A Companion to Roman Love Elegy is the first comprehensive work dedicated solely to the study of love elegy. The genre is explored through 33 original essays thatoffer new and innovative approaches to specific elegists and the discipline as a whole.
Contributors represent a range of established names and younger scholars, all of whom are respected experts in their fields
Contains original, never before published essays, which are both accessible to a wide audience and offer a new approach to the love elegists and their work
Includes 33 essays on the Roman elegists Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, and Ovid, as well as their Greek and Roman predecessors and later writers who were influenced by their work
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in Roman elegy from scholars who have used a variety of critical approaches to open up new avenues of understanding
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Yes, you can access A Companion to Roman Love Elegy by Barbara K. Gold, Barbara K. Gold in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Littérature & Critique littéraire ancienne et classique. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Calling out the Greeks: Dynamics of the Elegiac Canon
Joseph Farrell
Quintilian names Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid as the canonical poets of Roman elegy. His comments are brief enough that they can be quoted in full:
Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus. Sunt qui Propertium malint. Ovidius utroque lascivior, sicut durior Gallus.
(Quint. Inst. 10.1.93)
In elegy too we challenge the Greeks; I think its most polished and elegant author is Tibullus, but there are those who prefer Propertius. Compared to either of these Ovid is rather unrestrained, just as Gallus is rather stiff.
(All translations are my own)
In spite of his brevity, Quintilian gives us a lot to discuss; but his brevity itself deserves comment. Of all genres only iambus receives as skimpy treatment as elegy, each occupying about 1% of Quintilian’s canon. Moreover, Quintilian says that the Romans never really treated iambus as a proper genre, whereas he considers elegy a genre in which Roman writers successfully challenge the Greeks for supremacy. Why then does he say so little about it?
Quintilian’s Roman canon is of course modeled on an earlier Greek one, and it may be important that he has even less to say about Greek elegy, which he dispatches in a single sentence of sixteen words. (The relevant portion is italicized in the passage quoted below.) And the way Quintilian introduces Greek elegy is telling, as well. After discussing epic poetry, Quintilian mentions elegy via an elaborate praeteritio designed to anticipate complaints that he ignores a great number of capable poets. His justification?
Nec sane quisquam est tam procul a cognitione eorum remotus ut non indicem certe ex bibliotheca sumptum transferre in libros suos possit. Nec ignoro igitur quos transeo nec utique damno, ut qui dixerim esse in omnibus utilitatis aliquid. Sed ad illos iam perfectis constitutisque viribus revertemur: quod in cenis grandibus saepe facimus, ut, cum optimis satiati sumus, varietas tamen nobis ex vilioribus grata sit. tunc et elegiam vacabit in manus sumere, cuius princeps habetur Callimachus, secundas confessione plurimorum Philitas occupavit. Sed dum adsequimur illam firmam, ut dixi, facilitatem, optimis adsuescendum est et multa magis quam multorum lectione formanda mens et ducendus color.
(Quint. Inst. 10.1.57–59)
Neither is there anyone so far from understanding these things that he could not transfer into his own books a catalogue taken from a library. Nor am I, therefore, unaware of the writers whom I pass over. And, certainly, I do not condemn them, having already said that there is something useful in all. But we shall return to them when our powers have been established and made perfect: as we often do in great banquets, so that that after we are sated with the best dishes, the variety of plainer food is still pleasant. Then we shall have time to take up even elegy, of which Callimachus is considered the principal author and Philitas, in the opinion of most, has taken second place. But while acquiring that solid ability, as I said, we must grow accustomed to the best, and one’s mind must be formed, one’s style informed, by reading much rather than many.
Elegy is the only Greek genre to receive such ostentatiously marginalizing treatment. In comparison, Quintilian’s remarks about the Roman elegists, scanty as they are, seem that much more impressive. One might almost wonder whether Quintilian ever did read Callimachus and Philitas.
Perhaps this all has something to do with the fact that Quintilian simply takes both canons directly from the Roman elegists themselves. Propertius opens his third book with the following invocation:
Callimachi manes et Coi sacra Philitae, in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus. primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros.
