Latin Love Poetry Read online

  The Origins of Latin Love Poetry

  The origins of Augustan elegy have presented an especially pressing problem for classical scholars over the past century, and it remains difficult to identify a single foundation, much less trace its clear linear progression into the Augustan era.2 Our goal here, then, is to identify earlier literature that shares many of the same features as love poetry, especially its distinct adoption of a first person voice (a voice often called the poet’s ‘persona’): it is emphatically an ‘I’ who loves in Roman love poetry, not merely ‘he’ or ‘she’, or even a ‘Catullus’ in the third person. The scope and purpose of first person narration was developed over time in antiquity, so we turn first to the Greek poets.

  Greek Lyric and Epigram

  Poetry composed in the first person in ancient Greece, often called lyric because of its presumed performance with a lyre, emerged in pointed contrast to the most authoritative of all early literary genres: ancient epic.3 While there is considerable doubt today that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (epic poems dated roughly to the eighth century BCE) can be attributed to a single historical personage, the ancient Greeks took Homer’s existence for granted and his enormous influence over cultural and literary life lasted well into the Roman period. When the poet Sappho (c.625–c.570 BCE) professes in a famous fragment that ‘Some say an army on horseback, some say on foot, and some say ships are the most beautiful things on this black earth, but I say it is whatever you love’ (16), she coyly acknowledges the authority of Homer but also advocates a world very different from that of epic, shifting from the public sphere of war to a more private sphere defined by personal experience and emotion, one dramatically articulated through the first person.4 Archilochus (c.680–c.645 BCE), another Greek lyric poet, likewise presents a humorous refusal of Homeric values and militarism when he claims in one poem that he abandoned his shield on the battlefield while trying to save his own life (fragment 5).‌5

  Ancient epic employed its own characteristic metre – dactylic hexameter – yet Greek lyric poets like Sappho and Archilochus experimented with a range of metres. The elegos metre – known today as the elegiac couplet or ‘distich’ – originated in Ionia and from the seventh century onwards spread throughout Greece. Although, by the fifth century, Greek writers assumed that the term ‘elegos’ had originally referred to cries of mourning, the elegiac metre was used for a wide range of purposes, such as exhortations for courage in battle, moralizing pronouncements and political ruminations, appearing in the work of authors like Callinus, Tyrtaeus, and Archilochus.6 Surviving fragments from Greek poets like Mimnermus (fl. 630–600 BCE), however, point towards what would eventually become the prominent association of the elegiac metre with erotic themes; later, Antimachus of Colophon (fl. 400 BCE) would write an elegiac poem, Lyde, about the death of the woman he loved.7 Greek epigram, a genre that originated with short verses inscribed on votive offerings at sanctuaries and on funerary monuments, also employed the elegiac metre. Epigram later became a distinct literary form during the Hellenistic period (c.323–30 BCE), and the Alexandrian poets – a group that flourished in Alexandria in Egypt during the Hellenistic era – utilized epigram at times for specifically erotic scenarios.8

  Roman writers frequently acknowledged their debt to earlier Alexandrian poets, especially Theocritus of Syracuse (fl. 260–240 BCE) and Apollonius of Rhodes (born c.260 BCE). However, no Alexandrian author was more formative for Latin love poetry than Callimachus (c.305–c.240 BCE), an intellectual born in Cyrene, who made his way to Alexandria where he pursued a range of occupations, including poet, literary critic and even librarian at the famous Library.

