen and a partner of lesser standing, usually a younger man ‘who was a slave, an ex-slave, or a noncitizen’, all of whom could be labelled puer.150
We can witness the force of such ideology in Roman political invective as accusations of sexually passive behaviours were levelled time and again at prominent Roman leaders. Sling bullets from the Perusine War have been found inscribed with graphic accusations of Octavian’s alleged passive sexual practices,151 and Curio once infamously described Julius Caesar as ‘a man for all women and a woman for all men’ (Suetonius, Julius 52.3).152 In one of his poems, Catullus similarly calls Julius Caesar a pathicus (‘passive receiver’) (57.2),153 and in another calls Romulus himself a cinaedus (29), one of the most pejorative Latin terms used of the passive male partner.154 As we have seen, Catullus threatens various kinds of forced penetration in poem 16, yet such verbal attacks on other men pivot around the prevailing association of power and penetration rather than any negative connotation of homosexuality per se.155
Catullus does at times place pueri in an erotic context, but while he openly articulates his desire for them, he generally avoids reference to explicit sexual acts.156 In poem 48, addressed to a young man called Juventius, Catullus suggestively returns to the idea of endless kisses, a request he also made of Lesbia in the famous poems we looked at in Chapter 2 (poems 5 and 7). In a lengthier poem, 99, Catullus talks of stealing a kiss from ‘honey-sweet Juventius’, after which he claims to be tortured by the young man’s immediate attempts to wash it off. He expresses jealousy that Juventius prefers someone else in 81, although his tone is noticeably more restrained (and less sexually explicit) than in his attacks on Lesbia.157 Just as the puella helps consolidate the relationships between men, the puer also serves as an object of exchange when Catullus gives a boy to his friend Aurelius, begging that he return him untouched and vowing that he will be punished as an adulterer if he gives in to any desire for the young man (15.18–19). Although the puer is occasionally situated as the object of desire in Catullus’ poetry, some critics have argued that there is nonetheless a difference between Catullus’ poetry to young men and his poems about Lesbia, the latter more numerically prominent in the corpus. For one, although Juventius seems able to choose a different suitor in one poem, as well as refuse Catullus’ kiss, he does not seem to possess the same degree of sexual agency overall (or perhaps, in Catullus’ terms, sexual appetite) as Lesbia.158
Tibullus includes in his corpus a number of poems about a young man named Marathus, and the representation of this relationship has led some scholars to suggest that Tibullus was himself more invested in same-sex relationships.159 Of the ten poems in Book 1, Tibullus devotes five to Delia and three to Marathus (4, 8 and 9), but unlike the seeming imbalance between Lesbia and the pueri in Catullus, there seems to be ‘parallel power dynamics’ in Tibullus’ relationships with Delia and Marathus.160 ‘Both in the relationship with Delia and that with Marathus, amor leaves the poet/lover in the position of the passive, servile partner, in contrast to the norm.’161 Poem 1.4 begins with a question to the god Priapus: how, the poet asks, is he so successful with beautiful boys? (1–6) In a stance not unlike that of the later praeceptor in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Priapus responds with a lengthy speech of advice, explaining what kinds of boys to pursue and how (9–72). Praising the worth of poetry, Priapus critiques the tendency of boys to sell their favours, wishing that any who are that mercenary become followers of Cybele and commit acts of self-castration (57–72) – a clear allusion to Catullus’ earlier poem.162
Fredrick suggests that the role of the puer in Latin love poetry can be considered generic as well as erotic in that it can be traced back to Callimachus.163 But there are no representations of love poetry’s ego pursuing boys after Tibullus’ first book, leading some to propose that Latin love poetry, as it developed, increasingly ‘found male–female relations a more fruitful ground for its purposes than male–male sexual relations’.164 Such a tendency does not imply a firm stance against male same-sex desire, only that the puella seems to have become the main figure around which desire was contemplated in Latin love poetry; nor did the reliance on sexual difference as a key element of romantic relationships eliminate the power of homosocial bonding in love poetry. As Propertius’ above wish for a friend suggests, the prospect of same-sex relations continued to offer a pointed alternative to the puella. Ovid, in his own programmatic poem (Amores 1.1), treats both options as parallel, noting that he has neither a suitable puer nor puella for his song (19–20). On the other hand, in a passage we referenced earlier, Ovid professes in the Ars Amatoria that he is ‘less moved by love with a boy’ since he ‘hates sexual union that does not satisfy both’ (2.681–684), a claim that suggests a range of attitudes about the relative disparity between partner types, but is nonetheless difficult to pin down.165
We have come a long way in trying to map out the myriad crossings of power and gender in Latin love poetry and it remains only to consider the ways in which modern scholars have tried to interpret such complex dynamics.
