Love Motifs in Prudentius

By analysing three paradigmatic passages, this paper explores how Prudentius uses classical love motifs and imagery not only to lambast paganism, but also as a powerful rhetorical tool to convey his Christian message. The ‘fire of love’ imagery is conspicuous in Psychomachia 53–57, which wittily blends Christian and erotic language. In an entirely different context (C. Symm. 2.1071–1085), the flamma amoris is also fully exploited to depict lustful young Vestal Virgins, in combination with other classical metaphors of passion, such as the ‘wound of love’ and the signa amoris. Additionally, the contrast between heat and cold is a central element in the description of the Vestals’ tardy nuptials, redolent of classical satirical portraits of vetulae libidinosae. Finally, in Hamartigenia 628–636 the relationship between the soul and God draws from a Christian tradition of bridal (and coital) representation, but the lapse into sin is portrayed as the love triangle, typical of the Latin love elegy. These examples illustrate how Prudentius creatively and consciously frames love and sex imagery in new contexts, exploring their potential and infusing clichés with new meanings and forms.

Love Elegy, Propertius, and Soliloquy

This chapter argues that soliloquy as problem and opportunity was central to the aims of Latin love elegy, especially to Propertius’ Elegies. Drawing comparisons with the Lydia, Dirae, Tibullus’ elegies, Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, and Propertius’ elegiac predecessors, it studies Propertius’ corpus to demonstrate the relationship between the poet’s insanity and his solitude. It shows how seasonal indications inscribe this solitude in time and space, and how Propertius worked to rewrite love as a secret fiction. Propertius’ elegies, it argues, use solitude to shape the harmonization of elegiac subjectivity and the poets’ other political personae, culminating in the last of his elegies (4.11), which encapsulates the relegation of truth telling, love, and poetry to the solitary sphere, thus embodying new coordinations of public, the private, and the individual. In conclusion, it points to the impact of Propertius’ solitude on Renaissance literature, including the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels

This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

Chariton and Latin Elegy I

Chapter 1 establishes Latin love elegy (especially Propertius) as an important frame of reference for Chariton, and explores a number of characteristics (lexical and thematic) that all constitute an extreme or ‘totalizing’ attitude towards love on the part of the lover. Section 1.2 addresses the language of wholeness and exclusion (ὅλος‎ and μόνος‎; totus and solus) on display in Chariton and elegy, which is suggestive of a direct link. Section 1.3 approaches the conceptual analogy between love and death in Chariton and elegy, and argues that Chariton looks to the Latin poets for his characterization of Chaereas and Dionysius as obsessed with death and erotically motivated thoughts of suicide (especially in connection with the lover who imagines his own funeral). Section 1.4 similarly approaches the characters of Chaereas and Dionysius as susceptible to overwhelming jealousy, the quintessential ‘elegiac passion’; as well as a number of Propertian poems, this section also argues for an extended allusion to Ovid’s treatment of the Procris and Cephalus myth as narrated in Ars 3 and the Metamorphoses. Thematic proximities between Chariton and the Latin poets are supported by strikingly close points of verbal contact.

Achilles Tatius and Latin Elegy

Chapter 4 establishes the multiple connections between Achilles and Latin love elegy (especially Ovid), which he mobilizes as a principal weapon in his redefinition of the novelistic genre. This is especially in the first two books (during which time Clitophon attempts to seduce Leucippe), but also implicates the ‘antagonists’ Melite, Thersander, and Callisthenes. Section 4.2 demonstrates the importance of the contemptor amoris theme (as represented especially in Propertius 1.7 and 1.9). Sections 4.3, 4.3.1, and 4.4 establish the erotodidactic credentials of Clinias as they relate to elegy (4.4 focusing explicitly on the theme of consent), while Sections 4.5 and 4.6 do the same for Clitophon’s slave, Satyrus (with Section 4.6 focusing on the metaphor of servitium amoris). Section 4.7 homes in on the role of vision in the novel’s symposia and those in elegy (especially Heroides 16-17). Section 4.8 draws a connection between the way Achilles and Ovid aestheticize (and even eroticize) female distress (embodied in tears and fears). Section 4.9 focuses on the idea of love as a type of ‘theft’, and kisses as alienable possessions, in Achilles and elegy (Tibullus is prominent here). Section 4.10 is an extended reading of Clitophon’s refusal to have sex with Leucippe as modelled on Ovid’s description of a bout of impotence in Amores 3.7.

Love as a State of Exception

In Latin love elegy, the disavowal of law for the sake of love is couched in courtroom rhetoric and is thus both a denial and an appropriation of legal discourse. The elegiac recusatio is a version of the recusatio imperii, Augustus’ strategy for establishing his sovereignty by setting himself outside or above formal procedures. Not unlike the prince, Ovid proclaims a sovereign exception; he controls the production of law by deciding what lies outside it. The chapter studies a number of key passages from Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid to show that the love poets anticipate Augustus’ claims to sacrosanctity and sovereignty. It further examines love elegy’s affinities with the Saturnalian spirit of Roman comedy in order to argue that the elegiac suspension of legal action affords space for the emergence of an alternative jurisprudence of love.

The Courtroom in the Bedroom

This chapter compares the distinction between what lies inside and outside the rule of law with the blurring of public and private space in the age of Augustus. Love elegy blends private with public life but also bars Roman law from the privacy of the bedroom. The secrecy of lovemaking is emblematic of the autonomy of love poetry, an independent area governed by the sovereign laws of love. At the same time, love’s jurisdiction spreads from the privacy of the bedroom to occupy the spaces of public life. The bedroom in love elegy is part of the discursive independence of sexuality, an autonomy that is the basis of sovereignty. Focusing on representative case studies from the Amores (1.4, 2.5, 2.7–8, 2.19, 3.4, 3.14), the chapter examines the shift to the privacy of the elegiac bedroom against the background of Augustus’ policy of making all aspects of his private life public.

2. Love poetry

'Love poetry' examines Ovid’s ventures into the sub-genre of love-elegy and describes the development of this exclusively Roman literary form over the previous two generations, and the conventions that Ovid had inherited. Ovid wrote three books on the subject of love, these are Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), a meeting of love-elegy and the popular ancient tradition of didactic poetry. The Amores was the collection that launched Ovid’s poetic career, and it set the terms for the rest of it, marking him out as the leading proponent of elegiac verse in Rome. In his approach to love-elegy we also see a style that will characterize much of his later work, playful and intensely self-aware. The Amores is less poetry about love than poetry about love poetry, its primary appeal lying in witty manipulation of poetic convention. Meanwhile, the Ars Amatoria teaches men and women how to find and keep a lover, and then the Remedia Amoris explains how to ‘unlearn’ the lessons of the Ars.