What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Octavian/Augustus, following in the footsteps of both Pompey and Caesar, relentlessly pursues territorial expansion abroad, while at home he presents the Roman people with the image of himself as unstoppable expansionist. In one otherwise unprepossessing poem Propertius makes a strikingly romantic assertion: Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit (1.12.20). The word choice—finis—gives pause, especially when this particular elegy (1.12) and the ones with which Propertius surrounds it (1.8a, 1.8b, and 1.11) emphasize geographical space. To be more precise, they focus on Cynthia’s propensity to move through geographical space, away from the Propertian amator. Anxieties emerge from Propertius’ elegies when he imagines the individual faced with an infinite and ever-changing world. The Propertian amator struggles to establish and cling to the possibility of known and definable boundaries. He seeks to render Cynthia his finis and to anchor his self-definition to her.

Conclusion

The conclusion takes a final, closer look at empire’s toll on the subject in elegy. The juxtaposition of the puella of erotic elegy with the exiled Ovid in Chapter 5 highlights the differences between the ways that the aggressive pressure on Roman fines affect our textual characters. For the puellae, from Catullus to Ovid, the encounter, without fail, has consequences at the level of the body, although the specific manifestation is different in each text (or set of texts). The effects are not the same for the masculine subject. His corporeal self escapes the pressures, but as a subject he comes, or threatens to come, unhinged, incoherent, unstable.

On the Road Again

The space of empire also plays a starring role in Tibullus’ elegies; his obsession emerges around the word via, the road. It is not a great leap to assert that the road and the space of empire are inextricably intertwined. On the one hand, for Tibullus, the road and by extension the geographic expanse of empire are the root of all evils. Mobility belongs to the male world of commerce, exploration, and war—all activities he sets up in direct opposition to love. On the other hand, however, much as Tibullus struggles to divorce amor from the road, in particular, a dark and unholy alliance emerges between the two. Although he wishes to establish empire and amor as separate and opposing categories, bounded, fixed, and distinct, the fines do not hold. Characteristics of the man of politics, the warrior, and the merchant, players in the game of empire, turn up with increasing frequency as characteristics of the lover. And in the end, the viae appear on the very body of the puella, emblazoned on her most elegiac Coan clothing. Tibullus offers up a vision of the fallibility of fines, where things spill over the boundaries into places they are least welcome.

Sine finibus

This chapter juxtaposes Ovid’s erotic and his exilic elegy. In Rome people could visit and examine Agrippa’s map; expansion and conquest sit hand in glove with powerful fantasies of imposing order, control, and hierarchy. In his early elegiac works Ovid contemplates feminine self-adornment. Luxury goods from foreign places flow to the capital, and the city’s female inhabitants seek out, then display on their bodies, the commodities of empire. Once the Ovidian women cloak themselves in the trappings of empire, however, they become one with their accoutrements. In the second part of the diptych, exilic Ovid, just like his adorned women before him, suffers in the face of absent fines. At the very margins of empire, in Tomis on the Black Sea, when he finds himself contemplating first-hand the permeable fines at the furthest edge of imperium, stable, fixed boundaries evaporate, and hybridization and melange take over. It becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where imperium ends and the non-Roman world (not-yet-Roman world) begins. The Greeks, the Getans, the barbarians have already mixed together, and ultimately even the one Roman cannot sustain his Romanness.

Sine fine

Catullus’ poetry reveals an acute awareness of the constant and almost unfathomable widening of his world in the late Roman Republic. In his work people and goods circulate with ease through geographical space, impervious to boundaries. But the cultural notion that only the ends of the world impose limits on Roman territory takes its toll, especially at the level of the subject. The porous nature of geographical boundaries seems to rub off onto the signifiers by which Catullus constructs himself, Lesbia, his brother, his friends, enemies and acquaintances, as well as the places they move through, as coherent, unified, fixed entities.

Painted Worlds and Porous Walls

Propertius’ fourth and final book of elegies also dramatizes the anxieties that emerge when one draws a map. The false promise of order and control, of being able to determine what is “in” and differentiate it from what is “out,” what is “Roman” as opposed to what is “non-Roman” returns in the guise of an Augustan-era map that the young wife, Arethusa, consults in elegy 4.3 and of the walls around early Rome in Tarpeia’s story of transgression from elegy 4.4. Propertius intertwines cartographic fines with the fortified boundaries of the new city, until he retrospectively reconstructs the problem of porous limits as an originary one for Rome, one that does not solely spring up with the imperial expansion of the Augustan age but always already existed at the very beginnings of the city.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overarching view of the book’s questions, texts, and theoretical concerns. It moves from a concrete detailing of the physical extent of geographical space the Roman empire added in the late Republic and in the Augustan age to a consideration of the effects that such an expansive increase in territory might have on a people’s worldview, relying on theories of cartography and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan in conjunction with questions about how Romans conceptualized their world and what light the (no-longer-extant) late first-century BCE or early first-century CE map of Agrippa can shed on it. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the subject in Latin elegy (including Catullus) in poems that turn out to be chock full of geographical references. The book traces the different ways in which, and the varying consequences with which, the elegiac subject encounters the space of empire depending on gender in the works of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid.