Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  We begin with the love poets’ attempts to define their own place in the Greek and Roman literary canon, a strategy that underlines their status as close readers of earlier literature.

  In the Company of Poets

  The love poets routinely present themselves as immersed in a vibrant world of other writers, both past and present. Catullus, for example, presents literary authors and texts in constant dialogue; he dedicates his ‘little book’ to Cornelius Nepos, a Roman historian and biographer, and, among other writers, Catullus makes frequent reference to his friend Licinius Calvus, the author of elegies (now lost) to a woman named Quintilia. Mocking the work of certain poets sent to him by Calvus in poem 14, Catullus threatens to take his revenge by sending Calvus other ‘terrible poets’ in return. Conversely, in 50, he expresses delight at the day he and Calvus spent writing poetry for one another.1 Catullus also twice mentions sending Callimachus’ work to others (65 and 116), although his gift in 116 does not seem, he laments, to put an end to his often obscene antagonism with a man named Gellius.2

  Propertius responds to a friend named Bassus in 1.4, presumably the same iambic poet that Ovid also references in the Tristia (see below). In 1.7, Propertius addresses the epic poet Ponticus, warning Ponticus that he will gain new appreciation of Propertius’ poetry when he himself has been struck by Cupid’s arrow; Ponticus will then seek in vain to write ‘soft verse’ (19), Propertius predicts. Shortly after, in 1.9, Propertius gloats that Ponticus has indeed been brought low by love. Once again connecting Ponticus’ predicament to his literary output, Propertius asks what Ponticus gains from writing epic when ‘the verses of the poet Mimnermus are worth more in love than Homer’ (9–11). ‘Go,’ Propertius pleads, ‘and set aside those gloomy books of yours and write what a girl wants!’ (13–14).

  In poem 2.25, Propertius directly names Calvus and Catullus as his predecessors by begging their pardon when seeking to make Cynthia’s beauty more famous than those who came before (3–4). Propertius devotes even greater attention in 2.34 to the identification of his extended literary genealogy. The poem begins with an alleged romantic betrayal by his friend and fellow poet Lynceus. Expressing delight that Lynceus is now insane with love (25–26), Propertius urges Lynceus to imitate Philetas and ‘the dream of unpretentious Callimachus’ (31–32); openly employing Callimachean terminology, Propertius suggests more specifically that his friend ‘turn his verses on a narrow lathe’ and approach his own ‘fires’ (43–44). Later Propertius boasts that he himself holds court among a crowd of women because of the very ‘genius’ Lynceus disparages (57–58).

  In the remainder of the poem, Propertius presents a record of notably Roman literary achievement, one that ends with his bid for a place in that canon. Praising the poet Virgil, Propertius includes a couplet that, perhaps not surprisingly, ‘enjoyed remarkable fame in antiquity’:3 ‘Give way, Roman writers, give way Greek writers! Something greater than the Iliad is being born’ (65–66). He next praises both Virgil’s Eclogues and his Georgics (67–76), noting Hesiod’s influence on the latter (77–80). Finally, in the passage we saw in the last chapter, Propertius references earlier Roman writers who wrote love verse, citing also the names of most of their puellae: Varro (who seemingly wrote love poetry after finishing his translation of the Argonautica), Catullus, Calvus and Gallus (85–92). He concludes that Cynthia will have similar renown if he is allowed to take a place among them (93–94).

  While Tibullus gives little attention to his predecessors (beyond Virgil of the Eclogues, a relationship explored in a later chapter), Ovid frequently constructs his own literary lineage. Most notably, in Amores 1.15, he lists both his Greek and Roman precursors finding appropriate epithets to describe each: ‘Ennius lacking in skill’, ‘spirited Accius’, ‘elegant Tibullus’ (16 ff.).4 As we have seen, Ovid constructs a curriculum in the Ars Amatoria that terminates with his own love poetry, and in his exile poem alone, Tristia, Ovid likewise twice establishes his place in literary history. In the first passage, Ovid lists all the poets who, according to him, sang about love, starting his list with the Greeks and displaying an impressive mixture of epochs and genres. Under Ovid’s pen, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey become nothing but stories about adultery and love (Tristia 2.371–380), and Ovid similarly claims that all of Greek tragedy is plainly concerned with love (2.381–408) – claims underlined by his use of both Homer and tragic material in the Amores and the Heroides. On the Roman side, Ennius and Lucretius are listed as poets who use erotic material and ‘can be seen as teachers of immorality if we make up our minds to read them in a certain way’.5 These poets are followed by Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Virgil, whose epic is also seen through the lens of love poetry (2.361–466).

