Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire 0198871449, 9780198871446

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Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire SARA H. LINDHEIM

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Sara H. Lindheim 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949092 ISBN 978–0–19–887144–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For my family: Bob, Eric, Matthew and Mom, Dad, Rachel, Isabel

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Terminal Anxiety

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1. Sine fine: Imperium and Subject in Catullus

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2. What’s Love Got To Do With It?: Mapping Cynthia in Propertius’ Paired Elegies 1.8a–b and 1.11–12

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3. On the Road Again: Following the vias in Tibullus

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4. Painted Worlds and Porous Walls: Propertius 4.3 with 4.2 and 4.4

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5. Sine finibus: Imports and Exile in Ovid (Amores 1.14, Ars Amatoria 3, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Tristia, Epistulae Ex Ponto)

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Conclusion: The Amator, the Puella, and the Space of Empire

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Bibliography Index Locorum General Index

205 223 234

Acknowledgments As such a long (in time, not in space) project comes to its conclusion, it is a happy task to reflect on all the people to whom I owe gratitude. David Konstan was the first to read the manuscript in its entirety, and to utter the beautiful words: “it’s a book.” My thanks to him for his unwavering confidence in the project, for suggesting that I consider the Classical Literature and Gender Theory series at OUP, for shepherding the manuscript through to publication. Both he and Alison Sharrock, as series editors, offered comments and criticisms that have notably enriched the final version, as did the Press’s anonymous readers. I am grateful for the improvements they inspired and very aware that I alone am responsible for the errors that remain. I also want to thank OUP’s Katie Bishop, Georgina Leighton, Karen Raith, and project manager Kabilan Selvakumar, who all provided expert, patient guidance along the path to publication. The University of California, Santa Barbara has provided a creative and collaborative environment in which to work. A sabbatical year in 2016-17 allowed me the much-needed time to complete a draft of the project, and the Robert Emmons Faculty Award in 2019-20 provided me with funding to complete the final manuscript. Within the Classics department, my colleagues are a constant source of inspiration and energy, especially Dorota Dutsch, Rose MacLean, Helen Morales, and Bob Morstein-Marx. UCSB’s long-standing emphasis on interdisciplinarity has ensured that I also cross paths with many brilliant colleagues in other fields, in particular through the Comparative Literature Program. Richard Helgerson generously offered me encouragement, bibliography, and his discerning interpreter’s eye when the project was in an embryonic stage. His strong endorsement provided confidence at a crucial moment; as I reach the end of the project, I am saddened anew that he is not alive to share his perceptive insights. My first attempts to formulate my thoughts about Propertius, Ovid, and the space of empire were for audiences at Yale and Drew, at two separate events honoring the memory of Shilpa Rival, who was a graduate student with me and whose work on Ovid and feminist theory often intersected with mine. It seems fitting that she remains intertwined with this project, too. I am grateful to organizers, fellow speakers, and audience members alike for

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their excellent questions and comments. A workshop on ancient literary letters, convened by Helen Morales at UCSB, provided me with an opportunity to present and discuss later stages of my research. I learned much from my co-presenters, as well as from our lively and engaged audience. Friends and colleagues have been generous in conversation and in reading. My thoughts have been improved and sharpened by Mark Buchan, Emilio Capettini, Dorota Dutsch, Francesca Martelli, Allen Miller, Helen Morales, Bob Morstein-Marx, Kirk Ormand, and Mario Telò. Erika Zimmermann Damer and Micah Myers provided keen feedback on an earlier version of my chapter on Catullus that will appear in their forthcoming edited volume, Empire, Travel, and Geography in Latin Poetry. Two former students, Randy Pogorzelski and Nicole Taynton, were, at different ends of the project, important interlocutors. A third student, Maria Leventi, saved the manuscript from many errors and helped with the index locorum. Two former teachers, Georgia Nugent and Michael Putnam, will, I hope, still find traces of their indelible influence on me. And finally, thanks sine fine to my home team for their love and support. Thanks to the Friday night crew, Helen Morales and Tony Boyle, my forever-friends, Susannah McQuillan and Susie Chaitovitz, my parents, Ralph and Nancy Lindheim, my sister, Rachel Lindheim, my niece, Isabel Wilder, and last, but most of all, my children, Eric and Matthew LindheimMarx, and my husband, Bob Morstein-Marx, who have long endured, with love and good humor, my obsession with the idea of the map that somehow coincides with my inability to read an actual one. I could not have done this without you. Unless I note otherwise, the translations are my own and fairly literal. The epigraph to Chapter Two is taken from Christian Jacob’s The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History (University of Chicago Press, 2006), copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago. It appears with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. An earlier version of Chapter Two first appeared in 2011, in American Journal of Philology 132.4: 633–65, copyright © 2011 Johns Hopkins University Press.

Introduction Terminal Anxiety

“Give me a map; then let me see how much Is left for me to conquer all the world . . . ” Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part II V.iii.123–4 ‘The map is not the territory.’ Alfred Korzybski Latin elegy, even if we adopt a capacious definition of the genre, has a very short lifespan. Only about seventy years elapse from the time Catullus composes his poetry, now considered elegiac precursors even though they do not manage to register in Quintilian’s canon of elegy (Institutio Oratoria, 10.1.93), to the posthumous publication of Ovid’s final exilic complaints which effectively bring the curtain down on the genre. These seventy years correspond to the end of the Republic, the early years during which Octavian consolidates power, and the rise and establishment of the Augustan age. The changes on every level, despite the reiterated trope of restoring the res publica, are momentous, a cultural revolution. The political transformation and the effects of the upheaval on individual subjects are well known; many modern analyses of literature from the period highlight the ways in which authors grapple with their historical present. This book focuses instead on the spatial dislocation that accompanies the political one in an era that saw the massive increase of territory subject directly to Rome’s imperium. Augustus boasts: “I extended the boundaries of all the provinces of the Roman people to which there were neighboring peoples who were not subject to our imperium” (omnium provinc[iarum populi Romani,] quibus finitimae fuerunt gentes quae non p[arerent imperio nos]tro, fines auxi, Res Gestae 26.1). And yet, aggressive imperial conquest does not start with Augustus. Pompey and Caesar, too, expand the boundaries of empire, linking

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0001

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territorial expansion with the intoxicating notion of Roman imperium sine fine (“empire without end/boundaries”). Let us begin by attempting to imagine concretely the extent of physical space we are talking about. In the seventy years from the late 60s  to the early years of the first decade of the Common Era, Roman imperium expands very widely; all, most, or part of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain and Portugal, France, Belgium, Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Bulgaria fall under Rome’s direct control. Additionally, in these years the army makes splashy forays into Armenia, the Caucasus, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Sudan, Britain, and northern Germany. As Romans come face to face with their conquests—through triumphs, monumental building, an increased flow of goods and peoples— their understanding of the geographical space of the world changes. They experience the extent of their physical world in a novel way, with a newly conceived sense of geographical space. In this book, I suggest that if we look closely at elegy, including the poems of Catullus in our reading, what emerges is an overall sense that the Roman worldview becomes cartographic; in other words they apprehended physical space in a two-dimensional, interrelated way as if on a map. This statement, of course, does not imply that most ancient Romans in the first century  were familiar with maps as physical objects, the way we are today. They did not, for the most part, pore over atlases or illustrated geographical texts,¹ and they certainly never consulted aerial and satellite web-based maps. As we shall consider in more detail below, the first public map of the orbis terrarum (or the “inhabited world”) only takes its prominent place in Rome at the tail end of the first century  or at the start of the first century . What I am suggesting, however, is that the Roman sense of geographical space morphs (more or less, depending on the individual) into a physical conception of what is Roman, both what lies within and what lies beyond Roman imperium. And once Romans conceive of geographical space in this way, the next obvious step is a publicly displayed world map (Agrippa’s map) and the host of spatial issues it simultaneously responds to and introduces. Maps, especially world maps, force us to confront big questions beyond mere geography, in particular questions of power, control, and subjectivity. Maps of aggressively expanding empires frequently—and certainly in the case of Rome—raise issues

¹ See Chapter 4, pages 129–31 below, for more.

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about limits, boundaries, and self-definition. Maps drawn to clarify the margins of empire can introduce complications. Do they define the bounded territory or problematize the very possibility? The poetry of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid is chock full of geographic references, images, descriptions. This is not ornamental; for the poets, geography matters. On the one hand, in a world of increasingly expanding territory, mentions of new and therefore exotic places fall trippingly off the tongue (or the stylus). On the other hand, however, I suggest that we trace more meaningfully the reactions in the poetry to the extraordinarily expanded world. I have chosen the theoretical writings of twentiethcentury French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as a helpful way to tell the story of the deeper effects of massive spatial change and dislocation. Lacan compellingly explains that the subject is a mess—decentered, contradictory, dislocated—that constantly attempts to paper over the fissures and present a coherent self in images and language. Certain moments of trauma, however, of drastic change in the Symbolic realm, cause the fissures to come to the fore. This book suggests that this time period of changing Roman worldview, the seventy years that witnessed the transformation to seeing the Roman world cartographically, is just such a pressure point. For this reason, elegiac poems that mention the space of empire foreground problems with the subject; the subject, like the map, embodies a constant suspension between upholding a fantasy of a bounded whole and simultaneously revealing it to be no more than a fantasy. Most interpretations of the elegiac subject offered in the last few decades engage, to some extent, with questions of gender. Readings of elegy tease out the complex and nuanced gender relations that the poems expose, in particular those between the (usually) male lover-poet and his largely unattainable yet (therefore?) highly desirable puella. At first blush the story reveals a feminized amator, or at least an amator who has eschewed the regular trappings of Roman masculinity, in hot pursuit of a powerful, enchanting, yet distant beloved.² But if he pursues, how active, how dominant can she be? Not only does he pursue, but moreover he is the one who writes, whose voice we hear, who ultimately controls the narrative. So her representation, the ways in which she is characterized (or objectified), rests

² Hallett 1973 offers a feminist reading of elegy and the dominant role of the puella. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a return of feminist arguments emphasizing “releasing” or “resistant” readings that empowered women, for example, Liveley 1999. For the amator’s problematic relationship to traditional masculinity, consider Gold 1993, Oliensis 1997, Janan 2001, Miller 2004.

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in his hands. Rhetorical control belongs to him.³ And yet, as speaking subject, to what extent does he possess full control?⁴ At what moments, in which situations, do his words betray him, revealing more than he wishes— about the feminine subject, the masculine subject, his desires, his anxieties? An exploration of the gendered subjectivities of the amator and his puella, as well as other secondary characters, centrally occupy us in this study, always with the understanding that our access to them emerges from the narrative of the elegiac “I” whose words may exceed his calculations and/or intentions. As the elegiac subject encounters the space of empire, we shall see that the experience unfolds in strikingly different ways and with varying consequences depending on gender. In this book we shall come across masculine subjects caught up in imperial ventures in foreign lands—as soldiers, merchants, low-level participants in political life—and feminine subjects, most often in or near Rome, puellae and matrons, usually adulterous, in one case (also) a Vestal Virgin, frequently dressed to the nines in imported finery. Movement and travel over vast geographical expanses are generally masculine prerogatives, not without consequences, sometimes dire ones, to the masculine subject’s sense of integral wholeness. And yet, although she herself seems more generally rooted than footloose, it is the puella’s body that bears the mark of interaction with space. Empire’s aggressively porous boundaries and the woman’s corporeal instantiation remain intertwined in the poets’ imaginations. As we shall discover, individual poets at distinct moments in this short span of time between the 60s  and 18  each have unique expressions of the confrontation with the space of empire, and its subsequent effect on the gendered subject, leaving us to trace a complicated and multifaceted narrative about the subject in the transition to a new Roman worldview. The story unfolds diachronically and somewhat organically. Before we begin looking at the various poets, however, we need to step back for a wider view. What does a cartographic worldview look like? What drives us to make a map? And what are we looking at, explicitly and implicitly, when we examine one? To find our way into the issues that will occupy us—the intimate interconnection of cartography and subjectivity in Catullus and the elegists—let us think a bit first about maps in general and an important ³ See here arguments that draw connections between the puella and poetics, for example, Sharrock 1991, Keith 1994, Wyke 2002: Part One, and readings that emphasize the poet’s rhetorical power over representation, for example, Greene 1998, James 2003, Sharrock 2000, 2013. ⁴ Here see primarily the psychoanalytic readings of Janan 2001, Miller 2004, Taynton 2018.

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Roman map, the map of Agrippa, in particular, and then move to some introductory comments about cartography and subjectivity.

