76 See Murgatroyd, ‘Servitium amoris’, pp. 595–596.
77 Murgatroyd, ‘Servitium amoris’, p. 596. Copley likewise argues that Roman elegy places particular emphasis on physical punishment; see Copley, ‘Servitium amoris’, p. 299.
78 See K.R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York and Oxford, 1987), pp. 113–137.
79 In contrast to Propertius’ fairly light punishment, Cynthia demands that Lygdamus be shackled and sold (79–80). In 4.7, Cynthia likewise requests the torture of Lygdamus and Nomas (35–38).
80 William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge and New York, 2000), p. 31.
81 Earlier, he callously compares two quite different meanings of ‘freedom’, equating Corinna’s freedom in being able to meet her lover with the slave’s potential manumission (2.2.15–16).
82 Slaves often serve as mediators between lovers (e.g. Amores 1.11 and 1.12), a dynamic that, as Fitzgerald notes, is ‘both a convenience and a source of friction’; see Fitzgerald, Slavery, p. 51. McCarthy contends that slaves and women are used in love poetry ‘as instruments to express the selfhood of the author’; see Kathleen McCarthy, ‘Servitium amoris: amor servitii’, in S.R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan (eds), Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (London and New York, 1998), p. 175.
83 For more on these troubling poems, see Sharon James, ‘Slave-rape and female silence in Ovid’s love poetry’, Helios, 24/1 (1997), pp. 60–76. In his Ars Amatoria, Ovid outlines at greater length – and with greater brutality and detachment – the role of the maid in a mistress’s seduction (351–398), at one point openly deliberating the value of raping the slave (375 ff.). For James, Ovid’s brutal treatment of slave women seeks to expose the precariousness of the slave woman’s position at Rome; see James, ‘Slave-rape’, p. 74.
84 John T. Davis, Dramatic Pairings in the Elegies of Propertius and Ovid, Noctes Romanae 15 (Bern and Stuttgart, 1977), p. 100.
II. Author and Ego
1 Allen traces the influence of Catullus’ formulation on later Roman writers in Archibald W. Allen, ‘“Sincerity” and the Roman elegists’, Classical Philology, 45/3 (1950), pp. 152–153.
2 For a fuller discussion of ancient views of the authorial persona, see Diskin Clay, ‘The theory of the literary persona in antiquity’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, 40 (1998), pp. 9–40.
3 The phrase is taken from Paul Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry, and the West, tr. D. Pellauer (Chicago and London, 1988), p. 50.
4 See Victoria Pedrick, ‘The abusive address and the audience in Catullan poems’, Helios, 20/2 (1993), pp. 173–196.
5 David Wray, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge and New York, 2001), p. 65.
6 See the helpful overview of modern scholars’ attitudes towards Catullus at Wray, Catullus and the Poetics, pp. 9–13. See also Eric Havelock, The Lyric Genius of Catullus (New York, repr. 1967) and William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1995).
7 Paul Allen Miller, Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (London and New York, 1994), p. 52.
8 Ibid., pp. 55–57. See also Daniel L. Selden, ‘Caveat lector: Catullus and the rhetoric of performance’, in R. Hexter and D. Selden (eds), Innovations of Antiquity (New York and London, 1992), pp. 461–512.
9 Micaela Janan, ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1994), p. x.
10 Richard F. Thomas, ‘Sparrows, hares, and doves: a Catullan metaphor and its tradition’, Helios, 20/2 (1993), pp. 132–133.
11 Regarding the ongoing debate, see G. Giangrande, ‘Catullus’ lyrics on the passer’, Museum Philologum Londiniense, 1 (1975), pp. 137–146; H.D. Jocelyn, ‘On some unnecessarily indecent interpretations of Catullus 2 and 3’, American Journal of Philology, 101/4 (1980), pp. 421–441; Richard Hooper, ‘In defence of Catullus’ dirty sparrow’, Greece and Rome, 32/2 (October 1985), pp. 162–178; and Thomas, ‘Sparrows, hares, and doves’, pp. 131–142.
12 Cf. Sappho 105c. See Paul Allen Miller, ‘Sappho 31 and Catullus 51: the dialogism of lyric’, Arethusa, 26/2 (1993), p. 193.
