Latin Love Poetry Read online

  Augustan Marriage Reform

  Attempting to reinforce a population that had suffered considerable losses during the civil wars, Augustus introduced a series of laws specifically designed to regulate marriage within the Roman upper class.15 One of these laws, the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus (The Julian Law on Marriage), stipulated penalties for the celibate and the childless, a legal manoeuvre designed to encourage aristocratic families to produce more heirs. The second legislation, the Lex Iulia de adulteriis (The Julian Law on Adultery), was more to the point: marital infidelity became a punishable crime and people participating in adultery were now subject to severe prosecution with penalties that included relegatio (‘relegation’), which could involve a partial confiscation of property and enforced removal from Rome. Although making some modifications and concessions, the Lex Papia Poppaea, introduced in 9 BCE, was nonetheless still directed towards strengthening Roman marriage by discouraging adultery and celibacy.16

  Prior to the Leges Iuliae (‘the Julian laws’) adultery had been a private matter, one left to Roman families to deal with on their own. With this introduction of the new laws, there was in effect ‘a shift in regulatory power from the family to the state’.17 Such laws signalled that the princeps could now, at least theoretically, apply legal pressure to the lifestyles of individual Romans, and these Augustan incursions on private life presumably provoked a range of responses. Propertius, for example, expresses his delight at the repeal of one such marriage law in poem 2.7.18 Responding to an interlocutor who protests that, ‘still, Augustus is mighty’, Propertius answers defiantly that Augustan military power does not matter when it comes to love (5–6). He then rejoices that love for his beloved Cynthia can once again take priority over marriage with a woman of his own class, asserting emphatically that he will produce no children for the state’s military machine (13–14).

  Even as Augustus was reinvigorating the moral fibre of Roman society, he was also overhauling the city itself, making it a grand showpiece worthy of its place at the centre of a burgeoning empire.

  A City of Marble

  Although Augustus once boasted that he had found Rome a city of clay and left it a city of marble (Suetonius, Augustus 28.3),19 the city had actually begun its remarkable transformations under Julius Caesar. It was Caesar who first tried to change Rome ‘into his own personal text’ by executing several monumental projects, most of which were left incomplete at his death.20 Augustus later completed the Basilica Julia and Caesar’s forum, and, throughout his lengthy reign, he both restored many earlier buildings and added new structures of his own to the urban landscape with great fanfare.21

  Crucial both to Augustus’ building programme and the early fashioning of his own image was the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, a structure dedicated in 28 BCE and located in close proximity to the princeps’ own relatively modest house on the Palatine.22 Augustus’ personal identification with Apollo was well known to the Romans; indeed, Antony had allegedly accused Augustus of impersonating the god at a banquet (Suetonius, Augustus 70). Augustus’ victory at Actium was central to the temple’s message, linking ‘the Augustan present to the remote heroic past, [and] celebrating Octavian’s Actian victory in the guise of the deeds of Apollo’.23 Propertius’ lavish description of the temple complex in poem 2.31 is one of the best contemporary sources for its appearance and visual programme, and we shall look more closely at the temple’s important appearances in both Tibullus and Propertius in Chapter 5.

  By 20 BCE most of the love poets’ careers – and perhaps also their lives – had come to an end; only Ovid would remain to witness the latter stages of the Augustan period. In seeking Augustan monuments to set alongside Ovid’s later poetry, it would be hard to find a better example than the forum of Augustus dedicated in 2 BCE, a complex built entirely on the princeps’ own private property. Augustus’ forum impressively promoted the foundation ‘of a new national mythology, one that focused both myth and history on Augustus himself’.24 Insinuating that Augustus’ rise to power was the inevitable culmination of Rome’s great history, the forum featured on each side a long row of statues of prominent historical figures, a veritable ‘Hall of Fame’, including Romulus and Aeneas placed prominently in an exedra on each side.25 At the far end of the forum was the impressive temple to Mars Ultor (‘Mars the Avenger’), a temple that had been vowed by the young Octavian at Philippi in 42 BCE, but could now also commemorate Augustus’ settlement with the Parthians and the glorious return of the standards in 19 BCE – standards that had been lost with the defeat of Crassus in 53 BCE, an event that had long haunted the Roman imaginary.26

  Fostered by the relative stability of the Augustan era, it was not only Rome’s urban landscape that flourished, but also Augustan literature, which voiced both the great hopes and sizable anxiety associated with the new era.