  In his second list, Ovid limits himself to Roman poets and, even then, his vision of literary influence has narrowed (Tristia 4.10.41–54). While he mentions Macer (an author of didactic verse), Ponticus (the epic poet we just encountered in Propertius 1.7), Bassus (presumably also the one in Propertius), Virgil and Horace, he does not associate himself with their poetic legacy. Instead he observes: ‘Vergil I only saw; greedy fate gave Tibullus no time for friendship with me. He was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius his; after them I was fourth in order of time’ (50–54). Through this sequence, Ovid classifies himself exclusively as an elegist, and as Peter Knox observes, it is Ovid who essentially ‘defined the canon’ for later generations, because when Quintilian categorizes the main representatives of elegy, as we discussed in Chapter 1, it is ‘these same four whom he names and no others’ (Institutio Oratoriae 10.1.93).6 Perhaps most significantly, although Ovid responds to Catullus in a number of poems in the Amores, he here omits him from his list of predecessors, a move in clear contrast to Propertius, who continually cites Catullus as a literary influence.

  In poem 35, Catullus introduces an important conceit attached to the act of reading love poetry, one that reverberates throughout the love poets: namely that love poetry can produce in its audience the very thing it describes – love.

  Poetry and Seduction

  That love poetry should incite desire in the reader is also suggested by Catullus 16, a poem in which Catullus infamously proposes that his poetry, when hitting the right balance of softness and shamelessness, should ‘rouse an itch’ not merely in young men, but in those ‘hairy old men’ who can barely move their loins (7–11). Similarly, for Propertius, the reading of love poetry both provokes and guides romantic feeling. In considering the appropriate audience of love poetry, Propertius thus hopes that his poetry will ‘inflame boys and girls’ (3.9.45; see also 3.2.1–2). Ovid likewise underscores the association of readers and lovers in Amores 2.1 when he claims that his reader should be a woman warmed to the sight of her lover and a boy touched for the first time by passion (5–6). Reiterating the notion that the ideal reader of love poetry is one on the verge of love, Apollo tells Propertius in 3.3 that his ‘little book’ is fit for a girl to read as she waits for her lover (19–20). As we shall see, love poetry gradually takes on an emphatically didactic purpose, casting the reader as a kind of student of love, a function that reaches its peak in Ovid’s work. But already in Propertius, there is an implied lesson as the poet urges a ‘rejected lover’ to read his work closely and so learn from Propertius’ misfortunes (1.7.13–14).

  In 1.7, Propertius brags that his fame should be that he alone has pleased a docta puella (‘a learned girl) (11) and, in 2.13, he similarly expresses pleasure at being able to lie in the lap of his docta puella, reading his poetry, to which she listens with faultless judgement and approves (11–12). Such passages, like Ovid’s reading list in Ars Amatoria, cast the elegiac puella as an educated reader of love poetry (see Ars 2.281–286), a status that remains central to her standing throughout.7 Indeed, love poetry operates at times as a form of persuasion and even seduction directed at the puella. Tibullus, for example, openly professes that he seeks not merely his puella’s literary approval, but also sexual entrée, that his work m
ay grant ‘ready access to his mistress’ (2.4.19–20). Yet such reliance on the puella’s reading creates frequent tension,‌8 for the docta puella remains a markedly resistant reader of Roman elegy, in large part because she remains cognizant of the gap between her interests and those of the poet.9

  Noting that poetry may actually succeed where the lover fails, Ovid bitterly asks in Amores 3.8 what reward poetry brings when his work has dutifully gained entry to his beloved’s room, even as he remains locked outside (5–6). Acknowledging the inevitable separation of a writer and his or her work (a conceit central to the Heroides), the Latin love poets often emphasize the status of writing as a physical object, one passed precariously between the poet and his puella. In poem 42, Catullus elides poetic form – hendecasyllabic verse10 – and content in playing with the idea of poetry’s separation from its author. Complaining that his writing tablets have been stolen by some moecha (‘whore’), Catullus calls on his hendecasyllables to help restore them, then launches a torrent of abuse on the impudent moecha who took them in the same metre.