13 Catullus reuses the same image in his own wedding poem, 62.39–47.
14 See Elizabeth Manwell, ‘Gender and masculinity’, in Marilyn B. Skinner (ed.), A Companion to Catullus (Malden, 2007), pp. 116–117.
15 For more on the question, see also M.L. Clarke, ‘Latin love poets and the biographical approach’, Greece and Rome, 23/2 (1976), pp. 132–139.
16 Allen describes the scholarly treatment of Propertius at Archibald W. Allen, ‘Sunt qui Propertium malint’, in J.P. Sullivan (ed.), Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 1962), pp. 113–114.
17 Ibid., pp. 115–117.
18 Ibid., p. 117.
19 J.P. Postgate, Select Elegies of Propertius (London, 1881), p. lxxxix.
20 Allen, ‘Sincerity’, p. 147.
21 Ibid., pp. 146–147. See also, R. Heinze, ‘Fides’, Hermes, 64 (1929), pp. 140–166.
22 Allen, ‘Sincerity’, p. 153.
23 See, for example, R.O.A.M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace (Oxford, 1980), p. viii.
24 For more background, see Maria Wyke, ‘In pursuit of love: the poetic self and a process of reading: Augustan elegy in the 1980s’, Journal of Roman Studies, 79 (1989), pp. 165–173.
25 See, for example, Duncan F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993). There have been important critiques of the overall shift; see, for example, Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 49.
26 The work of Maria Wyke is crucial in this area; see, for example, Maria Wyke, ‘Mistress and metaphor in Augustan elegy’, rev. and repr. in ead., The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (Oxford, 2002), pp. 11–45.
27 While the role of women in Rome has been studied in great depth in recent decades, begin with Moses Finley, ‘The silent women of Rome’, Horizon, 7 (1965), pp. 57–64.
28 For female poets in antiquity, see Emily Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (London and New York, 1999), pp. 146–184. Also, more generally, Jane M. Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1989).
29 See Cicero, Brutus 58.211; Tacitus, Annals 4.53.3; Pliny, Natural History 7.46.
30 For more on this later Sulpicia, see C.U. Merriam, ‘The other Sulpicia’, Classical World, 84 (1991), pp. 303–305; Holt Parker, ‘Other remarks on the other Sulpicia’, Classical World, 86 (1992), pp. 89–95; and Judith P. Hallett, ‘Martial’s Sulpicia and Propertius’ Cynthia’, in Mary DeForest (ed.), Woman’s Power, Man’s Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy K. King (Wauconda, IL, 1993), pp. 322–353.
31 Thomas Hubbard, ‘The invention of Sulpicia’, Classical Journal, 100/2 (2004), p. 188.
32 Notably, a tablet with ‘the earliest known example of writing in Latin by a woman’ was found in Britain and connected with the birthday celebrations of a Claudia Severa; see Alan K. Bowman and J. David Thomas, ‘New texts from Vindolanda’, Britannia, 18 (1987), p. 138.
33 Hubbard, ‘The invention of Sulpicia’, p. 177.
34 Cicero intriguingly reports that women spoke Latin differently from men at On Oratory 3.45, although his argument has more to do with the use of archaic speech patterns. See Matthew Santirocco, ‘Sulpicia reconsidered’, Classical Journal, 74/3 (1979), p. 236.
35 For a thoughtful and balanced discussion of her distinct style, see N.J. Lowe, ‘Sulpicia’s syntax’, Classical Quarterly, 38/1 (1988), pp. 193–205.
36 Kristina Milnor, ‘Sulpicia’s (corpo)reality: elegy, authorship, and the body in {Tibullus} 3.13’, Classical Antiquity, 21/2 (2002), p. 26
2.
37 Barbara Flaschenriem, ‘Sulpicia and the rhetoric of disclosure’, Classical Philology, 94/1 (1999), p. 37.
38 As Laurel Fulkerson observes, in many ways, ‘Sulpicia’s poetry is a “drag” performance: the positioning of a woman as elegiac poet is a reversal of elegiac norms’; see Laurel Fulkerson, ‘The Heroides: female elegy’, in Peter E. Knox (ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Malden and Oxford, 2009), p. 84.
