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.

Introduction

This Introduction presents a study of Latin vocabulary for solitude as background for replacing bipartite divisions of Roman life (e.g., otium and negotium, “public” and “private”) with a tripartite model comprising public, private, and solitary spheres. It outlines this model’s applicability to Greek literature and philosophy, Roman religion, and Roman law, leading to a discussion of the Roman bedroom (cubiculum) and the solitary reading and writing to which it could be home. Reviewing the history of scholarship on Roman society, religion, and literature from antiquity through the present, it demonstrates how and why solitude has been written out of the study of Roman culture, and how the problem of solitude relates to the question of the individual in ancient society. Finally, it explores the relationship of literature to Rome’s solitary sphere in the age of Virgil, addressing problems of periodization, the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and literary production.

Virgil’s Eclogues as Meditation

This chapter argues that Virgil’s Eclogues give literary form to Rome’s solitary sphere and make solitude their central social and literary problem. A meditation on Virgil’s use of the verb meditari (“to meditate, contemplate, practice”) and on the fourth Eclogue provides background for a formulation of Virgil’s model of “loveful reading” that, in its solitude, nuances readings of the Eclogues as representing dreams of social reciprocity and communal (pastoral) humanism. Drawing on multiple genealogical and comparative sources, and the whole of the Eclogues book, it argues that the first, fifth, and tenth Eclogues privilege the solitary over the private and public. Finally, it shows how Virgil confounds the commonplace assignment of the pastoral of solitude to later literary periods, in ways appreciated by two of Virgil’s closest readers: John Milton and Andrew Marvell.

Conclusion

The conclusion re-articulates the book’s model of the solitary sphere in the age of Virgil within the context of imperial politics, showing how this sphere helped shape new coordinations of cosmos, imperium, and the individual. It shows the role played in this process by newly popular genres like pantomime and the newly (or newly fashioned) subjective element of literary characterization, and demonstrates how this sphere’s new forms are embodied by two work from after the age of Virgil: Manilius’ Astronomica and one of Marcus Argentarius’ epigrams. Following comparison of their figures of the solitary singer with the companionate model of reading evinced by other works before, during, and after the age of Virgil, it shows how Tiberianus’ Amnis ibat took up the age of Virgil’s terms for the solitary sphere in order to invite the reader to think of oneself, with his poem, as an imperium of one.

Virgil’s Solitary Spheres

This chapter argues that Virgil was a poet not only of cosmos and of empire, but also of individuals. It analyzes, by turns, the solitude of figures, of language, and of literature in the Georgics and the Aeneid. It argues that the Georgics is a poem for humans, but not of them, culminating in the story of Orpheus and in the mannered circularity suggested by the Georgics’ revolutionary envoi. The chapter looks to Virgil’s adaptation of Homer’s Shield of Achilles as a touchstone for the poet’s solitary model of poetic composition and of reading, testing it against the poem’s narrative joints. From scenes of soliloquy to dream scenes, solitude, it shows, is a characteristic quality of the poem’s settings, figures, form and its poet’s persona, that last of which, the chapter argues, contributed to the biographical tradition’s Lives of Virgil from antiquity to the Renaissance.

Cicero Speaking with Solitudes

This chapter argues that the question of how one can “speak with oneself” (secum loqui) was central to Cicero’s personal, philosophical, and political projects throughout much of his career, and especially in his late works. Set against the background of scholarship on Cicero’s life and work, Petrarch’s interest in Cicero, and the wide arc of Cicero’s philosophical works, it studies Cicero’s dilations on the paradox of solitude—including Scipio’s adage, “Least alone when most alone”—in the years 46 to 43 BCE. It explores Cicero’s treatment of solitude in his letters (especially to Atticus) and in major works on either end of this period, works that rewrote social genres in solitary form: the Brutus and Orator, it shows, reimagined oratory in the deserted forum, while his Laelius de amicitia answered the question Aristotle had left hanging, and of great interest subsequently to Montaigne, whether persons can be friends to themselves.

Horace and the Slip to Solitude

This chapter argues that Horace made the solitary sphere into a way of life. Against models of Horace’s persona and work that emphasize the contrast between public bard and coterie poet, it shows how the slip to solitude represented a pervasive gesture across his corpus. Proceeding chronologically, close reading of satires, Odes, and the relationship between the tale of the ostensibly mad man at Argos in the Epistle to Florus and the conclusion of the Ars poetica shows how the poet construed the solitary sphere in different ways in various genres, and how its representations formed an interconnected, self-encircling corpus. Throughout, review of the history of scholarship, including Richard Heinze’s theory of Horatian lyric, shows how Horatian poems have been re-socialized, how self-address works in a variety of Horatian genres, and how recovering Horace’s solitary sphere suggests a poet who had more in common with a Romantic than with a neoclassical spirit.