28 For the correlation of women with ‘materia’ in Ars Amatoria, see Molly Myerowitz, Ovid’s Games of Love (Detroit, 1985), pp. 111–116.
29 See Trevor Fear, ‘The poet as pimp: elegiac seduction in the time of Augustus’, Arethusa, 33 (2000), pp. 217–240. See also Ellen Greene, The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 108–113.
30 A.M. Keith, ‘Corpus eroticum: elegiac poetics and elegiac puellae in Ovid’s Amores’, The Classical World, 88/1 (1994), p. 31.
31 Kathleen McNamee, ‘Propertius, poetry, and love’, in Mary DeForest (ed.), Woman’s Power, Man’s Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy K. King (Wauconda, IL, 1993), p. 224.
32 Ibid., p. 215.
33 Wyke, ‘Written women’, p. 51.
34 Wyke, ‘Reading female flesh’, pp. 118–124.
35 See, for example, Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2004), pp. 66–67.
36 For Tibullus’ possible influence on Propertius, see Hubbard, Propertius, pp. 55–64.
37 Sharon James explains that ‘in the recusatio the lover-poet gives up the financial rewards of both military service and public poetry (epic, tragedy, scientific didaxis), in favor of serving his mistress’ at James, ‘The economics’, p. 227.
38 On the device of recusatio in Augustan poetry in relation to Callimachus, see Alan Cameron, Callimachus and His Critics (Princeton, 1995), pp. 454–483.
39 Indicative of his rich use of landscape in the poem, the final two lines allude to a passage from Virgil’s sixth Eclogue featuring Gallus; see Jeffrey W. Tatum, ‘Aspirations and divagations: the poetics of place in Propertius 2.10’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 130 (2000), pp. 395–396.
40 J.P. Sullivan, Propertius: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 122–126.
41 Ibid., p. 71.
42 Hubbard, Propertius, p. 100.
43 Gregson Davis, Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (Berkeley, 1991), p. 11.
44 Hubbard, Propertius, pp. 70–71.
45 For a discussion of the historical episodes Propertius credits to Ennius’ verse, see Francis Cairns, ‘Propertius the historian (3.3.1–12)?’, in D.S. Levene and D.P. Nelis (eds), Clio and the Poets: Augustan Poetry and the Traditions of Ancient Historiography (Leiden, Boston and Köln, 2002), pp. 25–44.
46 On the relationship between Horace and Propertius, see Sullivan, Propertius, pp. 12–31. Nethercut argues that Propertius’ humour in responding to Horace has often been underestimated; see William R. Nethercut, ‘The ironic priest’, American Journal of Philology, 91/4 (1970), pp. 385–407.
47 Katharina Volk, Ovid (Malden and Oxford, 2010), p. 50.
48 Archibald W. Allen, ‘“Sincerity” and the Roman elegists’, Classical Philology, 45/3 (1950), p. 157.
49 Patricia Watson, ‘Mythological exempla in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria’, Classical Philology, 78/2 (April, 1983), p. 118.
50 Fritz Graf, ‘Myth in Ovid’, in Hardie (ed.), Cambridge Companion, p. 113.
51 Watson, ‘Mythological exempla’, p. 119.
52 Richardson, Propertius, p. 147.
53 For further discussion of the passage, including its influence on Ovid’s use of the myth, see Francis Cairns, ‘Some observations on Propertius 1.1’, Classical Quarterly, 24 (1974), pp. 94–99.
54 Graf, ‘Myth in Ovid’, pp. 114–115. See also Mary H.T. Davisson, ‘“Quid moror exemplis?”: mythological exempla in Ovid’s pre-exilic poems and the elegies from exile’, Phoenix, 47/3 (1993), pp. 213–237.
55 Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves, p. 10.
56 See James, Learned Girls; the author proposes more particularly that certain poems of the Amores are ‘designed to showcase particular issues and problems in elegy’ (p. 156).
57 Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves, p. 18; cf. James, Learned Girls, p. 155.