  Augustan Literature

  In balancing the glorious claims of the Augustan era against the realities faced by the actual residents of Rome, it is crucial to remember the terror and confusion that characterized those transitional years for many individuals, some of whom, like the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), would get tragically caught on the wrong side of history. When writers like Propertius or Virgil seek to chart the meaning of the Augustan era in its early years, then, they are not simply reaffirming a set of values and ideas that have been in place for decades, but rather attempting to absorb and at times contest the countless new social and political discourses that were rapidly gaining ground.27 The poetry of the Augustan Age should thus ‘be viewed neither as independent nor as passive in its relationship to political art, but more like participating in a complex interaction’.28

  In addition to the elegists, the two most important poets of the Augustan era were Horace (65–8 BCE) and Virgil (70–19 BCE). Horace, the son of a freedman, fought on the losing side at Philippi; although, like many combatants, he was granted amnesty afterwards, his ancestral estates were nonetheless confiscated. While Horace’s literary voice was shaped to a large degree by his engagement with earlier Greek literature, he remains openly cognizant of his own Roman context throughout his work; perhaps most notoriously, he composes a poem following Cleopatra’s suicide in which he calls her a ‘deadly monster’ (Odes 1.37). Book 1 of Horace’s Satires was published around 35 BCE, followed by his second book of satires and Epodes around 30 BCE. In 23 BCE Horace’s Odes appeared – a work that includes what later scholars have often called the ‘Roman odes’ (poems 1–6 in Book 3), poems that seem related by style and their focus on Augustus. The Odes would exert special influence on Propertius among the love poets, although the two poets seem to have developed a conspicuous rivalry.29 In any event, Horace wrote a scathing account of the contemporary elegists and what he considered their sycophantic ways with one another in his Epistles (2.2.90–102).

  Virgil, on the other hand, is most strongly associated with his epic poem the Aeneid, which tells of Aeneas’ journey from the fallen city of Troy to Italy where he is destined to found a new Roman race. The Aeneid was unfinished at the time of Virgil’s death and was published posthumously – Virgil’s own wish that it be destroyed thankfully having been ignored by his friends. Consonant with other forms of Augustan narrative, the story of Aeneas allowed Virgil’s Roman audience to reconsider its own recent struggles through the lens of Rome’s earliest history.30 While Virgil’s own views of the Augustan era are today debated,31 in one of its most famous lines, the god Jupiter presents Rome’s future as an ‘empire without end’ (imperium sine fine, 1.279).

  Virgil also wrote two earlier poems, both of which influenced Augustan love poetry: the Eclogues and the Georgics. The Georgics (completed c.29 BCE) focuses on human cultivation of the land and the taming of wild nature, while the Eclogues (or Bucolics) was written in the pastoral genre traditionally associated with the singing contests of the shepherds in the countryside. The chronology of Virgil’s Eclogues, his earliest work, remains hard to pin down when i
t comes to individual poems, but it is fairly certain that the corpus was written and began circulating between 42 and 35 BCE. The sense of Virgil’s pastoral landscape that emerges from these works, often labelled Arcadia, became formative for later writers, providing the ‘spiritual landscape’ where other poets sought their poetic inspiration.32

  Especially important for the elegiac sensibility was the last, tenth poem of the Eclogues, in which Cornelius Gallus, by some accounts the first elegiac poet of Rome (see Chapter 1), appeared amid pastoral surroundings suffering from unrequited love for his cruel mistress (domina) Lycoris.33 Despite Gallus’ attempts to seek refuge in rural solitude, the poem ultimately presents him as unable to forget who he truly is: a poet of unrequited love and the city-dwelling lover of a fickle urban domina.34 In juxtaposing the dangers of the city and the idealized simplicity of the country, Eclogue 10 helps set the stage for the elegists’ own use of space, a topic that we shall take up at greater length in Chapter 5.

