Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  5.1 ‌Tibullus at Delia’s (1866) by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema.

  Domina in the Country

  As with Virgil’s vision of the countryside, Tibullus’ view of rural life involves a fair amount of manual toil. At the same time, Tibullus imagines his ideal landscape as a place suitable for love and song, and his enthusiasm for the countryside often seems eclipsed by his passion for Delia.10 Tibullus’ opening poem reiterates all the truisms of rustic simplicity and thriftiness: ‘let my poverty lead me through a quiet life’ (5) and ‘if only, if only I could live content with little and no more be given to long journeys’ (25–26).11 Throughout, as Michael Putnam observes, ‘the poet weighs two styles of living in the balance, the ambitious, practical, acquisitive political life of a Messalla and a poor, quiet, country existence towards which he aspires’.12 Constant motion is juxtaposed with rest; action with idleness; ancestral wealth with humble existence. Such constant fluctuation also entails a movement between life and death. The happy sentiment that ‘in the meantime, while fates allow, let us be in love’ is thus immediately followed by the rather glum ‘soon death will come with her head covered in darkness’ (1.1.69–70).

  Such mood swings highlight the paramount confusion of Tibullus’ ego since they offer neither the elegiac surrender to the plight of love nor the relatively consistent pastoral serenity of the Eclogues. Although Tibullus frequently indulges in the fantasies of simple rustic charms, the reader nonetheless discerns ‘him adding touches of sophistication or fastidiously criticizing it’.13 In his deliberate treatment of the contrasting conventions of pastoral and elegiac poetry, Tibullus ultimately conveys to his readers that the only suitable landscape for love poetry is, in fact, the city and that the country can never fully accommodate its needs.14

  Francis Cairns in his formative book on Tibullus describes him as a poet ‘yearning for a past age’, an ‘idealized primitive Roman past’.15 Yet, even as he may idealize the past, Tibullus rejects any possibility of turning back the clock or going back in time. Tibullus rejects the ‘forefathers’ riches or gains’ (1.1.41) and he longs for the impossible reconciliation of his rural dream with the urban reality of his patron, Messalla Corvinus, and his mistress, Delia. In the second elegy of the first book, Tibullus hints that his rustic bliss is meaningless without Delia: ‘If only with you, my Delia, I may yoke my oxen and pasture my flock on the familiar hill’ (1.2.73–74).

  In 1.5, Tibullus embarks on an idyllic portrayal of his life in the country, a scenario in which, having evoked the pastoral landscape as his setting, he labours in vain to incorporate both Delia and Messalla – refined urban dwellers ‘whose life represents the opposite of Tibullus’s pastoral imaginings’16 – seamlessly into it, highlighting well the unfeasibility of his entire fantasy. Tibullus first inserts his domina Delia into his picture of rural bliss, and she initially seems transformed from an urban, capricious puella into a bustling farm girl: ‘I will live in the country and my Delia will be there to guard the grain, while the threshing floor winnows the crops under the blazing sun’ (1.5.21–22). Into this pipe dream, Messalla soon also makes his entrance: ‘My Messalla will come here, for whom Delia will pluck down sweet fruit from the chosen trees’ (31–32).

  Despite Tibullus’ efforts, Delia does not in the long run fit the part of the thrifty housekeeper buried in rural primitive simplicity;17 Messalla’s appearance in the countryside helps to underline the incompatibility of both with Tibullus’ setup. For one, Delia’s special preparations for Messalla demonstrate the incongruity of his presence: he is a special guest who requires suave, urbane treatment, marking him as someone who does not quite belong. As much as Delia is ‘the practical flaw in the program’18 of Tibullus’ rural dream, then, Messalla is even more so.19 So that the idyllic scene ends with the poet’s own admission that he dreamed the whole thing up (1.5.35).

  Such sentiment is reinforced in the second book of the corpus when Tibullus’ domina Nemesis momentarily enters the countryside only to demonstrate that it is irreconcilable with her urban demands for an ostentatious lifestyle. Tibullus in his disappointment subsequently sums up his attitude towards the countryside:

  Farewell to the crops, if only there be no girls in the country,

  let acorns be our fare and let us drink water according to ancient custom.

  Acorns fed the ancients and they always had love.

  What harm was there if they had no furrows sown with the seed?