  The Shadow of Callimachus

  Callimachus was said to have written over eight hundred books during his lifetime, but little of it survives.9 Callimachus’ Epigrams presumably exerted considerable influence over the Latin love poets,10 but two other works seem especially crucial to their sense of poetics: Callimachus’ ‘Hymn to Apollo’ and the preface to his Aetia, a work that survives only in fragments.11 In his epilogue to the ‘Hymn to Apollo’, Callimachus famously shows Envy criticizing the ‘smallness’ or limited scope of his poetry. Apollo, however, brushes the criticism aside, responding that big rivers, while they may carry a considerable flow, nonetheless convey mainly ‘silt and garbage’; it is only the water from a sacred spring, ‘pure and undefiled’, that bees (a common symbol for poets) take to Demeter.12 As this scenario suggests, Callimachus generally ‘rejects the long-windedness of traditional epic’, advocating smaller poetic forms instead.13

  Written in the elegiac metre, the Aetia (a name that means ‘Causes’ or ‘Explanations’) was presumably put into its final form c.240 BCE, including the addition of the ‘Lock of Berenice’ at the end of Book 4 as well as a prologue and epilogue to the work. In the prologue to his Aetia, Callimachus relates a dream in which he encounters the Muses while tending his flocks on Mt. Helicon, a scene calling to mind the Greek poet Hesiod, who derived poetic inspiration from the Muses on Mt. Helicon in his Theogony. Callimachus then asks the Muses a series of questions about the causes of different things, such as the rituals or customs attached to individual places, questions the Muses proceed to answer in Books 1 and 2.

  The prologue of the Aetia has attracted particular attention because of the ways in which Callimachus uses it to define his poetic style. His critics, Callimachus claims, ‘snipe at me, because it’s not a monotonous uninterrupted poem featuring kings and heroes in thousands of verses that I’ve produced, driving my song instead for little stretches, like a child, though the tale of my years is not brief’.14 Praising the shorter works of Philetas and Mimnermus, he responds to his critics by asserting:

  To hell with you, then, spiteful brood of Jealousy: from now on we’ll judge poetry by the art, not by the mile. And don’t expect a song to rush from my lips with a roar: it’s Zeus’ job, not mine, to thunder.15

  Callimachus then recounts the instructions he received from Apollo himself, who urges that the poet keep his Muse ‘on slender rations’, while avoiding the common road ‘even if it means driving along a narrower path’.16

  We can witness the influence of Alexandrian poets like Callimachus, Philetas and Euphorion on Catullus and his contemporaries through the literary styles they emulated, models ‘characterized by metrical and formal experimentation, oblique and recherché treatment of myth, and, in general, an avoidance of epic’.17 The Augustan elegists, in turn, frequently adopt Callimachean terminology in defining their own craft,18 with Propertius taking direct inspiration from the Aetia in turning to aetiological themes in his fourth book.19 But although Latin love poetry has characteristics that derive from such predecessors (and more, such as pastoral poetry and even New Comedy),20 it clearly possesses its own unique impulse, one with no exact equivalent in earlier literature. So while a quest for precursors provides a useful beginning to our discussion, it is necessary to turn now more fully to the Latin love poets themselves.

  The Inventors of Love

  As is the case with many ancient authors, biographical information about the love poets comes primarily from their own poetry. While we need to use caution in relying on any poet’s account of him- or herself, we nonetheless want to present a brief overview of the presumed life and work of each of our poets, beginning with Catullus.

  Catullus: Love and Hate

  Beyond Catullus’ own poetry, we have only scattered and often contradictory references to his life, including conflicting dates of his death.21 Catullus was evidently born in Verona (then part of Cisalpine Gaul) in 87 BCE, and references to contemporary events in his poetry indicate that he lived until at least 54 BCE. Significantly, these references can all be dated between 56 and 54 BCE, which suggests Catullus’ relatively brief involvement in public life at Rome, even if it does not discount a lengthier period of literary activity.22 We know from Suetonius that Julius Caesar was a frequent guest of Catullus’ father (Suetonius, Julius 73), indicating that Catullus’ famil
y possessed a certain level of social standing. According to Catullus’ poetry, he himself served in Bithynia under Gaius Memmius, a sojourn he does not hesitate to criticize bitterly, as we shall see.