58 The identity of Macer has been debated. In his Epistulae ex Ponto Ovid tags him as ‘Ilian’ Macer (Ex Ponto 4.16.6) referring probably to the latter’s preoccupation with an epic about the events before and after the Iliad. This is most likely the same Aemilius Macer whom Ovid also mentions in the legacy list in the Tristia (4.10.41–54), the author of didactic poetry. See Peter Green, Ovid: Erotic Poems (London, 1982), pp. 26–28.
59 The reason for Ovid’s address to Macer in 2.18 can be explained as an attempt to bring Macer, a devotee of serious genres, to Ovid’s camp of love poets by showing him that love elegy is also suited for a genre as serious as tragedy and thus is not to be taken lightly.
60 Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, tr. A. Shapiro (Ann Arbor, 1990), p. 195.
61 Green, Ovid: Erotic Poems, p. 269.
62 For a more detailed discussion of Propertius’ and Tibullus’ influences on Ovid, see S.J. Heyworth, ‘Propertius and Ovid’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, pp. 265–278; and Robert Maltby, ‘Tibullus and Ovid’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, pp. 279–293.
63 Paul Allen Miller (ed.), Latin Erotic Elegy (London and New York, 2002), p. 247.
64 Green, Ovid: Erotic Poems, p. 325.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Joan Booth, ‘The Amores: Ovid making love’, in Knox (ed.), Companion to Ovid, pp. 66–67.
68 The dichotomy of poeta and vates was initiated by Virgil in his Eclogues (c.39 BCE); it acquired special poignancy in love elegy as the poets sought to establish the significance of their work. The most detailed discussion of the concept during this period can be found in J.K. Newman, The Concept of Vates in Augustan Poetry (Brussels, 1967). See also Molly Pasco-Pranger, ‘“Vates operosus”: vatic poetics and antiquarianism in Ovid’s Fasti’, The Classical World, 93/3 (2000), pp. 275–291.
69 See Caroline A. Perkins, ‘Ovid’s erotic vates’, Helios, 27/1 (2000), pp. 53–62.
70 Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves, p. 5.
71 Steven Green, ‘Lessons in love: fifty years of scholarship on the Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris’, in Roy Gibson, Steven Green and Alison Sharrock (eds), The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (Oxford, 2006), p. 5.
72 Ibid., p. 7.
73 J.M. Fyler, ‘Omnia vincit amor: incongruity and the limitations of structure in Ovid’s elegiac poetry’, Classical Journal, 66 (1971), pp. 196–203.
74 S. Harrison, ‘Ovid and genre: evolutions of an elegist’, in Hardie (ed.), Cambridge Companion, p. 84.
75 Green, ‘Lessons in love’, pp. 14–15.
76 Christopher Brunelle, ‘Form vs. function in Ovid’s Remedia Amoris’, The Classical Journal, 96/2 (December 2000 – January 2001), p. 123.
77 Gian Biagio Conte, ‘Love without elegy: the Remedia Amoris and the logic of a genre’, tr. G. Most, repr. in Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia (Baltimore, 1994), pp. 465–467.
78 Conte proposes that ‘the use Ovid makes of the aetiological scheme proves to be considerably more playful than had been thought’ at Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, tr. J.B. Solodow, rev. Don Fowler and Glen W. Most (Baltimore and London, 1994), p. 356; on the Fasti’s politics, see also A.J. Boyle, ‘Postscripts from the edge: exilic fasti and imperialised Rome’, Ramus, 26/1 (1997), pp. 7–28.
79 Harrison, Ovid and Genre, p. 85.
V. Country and City
1 Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge, 1996), p. 42.
2 Jennifer A. Rea, Legendary Rome: Myth, Monuments, and Memory on the Palatine and Capitoline (London, 2007), p. 7.
3 As Claude Nicolet has argued, representations of space and geography were employed in unprecedented ways during the Augustan period; see Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, 1991). The love poets’ recourse to spatial ideas also reflects their intense engagement with earlier literary traditions. See, for example, Ann Vasaly’s interpretation of Cicer
o’s use of space in Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1993).
4 See, for example, Vasaly, Representations, pp. 156–190.
5 In the same poem he jokes that those who do not want to hurt his feelings refer to his farm as ‘near Tivoli’ rather than the less fashionable ‘Sabine’ (1–3).
6 In the opening poem of the Eclogues, Tityrus, a country dweller, tells Meliboeus, an exiled shepherd deprived of his land by a war veteran, about his journey to Rome, revealing his amazement at the grandeur of the city, which, in Tityrus’ imagination, completely dwarfs his own humble rustic surroundings (19–25).
7 Rea, Legendary Rome, p. 13.
8 Harold G. Gotoff, ‘Tibullus: nunc levis est tractanda Venus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 78 (1974), p. 232.
9 David O. Ross, ‘Tibullus and the country’, Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi su Albio Tibullo (Roma, 1986), p. 251. For a different approach to Tibullus’ use of landscape, see P. Lowell Bowditch, ‘Tibullus and Egypt: a postcolonial reading of elegy 1.7’, Arethusa, 44/1 (2011), pp. 89–122.
10 Gotoff, ‘Tibullus’, p. 232.
11 On the programmatic nature of Tibullus’ first elegy, see Barbara Weiden Boyd, ‘Parva seges satis est: the landscape of Tibullan elegy in 1.1 and 1.10’, Transactions of American Philogical Association, 114 (1984), pp. 273–280.
12 Michael Putnam, Tibullus: A Commentary (Oklahoma, 1973), p. 49.
13 Gotoff, ‘Tibullus’, p. 238.
14 Julia H. Gaisser, ‘Tibullus 2.3 and Vergil’s tenth Eclogue’, Transactions of American Philogical Association, 107 (1977), p. 135.
15 Francis Cairns, Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome (Cambridge, 1979), p. 14.
16 Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2004), p. 119.
17 See Gaisser, ‘Tibullus 2.3’, p. 141; and Guy Lee, ‘Otium cum dignitate: Tibullus 1.1’, in T. Woodman and D. West (eds), Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (Cambridge, 1974), p. 103.
18 Eleanor W. Leach, ‘Poetics and poetic design in Tibullus’ first elegiac book’, Arethusa, 13 (1980), p. 86.
19 Miller observes that Messalla becomes ‘the fly in the ointment with regards to Tibullus’ dream of Arcadia’ at Miller, Subjecting Verses, p. 119.
20 White observes that towards the end of the 20s BCE, ‘Vergil, Tibullus, and Propertius each produced vignettes depicting the site of Rome as it looked before a city has risen there’ at Peter White, Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome (Cambridge and London, 1993), p. 182. See also Philip Hardie, ‘Augustan poets and the mutability of Rome’, in Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (London, 1992), pp. 59–82; Rhiannon Evans, ‘Searching for paradise: landscape, utopia, and Rome’, Arethusa, 36/3 (2003), pp. 285–307; and R. Maltby, ‘Tibullus 2.5 and the early history of Rome: a comparison of Tibullus 2.5, Virgil’s Aeneid and Propertius 3.9 and 4.1’, Kleos, 7 (2002), pp. 291–304.
21 On Evander, see Sophia Papaioannou, ‘Founder, civilizer, and leader: Vergil’s Evander and his role in the origins of Rome’, Mnemosyne, 56/6 (2003), pp. 680–702; cf. Elaine Fantham, ‘The role of Evander in Ovid’s Fasti’, Arethusa, 25/1 (1992), pp. 155–171.
22 Rea, Legendary Rome, pp. 89–95.
23 Evidencing even greater intricacy, we can discern in such accounts the mobilization of two distinct past eras: what Rea calls ‘proto-Rome, or Rome-prior-to-Romulus, and archaic Rome, or the Rome-of-Romulus’, each of which holds its own set of connotations; see ibid., p. 5.
24 Ibid., p. 15.
25 Putnam, Tibullus, pp. 182–183.
26 Rea, Legendary Rome, p. 4.
27 Significantly, Tibullus transfers Rome’s earliest human habitation from the Palatine to the Capitoline, underlining the prominence of Jupiter throughout the poem; see ibid., pp. 96 and 135.
28 Rea argues that Tibullus’ poem invites a reading of the myth that emphasizes not fratricide, but a more positive act – a ‘human sacrifice protecting the city’s boundaries’; see ibid., p. 98.
29 Edwards, Writing Rome, p. 87.
30 The connection of women to nature was treated by Sherry Ortner in her famous essay ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’; this work is reprinted, along with a later essay rethinking the question, in Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996).