  (2.3.71–74)

  In effect, Tibullus proposes that the ancestors were not familiar with elaborate agriculture or the accumulation of wealth, and because of that their love was gentle and open. But the countryside of contemporary times has become destructive to his relationship with the domina, whose demands of luxury prove that, in modern times, only wealth can foster love. There are no girls to pursue in the country, at least not the kind that the poet envisions as desirable.

  Dreaming of Rome

  Like all of the Augustan poets, Tibullus is attuned to the sharp contrast between the rural Rome of the past and the marvellous city taking shape around him. The juxtaposition of Rome’s early modesty and the splendour of the present city was a favourite trope of Augustan writers.20 Virgil’s influential pairing of Rome’s past and present occurs in the Aeneid as Evander takes Aeneas on a tour of the site that will become Rome, instructing the young man about the modest origins of settlements in Latium while alluding to Rome’s future greatness there (8.306–365).21 Significantly, Evander recounts the earlier ‘Golden Age’ under Saturn and then hints at the return of such an age under Augustus (8.347–348; see also Aeneid 6.791–795).22

  Literary depictions of Rome could present all phases of the city positively: past, present and future. But in their individual treatments, poets might choose to impose an unbridgeable gap between past and present or, conversely, emphasize continuity between the two, perhaps even causality, in the last case implying that Rome is great in the present precisely because of its more modest past. So, too, while the trope might call attention to the superiority of the present, it could also be used to highlight the flaws of modern-day Rome, casting its strivings for grandiosity in a distinctly negative light.23 Rather than any simple or clear-cut literary device, we therefore need to interpret appropriations of Rome’s past landscape within an ongoing and wider cultural conversation about Augustan Rome, one that continually ‘navigated the area between praise and polemic’.24

  Tibullus’ most openly ‘Roman’ poem, 2.5, moves ‘with subtlety between past and present, city and country, war and peace’.25 Set initially at the new temple of Apollo on the Palatine, the poem presents a hymn to Apollo in honour of the induction of Marcus Valerius Messalla Messalinus, Messalla’s eldest son, into the college in charge of the Sibylline books – books traditionally thought to predict Rome’s future. As Tibullus reflects on the role of the Sibylline prophecies, he starts with the famous encounter of Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl, one most famously related by Virgil in Book 6 of the Aeneid. At that point, Rome resides only in prophecy:

  Romulus had not yet marked the walls of the eternal

  city not to be dwelled in by his brother Remus.

  Back then cows grazed on the grassy Palatine

  and humble huts stood upon Jupiter’s citadel.

  (2.5.23–26)

  Tibullus purposely references both the Palatine and Capitoline hills in this passage, both of which were essential to the construction of collective memory about the Roman past. Broadly speaking, the Palatine was associated with Romulus’ initial founding of the city and the Capitoline was renowned for housing the first temple to Jupiter.26 As Tibullus reminds his audience, the Palatine Hill, where the luxurious residences of the Roman aristocracy were then located, was once a pasture for cattle, while the Capitoline Hill, where the splendid temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was built, was once covered by the lowly huts of Rome’s unpresumptuous ancestors.27 Tibullus’ explicit mention of the city walls traced by Romulus and his even m
ore poignant allusion to Remus in this passage are also noteworthy, as is the poet’s fairly neutral phrasing, which obscures Remus’ violent demise.28

  Tibullus’ Sibyl then delivers her prophecy to Aeneas amid the humble rural surroundings, addressing the city of Rome directly to add more poignancy to her words and closing with her expansive prediction of the city’s future glory:

  Now, bulls, crop the grass of Seven Hills

  while you may: before long this will be the site of a great city.

  Rome, your name is destined to rule the world

  wherever Ceres looks down from heaven on tilled land,

  from the place where the sun rises and where

  the Ocean bathes Sun’s panting horses in its flowing streams.

