Latin Love Poetry

  98 Compare Lesbia’s oath in Catullus 36 that she will burn ‘the worst poet’s most select writings’ (6–7).

  99 Barbara Flaschenriem, ‘Speaking of women: “female voice” in Propertius’, Helios, 25/1 (1998), p. 61.

  100 Lange, ‘Cynthia and Cornelia’, p. 336.

  101 For a critical response to the poem, see Judith Hallett, ‘Queens, princeps and women of the Augustan elite: Propertius’ Cornelia-elegy and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti’, in R. Winkes (ed.), The Age of Augustus, Archaeologia Transatlantica 5 (Belgium, 1985), p. 73.

  102 Richardson, Propertius, p. 481.

  103 See Greene, Erotics of Domination, p. xii; the author argues that critics have tended too much to focus on (and identify with) the workings of male desire in elegy.

  104 Propertius uses the term pudor here to speak of the appropriate behaviour for women; for the related concept of pudicitia, see Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge and New York, 2006).

  105 See Molly Myerowitz, Ovid’s Games of Love (Detroit, 1985), pp. 117–120.

  106 Aliston Keith, ‘Tandem venit amor: a Roman woman speaks of love’, in Hallett and Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities, p. 307.

  107 For a brief introduction to the Greek myth of the Amazons, see Elaine Fantham et al., Women in the Classical World (New York and Oxford, 1994), pp. 128–135.

  108 See John Warden, ‘Another would-be Amazon: Propertius 4.4.71–72’, Hermes, 106 (1978), pp. 177–187. Also Jeri B. DeBrohun, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (Ann Arbor, 2003), pp. 194–195.

  109 See Livy, From the Foundation of the City 1.11.5–9. For other versions of the story, see Jennifer A. Rea, Legendary Rome: Myth, Monuments, and Memory on the Palatine and Capitoline (London, 2007), p. 114.

  110 A permanent record of it was enshrined in the so-called Tarpeian rock, a site of sheer drop along the Capitoline from which traitors were said to be tossed to their deaths.

  111 For the Augustan use of Tarpeia’s myth, see Tara S. Welch, The Elegiac Cityscape: Propertius and the Meaning of Roman Monuments (Columbus, 2005), pp. 58–62.

  112 For these sites as ways of referring to the Capitoline hill, see Richardson, Propertius, p. 435.

  113 Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 57.

  114 Ibid.

  115 For background on the Vestal Virgins, begin with Mary Beard, ‘Re-reading (Vestal) virginity’ in R. Hawley and B. Levick (eds), Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (London and New York, 1995), pp. 166–177.

  116 See Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, pp. 74–76.

  117 Richardson, Propertius, p. 440.

  118 Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 57.

  119 See, for example, Micaela Janan, The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2001), pp. 70–84.

  120 Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 68.

  121 See Monica Silveira Cyrino, ‘Heroes in d(u)ress: transvestism and power in the myths of Herakles and Achilles’, Arethusa, 31/2 (1998), pp. 207–241.

  122 DeBrohun, Roman Propertius, p. 22.

  123 Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, pp. 114–115, 124–126.

  124 Richardson, Propertius, p. 471.

  125 In fact, the politician Clodius had caused a public scandal by sneaking into the rites in 62 BCE dressed as a woman; see Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 117. Tibullus warns a man whose wife is going to attend the Bona Dea that she may be using the occasion for something else (1.6.21–24); cf. Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 123.

  126 Ibid., p. 119.

  127 DeBrohun, Roman Propertius, pp. 121–125. See also, W.S. Anderson, ‘Hercules exclusus: Propertius 4.9’, The American Journal of Philology, 85 (1964), pp. 1–12. Emblematic of the barriers that persist in love poetry, the ‘paraclausithyron’ refers to an impassioned appeal to the inanimate door standing between lovers, e.g. Catullus 67, Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16 and Ovid, Amores 1.6. See Christopher Nappa, ‘Elegy on the threshold: generic self-consciousness in Propertius 1.16’, Classical World, 101/1 (2007), pp. 57–73.

  128 See Nicole Loraux, ‘Herakles: the super-male and the feminine’, in D.M. Halperin, J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin (eds), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, 1990), pp. 21–52.