  As the example of the Eclogues suggests, the Augustan poets were manifestly aware of one another’s writing and they responded to each other throughout their work, a literary conversation facilitated to no small degree by the custom of literary patronage.

  Patronage

  Patronage as a concept is usually applied to explain the networks of social and economic dependency (i.e. the asymmetrical relationships between patrons and clients) by which a relatively narrow group of Roman families achieved social prominence and considerable wealth.35 There was also a parallel system of aristocrats willing to support the arts in Rome, who – in addition to funding their own building projects – demonstrated their largesse by cultivating relationships with individual artists. Although the exact level of dependency between artist and patron is difficult to determine (including whether, for example, individual artists were receiving direct financial support), we find Roman poets routinely addressing their poetry to such figures.36

  Two men connected to literary patronage in Augustan Rome are especially important to love poetry: Maecenas and Messalla. Gaius Maecenas (70–8 BCE), a wealthy member of the equestrian order – a category in the Roman social hierarchy second only to the senatorial class – was part of Augustus’ inner circle and linked to such prominent writers as Virgil, Horace and Propertius.37 Maecenas’ role as patron is especially visible in Horace’s work; indeed, one of Horace’s Epistles ‘is as powerful an evocation of the joys and pitfalls of patronage as Horace ever wrote’ (Epistles 1.7).38 The fame of Messalla Corvinus (64 BCE–8 CE) – Augustus’ close friend who served as consul in 31 BCE and, a few years later, as governor of Gaul – is mostly confined to his status as patron to Tibullus. As we shall see, Messalla appears in Tibullus’ poetry as an embodiment of Roman power, one closely connected to Tibullus’ dreams of a tranquil life. Notably, Ovid and Horace were also associated with Messalla, and Ovid’s attachment to him lasted from his youth until Messalla’s death.39

  Peter White aptly observes that ‘in the Roman milieu it was not unusual to solicit favours, including literary favours, on behalf of one’s friends as well as oneself’.40 But the question of how actively literary patrons dictated the actual subject matter of Augustan poetry is not an easy one to answer. Even as he addresses Maecenas with open praise, for example, Propertius’ views of his poetic obligations are difficult to pin down, as we shall see in Chapter 4. We need to apply the same caution to our understanding of Augustus’ relationship with the love poets, who often incorporate Augustus into their work in terms that seem ambiguous.41 Augustus was himself clearly invested in the arts, but to what degree we can speak of censorship in this period, either formal or informal, has been widely debated, including whether Augustus himself placed any kinds of restrictions on what could be said about himself or his regime.42 As we shall see in Chapter 6, Augustus evidently removed Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) from the libraries and exiled the poet himself, but we cannot assume that all literature and art under Augustus operated under excessive political scrutiny at every point throughout his long reign. Indeed, Augustan literature remains a highly refined medium, one intricate in its methods and frequently open to multiple, even at times conflicting, interpretations.

  In the chapters that follow we want to unveil at greater length the operation of Roman love poetry; each chapter is based on a series of paired terms or concepts that we believe helped animate love poetry in distinct yet complementary ways.

  Structure of the Book

  Chapter 1, ‘Beginnings and Backgrounds’, traces the development of Latin love poetry, including its relation to earlier Greek and Hellenistic literature. We then give a short account of the works and lives of each of the love poets, including the elusive Gallus. Finally, we consider love poetry’s relationship to the politics of its era and its related promotion of a unique set of values and terminology.

  Chapter 2, ‘Author and Ego’, examines the form and function of the ‘I’ voice in Roman love poetry, including the use of the ‘I’ (or ego) in building a false sense of intimacy between author and reader. Looking first at the striking emotional intensity of Catullus’ ego, we then discuss the role of ‘sincerity’ in Augustan elegy. Finally, we look at the incorporation of the female voice in Roman love poetry, including the role of the female ego in poetry attributed to Sulpicia and in Ovid’s Heroides.