  (2.5.55–60)

  While such visions may seem mystifying to Aeneas, the Sibyl’s prediction reinforces for the Augustan audience outside the poem a bright account of its own future: the city on Seven Hills, which looked so unassuming in Aeneas’ times, is destined to rule the entire extent of the sun’s course. In light of Tibullus’ overall tone in the poem, it is worth noting that 2.5 is the earliest surviving Latin reference to Rome as the urbs aeterna, the ‘eternal city’ (23).29

  This juxtaposition of Rome’s once-modest pastoralism with its present opulence becomes even more pronounced in the poetry of Propertius and Ovid, with Ovid firmly resolving the Tibullan vacillation between rural dream and contemporary Roman reality in favour of the latter. Propertius, for his part, experiments at times with the isolation of the countryside, but he increasingly fastens his eye on the city, using it as a dynamic setting for his pursuit of Cynthia as well as a means for weighing the Augustan era’s evolving discursive and political manoeuvres.

  Propertius: The Lover and the Augustan City

  As we discussed in Chapter 4, Propertius uses Milanion’s taming of Atalanta in his opening poem to illustrate what he perceives to be the proper course of love. While we considered his use of the exemplum in relation to the other love poets, noteworthy here is the way Propertius’ account plays on the frequent association of women with the world of nature, a conceit that suggests that the ‘wild’ puella (Atalanta and, by extension, Cynthia) inherently requires ‘domestication’ at the hands of men.30 A related trope widely used in ancient myth and literature often draws on this elision of women and nature: love as a kind of hunt. In poem 2.19, Propertius exploits this idea more openly, writing first of Cynthia’s intention to leave the city, then his own decision to pursue her in her rural isolation.

  While he adopts Milanion as a kind of roadmap for masculine penetration of the countryside, Propertius importantly offers another motive for leaving the city in 1.1, begging to be conveyed to the ends of the earth where no woman will know how to find him (29–30). This delineation of two very different uses of space outside the city (the acquisition of love versus the escape from love) suggests some of the density of meaning Propertius invests in these spaces, and he continues to experiment with a range of threatened departures from Rome throughout Book 1.

  5.2 ‌Propertius and Cynthia at Tivoli by Auguste Jean Baptiste Vinchon.

  Leaving the City

  The departure of a friend or lover is a standard theme in ancient poetry (often called a propemptikon; see Amores 2.11), and Propertius plays it to the hilt. In poem 1.6, Propertius presents separation from the city as fitting for those men, such as his friend Tullus, who serve Rome.31 While he lavishly praises Tullus’ deep concern for his country, Propertius ultimately protests that he himself is unable to join Tullus, held back by Cynthia’s ardent pleas. We can witness a similar contrast of masculine pursuits in Tibullus 1.1 and 1.5, poems in which Tibullus urges his patron Messalla to pursue ambitious undertakings without him. Propertius later shows Tullus conversely enjoying greater leisure as he drinks the finest wines, reclining alongside the Tiber; yet even these activities, Propertius avows, cannot compete with the pleasures of love (1.14).

  While she seems to force Propertius to stay in the city, Cynthia herself is depicted on the verge of leaving Rome, or having left, in a number of poems in Book 1. In 1.8, Cynthia threatens to take a voyage to distant Illyria, but, in a surprising turnabout, Propertius soon reveals that she has changed her mind. He happily exclaims: ‘I am dear to her, and because of me, Rome is called dearest’ (1.8b.31) – a line whose very construction emphatically places Propertius between the city and his beloved, serving as a crucial mediator between the two. His own intimacy with the city, and Cynthia’s complementary distance from it, is reiterated in 1.12 when Propertius asks Rome why it is accusing him of idleness due to Cynthia when Cynthia has, in fact, gone away (1–4). In the preceding poem, Propertius with great consternation places Cynthia outside Rome at Baiae, an ancient resort whose reputation might be something akin to Las Vegas today.32 Unlike Tibullus, Propertius does not conjure idealized visions of his own life on the farm, but he does experiment in two poems near the end of Book 1 with what it might mean to locate himself in more rural settings (1.17 and 1.18). Using such remote locales ostensibly to escape Cynthia’s grasp,33 Propertius soon finds that such flight proves unsuccessful since Cynthia pervades even these wildernesses.

  Towards the end of Book 3, Propertius revisits some of his travel scenarios; in 3.21, for example, he diagnoses a trip to ‘learned Athens’ as a cure for his love (25–30). In the next poem, Propertius once again addresses Tullus, urging him to return to Italy. Painting a glowing homage that ‘may profitably be compared with Virgil’s famous hymn to the beauties of Italy in Georgics 2.136–176’,34 Propertius announces that ‘all marvels yield to Roman land. Nature placed here whatever it has anywhere’ (3.22.17–18). Yet Propertius also uses the city of Rome itself in Books 2 and 3 as a means for staging the roles of male lover and female beloved, one that covertly fashions the city as a site of masculine privilege.