39 One line (3.13.10) acknowledges sexual relations with Cerinthus, which commentators over the years have agonized over. See Mathilde Skoie, ‘Sulpicia Americana: a reading of Sulpicia in the commentary by K. F. Smith (1913)’, Arethusa, 33/2 (2000), pp. 302–304.
40 Hubbard, ‘Invention of Sulpicia’, p. 179.
41 One suggestion is that a later post-Ovidian poet composed all the poems in Book 3 in an attempt to imitate Tibullus’ work; see Niklas Holzberg, ‘Four poets and a poetess or a portrait of the poet as a young man? Thoughts on Book 3 of the Corpus Tibullianum’, Classical Journal, 94 (1998–1999), pp. 169–191.
42 The cycle of these Sulpicia poems might be related to Tibullus 2.2, a birthday poem for Cornutus, whom some have identified as Cerinthus. That poem also expands on the attributes of the perfect marriage.
43 Hubbard, ‘Invention of Sulpicia’, p. 183.
44 Hallett has also emphasized Sulpicia’s potential authorship of the ‘Petale inscription’; see, for example, Judith P. Hallett, ‘Human connections and paternal evocations: two elite Roman women writers and the valuing of others’, in Ralph Rosen and Ineke Sluiter (eds), Valuing Others in Classical Antiquity (Leiden and Boston, 2010), pp. 367–370.
45 Toril Moi, ‘Feminist, female, feminine’, in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (New York, 1989), p. 126.
46 For a critical examination of later scholars’ reconstructions of her life and poetic aims, including her same-sex desire, begin with Holt Parker, ‘Sappho Schoolmistress’, in Ellen Greene (ed.), Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996), pp. 146–183.
47 Havelock, Lyric Genius, p. 118; cf. Marilyn B. Skinner, ‘Ego mulier: the construction of male sexuality in Catullus’, in J.P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities (Princeton, 1997), p. 131.
48 Miller, Lyric Texts, p. 99.
49 Miller, ‘Sappho 31 and Catullus 51’, p. 185.
50 Sappho 31 was preserved only because the later writer Longinus used it as an example of excellence in his treatise On the Sublime 10.
51 Miller, ‘Sappho 31 and Catullus 51’, p. 190.
52 Ellen Greene, ‘Re-figuring the feminine voice: Catullus translating Sappho’, Arethusa, 32/1 (1999), pp. 4–5.
53 Ibid., pp. 7 and 9. On the two poems, see also Dolores O’Higgins, ‘Sappho’s splintered tongue: silence in Sappho 31 and Catullus 51’, in Greene (ed.), Re-reading Sappho, pp. 68–78.
54 T.P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World (Oxford, 1985), p. 154.
55 Greene, ‘Re-figuring’, p. 11.
56 Here Ovid suggests that women are more likely to fall short in matters of Latin usage and grammar, a condescending remark that might find echo in modern views of ‘ladies’ Latin’. For further discussion, see Roy K. Gibson, Excess and Restraint: Propertius, Horace, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (London, 2007), pp. 107–109. On documentary evidence for women’s letters, see Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton and Oxford, 2001), pp. 88–101.
57 For discussion of Ovid’s assertion, see Albert R. Baca, ‘Ovid’s claim to originality and Heroides 1’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 100 (1969), pp. 1–10; and Maurice P. Cunningham, ‘The novelty of Ovid’s Heroides’, Classical Philology, 44/2 (1949), pp. 100–106.
58 On Arethusa’s letter, begin with Maria Wyke, ‘The elegiac woman at Rome: Propertius’ Book 4’, in ead., The Roman Mistress, pp. 85–93.
59 This change in format that has led some scholars to argue that the pairs are not part of the original work, but were only later added to the corpus. See, for example, Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides, (Princeton, 1974), p. ix; Jacobson asserts that they were written by Ovid himself, but at a later period.
60 Important early studies include Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides and Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum (Princeton, 1985). See also Joseph Farrell, ‘Reading and writing the Heroides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98 (1998), pp. 307–338.
61 See, for example, Patricia Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge, 2001) and, more broadly, Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, 1986).