  The most notorious aspect of Catullus’ life is his alleged affair with Clodia Metelli, a married aristocratic woman generally identified as the ‘Lesbia’ of Catullus’ poems – ‘Lesbia’ being a pseudonym derived from the Greek island of Lesbos, in homage to Sappho.23 Clodia enjoyed a scandalous reputation during her lifetime; Cicero presents a damning portrayal of her alleged greed and lasciviousness in his infamous Pro Caelio, a speech ostensibly in support of his client Marcus Caelius Rufus, but which hinges rhetorically on his relentless demonization of the Roman noblewoman.24

  During his lifetime, Catullus seems to have been associated with a group of writers who were prominent at the end of the Republic, a group we today call the ‘New Poets’ or ‘Neoterics’, terms taken from Cicero’s attacks on them.25 Catullus’ relatively small collection of poetry – which he himself calls a libellus, a ‘little book’ – touches on a range of themes, but probably does not survive today in the form he intended.26 As we have it, Catullus’ corpus can be broken into three parts: the polymetric poems (poems written in a range of metres) (1–60); the longer poems, some in the elegiac metre (61–68); and the elegiac fragments (69–116). The most famous of Catullus’ poems are clearly those involving the unpredictable Lesbia, who makes an appearance in all three sections. Because of the emotional intensity of his narrative voice, most scholars see a profound connection between Catullus’ poetry and later Roman elegy, as do the elegists themselves, as we shall see in later chapters. Two of Catullus’ longer poems are also often singled out for their influence on later Augustan elegy: poems 68 and 76.‌27

  Between Catullus and the Augustan elegists falls the tantalizing figure of Cornelius Gallus. Although very little of his work survives, he clearly merits consideration, since Gallus’ work ‘seems to be the most important link between neoteric poetry [Catullus] and the love poetry of the Augustan age.’28

  Excursus: Cornelius Gallus, Elegy’s Phantom

  Almost everything that was said about Gallus until 1979 was sheer conjecture given that, until that point, only one line from his work survived: ‘uno tellures dividit amne duas’ (‘divided with one river two lands’). To some critics, this line suggested that Gallus was a skilful poet who composed a perfect ‘golden’ line with the verb in the middle and an interlocking pattern of adjectives and nouns.29 Given the paucity of his surviving work, however, other classicists were often harsh in their treatment of Gallus,30 and, over time, Gallus would become for many ‘the poet to whom all can be attributed since nothing is known’.31 Yet an important new fragment of Gallus’ poetry was discovered in Qasr Ibrîm in Egypt and subsequently published in 1979, giving us six full and five fragmentary lines to use in evaluating his contribution.

  According to Jerome’s Chronicle, Gallus was born around 70 BCE, although this date is widely disputed. We know that during his lifetime Gallus achieved a certain amount of political prominence, including Augustus’ appointment of him as the first Roman prefect of Egypt in 30 BCE (Suetonius, Augustus 66.1). Yet Gallus’ relationship with Augustus eventually became more fraught, tension between the two perhaps arising when Gallus ordered for himself a self-aggrandizing inscription praising his own military achievements in Egypt.32 To this alleged mistake some minor offences were apparently added,33 causing Augustus to renounce his ‘friendship’ with Gallus in 27 or 26 BCE, an act that led to Gallus’ suicide (Suetonius, Augustus 88; Ammianus Marcellinus, 18.4.5).

  Gallus is credited with a collection of four elegiac books entitled the Amores (Love Poems), which were most likely written before 50 BCE. The Amores presumably consisted of poems dedicated to a woman named Lycoris, generally identified as the freedwoman Volumnia, who herself used the stage name Cytheris. Much of our understanding today of Gallus’ place in the Roman literary landscape comes from Virgil’s Eclogues. Within this short collection Gallus appears in two poems, the sixth and the tenth (the latter we discussed previously), and the prominent position of Gallus seems puzzling. Franz Skutsch, however, proposes that the tenth Eclogue serves as a catalogue of various erotic motives developed by Gallus in his elegiac poetry, and that the sixth Eclogue incorporates mythological themes developed by Gallus in his other non-elegiac works.34

  The fact that Gallus’ achievements – before his precipitous downfall – combined political ability with poetic talent was central to his renown and influence among later Roman poets, including the Augustan elegists, a group to whom we now turn.