Introductory Roadmap Go to your computer and type “Google Earth” into the search function of your web browser. You will not be alone. Although Google notoriously safeguards its statistics, we know that one billion people had downloaded Google Earth in 2011, eager to orbit the world in 3D via satellite and aerial photography.⁵ When you reach the site’s home page, various tantalizing, pithy slogans greet you. “Gain a new perspective” and “explore the far reaches of the world;” click here and up pops a promise and a command: “The world is yours. Go explore.” With untold possibilities opening up before you, you will probably, like the overwhelming number of Google Earth users, turn inward before you look outward. Your first search will be for yourself. Brian McClendon, Vice President of Engineering at Google, in charge of Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Ocean, Google Sky, Google Moon, and Google Mars, is avowedly intent on creating a live digital atlas of the entire world, accessible on computers, phones, and other smart electronic devices. Although he seeks to offer users the whole world at their fingertips, he says that users “always” choose to search for themselves first, inputting their cities or towns, even their actual homes.⁶ The map-user’s egocentric choice stands at the heart of this book. When we look at a map, we seem to be looking, first and foremost, for ourselves, no matter what else we might also, simultaneously be searching for. “You are here” marks innumerable publicly displayed maps and directories to help us orient ourselves. In our cars and increasingly as we walk we follow trajectories on GPS devices or on our smartphones that begin with a blue dot marking our current location. Those examples imply, however, that maps serve primarily to help us move through space with ease, and some do. But many do not, like atlases, globes, world maps set up by imperial cultures, or like Google Earth. Even those that get us from one physical, geographical location to another also provide us with a comforting sense of our existence ⁵ The number now, after the release of version 9 on April 18, 2017, must be higher. On April 19, 2018, we learned that hundreds of millions of people had searched Google Earth since the launch of the new version (https://www.blog.google/products/earth/how-we-explored-wholewide-world-google-earth-past-year/, accessed November 13, 2019). ⁶ Garfield 2013: 427–9.

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in space as well as of our spatial coordinates vis-à-vis others. To the seemingly straightforward question “where would we be without maps?” the response is complex. “The obvious answer is, of course, ‘lost,’ but maps provide answers to many more questions than simply how to get from one place to another.”⁷ Indeed, the most burning question that a map answers is the query born from the viewer’s desire to know about him/herself and his/ her place in the world. Equally important, makers of maps, as well as their viewers, possess a similar impulse to locate themselves within a wider physical context. Early maps, and especially early world maps, overwhelmingly reveal a construction of geographical space that provides a consistent answer to the inevitable “where am I?” question posed by the culture producing the document. The map’s response: “at the center.” What does it mean if what one discovers at the center of a map are the coordinates of the culture that produces the artifact?⁸ It looks very much like the results of a digital mapping search today, where the user’s own location provides the focal point as a geographical grid extends outward. In other words, a map is less an objective, scientific representation of geographical space, and more a subjective rendering of a particular culture’s (or, in the case of online mapping, a particular individual’s) take on the world. This is not to imply that absolutely anything goes when it comes to map-making. Each map is based on a series of assumptions, scientific, religious, economic, and/or political, shared within at least a certain portion of the culture producing the artifact.⁹ But it is still a subjective construct of the world, and not an objective reproduction; as in the well-known dictum, “the map is not the territory.” More boldly, “a map always manages the reality it tries to show,”¹⁰ in the process constructing for the individual a (false) sense of self and other in relation to physical space. While the map attests to the profoundly human desire to locate the self in relation to some larger whole, a map also caters to another, equally human, ⁷ Brotton 2012: 4. ⁸ See here Talbert’s summary about the shape of the Peutinger Map, a conceptualization of a peaceful and united orbis terrarum, with Rome as its focal point in the center: Talbert 2008: 17–18. Talbert 2010: 261 boldly states about the same map: “only a mapmaker with a confident grasp of some conventional, ‘accurate,’ representation of this world would have had the capacity to reshape it so deftly.” ⁹ Consider the assertion of historian Jerry Brotton 2012: 220: “To adopt Marx, men make their own geography, but not of their own free will, and not under circumstances they have chosen, but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” ¹⁰ Brotton 2012: 7.

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urge. The map organizes and categorizes the surface of the earth, establishing centers and margins, borders and boundaries, places belonging to the ‘self ’ and locations that fall to the dominion of the “other.”¹¹ We shall discover that divisions of this sort must also ultimately be classified as primarily subjective. But the impulse to draw a line, to mark a boundary, to separate “in” and “out,” and to seek to define the self in a binary opposition to the other on the other side of the delineated space emerges beyond the enclosure of the map. We should not forget that the story of Rome, after all, begins with a wall, a line or a boundary established to separate “in” from “out,” “Roman” from “non-Roman,” to mark off Romulus’ new city. Indeed, to reinforce the association between city wall and geographical boundary, we should also note the connection the Romans made, based on ancient tradition (so claims Tacitus, at least), between the pomerium (the sacred boundary of the city of Rome, a strip just inside or outside the city wall)¹² and the boundaries of empire. The historian asserts that Roman military leaders who increased the boundaries of empire correspondingly had the power to increase the city limits.¹³ To consign this preoccupation solely to the Roman past, however, would be to forget a signature rallying call of the Trump presidential campaign of 2016. The racist and xenophobic call to “build the wall” boils down at its core to a desire to establish a fixed boundary, clear and impermeable, between “in” and “out,” between “American” and “Mexican.” At the center, but in the background, of all my readings in this book is a map, Agrippa’s map, the first publicly displayed map of the world in Rome, prominently located in the Porticus Vipsania in the Campus Martius, completed sometime after the death of Agrippa in 12  by Augustus ¹¹ On the urge to map, see for example Blaut, Stea, Spencer, and Blades 2003; for the desire to locate and define oneself spatially in relation to the “other,” see Kitchin 1994. ¹² Varro conjectures that etymologically pomerium is post+murum or “after the wall,” at De Lingua Latina 5.143. The correctness of the etymology is doubted; Ernout and Meillet 1959: s.v. murus. ¹³ “And Caesar [Claudius] increased Rome’s pomerium according to ancient tradition by which it is granted to those who have extended the boundaries of empire to enlarge the boundaries of the city. Roman military leaders, however, except for Sulla and Augustus, had not seized upon this power even though they had conquered great nations” (et pomerium urbis auxit Caesar, more prisco, quo iis qui protulere imperium etiam terminos urbis propagare datur. nec tamen duces Romani, quamquam magnis nationibus subactis, usurpaverant nisi L. Sulla et divus Augustus, Tacitus, Annales 12.23). There remains debate about whether Augustus actually presided over a pomerial extension; see note 35 below. We should note, however, that altering and extending the pomerium with the boundaries of empire also unwittingly underscores the lack of permanent fixity belonging to the boundaries of Rome, to what is “in” the city and what is kept “out.”

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himself. We cannot examine this map today; it is no longer extant.¹⁴ My readings, however, depend less on details of the actual artifact than on explorations of the map as a cultural idea. Why does a culture make a map? Why display it in public? From what perspective is it drawn? Why consult a map? What is the viewer seeking? What does he/she see? What does the impulse to make a map reveal about map-making culture and viewer? What does it reveal about a culture’s worldview at a particular historical moment, about the way it produces space?

Mapping an Empire: Theoretical Preliminaries a. The “Mapping Impulse” The avid interest in space in the humanities—now called the “spatial turn”— dates from the late 1980s, drawing on a term made popular by Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies, although the foundational text is Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces.”¹⁵ Across a wide array of disciplines, from geography to history, philosophy to literature, the concept of space has attracted the attention of scholars. Their work shows us that space is central, ubiquitous, no longer to be consigned to the background as some neutral or unchanging mise- en scène in front of which action—political, cultural, narrative—unfolds.¹⁶ Indeed, “no meaningful understanding of how human beings produce and reproduce their worlds can be achieved without invoking a sense that the social, the temporal, the intellectual and the personal are inescapably always and everywhere also the spatial.”¹⁷ Scholars, depending on their primary areas of specialization, demand that we consider space actively, that we explore how it participates in, and is a product of, social and political relations, constructions of identities, bodies, and monuments. We should think of space as imagined or culturally produced rather than as (or, as always already ineluctably intertwined with) real or given; there is no one monumental, monolithic way to experience “real” space. In addition, ¹⁴ Pliny the Elder twice refers to a map, NH 3.17 and 6.139 (where I accept the emendation of Ulrichs 1853 printed in the Teubner text of Mayhoff). In addition, Pliny refers in more than thirty places in books 3–6 to Agrippa’s geographic measurements. See Carandini 2017: 482. Dilke 1985: 44–52 collects and discusses them individually. We shall return to the map in more detail below, pages 10–12, where I provide the text for Pliny NH 3.17 and 6.139. ¹⁵ Soja 1989, Foucault (published) 1986, but from a lecture delivered in 1967. Equally significant is Lefebvre 1991. ¹⁶ See Hubbard and Kitchin 2011. ¹⁷ Warf and Arias 2009: 7.

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the work done on space from a psychoanalytic perspective emphasizes the interconnection of space and subjectivity. Subjectivity is not mapped onto a person against the backdrop of space. Instead, space itself plays a role in shaping, defining, limiting, obfuscating. Space participates, dynamically, in constructing the subject, in letting him/her know his/her place in the world.¹⁸ Exciting recent work in Classics has examined ancient literary texts for how they reflect and shape our understanding of space at various moments in Greece and Rome. Greek epic poetry as a genre draws the most interest; questions about whether the poems reveal an experience of space that was “hodological” (conceived in terms of an itinerary) or “cartographic” (conceived in terms of a map) recur.¹⁹ Often, discussions of space and Latin literature foreground the urban space of the city, Rome itself, as they explore the ways in which texts bring to life either “actual” urban spaces (for example, Ovid’s Rome in the Ars Amatoria) or types of spaces (for example, domestic space or the street).²⁰ This book shares many of the broad fundamental concerns of this scholarship about the centrality of the production of space in narrative, in particular the role space plays in the constitution of the subject. Additionally significant to my argument, however, are recent suggestions about the Roman sense of space among scholars considering maps and other information technologies rather than literature to pursue questions of physical geography in the Roman imagination. Recently, Richard Talbert and Andrew Riggsby have argued²¹ that although we do not possess many examples of Roman maps, and, in fact, although Latin seems to lack a noun to signify the item, nevertheless we should avoid leaping to the conclusion that Romans only experienced space in linear,

¹⁸ The literature on space and psychoanalysis is too large to summarize here. Bachelard 1964 remains essential. On psychoanalysis and cultural geography, in particular, see for example Pile 1996 and Blum and Nast 1996 (on the importance of Lacan on Lefebvre). Also consider Hubbard and Kitchin 2011, especially the entries for Rose and Sibely. ¹⁹ Thalmann 2011 sees a hodological experience of space in the Argonautica, while Purves 2010 distinguishes between the cartographic experience of space in the Iliad and the hodological one in the Odyssey. Also see Clay 2011 and Tsagalis 2012. Two recent edited volumes opt for wider generic coverage; see de Jong 2012 for a broad survey of space and narrative in ancient Greek literature, and Gilhuly and Worman 2014 who interrogate space, place, and landscape. ²⁰ To cite a few recent examples, for Latin literature, Larmour and Spencer 2007, Rimell 2015, Fitzgerald and Spentzou 2018. Rimell and Asper 2017 has essays about Hellenistic and Roman literature. ²¹ Talbert 2004, 2008, 2010, and Riggsby 2019. Consider, for example, Talbert 2004: 6: ‘in the minds of most users, maps were only one among several means by which they developed their worldview, and to them (unlike us) not even necessarily the most important means.’

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hodological fashion.²² Just because maps are not extant does not mean that they never existed. Moreover, we should not fail to consider other objects— texts, images, material objects—which may help to reveal complex and multiple models of Roman spatial understanding. Indeed, the evidence we do possess points to an audience capable of comprehending a twodimensional sense of space which reproduces elements of geographical reality (i.e. like a map). On the one hand, this first moves us forward to study Agrippa’s map and other map-like instantiations in order to mine them for what they tell us about how Romans see the world. On the other, it will bring us eventually to the heart of the argument: elegy, literary texts from the decades around the creation of Agrippa’s map. We shall explore what these texts, in juxtaposition with the map, have to tell us about the Roman worldview, and particularly, how they do so. The most important piece of evidence for a Roman cartographic worldview is a world map. So let us turn to our map—or rather, to be more precise, a map that is no longer extant. Initiated under the supervision, and from the geographical commentaries,²³ of Augustus’ right-hand man, Agrippa, the map once occupied a prominent position in the Porticus Vipsania, located in the Campus Martius.²⁴ Unfortunately, we can say little with any certainty

²² Janni 1984, Whittaker 2002, and Brodersen 2003 are the main proponents of the argument for Rome’s itinerary-driven or hodological perception of space. Now see also Brodersen in Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 108–10. His argument rests primarily on the lack of evidence of maps in the ancient Greco-Roman world. In addition to the absence of extant maps, he also notes that texts, descriptive geographies, did not rely on illustrations to assist the reader. Both of these propositions, however, are more complicated than he allows. We must acknowledge that illustrations did exist in ancient texts, but were often lost in transmission (Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 100); so, for example, scientific writings, like those of Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Ptolemy, appear for us without the illustrations that originally accompanied the written texts (Jacob, 2006: 55). Contra Janni, Whittaker, and Brodersen, see for example Nicolet 1991, Clark 1999: 201 n. 17, Salway 2001 and 2012, Talbert, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, Arnaud 2015, Riggsby 2019. ²³ These commentaries are no longer extant, but were used by Pliny and Strabo. See especially Nicolet 1991: 95–122. Pliny, NH refers to Agrippa as an auctor (3.86) and lists Agrippa in his index as an auctor. Moreover, Pliny cites Agrippa more than thirty times in books 3–6 for geographic distances “concerning the dimensions of the provinces and of regions of the world, the seas, the islands” (collected in Dilke 1985: 44–52) and Strabo cites Agrippa at least seven times. Now see also Arnaud 2015: 207, who counts “not less than 32 passages” where Pliny names Agrippa as his source; “the number of times Agrippa is quoted makes him the main explicit source of Pliny’s geographical books (3–6).” ²⁴ Pliny NH 3.17: Agrippam quidem in tanta viri diligentia praeterque in hoc opere cura, cum orbem terrarum urbi spectandum propositurus esset, errasse quis credat et cum eo divum Augustum? is [Augustus] namque conplexam eum [= orbem terrarum] porticum ex destinatione et commentariis M. Agrippae a sorore eius inchoatam peregit (“Indeed who could believe that Agrippa, given the exceeding painstakingness of the man and especially his care in this undertaking, and with him the divine Augustus, had made a mistake when he was about to