(Prop. 3.1.1–4)
Shades of Callimachus and sacraments belonging to Philitas of Cos, permit me, please, to enter your grove. I am the first to attempt to combine Italian revelry with Greek ceremony, drawing inspiration as your priest from a pristine source.
No doubt Propertius is following a Greek critical tradition that named these poets to the elegiac canon. But his decision to invoke them – to call them out – as predecessors is significant, as we shall see. Some years later, Ovid would name Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and himself as the canonical poets of Roman elegy:
Vergilium vidi tantum, nec avara Tibullo tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae. successor fuit hic tibi, Galle, Propertius illi; quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.
(Ov. Tr. 4.10.51–54)
Vergil I merely saw, nor did miserly fate give Tibullus much time to be my friend. He was your successor, Gallus, and Propertius his: with the passage of time I myself was fourth after them.
So Quintilian basically repeats what Propertius and Ovid said while they were attempting to define a Roman elegiac canon on the model of the Greek one and to inscribe themselves into it. This is not to say that Quintilian is wrong or eccentric: most people in his day as now probably agreed about who the canonical authors of Roman elegy were, because Propertius and Ovid were obviously successful in defining the canon on terms favorable to themselves. But, if Quintilian had undertaken any real comparison between these Greek and Roman canons, it is difficult to imagine what he would have said; because elegy as written by Callimachus and Philitas and elegy as written at Rome are almost totally different genres.
If we define canonical Greek elegy as the sort of poetry written by Callimachus and Philitas, then we are speaking of mythological narratives often of some length. Callimachus’ Aetia was a four-book collection of poems on the origins of various Greek cultural institutions in which the poet’s persona is exclusively that of an extraordinarily erudite researcher. Love, although it figures in such stories as “Acontius and Cydippe” (frr. 67–75 Pf) and “The Lock of Berenice” (fr. 110 Pf), is hardly among Callimachus’ principal themes. Philitas’ persona must have also have emphasized erudition – he is remembered as the prototypical Alexandrian poeta doctus or “poet and critic in one” (
, Strabo 14.2.19, 657c) – but we are also told that he wrote because he was in love with a woman named Bittis (more on this below). If this is true, then Philitas must have represented himself as a lover, something that Callimachus (except in some epigrams) did not do. As for Philitas, so far as we know, mythology was his principal subject. His own longing for Bittis may have been a device to “explain” his interest in the myths and to provide a frame for them. But in any case, both Callimachus and Philitas are known to have written third-person, narrative elegies.
If, however, we define Roman elegy as the kind of poetry that Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid wrote, we find that it is very different. All of them wrote in the first person, each about a love affair with a particular woman (or, in Tibullus’ case, with two different women successively). The names of these women suggest Greek culture and literary sophistication (Randall 1979). The women themselves are represented as lacking the status of citizen birth and as living off their attractiveness to the kind of men the poets make themselves out to be (James 2002, 37–41). The persona of the lover boasts a literary culture beyond any rival and just enough wealth that actual work never enters into consideration, but not so much that he fails to resent the lady’s demands for gifts – the main area in which those less cultivated rivals actually can surpass him (James 2002, 71–107). The poet/lover therefore lives in a state of constant jealously, enthrallment, and inability to satisfy the whims of his domina – his “mistress” in more than the modern sense because the word connotes actual domination, as over a slave (Copley 1947; Lilja 1965, 71–89; Lyne 1979; Murgatroyd 1981; McCarthy 1998; Fitzgerald 2000, 72–77). A recurrence, sometimes morbid and sometimes humorous, to the theme of death is also in evidence (Gibson 2005, 171). Each poet makes his own variations on these themes, but the basic elements are the same. Mythology is a frequent point of reference, but straightforward mythological narrative (as in Prop. 1.20) is rare. The poems are generally brief, and the ensembles do not involve the elaborate framing devices employed by Callimachus or (perhaps) Philitas.
Two very different canons, then – a situation that we do not find in any other genre that Quintilian mentions. How did it come about? We can best answer this question by investigating the pre-history of Quintilian’s canons – which, of course, did not simply spring into being all of a sudden, but were the end result of a dynamic process of poetic and critical self-fashioning that began in the Hellenistic period and took a long time to complete.