  129 DeBrohun, Roman Propertius, pp. 139–140; the author sees the boundary-crossing as one of genre more than gender.

  130 For one way to read the effects of the poem’s progression, i.e. through its resolution in a ‘violent reassertion’ of ‘rigid gender roles’, see Welch, Elegiac Cityscape, p. 114.

  131 Ibid., p. 131.

  132 Janan, Politics of Desire, pp. 144–145.

  133 See Shane Butler, ‘Notes on a membrum disiectum’, in S.R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan (eds), Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (London and New York, 1998), pp. 236–255. For the broader context of Cybele’s cult, see Jacob Latham, ‘“Fabulous clap-trap”: Roman masculinity, the cult of Magna Mater, and literary constructions of the galli at Rome from the Late Republic to Latin antiquity’, Journal of Religion, 92/1 (2012), pp. 84–122.

  134 Marilyn B. Skinner, ‘Ego mulier: the construction of male sexuality in Catullus’, in Hallett and Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities (Princeton, 1997), p. 137.

  135 Ibid., pp. 141 and 142.

  136 Alison Sharrock, ‘Constructing characters in Propertius’, Arethusa, 33/3 (2000), p. 266.

  137 Ibid., p. 270.

  138 Greene, Erotics of Domination, p. 104.

  139 Quoted at Greene, ‘Re-figuring the feminine’, p. 5, n. 10.

  140 See, for example, B. Heiden, ‘Sic te servato: an interpretation of Propertius 1.21’, Classical Philology, 90 (1995), pp. 161–167.

  141 Miller reviews the arguments against at Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2004), pp. 80–83. For Janan, it is precisely the myriad problems generated by the varying images of Gallus that determine his centrality to the Propertian corpus; see Janan, Politics of Desire, p. 18.

  142 See, for example, Richardson, Propertius, p. 207; the author prefers a more open-ended reading, especially when it comes to 1.21.

  143 Miller, Subjecting Verses, p. 86.

  144 Ibid., p. 84.

  145 Ibid., p. 85.

  146 Recent studies include Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York and Oxford, 1999) and Ormand, Controlling Desires.

  147 See Walters, ‘Invading the Roman body’, pp. 30–31.

  148 Ormand, Controlling Desires, p. 198.

  149 Holt Parker, ‘The teratogenic grid’, in Hallett and Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities, p. 47.

  150 Walters, ‘Invading the Roman body,’ p. 31.

  151 Judith Hallett, ‘Perusinae Glandes and the changing image of Augustus’, American Journal of Ancient History, 2 (1977), p. 157. One bullet even seems to have turned his name into a feminine form.

  152 See Edwards, Politics of Immorality, p. 91.

  153 Wray, Catullus and the Poetics, p. 120.

  154 For further discussion of this category, see Parker, ‘The teratogenic grid’, pp. 60–62. See also Amy Richlin, ‘Not before homosexuality: the materiality of the cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3/4 (1993), pp. 523–573.

  155 See Wray, Catullus and the Poetics, pp. 156–160 and Ormand, Controlling Desires, pp. 194–198.

  156 Ormand, Controlling Desires, pp. 192–193.

  157 Frederick, ‘Reading broken skin’, p. 176.

  158 Ormand, Controlling Desires, p. 194.

  159 James, Learned Girls, pp. 9–10. Virgil has often also been labelled ‘homosexual’ in modern times, although, as we have seen, the term can be misleading when applied to Roman culture; see Parker, ‘The teratogenic grid’, p. 56.

  160 Lee-Stecum, Powerplay in Tibullus, p. 287; Lilja suggests that ‘Tibullus reacts to the infidelity of Marathus far more passionately than to th
e infidelity of Delia and Nemesis’ at Lilja, Roman Elegists’ Attitude, p. 221.

  161 Lee-Stecum: Powerplay in Tibullus, p. 288.

  162 See Brenda H. Fineberg, ‘Repetition and the poetics of desire in Tibullus 1.4’, The Classical World, 92/5 (1999), pp. 426–427.

  163 Fredrick, ‘Reading broken skin’, pp. 174–175. See also, Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos, ‘Beyond sex: the poetics and politics of pederasty in Tibullus 1.4’, Phoenix, 61 (2007), pp. 55–82.