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about this map. We do not know its shape, its layout, or the medium in which it was executed,²⁵ nor have we discovered exactly when, between the years 7  and 14 , the Roman public could first view it.²⁶ Most of the little we do know about Agrippa’s map comes from the writings of Pliny the Elder. The Naturalis Historia, Pliny’s encyclopedic compendium, informs us of numerous specific geographic measurements for which Agrippa is responsible.²⁷ Moreover, Pliny twice refers to something that appears to be a map, first when he speculates about whether Agrippa could have carelessly mismeasured geographical distances “when he was about to exhibit the entire world for the city [Rome] to examine” (cum orbem terrarum urbi spectandum propositurus esset, NH 3.17), and a second time when Pliny indicates that he saw the precise location of the town called Charax in the Porticus Vipsania.²⁸ Scholars suggest that Agrippa’s geographic commentarii were the basis for his map that revealed not just the Roman world but, as the presence of Charax situated at the mouth of the Euphrates river demonstrates, depicted the entire inhabited world, orbis terrarum.²⁹ This is an exciting conclusion; Agrippa’s would be the first publicly displayed map of the world in Rome. That we cannot envision and describe Agrippa’s map as an actual artifact, however, does not much affect my arguments. It is the idea of the map, rather than the map per se—the exhibit the entire world for Rome to examine? For Augustus completed the portico that enclosed the map, the portico begun according to the plan and notes of Marcus Agrippa by his sister”). Pliny NH 6.139: prius fuit a litore stadios X—maritimum etiam Vipsania porticus habet— Juba vero prodente L p. (“[Charax] was previously 10 stades from the coast, and the Porticus Vipsania, too, has it by the sea, although Juba gave the distance as 50 miles,” following Mayhoff ’s 1906 Teubner text that accepts an emendation to read Vipsania porticus). ²⁵ See Brodersen, chapter 4 “Cartography” in Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 108–9, where he summarizes opinions on shape and appearance. These options include globe, floor mosaic, painting, engraved bronze or marble, in circles, ovals, or rectangles of various heights and widths. ²⁶ The Porticus Vipsania was built by Agrippa’s sister Vipsania Polla, and was not yet complete in 7  as we know from Cassius Dio 55.8. Pliny, NH 3.17 makes it clear, however, that the project was completed in Augustus’ lifetime. ²⁷ See note 23 above. ²⁸ Nicolet 1991: 98–9. Nicolet 1991: 99 accepts the emendation at NH 6.139. ²⁹ Nicolet 1991: 95–122. Similarly see also Dilke 1985: 39–54. Sherk 1974 discusses the importance of commentarii to communicate geographical knowledge possible because of Roman expansion. Crook 1996a: 71 acknowledges that Agrippa wrote commentarii and 1996b: 139 that Agrippa’s map performed an important service in Augustan ideology. Riggsby 2019: 190 reminds us that commentarii are always notes on something else (my emphasis).

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impulses behind making and displaying it, impulses of which the map is but one instantiation—that drives this exploration. The map is “a gesture of authority, both Roman political authority over much of the land displayed and a more general capacity to comprehend and appropriate the oikumene as a whole.”³⁰ As Nicolet shows in his groundbreaking work, Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, the creation and exhibition of a world map very well suits the zeitgeist of the Augustan age. Drawing up and disseminating world maps, it turns out, is a behavior shared by those in possession of large-scale world empires.³¹ In his wide-ranging exploration Nicolet powerfully marshals evidence to support what might be, at first blush, a strange assertion: “Rome had an empire before becoming an empire.”³² The transition from “having” an empire to “becoming” one entails, he argues, a dramatic shift in awareness about space for Romans in the Augustan age.³³ The ability to conquer vast expanses of territory had long been a Roman specialty, but the inability to establish a way of governing the territory effectively and coherently was one of the factors that led to the demise of the Republic. The age of Augustus, however, managed both to conquer and subsequently to rule, a feat that simultaneously depended on and demanded a new and active interest in spatial boundaries. On the one hand, Romans began to apprehend in a unified fashion the physical extent of the world that was theirs. Strabo composes his extensive geography under Augustus. The princeps’ great summary of his own accomplishments, the Res Gestae, a text he wanted inscribed outside his mausoleum at his death, “can be considered at least in its second half as a genuine geographic survey” of Augustus’ conquests, pointing out annexed territories and looking towards potential future acquisitions.³⁴ A global map of the world, publicly displayed “for the city to survey,” embodies a similar push for Romans to conceptualize their world in a unified fashion. ³⁰ Riggsby 2019: 191. Riggsby adduces as comparandum the world map at a rhetorical school in Augustodunum (modern-day Autun) that the orator Eumenius asked to restore. The map itself is no longer extant but the rhetorical speech delivered in the 290s  exalts its pedagogical value as well as its value as a tool of empire, allowing the students to enjoy a depiction of the world in which they see nothing that does not belong to them. Talbert 2010: 255–9 also discusses this world map. ³¹ A brief Roman story illustrates the fact that maps and imperium go hand in glove. When Mettius Pompusianus had a world map painted on his bedroom wall, he aroused the ire of the emperor Domitian, who had him put to death for his “cartographic crime.” In other words, the map led to the accusation that Pompusianus harbored imperial ambitions. See Arnaud 1983. Dio tells the story at 67.12.3-4. ³² Nicolet 1991: 1. ³³ Nicolet 1991; Whittaker 1994. ³⁴ Nicolet 1991: 9.

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On the other hand, successfully governing conquered territory, people, and resources equally demanded that Romans under Augustus conceive of physical space with new interest and in a coherent way. Though ultimately deciding not to adopt the name Romulus, Augustus goes to great lengths to associate himself with Rome’s legendary founder, ideologically establishing himself as a second founder of the city. To assert this claim the princeps perhaps even expanded the city’s pomerium, its sacred boundary and the line Romulus initially drew to found Rome.³⁵ Augustus divided Rome and Italy into districts or regiones.³⁶ Rome became the primary vantage point for the administration of a unified empire. Documents recording numbers of people and extents of land circulated and flowed to central repositories, allowing for more tightly controlled, unified, and centrally administered record-keeping—in theory, at least. Censuses no longer stipulated that citizens come to Rome to be counted; magistrates in local municipalities throughout Italy counted Roman citizens and sent documents preserving the number to a central administrative repository in Rome. Similar techniques applied to censuses now taken at the provincial level, and increased the ease and frequency with which such counts could occur. In addition, it became obligatory in the Augustan period to register births.³⁷ In a manner that displays a similar tendency towards considering and recording inventory, public and private land was surveyed, measured, divided, bounded, and these operations were logged and centrally maintained.³⁸ The points of intersection between world map, geographical writing, territorial divisions, the recording of numbers of people and their property are not difficult to comprehend.³⁹ All partake of the “mapping impulse,” a drive to represent, to circumscribe, to unify, to control, a desire particularly appealing to imperialist powers seeking to achieve and retain mastery over a large extent of territory, people, and resources. An explosion of theoretical work on maps and mapping, primarily at first by geographers, in the 1990s ³⁵ On Augustus as a second Romulus, see Suetonius, Augustus 7.2 and Dio 53.16.7–8. Also see Ungern-Sternberg 1998: 166–82 and, for visual connections, Zanker 1988: especially 201–10. The question of whether Augustus actually presided over a pomerial extension remains debated, despite the literary evidence of Tacitus, Annales 12.23, Dio 55.6.6, and the vita Aureliani of the Historia Augusta. Though often simply accepted (Ober 1982: 317–19, for example) Augustus’ extension of the pomerium still has its doubters (Syme 1983: 131–45, Boatwright 1986, Richardson 1992, s.v. pomerium, for example). ³⁶ Wallace-Hadrill 2005 and 2008. ³⁷ Nicolet 1991: 132. Similarly Richardson 2008: 117–45. ³⁸ Nicolet 1991: 123–70. ³⁹ “ . . . [M]aps have never been used to the exclusion of other strategies for simplifying spatial complexity. Even in modern industrial societies, maps are routinely used in conjunction with other, noncartographic descriptions of space,” Edney 2007: 119.

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and early 2000s, has opened up fruitful perspectives on this impulse, exploring why one draws, and how one interprets, cartographic lines.⁴⁰ Challenging the accepted wisdom that maps are scientific and objective representations of a reality “that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve in no other way,” historians of cartography now question a map’s pretensions to totality, cohesion, and “reality.”⁴¹ Maps are texts, map-makers, individual subjects embedded in networks of political, social, cultural relations; as such maps cannot escape the fact that they are subjective, constructed products. A map, by nature, requires a choice, a decision about what to represent, and from which focal point;⁴² hence “mapmakers do not just reproduce the world, they construct it” and “a map always manages the reality it tries to show.”⁴³ A map flattens, uncomplicates, unifies space;⁴⁴ it betrays “a metaphysical urge to harness geographical diversity–and often cultural diversity as well–to a dream of order.”⁴⁵ To the anxiety-producing possibility that the unmapped world has “no contour, limit, form, nor dimension,” the map “is an attempt to impose the discipline of reason onto what is indistinct, indeterminate, and formless.”⁴⁶ It presents its audience with the fantasy of a unified, knowable, orderly space with fixed boundaries over which mastery is possible. It feeds and creates illusions of power and control.

b. “To ask what a map is, and what it means to map therefore, is to ask: in what world are you mapping, with what belief systems, by which rules, and for what purposes?” So let us return to Agrippa’s map.⁴⁷ Even without knowing its precise orientation, dimensions, relative scale, by allowing its existence as a “map,” however ⁴⁰ To cite a few most significant examples: Gould 1985; Olsson 1992; Wood 1992; King 1996; Cosgrove 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2004. ⁴¹ Wood 1992: 1. ⁴² The classic example here is Saul Steinberg’s cartoon that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker on March 29, 1976, often dubbed “A New Yorker’s View of the World,” featuring an exaggeratedly large Manhattan centrally located within a significantly compressed United States and beyond an even more significantly compressed world. ⁴³ Brotton 2012: 7. ⁴⁴ “Where real space is an assemblage of landscapes with infinite differences, a map introduces a ruling order with categorical constants,” Jacob 2006: 23. ⁴⁵ Cosgrove 2001: 13. To put it bluntly, maps “could never be ideologically neutral,” Helgerson 1992: 147. ⁴⁶ Jacob 2006: 29–30. ⁴⁷ The quotation that makes up subheading b. is Pickles 2004: 76–7.

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loosely defined, we acknowledge for the map-makers and for the viewing public a shared “worldview,” or an understanding of space that sees places in relation to one another in a more complex fashion than in linear, onedimensional, hodological terms.⁴⁸ Exhibited in a “crowded, public place,” serving neither administrative nor touristic purposes,⁴⁹ set up, as Pliny points out, “for the city (Rome) to examine,” the world map allows Romans to see how much of the world was theirs. Indeed, on the one hand, controlling large swaths of territory can produce a certain amount of anxiety. It is a little unsettling to be faced with the prospect of belonging to a new, enlarged empire that remains formless and indeterminate. A map, a visual conceptualization of empire, invites viewers to acquire knowledge, and control, of the land depicted. Armed with information about Rome’s latest conquests, the dutiful imperial subject can trace the empire’s boundaries.⁵⁰ The map suggests that this fixed, unified space on the wall, this false vision of knowable space with clear and stable boundaries, over which mastery is possible, represents the Augustan empire. On the other hand, however, the map in and of itself is problematic. Setting boundaries, as we have just seen historians of cartography point out, is often more messy than it seems on the surface. Recent studies about frontiers of the Roman empire have argued for apprehending frontiers in fluid rather than rigid terms, thus belying the possibility of clear, bounded spatial divisions.⁵¹ Moreover, the Augustan empire was not a static entity. The territorial limits of the Augustan empire one day/month/year were not necessarily those of the empire the next. Tiberius’ controversial claim that Augustus informed him that the limits of empire had been reached and that he should undertake no further expansion reinforces the point.⁵² Whether Augustus ⁴⁸ “The display value of maps . . . hinges on the average viewer being able to grasp that a map . . . is a representation of a certain kind of space, whether or not that viewer understood or cared about the details,” Riggsby 2019: 197. Of course, this is not to say that Roman map use was widespread or that itineraries were not the most common spatial expressions; see Talbert 2010. ⁴⁹ Riggsby 2019: 191. ⁵⁰ Indeed, as Nicolet 1991: 180 astutely points out, Augustus went to great lengths to emphasize his conquests and keep them front and center in people’s minds. His death provides a nice example. At the first meeting of the Senate after his death, three documents were read out, instructions regarding his funeral, his Breviarium in which he offered an accounting of the empire’s lands, peoples, and monies, and his Res Gestae which listed his conquests. (Suetonius, Augustus 101.4; Tacitus, Annales 1.11.3–4 speaks about the Breviarium, on which see Goodyear 1972: ad loc. Dio 56.33.3 mentions a fourth document.) His funeral procession, as Dio 56.34.3 records it, then featured a parade of allegories of conquered peoples. Similarly Richardson 2008: 143–5. ⁵¹ Here see in particular the work of Whittaker 1994 and 2004. ⁵² Tacitus, Annales 1.11: quae cuncta sua manu perscripserat Augustus addideratque consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii (“All these things Augustus had written in his own hand,