  Appropriating Catullus’ theme of lost tablets, Propertius later professes that his missing tablets were capable of appealing to girls in his absence (3.23.1–10). Now, however, he can only guess at the message they conveyed from Cynthia, dejectedly imagining them overwritten with some greedy person’s financial accounts (11–20). In the Amores, Ovid returns to this same scenario, but his experience is emphatically defined by failure rather than loss, for Ovid’s eager anticipation of Corinna’s response in 1.11 is dashed by her one-word answer, ‘no’, in 1.12. Threatening the tablets with destruction, Ovid muses that they might more suitably contain the accounts of some greedy man – a conscious echo, and ironic embrace, of Propertius’ worst fears.11

  Playing with the idea of the materiality of writing, the love poets also seek to imbue love poetry with economic value. For the Roman elegists, protesting their own poverty, like to claim that their poetry serves as payment or reward for the puella, a commodity that allows the poets to compete against rivals who have more tangible things to offer. But does the puella share this view of love poetry’s compensations?

  Excursus: Love for Sale?

  The love poets frequently castigate the puella’s alleged desire for material payment (e.g. Tibullus 2.4 and Amores 1.10),12 and modern scholars often show similar disregard for the economic relations underlying the romantic plot in Latin poetry.13 As Sharon James points out, however, greed (or ‘avaritia’) – a feature the poets paint as a ‘character flaw’ of the puella – is actually an essential trait of the courtesan, an occupation many of the puellae hold.14 Hence by insisting – or pretending – that the courtesan can offer ‘free’ love, the love poets create ‘an insoluble tension’ or what James calls the ‘elegiac impasse’.15 For the Roman courtesan, lacking long-term financial security, was required to earn money while she could, and the love poets themselves hint at the uncertainty of the courtesan’s future when they gleefully predict the effects of ageing on the puella (e.g. Propertius 3.25). Equally indicative of the imbalance between lovers, while the courtesan’s livelihood leaves her few options, ‘the lover can always return to other activities and careers (as, indeed, he does in Propertius 4 and Am. 3.15)’.16

  The love poets bring into their poetry a provocative look at the professional demands placed on the puella through the figure of an already aged courtesan or lena (‘female pimp’ or ‘procuress’).17 The character of the lena appears in all three Augustan elegists, but while she is presented only as a figure of opposition in Tibullus (1.5.47–56 and 2.6.44–54),18 she actually speaks in both Propertius and Ovid. Suggestive of the general hostility directed against the lena, Propertius’ lena is named Acanthis (4.5), meaning ‘thorn’, while the lena in Ovid is called Dipsas (Amores 1.8), the name of a small snake renowned for its thirst, implying her drunkenness.19 In both Propertius and Ovid, the lena gives important advice to her protégée, the puella, and, by doing so, the lena presents a rival perspective to that of the ego – one that both complements ego’s romantic visions with some hard truths and seems to usurp his very narrative authority.20 Still, while the lena may dramatically hijack the text with her speech, her reign is only provisional, and both Propertius and Ovid end their poems with expressions of rage directed against her, aggressively reclaiming their jurisdiction over the practice and meaning of love.

  Fifteen Minutes of Fame?

  As we have seen, ego’s control of writing remains an important source of power, and poetry is employed at times directly against the puella. When Propertius tells Ponticus that he is accustomed to writing love poetry, he openly confesses that he seeks in it something to use ‘against his cruel mistress’ (1.7.5–6). In a passage we looked at previously, Propertius refuses to commit physical violence against Cynthia, threatening her instead with something even more damaging and enduring: his curt written assessment (2.5.27–28). But the poets also insist that their poetry provides a reward for the puella by bestowing fame upon her. Thus, Ovid professes in Amores 1.10 that his gift ‘is to celebrate deserving women in song’, which allows him to make ‘whomever he wants famous’ through art (59–60; see also Amores 2.1.33–34). Later, in Amores 2.17, Ovid brags, ‘many women want to be famous through me,’ adding jokingly that he even knows a woman ‘who goes around pretending to be Corinna’ (28–29). In 3.2, Propertius similarly announces that any woman would be lucky to be celebrated in his book since his poems provide ‘monuments’ of female beauty (17–18).21 He nonetheless reverses his opinion later in the book, bitterly regretting the fame he has given his puella and claiming his ‘exaggerations’ of her beauty have made her too arrogant (3.24.1–8).