  Chapter 3, ‘Power and Play’, explores the role of gender in Latin love poetry, querying first how love poetry conceptualizes female subjectivity. Noting the potential opportunities for female empowerment in the text, we also consider the means by which the female beloved (often called the ‘girlfriend’ – in Latin puella, or puellae in the plural) is constricted and physically dominated in the work. Next, we consider the role of male homosexual desire, as well as the importance of male communities more generally. We conclude with discussion of whether, given its seeming disruption of conventional Roman ideas about gender, love poetry should be considered a feminist genre.

  Chapter 4, ‘Readers and Writers’, focuses on love poetry as a specifically literary enterprise, including the love poets’ keen awareness of their position within various literary traditions. We also explore the puella’s role as a primary reader of the text (a role often framed by her status as a courtesan), as well as her embodiment of the poet’s own literary programme. Finally, we trace the evolution of ideas about love poetry and elegy itself in the works of both Propertius and Ovid.

  Chapter 5, ‘Country and City’, emphasizes the importance of place in love poetry, especially the recurring opposition of rus and urbs, countryside and city. After situating Virgil’s Eclogues and Catullus’ poetry as important antecedents, we examine the work of Tibullus, whose elegies are full of melancholy ruminations about an idealized country landscape. We next document the ways that Propertius presents the city as essential to his amorous pursuits in Books 1–3 before turning, in Book 4, to the rapidly changing topography of Augustan Rome. Finally, we demonstrate Ovid’s ardent preference for the city over the countryside – contrasting rusticitas (‘the country bumpkin’s lifestyle’) with cultus (‘refinement’ or ‘sophistication’) – while coyly presenting specific sites in Augustan Rome as ideal locales for seduction.

  Ovid’s transformation of the elegiac ego from erotic lover to displaced exile is the focus of Chapter 6, ‘Love and Exile’. We address first the tantalizing mystery of Ovid’s exile to Tomi, which he credits to carmen et error (‘a poem and a mistake’). Since readers today generally presume that the carmen was Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, we look closely at that work to see why it might have caused offence. While in exile, Ovid continued to write elegy, and we ultimately argue that Ovid’s exilic poetry provides the closing chapter of love poetry’s development in Rome.

  Finally, Chapter 7, ‘Death and Afterlife’, addresses the reception of Roman love poetry in antiquity and beyond. We offer a brief survey of the textual transmission of all four poets and then examine a number of sites of later literary reception, including Catullus among
English writers, Propertius in the work of Ezra Pound, and Ovid’s exilic poetry in Romania and Russia.

  While each of our chapters takes a different tack, cumulatively we seek to highlight the ways Latin love poetry self-consciously explores the art of writing even as it presumes to document the ‘actual’ experience of love itself. In this way, Roman love poetry continues to invite lively scrutiny of the tenuous lines between reality and representation, between the ways we experience ‘love’ and the complex manner in which our experiences and desires acquire meaning in language and against diverse literary and historical backdrops.

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  ‌Beginnings and Backgrounds

  Like everything else, like clocks and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented. After millenniums of sex and centuries of poetry […] the true-life confessions of the poet in love, immortalizing the mistress, who is actually the cause of the poem – that was invented in Rome in the first century before Christ.

  Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

  ANY ATTEMPT TO DESCRIBE the standard features of Latin love poetry – its style, subject matter, audience or narrative voice – raises perhaps more questions than it answers since each of these elements has a complexity that defies generalization. The actual content of Latin love poetry, for example, often shows greater variety than we might expect. So, too, Roman love poetry addresses multiple audiences with supreme self-awareness.1 Love poetry ostensibly emanates from the poet’s desire to confess his love for his puella, yet many poems are explicitly addressed to other men, friends with whom the poet wishes to share his experiences and feelings. To that, we could add the poet’s awareness of an audience external to the poetry (the reader or listener) and also the poet’s attempt to respond to a range of other writers both past and present. Given its distinct qualities, we want to begin our discussion with an important – albeit much disputed – question: where did Roman love poetry originate?