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actually issued such advice at the end of his life or Tiberius merely imputed the idea to his predecessor, this represents a radically new policy.⁵³ Under Augustus the Roman empire experienced, on several frontiers, the greatest territorial expansion since the Mediterranean conquest of the third and second centuries .⁵⁴ If Augustus did indeed attempt to call a halt to additional territorial acquisition, then it was only after a period in which Roman power and the limits of the world seemed coterminous. Boundaries were not only markers of the end of empire at any given time, but also a line beyond which Romans constantly aspired to reach. To insist on the fixedness of boundaries necessitates the unthinkable imposition of closure on future Roman imperial expansion. Jupiter’s famous prophecy in the Aeneid culminates in the promise of imperium sine fine: “I set no limits to their holdings and no time; I have given empire without end” (his ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: imperium sine fine dedi, 1.278–9). The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo in his Geography both echo the poet’s sentiments, equating the borders of the inhabitable world and the limits of Roman empire.⁵⁵ Boundaries always contain within themselves that which will invite an imperial power to dismantle, deconstruct, re-erect them further on down the line. Despite the desire that they be fixed, they must be fluid. In a rather circular fashion, this fuels an impulse to map. Sine fine, it turns out, provokes an unsettling anxiety and thus a desire to conceptualize the physical extent of one’s world in a unified manner, to impose and see the fines. It is important to note here that Virgil’s Jupiter proffers an alluring fantasy of Roman imperium that takes on, within the epic, complex layers of meaning. The god promises an imperium boundless both temporally and physically so that ultimately limits of both historical time and geographical

and he had added the counsel that the empire should be maintained within its current boundaries”). ⁵³ The question of whether Augustus, at the end of his life, compelled by the Pannonian revolt (6–9 ) and the defeat of Varus (9 ), actually advocates a policy of no new expansion or whether this was his successor’s own intention foisted on Augustus at his own accession in 14  is much debated. The ancient sources are Tacitus, Annales 1.11.4 and Dio 56.33.5–6. See now Harris 2016: 55–7, and also 112–50 (chapter 4). For the purpose of my argument, it does not matter whether Augustus explicitly formulated this idea or whether it only became explicit in 14 . ⁵⁴ Gruen 1996: 147–97. ⁵⁵ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.3.3: “She [Rome] is the first and only state recorded in all time that ever made the risings and the settings of the sun the boundaries of her dominion.” See also Strabo, Geography 1.2.1 and 6.4.

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space fall away. Indeed, the Aeneid thematizes multiple definitions of the word finis, thus alternating between, while simultaneously intertwining, various ideas about endings—of speaking, narrative, life, war, historical time, and territorial borders.⁵⁶ And yet, even though the poet enshrines the memorable phrase in his epic sometime in the 20s , the notion of Rome’s boundless territorial empire, including the gradual shift in meaning of the word imperium as it begins to acquire a “geographical flavor,”⁵⁷ has already achieved cultural currency, as far back as either the 80s or, on another view, the 60s . Richardson, for example, in his important study The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century  to the Second Century , points out that Pompey’s activities in the East after his defeat of Mithridates, annexing territory and thereby altering the meaning of “province” in relation to Roman imperium, register fundamental changes in the “mental wallpaper of a section of society.”⁵⁸ Erich Gruen, in his earlier groundbreaking work, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, sets the date for a dawning Roman sense of expansive territorial empire somewhat earlier, in the 80s , offering as evidence Ciceronian speeches, the Ad Herennium, and repeated images on coins.⁵⁹ Whether one agrees with Gruen or Richardson makes no significant difference to my argument here. Virgil manages to capture and to distil into an indelible catchphrase (albeit with his own temporal twist) a conception that predates the writing of the Aeneid by several decades. We must remember that maps do not exist in a vacuum. The impulse to impose fixed and stable boundaries, to imagine a large expanse of land, people, and resources as a coherent unity,⁶⁰ the “mapping impulse,” reemerges in countless aspects of a culture, in a myriad of ways. In “Toward a Cultural History of Cartography,” Christian Jacob explains: The historian of cartography can consider maps in isolation, as self-defined artifacts to be classified and analysed. Or an attempt can be made to understand maps within the culture that produced and used them, so long as such a contextual approach does not lose sight of the map itself. ⁵⁶ See Mitchell-Boyask 1996. ⁵⁷ Richardson 2008: 92. ⁵⁸ The quotation is Richardson 2008: 6. His discussion of Pompey is at pp. 106–16. For more on Pompey and Caesar and boundless imperium, see Chapter 1, pages 28–30 below. ⁵⁹ Gruen 1984: 273–87. ⁶⁰ Indeed, one should note here that recent work on globalism and Roman imperialism also adds to the argument against any kind of fantasy of unity marking peoples and places that become part of the Roman empire, suggesting instead that we consider regional variation and diversity in the adoption of Roman culture. See for example Hingley 2005 and De Angelis 2013.

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       The cultural context of a map might be compared to a pattern of concentric circles surrounding the map. We can move from the inner circle of map making to the remote circles of economic, social, political, intellectual and artistic context.⁶¹

As we have seen, the impulse to create a map of empire coincides with other propensities for controlling space in the Augustan period—census-taking, cadastration, writing of geographic literature, division of Rome and Italy into discrete units.⁶² Let us move further afield. The impulse to gain control of space, the desire to impose boundaries and to create a coherent unified whole out of the empire’s territory and its people, spills over into almost every aspect of Roman public life. Political, social, and cultural discourses in Augustan Rome, rotating around questions of what it means to be Roman, especially Roman and male, display a striking tendency towards order, stability, and fixity.⁶³ Augustus lobbies for, and lends his name to, social legislation concerning the boundaries of marriage.⁶⁴ Civic space and public monuments—the Augustan Forum and Ara Pacis and the immense sundial, the solarium Augusti, to name but a few examples⁶⁵—equally reveal this Augustan desire for order and fixity. So far, we have discussed Augustus and the increasing awareness of the physical space of Roman imperium. As my first chapter will show, however, ideas of Roman imperium sine fine, while certainly reaching new heights and developments under Augustus, begin, in fact, in the late Republic with Caesar and Pompey. These two rivals focus their attention on adding, almost unfathomably, to the space of empire—Pompey to the East and in Spain, Caesar in Gaul, Germany, and even Britain. Because the real geographical space of the Roman world expands and reconfigures itself so aggressively in the 70–80 years that span the end of the Republic, the rise of Octavian and the ensuing Augustan age, I propose to explore what light the poets of Roman elegy, a genre almost chronologically coterminous with

⁶¹ Jacob 1996: 193. ⁶² Nicolet 1991, also Wallace-Hadrill 2005. ⁶³ On the Augustan “revolution in structures of knowledge,” see Wallace-Hadrill 2008: 213–312; on reorganizing time in lockstep with reconceiving space, see Feeney 2007: especially 167–211; on public order in Rome, see Nippel 1995: especially 85–98. ⁶⁴ On Augustan legislation and ideology, see Cohen 1991, Edwards 1993: 34–62, Severy 2003: 52–6 and 232–51, Milnor 2005: 140–85. ⁶⁵ Zanker 1988 remains essential reading. Nicolet 1991: 21–3; 41–5; 171–2 (especially) has much to say about the Augustan Forum. See also Kellum 1990 and Rehak 2006 on the Ara Pacis and the solarium Augusti.

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such vast changes, can shed on the (elite, male) Roman worldview, the Roman conception and production of the space of empire at that particular historical and cultural moment.

c. Emphasis on “Impulse”: Cartographic Theory and Jacques Lacan Psychoanalytic theory, especially the work of the twentieth-century French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, offers a fruitful way to link together the massive expansion in the space of Roman imperium between the 60s  and 18 , the effects such spatial dislocation has on the collective Roman unconscious, and the features that emerge in the poetry of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Rapidly increasing imperial territory introduces stress and anxiety; how does one define what is Roman in a unified and fixed way? An impulse to create a coherent and orderly image under the signifier “Roman empire” emerges. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on this nexus of anxiety and desire which also emerges in the “I” of erotic poetry, and is especially apparent in the Catullan and the Latin elegiac subject. Indeed, in fascinating ways, Lacan’s theories about the constitution of the subject mirror both the strategy behind, and the ultimate failure of, the desire to make and study a large-scale map. Just as the map proffers a fantasy, an uncomplicatedly false vision (adjusted, flattened, altered) of a unified and knowable space with clear, stable boundaries, over which mastery is possible, so, too, a powerful fantasy of unified wholeness, bounded and gendered, propels the Lacanian subject. The subject seeks this wholeness through adherence to images and signifiers that can offer only false wholeness because the images and signifiers are, in themselves, ultimately divided, lacking, and unstable.⁶⁶ The subject, Lacan argues, is inherently fractured and lacking; irremediable division, or inescapable alienation, characterizes subjectivity itself.⁶⁷ The lack of unifiedness in the Lacanian subject, the stress and anxiety this produces, and the impulse to seamless order that emerges render Lacanian psychoanalytic theory a meaningful tool to connect the subject of elegy and the space of empire, the deeper effects of transition on cartography and subjectivity. ⁶⁶ In addition, it is impossible to separate out images from signifiers since language always already intervenes, in particular because images exist structured in and by language. Or, in other words, Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic realms are always already ineluctably intertwined. ⁶⁷ Lacan 1981: 203–15.

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Language (among other factors) renders the subject divided, a proposition Lacan nicely illustrates with the paradox: “I am lying.” The statement lays bare two, irreconcilable “I”s, the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.⁶⁸ Language exists before the subject and exerts controls over her; she emerges into a network of signifiers in place long before her appearance and with which she strives to align herself. Lacan defines the subject as “that which one signifier represents to another signifier.”⁶⁹ But language itself is lacking. Language makes each fixed and coherent selfimage ultimately unravel. The subject desires wholeness and attempts to paper over fundamental lack and dividedness; s/he embraces apparently firm, fixed, unified cultural identities and presents her/himself accordingly, a totality, undivided, coherent—a “man” or a “woman,” a “Roman,” an “amator” or a “puella.” The subject anchors his/her sense of self, however, on a signifier (or several), which, as is the way with signifiers, turns out to be itself falsely unified, stable, and coherent. On the one hand, language’s construction of meaning is not finite; the possibility constantly exists that a new signifier will come along that will retroactively require all other signifiers to shift their meaning. On the other, signifiers acquire meaning through a relation of difference with other signifiers (hence the prevalence of binary opposition—e.g., Man/Woman, Roman/Non-Roman), for which one must posit a complete and closed system of signifiers to which nothing new can be added. Ultimately the subject cannot escape a bind: the Symbolic order (the realm of language, law, society), in which she must operate, cannot successfully define her because it is only capable of accounting for her through signifiers that cannot but fail to represent her.⁷⁰ Although she struggles to present herself according to a signifier that her culture enshrines

⁶⁸ Lacan 1981: 138–42. Theorists of cartography isolate a similar rift that emerges from the subject as she locates herself on a map with the famous words “I am here.” Consider Jacob 2006: 27: “The map allows for the experience of a duplication and a distancing: ‘I am here,’ that is, I am at the same time here, on this side of the representation, in reality, and inside the representation itself, a simulacrum of this reality” and “Identifying one’s place on the map means indicating the place one occupies in real space by virtue of this detour through representation, and of this metaphorical place where I see myself but where I am not.” ⁶⁹ Lacan frequently repeats this formulation, but see for example 1981: 207. ⁷⁰ Lacan 1981 defines a subject as that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier. The signifier stands in for the subject that is eclipsed by language. In his lucid book about the Lacanian subject, Bruce Fink 1995: 52–3 explains: “The signifier is what founds the subject; the signifier is what wields ontic clout, wresting existence from the real that it marks and annuls. What it forges is, however, in no sense substantial or material.”

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as an unproblematic totality, ultimately contradictions, divisions, and incoherence emerge.⁷¹ So self-presentation for a subject, Lacan suggests, always involves the contradictory, the conflicting, the incoherent. Such is the fate of all subjects. And yet, the possibilities for dislocated representation, the images and signifiers at the center of the construction, vary. Moreover, fractures and tension always exist, but some moments of upheaval, crisis, flux bring the decentered nature of the subject to the fore, drag it out into the light for our contemplation. The change in the Roman production of space, a striking shift in worldview that accompanies brutal civil wars, the collapse of the Republic, and the rise of the principate, is one such dramatic metamorphosis. Simultaneous with, and as a means of recovery from, civil war, comes an age of boundless conquest for Romans. Imperial expansion can be a mixed blessing. Tremendous territorial acquisition brings tangible benefits: an influx of people and goods from various cultures to Rome, a mix of identities within the boundaries of empire, a heady sense that only the end of the habitable world can bring a halt to Roman expansion.⁷² It also has consequences. These elements combine to provoke anxiety in the form of the rather uncomfortable possibility that with each conquest what it means to be Roman may not be stable but rather be up for renegotiation. If a signifier gains meaning only in its relation of difference to other signifiers, a “Roman” has meaning only through the existence of that which is “nonRoman.” That which is “non-Roman,” moreover, must be fixed and unalterable for “Roman” to attain definite, clear-cut meaning; there cannot be the possibility of another signifier coming along that will retrospectively change the definition of the signifier “Roman.” But that possibility, by definition, always remains present in language, and thus the signifier can never be fixed, stable, and coherent. To be more precise, zeroing in on the example of Roman imperial boundaries (the issue at the heart of this book), the proliferation of Roman conquest, sine fine, constantly threatens to reclassify what is “non-Roman” as “Roman,” thus rendering both categories disquietingly shifting. What kind of essential ⁷¹ See here the formulation of Porter and Buchan 2004: 3: Lacanian theory “is less a worldview than a theory of why worldviews never entirely cohere . . . ” The entire section entitled “Classical Antiquity with Lacan” (pp. 2–6) sets forth lucidly the Lacanian notion of the subject as empty, something to be considered for what it lacks, for desire, rather than for the narratives it offers about itself. ⁷² Ovid, Fasti 2.683–4, himself offers this oft-cited formulation: gentibus est aliis tellus data limite certo: / Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem (“to other nations territory is granted with fixed boundaries: the extent of the city of Rome and of the world is one and the same”).