62 Duncan F. Kennedy, ‘The epistolary mode and the first of Ovid’s Heroides’, The Classical Quarterly, NS 34/2 (1984), p. 415. See also Gareth Williams, ‘Ovid’s Canace: dramatic irony in Heroides 11’, The Classical Quarterly, NS 42/1 (1992), pp. 201–209.
63 Kennedy, ‘The epistolary mode’, p. 413.
64 Ibid., p. 416.
65 Ibid., pp. 416–418.
66 Alessandro Barchiesi, ‘Future reflexive: two modes of allusion and Ovid’s Heroides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 95 (1993), pp. 333–334. See also Sergio Casali, ‘Tragic irony in Ovid, Heroides 9 and 11’, The Classical Quarterly, NS 45/2 (1995), pp. 505–511.
67 Barchiesi, ‘Future reflexive’, p. 346. Knox considers whether the Medea letter is actually in conversation with Ovid’s own lost tragedy in Peter E. Knox, ‘Ovid’s Medea and the authenticity of Heroides 12’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 90 (1986), pp. 207–223.
68 In this way, the writers of the Heroides might resemble Sulpicia herself; see Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, ‘Sulpicia: an/other female voice in Ovid’s Heroides: a new reading of Heroides 4 and 15’, Helios, 36/2 (2009), pp. 149–173.
69 Barchiesi, ‘Future reflexive’, p. 350.
70 Kennedy, ‘The epistolary mode’, p. 421.
71 Smith similarly argues that the differences between Ariadne in Heroides 10 and Catullus 64 allow Ovid to suggest the ‘personal growth’ of Ariadne’s character; see R. Alden Smith, ‘Fantasy, myth, and love letters: text and tale in Ovid’s Heroides’, Arethusa, 27 (1994), p. 251.
72 See also Gareth Williams, ‘Writing in the mother-tongue: Hermione and Helen in Heroides 8 (a Tomitan approach)’, Ramus, 26/2 (1997), pp. 113–137.
73 Pamela Gordon, ‘The lover’s voice in Heroides 15: or, why is Sappho a man?’ in Hallett and Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities, p. 280.
74 Efrossini Spentzou, Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (Oxford and New York, 2004), p. 3.
75 Laurel Fulkerson, The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge, 2005). Bloch has suggested that the letters addressed to Jason by Hypsiple and Medea be read in dialogue in David J. Bloch, ‘Ovid’s Heroides 6: preliminary scenes from the life of an intertextual heroine’, Classical Quarterly, 50/1 (2000), pp. 197–209.
76 See Marilynn Desmond, ‘When Dido reads Vergil: gender and intertextuality in Ovid’s Heroides 7’, Helios, 20/1 (1993), pp. 56–68.
77 Drinkwater, however, demonstrates some of the forms of writing that certain letter-writers are associated with in their original myths in Megan O. Drinkwater, ‘Which letter? Text and subtext in Ovid’s Heroides’, American Journal of Philology, 128 (2007), pp. 367–387.
78 Richard Tarrant, ‘The authenticity of the letter of Sappho to Phaon (Heroides XV)’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 85 (1981), pp. 148–149.
79 Pamela Gordon provides a quick overview of the issues concerned at Gordon, ‘The lover’s voice’, pp. 274–275. See also Gianpiero Rosati, ‘Sabinus, the Heroides and the poet-nightingale: some observations on the authenticity of the Epistula Sapphus’, Classical Quarterly, 46 (1996), pp. 207–216.
80 Gordon, ‘The lover’s
voice’, p. 277.
81 Smith, ‘Fantasy, myth, and love letters’, pp. 267–268.
82 For more background on Roman attitudes towards female same-sex desire, see Judith P. Hallett, ‘Female homoeroticism and the denial of Roman reality in Latin literature’, in Hallett and Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities, pp. 255–273.
83 Gordon, ‘The lover’s voice’, p. 275.
84 Ibid., pp. 281–282.
85 Victoria Rimell, Ovid’s Lovers: Desire, Difference and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge and New York, 2006), p. 154.
86 Lucille Haley, ‘The feminine complex in the Heroides’, The Classical Journal, 20/1 (1924), p. 23.
Latin Love Poetry Page 25