The Proto-canon of Hermesianax and Its Influence
Representing Greek elegy as a proper genre was a challenge for Hellenistic canon makers (Murray 2010). From the perspective of Roman elegy, two poets from Colophon, an Ionian city not far from Ephesus, were an important part of this process. Mimnermus belongs to the seventh century BCE, and his works survive only in excerpts quoted by later writers. But these tell us that he collected his elegies and dedicated them to a hetaira called Nanno. It seems more than just possible that he provided a model for his countryman Antimachus, who in the late fifth century also named an elegiac poem after his beloved, Lyde – a foreigner, as her name (“woman from Lydia”) shows. The two poets are frequently mentioned together, as they are in Leontium, another elegiac poem which was composed in about 330 BCE by Hermesianax – also of Colophon! – and which he also named after his mistress. This is quite a tradition of erotic elegy produced within a single Greek city (Spanoudakis 2001).
Leontium, like the elegies of Callimachus and Philitas, seems mainly to have told mythological love stories in the third person, like that of Polyphemus and Galatea (fr. 1 Powell). But an entertaining passage from the third and last book of the poem (fr. 7 Powell) gives a catalogue of poets and philosophers who felt the pangs of love. Here Hermesianax mentions three elegiac poets, Mimnermus, Antimachus, and Philitas. Of Mimnermus we learn that he loved Nanno and that “he suffered much and invented the sweet sound and spirit of the soft pentameter”
This is important for representing Mimnermus as the inventor of elegiac poetry in response to his lovesickness – which is effectively to define elegy as love poetry. We next learn that Antimachus was “struck by love for Lydian Lyde … and wept when she died and placed her under the dry earth … and filled his sacred books with laments”
Again Hermesianax associates elegy with love for a particular woman and adds the important element of grief to that of erotic longing. Philitas, the last poet named in the entire catalogue, is cast in the same mold: “you know as well the poet … Philitas, who sang of nimble Bittis”
Why exactly Bittis should be “nimble” is something of a puzzle. In this regard, it is tempting to follow those who render
as “fickle” (Knox 1993, 66; Bing 2003, 341 n. 44), thus introducing the theme of rivalry into the mix. In any case, the facts are these: Our catalogue is found in an elegiac poem. It names three elegiac poets in the company of others representing such genres as epic, lyric, and tragedy. It thus implies that elegy is to be considered a genre on the same terms as they. In fact, it emphasizes elegy especially by naming three elegiac poets, as compared with no more than two from any other genre. It names Mimnermus as inventor of this genre and concludes with Philitas, making elegy the only genre that is represented as having a history that extends from the distant past to the present day. Finally, the elegists mentioned are all characterized as poet-lovers, each devoted to particular woman, at least one of them a courtesan, a second foreign, and the third fickle. Finally, all three of them share their names with an elegiac poetry book.
Canon formation is not a disinterested process, especially in the case of someone who is poet and critic in one. It is hard not to infer that Hermesianax – perhaps following the teachings of Philitas – designed this part of his poem as a capsule history of Greek love elegy. Far from being mere reportage, it is instead a speech act, a calling into being of the tradition to which the poet presents himself as heir. And in establishing his pedigree, he consigns all other forms of early Greek elegy to oblivion. The catalogue is therefore important not only for what it says, but for what it does not say, for if we survey the earlier elegiac poets whom Hermesianax does not name, we find them an interesting if miscellaneous bunch.
The great Archilochus, whose name was chiefly identified with iambic poetry, composed elegiacs on martial themes, and his contemporaries Callinus of Ephesus and Tyrtaeus of Sparta used elegy to exhort their countrymen to virtue in battle. The Athenian statesman Solon adapted this approach to the civic sphere. Theognis of Megara, operating in the private setting of the symposium, blends reflection on civic themes with other characteristic motifs of sympotic poetry. Love is prominent among all these poets, although for Theognis it is the idealized man/boy relationship between erastes and eromenos that matters. These poets belong to the same period as Mimnermus; yet Hermesianax ignores them and st...