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differences can one posit if one can conceivably renegotiate the meaning of the “non-Roman” and the “Roman,” particularly when the “Roman” can capaciously expand to incorporate the “non-Roman,” thus compelling both to be redefined?⁷³ Enter Augustus, who, at every turn, encourages, and responds to, the desire for unified, bounded wholeness—centralizing, consolidating, and justifying his overarching administrative, financial, military, moral, and religious power.⁷⁴ Indeed, as Micaela Janan has suggested, Augustus “represents a desperate and determined effort to make ‘wholeness’ possible, to locate a redeemed and healed subject in a purified, coherent Roman State.”⁷⁵ This is not to impute entirely pernicious motives to the princeps; as a subject himself Augustus operates according to his own desire for wholeness.

Drawing the Line(s): Elegy and the Space of Empire This book traces the responses in Latin elegy to the changing perceptions about the space of empire as Octavian emerges onto the world stage and then consolidates his power over Rome as Augustus. For reasons that I will explain in more detail hereafter, mostly having to do with the fact that literary and political history are never quite as neatly circumscribed as we would like them to be, I begin both before Octavian and before what is technically called Roman elegy in the 60s  with Catullus, and I end by the Black Sea with Ovid, and his generically transgressive Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto, a few years after the death of Augustus in 14 . A word seems in order here about my choice to limit my textual exploration to Catullus and the elegiac poets. It is impossible to escape the irony that one needs, even in a book that exposes the reflex as problematic and artificial, to establish some boundaries, to decide, for the sake of order and control, what belongs “inside” the discussion and what must be relegated to a spot “outside” this particular conversation. While the genres of epic, satire, and historiography ⁷³ Janan 2009 deploys Lacan in a similar fashion to reflect compellingly on Roman identity and its predication on the non-Roman, especially when she discusses Narcissus and Aeneas (pp. 174–9), Pentheus and the snake (pp. 186–212) in the Metamorphoses, and Silius Italicus’ post-Ovidian epic (pp. 233–9). ⁷⁴ See Dio 53.17: “And thus, the entire power of the people and of the senate passed to Augustus, and from that time (27 ) a veritable monarchy was established.” And indeed, as his principate continued, Augustus consolidated more and more elements of power in his own hands. ⁷⁵ Janan 2001: 19.

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occupy the attention of the majority of scholars working on questions of space and Roman literature,⁷⁶ elegy and its precursor in Catullus call out for this particular line of interrogation. The genre, perhaps uniquely short-lived, explodes onto the scene, flourishes, and then disappears, almost in lockstep with a dramatic shift in Roman spatial imaginations towards a cartographic worldview. I shall argue that elegy’s experiences of Roman spatial dislocation mirror, anticipate, run parallel to the ways in which the map produces space, highlighting the problems and anxieties born from expanding empire, ones that the map both tries to solve and simultaneously uncovers. The changing world affects individual elegiac identities, both masculine and feminine. As I conceived of this project, and discussed it with many interlocutors, I became aware just how pervasively issues of space emerge in literature written in the late Republic through the age of Augustus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Horace, and Virgil are all authors whose works show a profound engagement with the space of empire.⁷⁷ Ovid’s fifteen-book epic, the Metamorphoses, may very well be the text most suited to this line of inquiry, reveling as it does in its unbounded nature, its stories that spill into other stories, and its narratives that wantonly disregard ends of books, traditional markers of a tale’s conclusion.⁷⁸ But let us consider, for a brief and short-hand example, the well-known and heavily programmatic sequence of poems that launches Propertius’ third collection of elegies. The poet foregrounds a variety of issues as he sets forth his themes for the book. Primary among these is a significant dichotomy around which elegy constitutes itself. The elegiac poet sets himself up in opposition to a writer of public poetry. To himself he attributes the qualities of fashioning aesthetically polished, sparklingly original, pithy bon mots about love; to his counterpart belong war and the expansion of empire in screeds that rival the weightiness of the subject matter in length and scope. A multitude of others, Propertius claims, will keep track of Roman history, tracing its geographic expansion to modern-day Afghanistan where “Bactra will be the boundary of empire” (finem imperii Bactra futura, 3.1.16). These writers mimic in verse the adventures of Augustus who ponders engaging “weapons” (arma, 3.4.1) “against wealthy India” (dites . . . ad Indos, 3.4.1), ⁷⁶ There are, of course, exceptions, in particular Catullus (see Chapter 1, below), Horace (e.g., Fitzgerald 2018, Rimell 2015, Oliensis 1998), Ovid (e.g., Rimell 2015, Habinek 1998), Seneca (Edwards 2018, Rimell 2015), Statius (Kirichenko 2017, Rimell 2015). ⁷⁷ Again here see recently for example Riggsby 2009, Rimell 2015, Rimell and Asper 2017, Fitzgerald and Spentzou 2018, Krebs 2018. ⁷⁸ My first attempt is Lindheim 2010.

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“the most distant land” (ultima terra, 3.4.3). The elegiac poet, in a carefully self-constructed opposition, refuses war as a topic of his verse—a valeat, Phoebum quicumque moratur in armis (“Off with him, whoever delays Phoebus with discussions of war,” 3.1.7, with armis echoing Augustus’ preoccupation with arma at 3.4.1). The road (via, 3.1.14, a concept that will occupy us again hereafter)⁷⁹ that the elegist travels is pristine (intacta, 3.1.18), not wide (lata, 3.1.14), a path that does not strike out through the physical extent of empire (the orbis terrarum) but remains steadfastly in the realm of elegiac song (carminis . . . in orbem, 3.2.1). The dichotomy Propertius tries to draw is clear. And yet, even as he banishes Bactra and India, the boundaries of imperium and its furthest lands, they enter the text and the reader’s imagination as central to the amator’s definition of self and of his puella. Through my readings I hope to ask readers to reconsider poems, often well-known ones, with an eye to noticing how frequently in fact geography emerges, either explicitly as a central theme or quietly hovering at the margins. We shall discover as we proceed through our readings that Catullus and the elegists betray an intense interest in the subject in relation to the expanding boundaries of the Roman empire. New possibilities open up for reading elegy’s deep engagement in the construction of Roman identity in the period of dramatic upheaval and transformation at the end of the Republic and into the early empire, a vital and vibrant project whose literary agents are often sought among the more serious and robust “public” poets or the prose writers of historical importance.⁸⁰ My observations about the importance of the physical space of empire in poems of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid intertwine with, and give fresh explanation to, a significant line of interpretation that focuses on the unstable Roman masculine self that emerges from the poetry. While the claim that elegy’s subject is destabilized has by now gained widespread acceptance, interpreters can, and do, describe and explain the incoherence that they perceive differently.⁸¹ I suggest that we consider the link between geography and the

⁷⁹ See Chapter 2, pages 71–4 below, and especially Chapter 3, passim. ⁸⁰ For example, the following statement points to a fairly typical range of texts suggested for this type of project: “In particular, there is no question that an alert reading of Greek and Roman authors can uncover much about their worldview – among major ones, for example, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Julius Caesar, Pliny the Elder, Pausanias, Ammianus Marcellinus” (Talbert 2012: 6–7). ⁸¹ To cite a few examples: Lee-Stecum 1998; Janan 2001; Wyke 2002: 155–91; Miller 2004; Greene 2005; Rimell 2006.

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instability of the subject in poems that concern themselves with the physical space of empire. Elegy is where I chose to draw the line.

A Second Roadmap: An Overview Every book tells a story, and this one is no different. It offers a narrative about Latin elegy in which the genre’s various responses to the changing shape and perception of the space of empire in the second half of the last century  takes center stage. My reading of elegy will seem simultaneously both different and familiar, inevitably intersecting with the work of others about genre, gender, subjectivity, Roman-ness, late Republican/Augustan age politics, yet ultimately insisting that geographical space becomes the lens through which our interpretation gets filtered. We begin with Catullus (Chapter 1) whose poetry reveals an acute awareness of the constant and almost unfathomable widening of his world. In his work people and goods circulate with ease through geographical space, impervious to boundaries. But sine fine 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 the subject constructs him/herself as a coherent, unified, fixed entity. The situation has not changed dramatically by the time Propertius writes his early elegies (Chapter 2). Octavian/Augustus, following in the footsteps of both Pompey and Caesar, relentlessly presents the Roman people with the image of himself as unstoppable expansionist. Propertius’ Cynthia takes advantage of the geographic expanse, journeying through geographic space away from Rome and away from her lover. As we see with Catullus’ poetry, the anxieties also emerge from Propertius’ elegies when he imagines the individual faced with an infinite and ever-changing world. While the Catullan subject comes undone, the Propertian subject has a different response, one that reflects the overall movement from reveling in vast spaces towards creating clearly demarcated territories. 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. The story continues in the elegies of Tibullus (Chapter 3). If Propertius in the Monobiblos seems to embrace the desire for control and fixity at the heart of map-making, Tibullus’ poems both acknowledge their intense attraction and admit their ultimate impossibility. On the one hand, he draws a firm line between the lover-subject and anything that participates

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in the geographic expanse of empire; his attention lingers on the viae in particular. In Tibullus, commerce, exploration, war all stand in direct opposition to amor. On the other, the fines between the two spheres seem less clear, less stark than they might be. Just as boundaries on a map are not eternally fixed, but lines to be crossed by expanding powers, or not precisely delineated, but rather hazily defined zones of interaction, so in Tibullus’ elegies empire encroaches into amor, and somehow the two enter into a troubled alliance. Propertius’ fourth and final book of elegies also dramatizes the anxieties that emerge when one draws a map (Chapter 4). 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. Ovid brings the narrative to its conclusion (Chapter 5). In the city people can visit and examine Agrippa’s map; we have reached a time when the “mapping impulse” finally leads to a map, a time when, evoking powerful fantasies of order, control, and hierarchy, a publicly displayed world map clearly demarcates center and peripheries. But side by side with these fantasies, daily life reveals a heightened increase of movement of goods and of people, as if fines were evaporating. The poet rejoices, heralding the capital city as an imperial hub, destination for the flow of all commodities. In his early erotic works, Ovidian women become consumers par excellence, enhancing their appearance, and therefore their desirability in the new “global” economy. After all, what could go wrong in this new world? Serious issues crop up, it turns out, that take on a somewhat different aspect for women and men. After a woman cloaks herself in the luxurious trappings of empire that now flow to Rome, as she must to keep in step with her times, we discover an impossibility of rediscovering her pre-adorned “self.” Catch her before she performs her daily toilette and what you find is an absence. With Ovid, banished to the very margins of empire away from his beloved, central Rome, we get a front-row seat to what would be the fines imperii on the map. But at Tomis nothing is clearly demarcated. Everywhere hybrid and melange take over. And again the self falls into crisis, alienated from himself, barbarus rather than Roman, “practically a Getic poet” rather than a Roman one (paene poeta Getes not Romanus vates).