  164 James, Learned Girls, p. 12.

  165 See Edwards, Politics of Immorality, pp. 71–72.

  166 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), pp. 117–118.

  167 See, for example, the special issue of Helios, 17 (1990), which initiated important discussions of Ovid and feminism.

  168 Paul Allen Miller and Chuck Platter, ‘Introduction’, The Classical World, 92/5 (1999), p. 405. See also the account of contemporary feminist criticism at James, Learned Girls, pp. 28–30, and Maria Wyke, ‘Taking the woman’s part: gender and scholarship on love elegy’, in ead., The Roman Mistress, pp. 155–191.

  169 Janan, Politics of Desire, p. 165.

  170 Gold describes Augustan elegy as emerging from an ‘unsettled political climate, the concomitant shakeup of societal values, and the search for an individual response to the failure of the patriarchal state in Rome at that time’ at Gold, ‘But Ariadne was never there’, p. 77.

  171 Paul Allen Miller, ‘Why Propertius is a woman: French feminism and Augustan elegy’, Classical Philology, 96/2 (2001), p. 132.

  172 Ibid., p. 127.

  173 Judith P. Hallett, ‘The role of women in Roman elegy: counter-cultural feminism’, Arethusa, 6 (1973), p. 108.

  174 Aya Betensky, ‘Forum’, Arethusa, 6 (1973), p. 267. Hallett and Betensky replied to one another in Arethusa, 7 (1974).

  175 Wyke, ‘Mistress and metaphor’, p. 13.

  176 Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  177 Gardner, ‘Ariadne’s lament’, p. 176.

  178 James, Learned Girls, p. 210.

  179 Gold, ‘But Ariadne was never there’, p. 92.

  180 Gold expands that ‘Propertius’s figure of the female defies any identification and, at least by that act of defying identification, manages to elude the traditional categories that have been used to describe the female in Western literature’ at ibid., p. 93.

  181 Ibid., p. 83.

  182 Ormand, Controlling Desires, p. 198.

  183 Greene, Erotics of Domination, p. xiii.

  184 Miller, ‘Why Propertius is a woman’, p. 143.

  185 Ibid., p. 144.

  186 Paul Allen Miller and Chuck Platter, ‘Crux as symptom: Augustan elegy and beyond’, The Classical World, 92/5 (1999), p. 446.

  187 Sharrock, ‘Constructing characters’, p. 267.

  188 Vicki Kirby, ‘“Feminisms, reading, postmodernisms”: rethinking complicity’, in S. Gunew and A. Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference (Boulder and San Francisco, 1993), p. 32.

  189 Kathryn J. Gutzwiller and Ann N. Michelini,‘Women and other strangers: feminist perspectives in classical literature’, in J.E. Hartman and E. Messer-Davidow (eds), (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe (Knoxville, 1991), pp. 77 and 78. See also Mary-Kay Gamel, ‘Reading as a man: performance and gender in Roman elegy’, Helios, 25/1 (1998), pp. 79–95.

  IV. Readers and Writers

  1 Calvus also appears in 53 and 96. Horace insults Catullus and Calvus in Satires 1.10. For Catullus’ attitudes towards other authors, see also 22, 36 and 95.

  2 See Catullus’ poems 74, 80, 88, 89, 90, and 91.

  3 Lawrence Richardson, jr, Propertius: Elegies I–IV (Norman, 1977), p. 315.

  4 For a detailed analysis of Ovid’s literary lists, see Richard Tarrant, ‘Ovid and ancient literary history’, in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 13–33; and Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 19–48.

  5 Alessandro Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince (Berkeley, 1997), p. 26.

  6 Peter E. Knox, ‘A Poet’s life’, in id. (ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Malden and Oxford, 2009), p. 4.

  7 Sharon L. James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2003), pp. 219–220. On the puella as reader, see Sharon James, ‘Slave-rape and female silence in Ovid’s love poetry’, Helios, 24/1 (1997), pp. 61–62. For a number of occasions where Ovid points to a specifically female readership, see Mary-Kay Gamel, ‘Non sine caede: abortion politics and poetics in Ovid’s Amores’, Helios, 16/2 (1989), p. 186.