Is Latin Love Poetry Feminist?
Although the term feminism is often used loosely, strictly speaking it denotes a political struggle against patriarchy and sexism; feminism, therefore, does not merely indicate an interest in women’s rights or a concern for the status of women, but a commitment to exposing and unseating historically pervasive systems of male domination.166 Since feminism is at its root a political stance, it is possible for men to be feminist just as it is possible for them to be feminine. As we have seen throughout this chapter, classical scholars have formed diverse views about how power works in Latin poetry and, indeed, what such power relationships connote. Some critics have applied the term ‘
feminist’ to one or more of the Latin love poets:167 is such a designation appropriate? Does Roman love poetry advocate an ancient form of ‘girl power’, including a dismantling of longstanding forms of inequality, or is its aim something quite different?
Paul Allen Miller and Chuck Platter divide feminist scholarship on Augustan elegy specifically into two opposing camps: ‘the negative view sees elegiac women as completely mastered by masculine cultural discourse, while the positive view detects in them elements of subversion that unsettle received modes of thought.’168 We can elaborate this distinction in a number of ways. For one, we might ask whether certain poets like Ovid seek to celebrate male privilege or rather to expose its brutality. In more fundamental ways, as critics like Janan have argued in relation to Propertius, we might posit that love poetry attempts to reveal not merely the inequity in – or damage done by – cultural systems like gender, but also the flaws and fault lines in the very ideology that undergirds them. As Janan phrases it, Propertius has a ‘special fascination with Woman’, and ‘aptly so’, since ‘Woman […] iconically marks the point at which logical systems break down’.169
For many critics, it is impossible to separate the purpose of love poetry from the turmoil of the historical context in which it was produced, periods of both massive uncertainty and dramatic social change. Such instability was already felt at the time of Catullus’ writing and, by the next generation, the elegists would need to come to terms with the rise of Augustus and the promise of a new age, one built on the ashes of the Republic and perhaps despite the traumatic memories of some its residents.170 Sullivan, as we have seen, suggests that ‘the social turmoil of the civil wars had for some its compensations’, but, whether accurate for some Roman women or not, scholars like Skinner and Fredrick have seen in Catullus and the Augustan elegists a record of the progressive political marginalization of Roman male citizens as a group. Adopting a Lacanian approach, Miller suggests that even greater catastrophe can be witnessed in elegy, proposing that it ‘does not so much reflect the lives and positions of a Tibullus or a Propertius as it does a crisis in the categories of the Symbolic’,171 which he defines as ‘the world of linguistically constituted norms that allows us to be recognized as subjects within the community’.172
But even if love poetry exposes the changing nature of political power at Rome, or more deep-seated structural crises, was it also committed to unseating persistent forms of male domination, the second part of feminism? To phrase it somewhat differently, if the world outside shapes Latin love poetry, did Latin love poetry, in turn, try to reshape the Roman world outside? In a groundbreaking article, Judith Hallett has argued that the elegists were part of a ‘counter-culture’.173 Hallett’s article launched an important debate that continues still today, one centred around the question of whether Latin love poetry aims ultimately to sustain the status quo or rather to alter radically the social and ideological structures that defined men and women in Roman society. Contesting Hallett’s claim that elegy was actively directed at social transformation, Aya Betensky countered that even if elegy offers new roles for its lovers, they are merely poetic license rather than social statement.174
Sometime later, Maria Wyke would revisit the same question, wondering whether Augustan love poetry, ‘focus[ing] on a female subject who apparently operates outside the traditional constraints of marriage and motherhood, could […] constitute the advocacy of a better place for women in the ancient world’.175 Turning from the larger (and largely unanswerable) question of love poetry’s precise impact on contemporary Roman society, she insists that, in any case, the only gains to be found in elegy are those received by the male narrator: ‘it is not the concern of elegiac poetry to upgrade the position of women, only to portray the male narrator as alienated from positions of power and to differentiate him from other, socially responsible male types.’176 In this way, some scholars have argued that the love poets are far more invested in interrogating their own relation to power than in elevating that of the puella. Nor is it clear how reliable the poets’ frequent claims to disempowerment actually are; as Gardner sees it, ‘the poet-lovers of elegy betray a certain satisfaction with their own marginality, as well as the power to return to the familiar territory of symbolic structures.’177 Is the experience of male vulnerability lauded throughout love poetry, then, a sign of the times or rather a vicarious pleasure, a kind of fantasy or closely controlled means of role-playing that ultimately does not abrogate much authority at all? In the end, is it the puella who ‘bears all the risks of elegiac love’?178
While Barbara Gold acknowledges the manifest risks in love poetry, she nonetheless imagines potential gains for the puella, at least in Propertius, by arguing that Propertius attempts to ‘show us new ways of organizing and reading sexual difference’.179 Thus, Gold reads Cynthia’s instability or changeability, her ‘levity’, not as a means for dissolving or denying female subjectivity, but rather for providing its very grounds. In short, it is her very fluidity that animates the levis puella, while allowing her at the same time to remain subversive in her refusal to adhere to traditional structures of being and representation.180 Could Virgil’s infamous statement ‘woman is a thing ever variable and changing’ (Aeneid 4.569–570), then, be not an insult, but a call to action?