1 Sine fine Imperium and Subject in Catullus

gentibus est aliis tellus data limite certo: Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem. “To other nations territory is granted with fixed boundaries: The extent of the city of Rome and of the world is one and the same.” Ovid, Fasti 2. 683–4 Catullus is a bundle of contradictions. He says so himself. His feelings about Lesbia, or about desire in general, unveil most clearly the Catullan subject’s lack of fixity. In what is arguably his most famous poem, he offers a pithy but discordant statement about desire: odi et amo (“I hate and I love,” 85.1). He does not necessarily fare much better when he attempts to explain the sentiments that Lesbia, in particular, inspires in him, alternately enraptured by her untouchable, goddess-like aspect and disgusted by her whore-like behavior.¹ Ultimately he ties himself in such knots that he utters the striking confession that he has reached the point “that it is not possible any longer to wish you well, should you become the most virtuous woman, nor to cease loving you, should you stop at nothing” (ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias, / nec desistere amare, omnia si facias, 75.3–4).² The carmina Catulli do not lack sophisticated interpretations that home in on the paradoxical and conflicting layers that make up the “I,” especially ones that consider the poet’s treatment of amatory or poetic issues.³ And yet, while the ¹ The two Sapphic poems, 11 and 51, constitute the most obvious pair of poems to illustrate this polarity. In my opinion, Janan 1994: 62–76 has the best reading, and it will become clear to the reader that I find Lacan the most productive lens through which to read Catullus. ² Thomson 2003: ad loc, suggests that omnia si facias means “if you should prove to be capable de tout.” I use his text except where otherwise noted. ³ For example, see Greene 1998: 1–36, who argues that erotic desire in Catullus reveals “the fragmenting effects of amor on the self” (1), and Fitzgerald 1995 considers the power of the poet in relation to poetic language to construct himself, his characters, and his readers as he chooses. Miller 2004 and Janan 1994 fall partially into this category, but their use of Lacanian theory to Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0002

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divided Catullan subject occupies my attention in this chapter, for the most part my reading emerges from an exploration of poems that belong in the category neither of Lesbia poems nor of poems that center explicitly on aesthetic, poetic choices. My interest lies instead in poems that highlight geography, the physical space of the imperium Romanum, as Catullus conceives of it in his poetry.⁴ I define the physical space of empire broadly to include, along with an interest in geographical expanses, the flow of people, goods, and information from one place to another, for political as well as non-political (commercial, travel, etc.) purposes. I suggest that these poems, in a manner that rivals the poems that center on the amatory experience, present an intensely fractured and divided subject, who cannot cleave to a narrative of wholeness, but rather slides from signifier to signifier at dizzying speed. The question is why the thought of geographical space seems to incite, in the Catullan text, the dissolution of the subject as a coherent, fixed entity. In an effort to cast light on the polysemous subject that emerges from these particular poems, I attempt an interpretation that marries the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan about subjectivity and desire and the work of Roman historians—social, cultural and political—about changing Roman conceptions of their imperium. In Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, Nicolet argues that the Augustan age moves Romans towards a new understanding and conceptualization of the geographical space of their empire. As Octavian transforms into Augustus and establishes his rule, as Rome grows from “having to becoming an empire,” the princeps’ “obsession with space”⁵ becomes progressively more and more pervasive. An emphasis on territorial read the text means that the desire they are exploring goes beyond the erotic self-portrait of the amator. Janan’s groundbreaking reading of the Catullan corpus demonstrates that a Lacanian analysis of the poems reveals in poet and audience the relentless desire that exists at the heart of the subject to fashion and embrace unifying fictions while the text simultaneously demonstrates the impossibility of achieving such ideals. Miller, in his book about Latin elegy, which includes a chapter on Catullus whom he designates as a precursor to the elegists, deploys Lacan to explain the unstable characterization of the elegiac amator, a frequently self-contradictory and incoherent self-representation that emerges from the collapse of the Republic and transition to the regime of Augustus as cultural values and identities are in flux. ⁴ Usual readings of these poems (and I shall discuss 11, 29, 115 below, pages 34–9, and 28 below, pages 43–5) consider the extent to which Catullus rails against Roman brutality, culminating most often in a linking of Lesbia’s promiscuity in poem 11 with the greedy grasp of Roman imperialism—for example, Konstan 2000, 2007, Fitzgerald 1995: 179–84, Greene 1998: 26–36. ⁵ Nicolet 1991: 8.

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expansion spills over into other strategies for ordering space, such as a reorganization of Rome and of Italy into regions and a movement to centralize and classify archives.⁶ And yet, imperial conquest is hardly a concept novel to Augustus. Nicolet himself acknowledges that Pompey and Caesar, too, focus their attention on the space of empire. Both men link together vast territorial expansion and the intoxicating notion that Roman political dominion stretches over the orbis terrarum.⁷ Pompey’s conquests in the East—in Asia, Pontus, Armenia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Syria—not only extend the fines imperii to an almost unfathomable degree, but also allow him to boast Asiam ultimam provinciarum accepisse eandemque mediam patriae reddidisse (“that he had received Asia as the most remote of [Roman] provinces and had handed it back to his country at its center,” Pliny, NH 7.99).⁸ Emphasizing his victories in Spain and Africa, along with his eastern expansion, in triumphs, inscriptions, speeches, coins, and the decor of his theater, that culminates rather ostentatiously in the nude statue of the imperator with a globe in his left hand,⁹ Pompey trumpets to Rome the idea that imperium sine fine is the new Roman reality.¹⁰ Buying into his vision, publicani compete so frenetically for tax contracts in the East in 61  that they must request adjustment downward by about a third from the Senate to compensate for their rash overbidding.¹¹ The results notwithstanding, the exuberance with which the publicani initially bid when the opportunity first becomes available underscores their (perhaps rather naive) sense of a boundless world with limitless resources opening up to them. Not to be outdone, Caesar pursues a similar policy of limitless expansion, pushing back Roman boundaries through military conquest in Gaul, Germany, and even Britain. Indeed, when Pliny compares the two men with respect to the glory each brought to the Roman empire (ad decus ⁶ In a similar vein to Nicolet, see Wallace-Hadrill 2005 and 2008 and Richardson 2008: 117–45. Also see the Introduction, pages 12–13 above, with footnotes. ⁷ See Nicolet 1991: 29–56, chapter 2, “Symbolism and Allegories of the Conquest of the World: Pompey, Caesar, Augustus,” for a discussion of how and when the expression orbis terrarum first makes its way into Roman political discourse, and then into official Roman documents. ⁸ Pliny claims that Pompey uttered this boast when discussing his achievements in the assembly (contio), NH 7.99. Similarly, Cicero, De Provinciis Consularibus 31. ⁹ Nicolet 1991: 31ff.; RRC no. 426 4a, described by Nicolet 1991: 37. See also Kuttner 1999. ¹⁰ Plutarch, Pompey 45.5: “For others before him had celebrated three triumphs; but he celebrated the first over Libya, his second over Europe, and his last one over Asia, so that he seemed in a way to have included the whole world in his three triumphs.” ¹¹ The classic treatment is Badian 1972: 99ff.

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imperii Romani, NH 7.95), he ranks Caesar ahead of his rival (maior, NH 7.99). Pompey, Pliny claims, proudly and publicly asserts his territorial acquisitions for Rome, but should anyone wish to scrutinize Caesar’s achievements (Caesaris res, NH 7.99), totum profecto terrarum orbem enumeret, quod infinitum esse conveniet (“he would assuredly reckon up the whole world, which task will be agreed to be infinite,” NH 7.99). Caesar, to an even greater extent than Pompey, succeeds in rendering the limits of imperium Romanum equivalent to those of the inhabitable world. Between the actual conquests of the two commanders in the fields and their selfpromoting efforts to ensure awareness of their accomplishments at home, a person living in Rome in the late 60s and early to mid 50s  cannot but view his world as extending constantly and rapidly outward. A transpadanus by birth,¹² from Verona, Catullus lived in Rome during this heady time of Roman expansion. In this chapter I explore the various ways in which his poetry responds to the ever-increasing geographic space of Roman imperium; indeed, even a cursory reading of the extant Catullan corpus reveals fairly frequent and insistent geographical references.¹³ It is important to note here, however, that a worldview that entertains fantasies of constant territorial acquisition is not, literally, the same as one in which boundaries simply do not exist (sine fine). A shared visualization of aggressive expansion does not reveal an insouciance about limits. On the contrary, imperium sine fine, somewhat paradoxically, reveals an obsession with, rather than a heedlessness of, geographical boundaries—an obsession simultaneously with their fixed existence and with their transgression. Geographical boundaries always will invite an imperial power first to apprehend them and then to dismantle, deconstruct, re-erect them further on down the line. They are markers not only of the end of empire at any given time, but also the line beyond which Romans must constantly aspire to reach. Moreover, to complicate matters further, the markers themselves are always already in flux. Recent studies about the frontiers of the Roman

¹² Catullus refers to himself as transpadanus at 39.13. Lewis 2018: 122–3 nicely observes that “on that side of the Po” implies Rome as the point of focalization, indicating a colonized Catullus who sees the world through a Roman lens. ¹³ Recently Lewis 2018 and Fitzgerald 2018 both discuss the production of space in Catullus’ poetry. Lewis focuses on three different ways that Catullus locates Lesbia in space in his poems while Fitzgerald links geographical space and the space of individual poems. About half of the polymetric poems (28 out of 60) “feature explicit geographical references” (Lewis 2018: 121 and n. 7). Lewis distinguishes among political and contemporary places in the polymetric poems, archaic and literary “neoteric” space in poems 63–8, and abstract space in the epigrams.

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empire point out that, practically and conceptually, the boundaries consist of fluid zones rather than precisely defined, clear lines in the sand.¹⁴ The constitution of the subject, in Lacanian theory, mirrors the problems with the establishment of physical, imperial boundaries in spatial terms. Just as geographical limits are both sought and pushed back, the subject, too, seeks to lay down its boundaries, which must inevitably, inherently be transgressed. Lacan argues that the subject is intrinsically fractured and lacking; language (among other factors) insists that the subject be irremediably divided.¹⁵ The lack results in desire, a desire to discover the object that will confer wholeness to the subject, a wholeness in the form of coherence and a unified self-image. On the one hand, the “I” develops from a fusion or a sedimentation of linguistically structured images that coalesce into a whole. On the other hand, however, language is always already lacking.¹⁶ A signifier acquires meaning in its relation of difference to other signifiers; “Man” requires “Woman” to make sense while “Roman” has meaning only through the existence of what is “non-Roman.” But the other signifier, in relation to which the first signifier gains meaning, must be fixed and stable in order for this operation to work. And yet, by definition, the signifier is never unalterable, for there is always the possibility of another signifier emerging that threatens to shift the definitions of already existing signifiers. If, by continuing conquest, what was previously “non-Roman” becomes suddenly “Roman,” for example, the definitions, the boundaries of both categories dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a disquietingly shifting way. In this chapter I argue, with the help of Lacanian theory, that Catullus betrays an intense awareness of his changing geographic world in his poems and that one can trace the impact of this historical, spatial awareness on the ways in which the poet imagines the subject in his verses. The lack of spatial fixity, intertwined with a sense of practically unlimited potential for Roman expansion, causes an anxiety made manifest as the Catullan subject comes apart at the seams.

The Whole Wide World: Catullus 11, 29, 84, 95, 115 The poems of Catullus have a cosmopolitan feel. On one level, the poet seems obsessed with defining and defending his own urbanitas, as well as the

¹⁴ Whittaker 1994.

¹⁵ Lacan 1981: 203–15 and 138–42.

¹⁶ Lacan 2006: 495.

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aesthetic and ethical big-city sophistication that his social set of friends and fellow-poets displays.¹⁷ Unlike Egnatius, the Spaniard, who brushes his teeth with his own urine until they shine brightly (39.17–21),¹⁸ or Suffenus whose abundance of bad verses transforms him into “just any country bumpkin” (unus caprimulgus, 22.10), a “ditch-digger” (fossor, 22.10), “more crude than the crude rustic countryside” (inficeto . . . inficetior rure, 22.14), Catullus is a man of Rome, in possession of all the urban social niceties, a writer of witty, learned, Hellenistically-inspired verse. On another level, however, the poet’s work exudes a sense of Rome’s place in a wider geographical context. Catullus and his friends circulate, traveling east to Bithynia and Macedonia (10, 28, and back 31), and west to Spain (9, 12). Products also flow to Rome, like the special napkins that Veranius and Fabullus bring home with them from Spain as gifts for Catullus (sudaria Saetaba ex Hiberis, 12.14) to accompany their stories about the “places, deeds, and peoples” (loca, facta, nationes, 9.7). Not a small, isolated little city like the Verona of poem 67 where doors are most concerned to reveal the sordid goings-on of households beset with adultery, Catullan Rome and its inhabitants, for better but more often for worse, direct their attentions outward rather than inward, beyond the boundaries of the city to the boundaries of the world. The lived reality of Roman territorial expansion crops up in many guises in Catullan verse. Poem 84 is an amusing and clever piece that builds slowly to the punchline of the closing word. A poem about the uncouth speech of a certain Arrius, the verses regale the reader with examples of words beginning in a vowel that the poor man, attempting to put on an air of sophistication, aspirates. In addition, as scholars have pointed out, Catullus more subtly excoriates the same wretch with the constant repetition of the “s” sound. While Arrius is in Rome, he drives everyone mad with his insistent aspiration and his hissing.¹⁹ At line 7, everyone’s ears (omnibus aures) catch a break; Arrius departs the city and “h”s and “s”s no longer abound. Pointedly, however, Arrius has not simply left Rome; indeed, Catullus grants

¹⁷ For example, see Fitzgerald 1995: chapter 4 on Catullus’ performances in laying claim to urbanitas. Urbanitas for Catullus is a social and ethical but also an aesthetic stance; poetic style, in particular an allegiance to Callimachean principles, plays a significant role (along with proper behavior) in staking a claim to urbanitas, see Fitzgerald 1995: especially 87–93. On Catullus’ defining urbanitas to include other key terms—venustus, lepidus, bellus, elegans, salsus—see Wiltshire 1977 and Seager 1974. ¹⁸ See Lewis 2018: 129–31 on Egnatius in poem 37. ¹⁹ See Thomson 2003: introduction to poem 84, and Vandiver 1990.