  While announcing their ability to grant literary fame to their lovers, the love poets increasingly point to the status of the puella herself as a carefully constructed literary invention, a creation the poet moulds (or ‘womanufactures’) not so much to extol her special talents as to prove and ascertain his own.

  The Scripta Puella

  In the very first line of his work, Propertius famously opens with the name ‘Cynthia’, accusing her eyes of being the source of his downfall (1.1.1–2). Propertius’ first book was circulated on its own in 29 or early 28 BCE, and the placement of Cynthia’s name was key to its reception; in addition to being referred to as the ‘Monobiblos’ in later eras, the work was presumably also known by its first word, ‘Cynthia’.22 Such a practice creates an ambiguous line between Cynthia the poet’s beloved and Cynthia the poetic book; in Book 2, Propertius exploits the potential overlap, quoting an unnamed interlocutor who reminds him that he has become a subject of gossip now that ‘his Cynthia is read all over the forum’ (2.24.1–2).

  Earlier, Propertius opens Book 2 with an elaborate explanation of his standing as a love poet. Responding to imagined interlocutors who ask how he is so prolific at love poetry – that is, from which source his ‘soft’ (mollis) book comes – Propertius denies the influence of Calliope, one of the Muses, and Apollo (affiliations he will later claim in Book 3), professing that it is Cynthia who stirs his efforts (2.1.1–4). Making love poetry and not love per se the inevitable outcome of Cynthia’s attractions, Propertius asserts that everything about Cynthia inspires him: her Coan dress, her flowing hair, her lyre-playing, even her demeanour as she falls asleep (5–12).23 With a dig at Homeric epic, Propertius announces that from their night-time struggles ‘long Iliads’ emerge (13–14).

  Propertius eventually amplifies Cynthia’s relation to textuality, treating her as not merely the font of his poetry (i.e. the thing that generates his writing), but also its primary product (i.e. the thing generated by his writing), casting her as scripta puella or ‘written woman’. He himself provides the terminology for such a shift in 2.10, when he ostensibly indicates that it is time to sing the exploits of Augustus – observing that the young poet sings of love, while the older poet sings of battles – and then clarifies: ‘I will sing wars when my girlfriend is written [scripta]’ (2.10.
6–7).24 Propertius’ insistence on a contrast between bellum (‘war’) and puella underscores the boundaries between elegy and epic,‌25 a contrast that remains prominent throughout Propertius’ attempts to define his poetic voice. Yet the phrasing of his promise here, as Richardson argues, is ‘tantamount to saying that he will not take up the theme of war in the foreseeable future’,26 and indeed scripta Cynthia continues to appear throughout Books 2 and 3.

  In 2.5, a poem about the induction of Messalla’s eldest son into the priesthood, Tibullus likewise casts Nemesis as the source of his verse, noting that she gave him ‘words’ and ‘rightful feet’ (2.5.111–112).27 Later, in Amores 1.3, Ovid similarly requests that his puella furnish herself as materies (‘material’) for his poetry, poems that will, he promises, prove worthy of her (19–20).28 Echoing Propertius’ use of recusatio (‘refusal’, a rhetorical device that we shall examine below), Ovid goes even further in 3.12 in refuting mythical themes and the deeds of Augustus as the subject of his verse, naming Corinna instead as the sole source of his ‘genius’ (16). This insistence by the Augustan love poets on the puella as the source of poetic composition becomes so associated with their work that poets of the later Empire return to it as they seek to insert themselves into the same tradition. Claiming that Cynthia made ‘lascivious’ Propertius a poet, and that the other puellae – Lycoris, Nemesis and Lesbia – were similarly responsible for their authors’ renown, Martial wryly asks only for ‘some Corinna’ of his own (8.73; see also Juvenal, 2.149 ff.).