What does it mean, moreover, for Propertius and the other poets to identify as ‘feminine’ (a stance beyond simply sympathizing with the plight of women)? Does that strategy provide a way to unsettle gender boundaries, or, as Gold phrases it, a means to ‘disrupt the structures of […] society and to produce in the process a new formulation of gender’?181 Or perhaps in line with other arguments, we might envision the love poets as being exclusively devoted to rewriting what it means to be masculine. As one scholar maintains, Catullus’ ego ‘carves out for himself a relatively new sexual identity’ – that of a lover who ‘cannot completely control himself’ – yet he carefully distinguishes any such stance from one of passivity.182 Of course, not all poets (or even poems) need do the same thing. Even as ‘the Catullan lover appears to struggle against his own “feminization”’,183 are the Augustan elegists (or perhaps only Propertius) more willing to experiment with and occupy such a position? Is one strategy necessarily ‘better’ or more productive than the other? Relying on some of the same theoretical groundwork as Gold, Miller deems Propertius a woman, ‘because his subject position cannot be precisely located in any one spot within conventional Roman ideological space’.184 But he adds: ‘Unlike other women, however, Propertius, at least theoretically, retains the option of being a man […] And that is real power too.’185
As Miller and Platter observe, in some ways our very approach to love poetry can undermine any sense of the work’s radical nature. They ask:
on what basis can an ethics or politics of gender liberation be propounded, if the category of gender itself is the product of power, so that any strategy that takes this category as its starting point is always already complicit with the ideological structures that make it possible?186
Meaning that, if we bring gender to the study of love poetry, do we simply reproduce its authority, its longstanding power as a means for structuring and regulating difference, from the very outset? Perhaps the best way to end our discussion of power and play in Latin love poetry is thus to consider the role of the reader, the person or persons charged with ‘making meaning’ of these complicated, and at times contradictory, texts. Sharrock argues that the male friends in love poetry serve not only as an internal community for the poet, but also as a stand-in for the reader her- or himself.187 But what if we refuse to play along?
Vicki Kirby calls reading ‘an act of transformation, not a simple retrieval or diagnostics’,188 and Kathryn Gutzwiller and Ann Michelini propose that the feminism of Latin love poetry may ultimately come from how we self-consciously resist its devices. Noting that feminist literary approaches grant one ‘the means to escape the elegist’s persuasion and to see more clearly his rhetorical techni
ques’, they contend that, by resisting such manipulation, readers gainfully strip the love poet of ‘the means by which he uses his subservient pose to seek power and sexual control’.189 The love poets themselves recognize well the paramount role of the reader, and so we turn next to a consideration of the ways in which both writers and readers are constructed in love poetry, as well as to the poets’ evolving views on love poetry itself.
IV
Readers and Writers
… So, girls, be generous to the poets;
they have divine spirit and the Muses favour them.
Ovid, Ars 3.547–548
IN THE THIRD BOOK of his Ars Amatoria, Ovid prescribes for his female audience an impressive reading programme. On the Greek side, he advocates the works of Callimachus, Philetas, Anacreon, Sappho and Menander, while on the Latin, he calls for Varro, Virgil’s Aeneid (‘a work more famous than any other in Latium’), as well as a ‘song of tender Propertius’, ‘something of Gallus’ or of ‘yours, Tibullus’ (Ars 3.329–338). Ovid slyly notes that someone may eventually even recommend his own works, urging that they ‘read the sophisticated songs of our master’ (Ars 3.341). Ovid’s list of authors and works is suggestive and includes what we might call a brief synopsis of Roman love poetry, one that omits Catullus and pointedly culminates in three of Ovid’s own elegiac works: the Ars Amatoria, Amores and Heroides. As this attention to the education of his female reader insinuates, love poetry’s puella often serves as a primary reader of love poetry, yet she can also serve as a written artifact herself – a personification of the poet’s own literary project. In this chapter, then, we want to examine more fully the role of the poet and his puella in terms of both reading and writing. In addition, we shall chart the specific ways in which Propertius and Ovid further extend their own examination of what it means to be a love poet, in the process defining and redefining the boundaries of elegy itself.
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