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him a very specific destination—Arrius gets sent to Syria.²⁰ Arrius travels far from Rome, a geographic distance that requires a fair amount of time to reach, both poetically—three lines—and temporally—a long enough period that the pained ears of those who had the misfortune to hear him converse (and of the poor readers as well) now have a chance to recover. Suddenly, however, news comes back to the city. The Ionian Sea, once crossed by Arrius, now gets renamed “Hionian” (84.12)! Roman boundaries move outward, more and more territory belongs under Roman rule; in the period of the late Republic, the possibility of a man in Rome undertaking a journey to Syria is not far-fetched, but rather one of the everyday experiences that make up the texture of Catullan verse. Not only people, but information, too, flows freely between places, since a message (nuntius, 84.10) announces Arrius’ geographical progress. The opening up of the eastern world to Roman domination gets imagined here by Catullus in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, as an uncouth, aspirating Roman compels the Ionian Sea into linguistic submission. A similar interest in geographic spaces emerges when Catullus imagines literary fame. In a poem that scholars mine to demonstrate the poet’s allegiance to Callimachean literary aesthetics,²¹ Catullus sharply contrasts the verses of Cinna and Volusius. Over the course of nine long years Cinna has composed the Zmyrna (95.1–2), a poem whose glory will transcend time (95.6) and also space (95.5). Its fame will reach the hollow waves of Satrachus (cavas Satrachi . . . ad undas, 95.5), a river in Cyprus, home of Zmyrna’s story. Volusius, meanwhile, a prolific scribbler like Hortensius, poet of five hundred thousand (words?, milia . . . quingenta, 95.3) in one (year?, uno . . . 95.3) and long-winded Antimachus (tumido . . . Antimacho, 95.10),²² will not enjoy similar success. Volusius’ verses will immediately provide abundant wrappings for mackerel (laxas scombris . . . tunicas,

²⁰ Thomson 2003: ad loc. argues that Arrius is probably sent on military expedition with Crassus, and therefore dates the poem to about 55 . There is, however, no reason to assume that there could be no other purpose for Arrius’ travels to Syria. ²¹ There is a great deal of scholarship on Catullus as a learned (doctus) poet with Callimachus as his primary poetic model. See for example the oft-cited Clausen 1964. In the latest companion to Catullus, two chapters focus specifically on Catullus’ Callimacheanism. Knox 2007 surveys the influence of Callimachus on Catullus while Batstone 2007 approaches the issue from another angle, considering the extent to which the programmatic aspects of Callimacheanism are useful to a reading of Catullus. ²² Thomson 2003: 525 rehearses the arguments for accepting poem 95 as a whole, rather than relegating the aspersions cast on Antimachus to a separate fragment.

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95.8),²³ presumably fished out of the Padus (Po) river where Catullus assures us Volusius’ literary fame will die (95.7). While clearly a polemic expression of aesthetic preferences, pointing out, in fine Callimachean fashion, the desirability of poetry that runs like a swift, clear river (Satrachus) rather than like a slow, muddy one (Po), poem 95 also has something to say about Catullus’ geographic world. Strikingly, literary fame here possesses a spatial as well as a temporal dimension. Bad poetry has no afterlife in time or space, remaining where it was originally produced to wrap fish. Excellent poetry, on the other hand, transcends its author, read (and appreciated) by generations to come not only in the place where Cinna wrote, but throughout the Roman world. Territorial expansion through military conquest also plays a significant role in creating the sense of Rome’s infinite geographic possibility that emanates from Catullan verse. Poems 29 and 115 center on Mamurra, a Roman eques from Formiae (poems 41, 57) who served under Pompey in the East, and under Julius Caesar in Spain in 61–60  as well as in Gaul. A scathing attack on all three of his countrymen, poem 29 expresses Catullus’ feelings of outrage at Mamurra’s large-scale profligacy, and at the two generals’ willingness first to provide the wastrel with the means for his expenditures, then subsequently to turn a blind eye to his excesses. Enriching himself with loot (praeda, 29.18) from Pontus (29.18) and then Spain (29.19), Mamurra manages to spend his profits faster than he acquires them (29.16).²⁴ Insatiable, he now desires quod Comata Gallia / habebat ante et ultima Britannia (“that which Long-Haired [Transalpine] Gaul and farthest Britain used to possess before,” 29.3–4). Catullus links Mamurra’s appetites with the extent of territory under Roman domination; both emerge from the poem as limitless, ever capacious.²⁵ Indeed, one could suggest that Catullus highlights this very connection, albeit in a (typically Catullan) hyperbolic fashion. Mamurra’s excesses, catalogued in a series of poems (29, 41, 57, 105, 114, 115), have reached such a frenzied level that Catullus has chosen to brand him with an ²³ See Thomson 2003: ad loc. for the assertion that laxas means abundant. There is some argument over whether we are supposed to imagine the fishmongers wrapping the fish in the papyrus sheets or whether such coverings were used only for cooking. ²⁴ Indeed, Pliny (NH 36.7) notes that Mamurra’s house was infamous for its excessive luxury, the first to have marble paneled walls (Wiseman 1985: 103, with n. 40). ²⁵ Konstan 2007 points out that poems 29 and 115 link Roman imperial expansion with Mamurra’s avarice and profligacy. He focuses, however, on Catullus’ sustained and serious critique of Roman military expansion, motivated by a “a hollow lust for power, display, and sex” on the part of the ruling men of the time (75).

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expressive nickname: Mentula (“the prick”). In poem 115, this mentula magna minax (“huge, threatening prick,’ ” 115.8) has entirely forgone his human characteristics—non homo (“he is not a human being,” 115.8); instead, as monstrous mentula, he is acquisitive appetite writ large.²⁶ For one so lacking control, his estate, even if it should acquire boundaries usque ad Hyperboreos et mare ad Oceanum (“all the way to the land of the Hyperboreans and to Ocean,” 115.6), boundaries equivalent to the ends of the earth, would not provide him with sufficient resources to make him rich,²⁷ since, as Catullus explains elsewhere, the man’s expenditures outpace his income (fructus sumptibus exsuperat, 114.4, as well as 29.16). The link between Mamurra’s boundless excesses and expanding Roman territory turns poem 115’s usque ad Hyperboreos et mare ad Oceanum into an expression of a lust for imperium sine fine. Catullus’ most overt and best-known poetic discussion about the geographic expanse of empire comes in poem 11. Addressed to Furius and Aurelius, defined as comites Catulli (“companions of Catullus,” 11.1), the poem takes the reader on a far-reaching tour of the world that extends languorously for the opening three stanzas, or half of the Sapphic piece. Furius’ and Aurelius’ alleged willingness to follow Catullus to the ends of the earth—India, Arabia, Parthia, Egypt, Gaul right up to its border with Germany, Britain—turns out to be merely an opening movement, a prelude to the serious business of the poem. Catullus wants his comites to speak to his girlfriend; in fact, he wants them to accomplish the task he presumably is unable to undertake himself, that of breaking off their relationship by pointing out, in crude terms, her chronic infidelity.²⁸ But, as David Konstan eloquently asks: “Why should Catullus have introduced this dimension of

²⁶ There is nothing strange in Catullus’ choice to link together sexual excess with cupidity of other varieties (greed, gluttony)—all reveal in Roman discourse a shameful and non-masculine lack of control. Skinner 1979 notes that Catullan invective picks up features of Roman political abuse. For a key treatment of these issues, see Edwards 1993. ²⁷ See Konstan 2007: 75 for this reading of poem 115. ²⁸ Because Furius and Aurelius appear in other Catullan poems, together or individually (15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26), and are treated to the poet’s insults and attacks, much scholarly conversation involves whether these two are really Catullus’ friends or whether the task Catullus reserves for them in poem 11 in fact reveals an ironic twist on their friendship. A nice summary of existing opinions is Sweet 1987: n. 1. Although she herself does not discuss Catullus, the argument Rimell 2015 makes about the retreat to small enclosed spaces in Roman literature from Virgil onwards, enclosures that turn out to be at once comforting and secure and simultaneously a horror, works well for Catullus’ retreat to the edge of the meadow in poem 11.

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Roman imperialist activity so emphatically into this poem, the ostensible purpose of which is to terminate an amorous relationship?”²⁹ The reader cannot ignore how striking it is for Catullus to choose to place an announcement of his failed relationship with Lesbia in the context of a catalogue listing the remotest geographic parts of his world. Interpreters have long pointed out the political overtones of the poem. They note that in poem 11 Catullus makes strong, condemnatory statements about Roman imperial conquest by linking Lesbia’s voracious sexual appetite to Roman leaders’ boundless cupidity for expansion, and Lesbia’s castrating violence to the ruthless brutality of Roman soldiers and generals.³⁰ I would like to suggest that we change the angle of approach. When we consider poem 11, as we have just done, in conjunction with other Catullan poems that emphasize the contemporary opening out of the late Republican Roman world, we bolster the argument that the Catullan corpus betrays an acute awareness that a new geographic possibility of seemingly boundless expansion is emerging for Rome. But what happens if we shift our focus to the poet’s response to his understanding of the new Roman geographic realities and aspirations, if we train the spotlight on the poetic subject in the face of these new geographic possibilities?

velut prati / ultimi flos (“like a flower on the meadow’s edge,” 11.22–3): Poems 11, 63, 10, 28, 68, 101 Let us remain with poem 11. A closer look reveals that neither space nor the subject emerges intact. On the one hand, Catullus draws up for Furius and Aurelius what might be considered a map of empire, painting the contours in broad brushstrokes to present an image of a whole. His friends are eager for foreign travel and the sheer speed of the poem’s movement over the landscape reduces the scale of their voyage. The trajectory is east to west, but strikingly absent is its center, Rome. On the other hand, however, William Fitzgerald draws our attention to the Catullan voice that “evinces a delight in exotic places,” and that dallies “in the expansive imaginative possibilities of the imperial world.”³¹ On this reading, as Furius and Aurelius hypothetically

²⁹ Konstan 2007: 78. ³⁰ See for example, with somewhat differing interpretations, Sweet 1987: 517, Fitzgerald 1995: 179–86 and 2018: 149–51, Konstan 2007. ³¹ Fitzgerald 1995: 182 and 183, respectively.

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embark on their tour of the furthest limits of Roman imperial aspirations, the poet titillates first the ear with echoes of the resounding eastern wave (11.3–4) and then the eye with images of the Nile’s colorful waters (11.7–8). He lingers over the far-off people of India (11.2) and the effeminacy of the Arabs (11.3–5). From the “soft” East Catullus turns to the harsh West, presenting us with striking images of high, rugged mountains (altas . . . Alpes, 11.9), wild waterways (Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor, 11.11), and the inhabitants of Britain so far remote that their modifying adjective must straddle two lines of verse (ulti- / mosque Britannos, 11.11–12). The world, on one glance reduced to a small, conquerable scale, now also seems distant, daunting, strange, and foreign. We shall see that a similar but more pervasive unraveling of fixed notions of place creeps into the poems about the death of Catullus’ brother. After conjuring up adventures across the wide world, Catullus suddenly puts the brakes on his companions.³² Furius and Aurelius, it turns out, do not need to leave Rome. They must seek out Lesbia, and tell her that Catullus is ending their relationship. But the reader feels space shifting again, since she is now asked to direct her glance towards a periphery, but not one already visited in the East or the West. Lesbia has utterly destroyed his love that “has died like a flower on the meadow’s edge, after it has been grazed by a passing plow” (cecidit velut prati / ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam / tactus aratro est, 11.22–4). The poem has elicited many sensitive readings. Michael Putnam’s classic New Critical approach asks us to appreciate the poet’s assumption of the feminine role. Catullus, betrayed by the violent indifference of Lesbia, imagines himself as a flower, a beautiful, virginal image he deploys for the bride in one of his epithalamia (poem 62.39–40). Conversely he attributes to the puella masculine qualities of aggression and potency. Moreover, Putnam argues, Catullus, by conjuring up a feminized, betrayed lover in his self-representation, links himself with the great, abandoned heroine of his poetry collection, Ariadne, left behind by the indifferent Theseus in poem 64.³³ Changing the interpretive angle, a New Historicist reading pushes us to consider the Catullan flower and the Lesbian plow in the political/historical context of the 50s . Catullus compares Lesbia’s voracious sexuality to the capaciously expanding Roman empire as the plow, “an agent of ruthless civilizing power,”³⁴ indifferent, violent, like Roman ³² Fitzgerald 2018: 150 observes that the “imperial sweep of the opening stanzas” aligns with the poem’s own opening up into its poetic project. ³³ Putnam 1982: 20–4. ³⁴ Fitzgerald 1995: 180. Also, cf. Konstan 2007: 78--9.

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imperial power, cuts down the meadow-flower, just at the periphery of the plow’s reach.³⁵ Rather than setting the readings at odds with one another, however, let us consider the ways in which both interpretations intersect, revealing a similar response on the part of the poet. As the world opens up to declare its practically unlimited potential for Roman conquest, and geographical space seems less fixed than it should be, when the lens focuses inward on the individual, the individual, too, becomes increasingly fluid. Whether we choose to think about Catullus as oscillating between masculine and feminine incarnations, or as alternating between imperialist and peripheral victim of Rome’s ruthless imperial drive, both self-representations share at their core a strikingly analogous sense of disintegration. As the poem opens, Catullus lays a strong claim to his masculinity, vaunting his ability to “penetrate” with his companions into India, in a verse where the verb penetrabit aggressively inserts itself between the noun Indos and the adjective extremos that modifies it (line 2), or “prepared” along with Furius and Aurelius “to make an attempt on all things” (temptare, a verb with strong sexual innuendo,³⁶ line 14). He is ruthless, masculine, Roman, expanding his empire to the boundaries of the world. But suddenly, representations change. Before our eyes, his puella suffers a metamorphosis, and as she transforms, so, too, does he. Sleeping with a hyperbolic three hundred lovers at the same time, voraciously enjoying sex, but feeling no love, she appears at first stereotypically feminine, lacking in the all-important masculine virtue of self-control. And yet, by the end of the poem, she has become the plow, and Catullus the flower; she has assumed the masculine role, and he the feminine. The rapid realignment with shifting signifiers within the space of twenty-four short lines reveals a fractured and incoherent subject. The same impossibly contradictory impulses emerge as the poet veers from imperial expansionist striking out to the ends of the earth, to mowed-down flower, at the very edge of the meadow, victim of the very expansionism he just seemed to represent. In this scenario the puella figures first as non-Roman other to be conquered, only to become aligned by

³⁵ Fitzgerald 1995: 182. Fitzgerald, however, goes on to point out that Lesbia’s position in this poem is double and ambiguous. Not only does she figure Roman imperial expansion, but also the very thing which threatens that expansionist power. Her lust represents a threatening force like the dangerous, foreign peoples on the edge of empire, just beyond the reach of the civilized world. ³⁶ See Janan 1994: 64; Greene 1998: 31.