31 Propertius also addresses Tullus in 1.1, in effect dedicating the work to him. Tullus was presumably a nephew of Lucius Volcacius Tullus, the proconsul of Asia in 30–29 BCE; see Richardson, Propertius, p. 147. Tullus is also addressed in 1.14, 1.22 and 3.22.
32 In epigram 1.62, Martial professes of one woman that she arrived at Baiae a Penelope and left a Helen; cf. Ars Amatoria 1.255–258.
33 Solmsen lists a number of potential Hellenistic and Roman models for this type of poem at Friedrich Solmsen, ‘Three elegies of Propertius’ first book’, Classical Philology, 57 (1962), pp. 73–74. Hubbard points specifically to Acontius in Callimachus’ Aetia as a model at Margaret Hubbard, Propertius (New York, 1975), p. 11.
34 Richardson, Propertius, p. 403.
35 Richardson notes that the district ‘was created by Augustus’ extension of the pomoerium’ and ‘[b]eing a new district and far from the Forum it was probably not fashionable’ at Richardson, Propertius, p. 409.
36 On the Campus Martius, see Horace, Ode 1.8 and the interpretation of its use of space by Mary Jaeger, ‘Reconstructing Rome: the Campus Martius and Horace, Ode 1.8’, Arethusa, 28 (1995), pp. 177–191.
37 Edwards, Writing Rome, p. 23. For discussion of the theatre of Pompey and its adjoining portico, see Diane Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge and New York, 1996), pp. 59–60; see also Jane D. Evans, ‘Prostitutes in the portico of Pompey?: a reconsideration’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 139 (2009), pp. 123–145.
38 Equally suggestive, Propertius begins the very next poem with the word ‘peace’: ‘Love is the god of peace, and lovers worship peace’ (3.5.1). See Donald N. Levin, ‘War and peace in early Roman elegy’, in Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (eds), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, 2.30.1 (1982), pp. 418–538.
39 For an excellent study on the subject, see Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
40 There is now a consensus that this stanza refers to Julius Caesar and his future Parthian triumph, not to Octavian’s triumph over Cleopatra. See R.J. Anderson, P.J. Parsons and R.G.M. Nisbet, ‘Elegiacs by Gallus from Qa�sr Ibrîm’, Journal of Roman Studies, 69 (1979), p. 141, which also contains the editio princeps (first publication) of Gallus’ new fragment. This clarification is important in dating the fragment since it means that it could have been written only before March 44 BCE.
41 Anderson, Parsons and Nisbet, ‘Elegiacs by Gallus’, p. 140.
42 Peter Green, Ovid: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2005), p. 256.
43 See Michèle Lowrie, ‘Ovid’s triumphs in exile: representation and power’, in ead., Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome (Oxford, 2009), pp. 259–275.
44 Horace also penned a poem about the temple’s opening: Ode 1.31.
45 On the significance of the Danaid portico, see Ellen O’Gorman, ‘Love and the family: Augustus and Ovidian elegy’, Arethusa, 39 (1977), pp. 103–123. On the role of gender in the temple’s decoration, especially in relation to the Danaid portico, see Barbara Kellum, ‘Concealing/revealing: gender and the play of meaning in the monuments of Augustan Rome’, in T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds), The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge and New York, 1997), pp. 158–161; and Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford, 2005), pp. 50–53. Corinna is shown at the portico in Amores 2.2.
46 For a more extensive interpretation o
f the poem, begin with Lowell Bowditch, ‘Palatine Apollo and the imperial gaze: Propertius 2.31 and 2.32,’ American Journal of Philology, 130/3 (2009), pp. 401–438.
47 William R. Nethercut, ‘Propertius 2.15.41–48: Antony at Actium’, Rivista di Studi Classici, 19 (1971), p. 301.
48 See Danijel Dzino, ‘The praetor of Propertius 1.8 and 2.16 and the origins of the province of Illyricum’, Classical Quarterly, 58/2 (2008), pp. 699–703.
49 See Lowell Bowditch, ‘Propertius and the gendered rhetoric of luxury and empire: a reading of 2.16’, Comparative Literature Studies, 43/3 (2006), pp. 306–325.
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