  Romancing the City

  Beginning with Book 2, Propertius intensifies the role of Rome as it becomes both the setting for and witness to his romantic (mis)adventures. Like Catullus and his nosy old men, Propertius portrays the city constantly scrutinizing his affair, asserting in one poem that no street corner is silent when it comes to the two lovers (2.20.22; see Amores 3.1.21). Using a strategy we discussed in Chapter 4, Propertius deftly conflates those watching the lovers with those reading his poetry, asking: ‘Is it true, Cynthia, that you are being conveyed all over Rome and openly conducting yourself with shame?’ (2.5.1–2). Later, Propertius imagines an interlocutor openly challenging him: ‘You can talk, when you are already a subject of gossip with your infamous book and your Cynthia is read around the whole forum!’ (2.24.1–2).

  Rome also supplies the specific sites that help define the lovers and their conduct. Near the end of Book 3, Propertius specifies that his house is located on the Esquiline (3.23.23–24; see also 4.8.1–2), a neighbourhood that might help advertise the poet’s distance from the corridors of Augustan power.35 He cites the Campus Martius and the theatre as places that hold no interest for him without Cynthia (2.16b.33–34),36 although he subsequently names the theatre as a place ripe with the possibility of new seductions (2.22a.3–10). Accusing Cynthia in one poem of not appreciating the portico of Pompey, Propertius proceeds to describe it in loving detail (2.32.11–16), a passage that might have additional resonance if the portico was associated with prostitution, as some scholars have argued – a connotation that would also add texture to Catullus’ search there for his friend.37 When Cynthia, in turn, seeks to deprive Propertius of the temptations of the city in dictating the terms of his punishment in 4.8, she forbids him from going to Pompey’s portico while also warning him about the forum during holidays; she likewise cautions him not to look around in the theatre or gaze too closely at a passing litter (75–78).

  While Rome provides the backdrop for male seduction (a function of the city we shall also witness in Ovid’s poetry), the city is also the primary site where Roman conquest acquires its substance and meaning for Properti
us, even as he insists on his own inability to take part. Such a strategy is captured well by poem 3.4, which presents Propertius’ ostensible excitement at Augustus’ pending campaign against Parthia. For even as he enthuses about the prospect of foreign conquest, Propertius continually emphasizes the exhibition of such feats in Rome itself. ‘Far away lands,’ he proclaims, ‘are preparing triumph’ for us (3). Later, Propertius describes the spectacle of the triumph that he will witness, but specifies that he will watch it while leaning on the bosom of his puella, underlining his preference for the puella over bellum (15–16). After urging long life for Augustus – the progeny, he claims, of both Venus and Aeneas (19–20) – Propertius concludes once again with a reminder of his own more passive preferences when it comes to imperial efforts: ‘May the plunder be for those whose labours merit it; it will be enough for me to cheer along the Sacred Way’ (21–22).38

  The Roman triumph, an important public celebration of Rome’s military achievement, held enormous significance for the Romans,39 and it became a symbol the love poets could use to carve out their own perspectives on Rome and its values. Propertius’ ambivalent participation in Augustus’ triumph had an important precedent in elegy, for in the one surviving fragment by Cornelius Gallus, the poet likewise depicts himself as a humble spectator of Julius Caesar’s achievements: ‘My fates will be sweet for me then, Caesar, when you will be the most important part of Roman history. After your return I will survey temples of many gods made richer by your spoils.’‌40 Like Propertius, Gallus distances himself from the world of military conquest by proclaiming: ‘The Muses produced poems that I would be able to declare worthy of my mistress.’41 Extending even further the idea of the triumph, we have seen that Ovid imagines displaying the brutalized Corinna in triumph, and he conversely places himself in Cupid’s triumph in 1.2 (23–50). Moreover, while in exile Ovid indulges in ‘anticipatory wishful thinking’42 about what Augustus’ triumph over the Germans might look like, a way of both placating the princeps and stressing his own absence from the city, where he would have been able to witness such an event in person (Tristia 4.2).43