  8 For Cynthia’s problematic reading of Helen in the Iliad, see Denise E. McCoskey, ‘Reading Cynthia and sexual difference in the poems of Propertius’, Ramus, 28/1 (1999), p. 16. Ovid cagily attempts to circumvent the importance of the puella’s literary verdict when he professes himself susceptible to all sorts of women, including those who consider Callimachus’ poetry ‘rustic’ compared to his and those who find fault with his own verse (Amores 2.4.19–22).

  9 James, Learned Girls, pp. 106–107.

  10 The most common metre in Catullus’ poetry was hendecasyllabic, a metre that featured in some forty of his poems and became strongly associated with him in later centuries. See Julia H. Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (Oxford, 1993), p. 195.

  11 See Robert J. Baker, ‘Duplices tabellae: Propertius 3.23 and Ovid, Amores 1.12’, Classical Philology, 68/2 (1973), pp. 109–113. See also Elizabeth Meyer, ‘Wooden wit: tabellae in Latin poetry’, in E. Tylawsky and C. Weiss (eds), Essays in Honor of Gordon Williams: Twenty-Five Years at Yale (New Haven, 2001), pp. 201–212.

  12 On Ovid 1.10, see Leo Curran, ‘Ovid, Amores 1.10’, Phoenix, 18/4 (1964), pp. 314–319.

  13 Nisbet, for example, reassures his readers that ‘a Cynthia would not expect payment cash down: like the poets themselves in relation to their patrons, mistresses did better when their recompense was undefined’ in R.G.M. Nisbet, ‘Pyrrha among roses: real life and poetic imagination in Augustan Rome’, Journal of Roman Studies, 77 (1987), p. 187.

  14 Sharon L. James, ‘The economics of Roman elegy: voluntary poverty, the recusatio, and the greedy girl’, The American Journal of Philology, 122/2 (2001), p. 225. See also Suzanne Dixon, ‘Exemplary housewife or luxurious slut?: Cultural representations of women in the Roman economy’, in F. McHardy and E. Marshall (eds), Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization (London and New York, 2004), pp. 56–74.

  15 James, ‘The economics’, p. 227; see also ead., Learned Girls, p. 213.

  16 James, ‘The economics’, p. 239.

  17 As Myers notes, there is a distinct cultural hostility expressed against older women in classical literature; see K. Sara Myers, ‘The poet and the procuress: the lena in Latin love elegy’, Journal of Roman Studies, 86 (1996), p. 6. Also, on Ovid’s ‘advice’ to ageing women, see Victoria Rimell, ‘Facing facts: Ovid’s Medicamina through the looking glass’, in Ronnie Ancona and Ellen Greene (eds), Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry (Baltimore, 2005), p. 178.

  18 In fact, she functions as a kind of scapegoat in Tibullus, allowing Tibullus to claim at one point that ‘the lena is the one who injures me, the girl herself is good’ (2.6.44).

  19 Myers, ‘The poet and the procuress’, p. 7.

  20 See Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, ‘The lover and the lena: Propertius 4.5’, Ramus, 14/2 (1985), pp. 108–112; cf. Myers, ‘The poet and the procuress’, pp. 19–20.

  21 Compare the famous designation of poetry as a ‘monument’ in Horace, Ode 3.30.1.

  22 Richardson, Propertius, p. 8.

  23 For the significance of this description, see Maria Wyke, ‘Reading female flesh: Amores 3.1’, in A. Cameron (ed.), History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), pp. 148–151.

  24 Some scholar
s have posited that 2.10 is actually the first poem of the next book, and that the current Book 2 of Propertius contains the remains of two separate books; see Margaret Hubbard, Propertius (New York, 1975), p. 41 and Chapter 1.

  25 Maria Wyke, ‘Written women: Propertius’ scripta puella (2.10–13)’, in ead., The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (Oxford, 2002), p. 52.

  26 Richardson, Propertius, p. 242.

  27 On the highly literary nature of this poem, see Parshia Lee-Stecum, ‘Poet/reader, authority deferred: re-reading Tibullan elegy’, Arethusa, 33/2 (2000), pp. 200–211.