  Augustan Elegy

  When scholars define Roman elegy as a genre, they generally focus on three major practitioners of the form: Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. This canon of three, along with Gallus, is the precise group identified by Marcus Fabius Quintilian (35–95 CE), a Roman rhetorician active in the generation after the elegists, in his Institutio Oratoria (Institutes of Oratory). Evaluating the main representatives of Augustan elegy, Quintilian proposes that ‘in elegy we also challenge the Greeks, of which genre Tibullus seems to me the most terse and elegant author. There are those who prefer Propertius. Ovid is more playful than both of them, just as Gallus is harsher’ (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.93). Quintilian’s brief observations about elegy bear further amplification. First of all, his assessment suggests that the Romans could consider amatory elegy a genre in which they might compete with, if not surpass, the rival Greeks.

  Similarly, we find confirmation in Quintilian that Gallus was firmly associated with the genre of elegy in antiquity, even though Quintilian labels him ‘harsh’ (durus), a term that, as we shall see below, might also suggest the most ‘manly’ of the love poets. Quintilian’s pithy attempt to characterize the style and quality of the three surviving elegists has been suggestive for modern critics, with many finding Quintilian’s curt dismissal of Propertius especially unfair;35 on the other hand, Quintilian cites Ovid for his lascivious humour and he singles out Tibullus as the pinnacle of elegiac achievement, a poet who has often been undervalued by later generations of readers.36

  Tibullus: The Lover in Pastoral Retreat

  Not much is known about Tibullus’ life. His death is variously dated to the same year as Virgil’s (19 BCE) or to the beginning of 18. Based on this date, his birth in Latium (probably in Pedum or Gabii) has been estimated as taking place between 55 and 50 BCE.37 Tibullus apparently belonged to a relatively prosperous family of the equestrian class; thus the motif of poverty, which we often encounter in his poetry (and which he shares with the other elegiac poets), should be taken with a grain of salt. Although the Roman elegists after Gallus generally turned away from public service, Tibullus reluctantly followed his patron Messalla on his Aquitanian campaign.38

  Tibullus survives for us in a single collection of elegies, the so-called Corpus Tibullianum, which consists of three books, although the last book was divided into two during the Renaissance.39 Modern scholars, however, attribute only the first two books of the poetic corpus to Tibullus with any certainty, a debate we shall return to in our discussion of Sulpicia in Chapter 2. The start of Tibullus’ first book is dated to around 32 BCE with publication in 26 or 25 BCE.40 Book 1 is primarily concerned with the capricious domina Delia, who, in the second book, is replaced by another woman, Nemesis, a name which signals her unscrupulous and treacherous nature. As we shall see later, despite his use of many elegiac themes and conventions, Tibullus’ poetry is concerned to a large degree with the ideals of rural peace and it relies on a persistent juxtaposition of city and country.

  Propertius: The Lover in Augustan Rome

  We know very little about the life of Propertius, who was born in Umbria (most likely in the region of Assisi) to a family with significant land holdings. Lawrence Richardson, jr has placed the poet’s birth sometime between the years 55 and 45 BCE – a range suggested by the fact that Ovid speaks of Propertius as older.41 When Ovid writes of
Propertius in the past tense in the Remedia Amoris (The Cures of Love) (764), written in 2 CE, he likewise provides our only means for estimating the date of Propertius’ death. In his Tristia (Poems of Sadness), Ovid places Tibullus before Propertius in his ordering of elegists following Gallus (4.10.41–53), but Propertius may have begun publishing his work a few years before Tibullus.42 The content of Propertius’ poetry strongly suggests that he began his work in the early years of the Augustan era (around 29 BCE) and completed the fourth and final book in 16 BCE.43 Despite his persistent engagement with the emerging Augustan Age throughout his poetry, Propertius’ own experience of the earlier Republic and its violent demise breaks through on a number of occasions. Two short poems at the end of Book 1 reference the Perusine War (1.21 and 1.22), a traumatic event that seems to have had very personal consequences for Propertius, including the loss of his family’s land in the confiscations that followed (see 4.1b.127–130).44