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the end with the Roman agent of conquering power, while he himself takes up residence, like the Indi or the Britanni, on the margins.³⁷ This sense of the disintegrating, fractured, incoherent, and selfcontradictory subject emerges from the Catullan corpus whenever geographic space comes into play. When Attis travels east from Greece to the Troad (poem 63), when Catullus follows Memmius to Bithynia as a member of the praetor’s retinue (poems 10, 28), when Catullus contemplates his brother’s death on the plains of Troy (poems 101, 65, 68), the subject comes significantly unglued before the reader’s eyes. Scholars interested in gender have recently unpacked the fluctuating identity of Attis, a young man who, in the very fast-paced opening lines of poem 63, crosses the ocean from Greece to the wild forests of Phrygia, castrates himself, and gives him/herself over wholly to celebrating the rituals of the goddess Cybele.³⁸ Attis clearly embarks on this poem as masculine, modified by participles with clearly masculine terminations—vectus, 63.1, stimulatus, 63.4. After he renders himself sine viro (“without manhood,” 63.6), however, adjectives and participles with feminine endings begin to creep in—citata, 63.8, adorta, 63.11, to cite only two examples. The poem’s narrator and soon thereafter Attis herself appear fairly confident in attributing a feminine gender to the castrated figure; indeed, the narrator describes Attis with purely feminine forms (63.31, 32, 42, 45, 49) from the moment of castration up until the sad monologue that Attis pours fourth after recognizing the consequences of her actions, while the character’s first-person lament, in its first movement at least, resolutely confers the feminine gender upon herself (63.54, 58, 63).³⁹ Things, however, are not as incontrovertible as they first seem. First, the geographical space itself appears less than fixed. While Attis’ rapid travels begin in Greece and end in Phrygia, where exactly we should locate Phrygia is not entirely clear. The devotees of Cybele seem to be in constant motion, frequently tagged with a form of the adjective vagus (“wandering,” lines 13, 25, 31, 86). And Phrygia itself demands that we imagine it simultaneously and impossibly both in its “mythological” location near Troy and in its “historical” location in central Asia Minor. For Mount Ida (lines 30, 52, 70) and Mount Dindymon (lines 13, 91), which both serve as geographical

³⁷ Consider the adjectives: extremos Indos, ultimos Britannos, ultimi prati. ³⁸ For my work, the most influential reading is Janan 1994: 103–7. ³⁹ It is possible, however, that furibunda and remota are neuter plural rather than feminine singular. At line 63, I prefer not to emend with Thomson, but instead to opt for the more commonly printed “ego mulier.”

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markers, point to two alternative places.⁴⁰ Second, castration turns out, on the one hand, to alter Attis’ gender from one fixed category to its opposite, while on the other hand, to create a complicated blurring of categories. The voyage across the sea and into the depths of the Phrygian forests yields disjunctive noun–adjective pairs and inconsonant results: a notha mulier, in the words of the narrating voice, (“a counterfeit/fake woman,” 63.27), and a vir sterilis, in Attis’ (“a barren man,” 63.69). So not exactly feminine, but not exactly masculine either. The choice of the feminine gender, which we traced just above, seemingly favored by both Attis and the narrator, now appears less unequivocal. The last lines of the poem reinforce the confusion. Attis’ lament about the decision to embrace full participation in the cult of Cybele draws the goddess’ ire. She sets a savage lion on Attis, marking out her castrated devotee with the masculine demonstrative pronoun hunc (63.78) and the masculine relative pronoun qui (63.80). Moreover, as the poem draws to its conclusion, twice the narrator seems to define Attis as masculine. The poem’s speaker reveals that the lion sees tenerum Attin (“tender Attis,” 63.88), just before he (ille, 63.89) flees back into the woods. Some philologists emend the text at these two specific points, choosing to render the masculine adjective as a feminine (teneram, 63.88) and printing illa instead of ille (63.89).⁴¹ But we shall let the text stand with its contradictions, contradictions that emerge not just at the end, but in fact, throughout the poem. Attis veers back and forth between two signifiers, masculine and feminine, neither of which really applies. This allows interpreters to argue that the poem contributes to our understanding of both the Roman construction of masculinity⁴² and simultaneously of femininity.⁴³ Let us refuse to take sides in this debate, however, and instead acknowledge both positions. Like poem 11, poem 63 once again links together geographical expansiveness and the dissolution of the subject. As Attis leaves behind young, elite, male civic spaces—forum, wrestling grounds, racetrack, gymnasium (63.60)—and becomes a castrated devotee of Cybele in the Phrygian woods (63.70–1), we find an “I” who is both, yet simultaneously neither, masculine and/or feminine. As gender stability vanishes, as the boundaries separating ⁴⁰ See Thomson 2003: 374. He seeks to re-establish geographical stability by concluding that we should imagine the location near Troy, although some names from places in central Asia Minor creep in. ⁴¹ Lachmann proposes these changes. Thomson 2003: ad loc. argues against the changes. Thomson believes that Attis emerges as masculine when he attempts to rebel against the power and desires of Cybele. Presumably Lachmann’s proposed emendations reveal a desire for a unified portrait of Attis as feminine. ⁴² Skinner 1993. ⁴³ Panoussi 2003.

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“masculine” and “feminine” seem infinitely permeable, the self itself begins to disintegrate. Like Attis, Catullus, too, travels abroad with a group of young men. Like Attis, Catullus feels a strong desire to return home. And like Attis, the experience of the journey and of adventures in foreign lands renders Catullus incoherent as a subject, a collection of signifiers that become confused and unstable even as he attempts to hold them together and present a unified self. In 57–56  Catullus travels to Bithynia, a Roman province in the north-west corner of Asia Minor, as part of the retinue of the praetor, Memmius; he refers to himself as a member of a cohors (10.10 and 13) and acknowledges “a delightful circle of companions” (dulces comitum . . . coetus, 46.9). Despite the pleasurable society of friends, however, both poems 31 and 46 indicate Catullus’ longing for a return to the familiar after a long journey. Exhausted by “the hardships of foreign travel” (peregrino / labore, 31.8–9) that befall those currently “far from home” (longe . . . a domo, 46.10), the poet emphasizes the joy he feels at the prospect of a return to domestic soil. Poem 46 highlights his anticipation. His mood is exuberant, figured by the arrival of spring with its warm westerly breezes (46.1–3). His feet are “happy” (laeti, 46.8) and gain strength as they move homeward (46.8), while his mind is “violently fluttering in anticipation”⁴⁴ (praetrepidans, 46.7). In poem 31 he is profoundly grateful that he has left behind Thynia and the Bithynian fields and that he has arrived “safe and sound” (in tuto, 31.6) at his villa.⁴⁵ Overwhelmed with emotion, scarcely believing (vix . . . credens, 31.5) his good fortune, he apostrophizes Sirmio, the peninsula that juts out into Lake Garda, in surprisingly erotic terms. After a long trip abroad, Sirmio is “charming” (venusta, 31.12) and “the apple of his eye” (ocelle, 31.2).⁴⁶ He is overjoyed to see it again (libenter, laetus, 31.4, gaudente, 31.13); indeed, in a rhetorical question he asks what renders one happier than returning to one’s Lar (quid . . . est beatius, 31.7). If we find the blurring of domestic return with erotic emotions somewhat jarring, a closer consideration of the effects of eastern travel on the Catullan subject reveals further complications. Once again we find an intertwining of the expanding geographical space of the Roman world with a lack of clear, bounded fixity in the Catullan subject, especially where gender boundaries ⁴⁴ Thomson 2003: ad loc. suggests this translation. ⁴⁵ Wiseman 1987: 307–70 explores the history of the Valerii Catulli and the site of Sirmio. ⁴⁶ Thomson 2003: ad loc. asserts that here the meaning of the word “is extended to general praise of scenery,” and he cites parallel examples in Cicero. He does, however, acknowledge that the term indicates affection and points to this usage at 50.19.

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are concerned. When the poet focuses on himself in the direct aftermath of the Bithynian trip, his self-representation emphatically stresses incoherence and confusion, in particular a strange difficulty in drawing distinctions between self and other. In part, of course, this is a joke, a playful turn of the story for the benefit of the reader, although one cannot completely ignore the less-than-charming manipulative strategies to which Catullus resorts to establish his own power.⁴⁷ And yet, a careful examination of poems 10 and 28 reveals that it is not only the coy punchline of poem 10 where lines of identity become blurred. Poem 10 features a witty recounting of an interview with a friend’s new love. Varus takes Catullus, freshly returned from his stint in Bithynia on the governor’s staff, to meet his girlfriend, whom the poet immediately classifies as a scortillum . . . non sane illepidum neque invenustum (“a little whore, not entirely without charm and elegance,” 10.3–4). Scortillum is jarring, and serves, as Marilyn Skinner notes, to mark Varus’ girlfriend as different from, and more precisely, inferior to, Catullus in class and gender.⁴⁸ Conversely, as we have already seen, lepos and venustas are markers of the neoteric urbanitas and Callimachean polish that Catullus and his set embrace as self-defining hallmarks. If he begins the poem as simultaneously both like and unlike Varus’ girlfriend, the complications with his identity only grow as the text unfolds. Catullus pointedly notes that Varus takes him e foro (“out of the Forum,” 10.2) to visit his girlfriend, leading us to expect a conversation free from the tedium of the public, imperial, business world.⁴⁹ The reported discussion, however, centers on Catullus’ time in Bithynia, as his friends question him in particular on the ways in which he profited financially from his travels there (10.6–8). We expect Catullus to take the moral high ground; indeed, his poetry, especially about Mamurra’s excessive self-enrichment in the provinces under Pompey and Caesar, relentlessly adopts a position of moral outrage with regards to corrupt, extortionist provincial government. Indeed, considering Roman imperialism in the Late Republic, Cicero argued that Rome had a moral responsibility to provide just government to its allies and subjects since “the usual stance of members of the elite of the Late Republic is to stress the benefits of Roman rule in general and the probity of their own ⁴⁷ Pedrick 1986, Skinner 1989, and Fitzgerald 1995: 173–9. ⁴⁸ See Skinner 1989:16: “The diminutive has strongly patronizing class overtones and makes a sly appeal to conventional Roman prejudices linking low birth with base moral conduct.” ⁴⁹ Segal 1970 discusses this moment in his key treatment of how Catullus defies the life of Roman negotium by choosing love and poetry.

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provincial administration and service . . . In particular, it was commonly perceived as the duty of the governor to control not only himself but all those around him.”⁵⁰ Hence Cicero writes to his brother Quintus about the importance in governing Asia of maintaining integrity himself, as well as in his cohors, while conversely he excoriates Verres for his behavior in Sicily.⁵¹ And we have seen Catullus align himself with this stance when he casts his glance on the provincial politics of Caesar and Pompey. Contrary to expectations, however, we discover Catullus lamenting the lack of personal enrichment resulting from his trip to Bithynia. The praetor, who has kept his cohors in check and did not allow them free rein, does not receive glowing praise for his morally upright comportment. Suddenly Catullus abandons the moral high ground and instead launches into a diatribe against moral probity in provincial government.⁵² Because he was not permitted to exploit subject peoples for personal financial gain, the poet disparagingly claims that Memmius does not care for his retinue (10.13), and worse that he is an irrumator (10.12). He repeats this characterization of Memmius in poem 28, when he once again contemplates his failure to accrue financial gain from his stint in Bithynia. In a direct apostrophe, Catullus baldly states: o Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum / tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti (“as I lay well and truly supine for a long time, you slowly crammed the whole length of your penis in my mouth,” 28.9–10). Not only does he now espouse the view, at odds with other incarnations of himself, that Roman imperial rule owes self-enrichment to its governing elite, rather crudely referring to himself as “screwed” because he was prevented from acquiring what he felt he deserved, but further, and rather surprisingly, he adopts a subordinate and not altogether masculine stance, in relation to other men, through the sexual metaphor he deploys.⁵³ In poem 10, Varus and his girlfriend respond lightheartedly that surely Catullus acquired litter-bearers (ad lecticam homines, 10.16), the luxury item for which Bithynia is known (quod illic / natum dicitur esse, 10.14–15). Indeed, we remember that it is not uncommon for travelers to bring back ⁵⁰ Braund 1996: 49. ⁵¹ Braund 1996: 49–52 carefully reviews the evidence in Cicero. ⁵² Tatum 2007: 358 argues that Catullus has a shifting invective voice, performing both righteous moralizer and “compromised iambic reveler.” ⁵³ While he certainly takes on feminine characteristics when he considers himself in relation to Lesbia, this position is contrary to the one he most frequently adopts with other men, in which he is the aggressor. For example, using the same verb, he makes himself the subject rather than the object at the opening of poem 16: pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (16.1). Also see 21, 37, and consider Wray 2001 for full discussions of the coded poetic performances of manhood in Catullus.

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souvenirs from abroad, just as Veranius and Fabullus brought home napkins as mementos from their trip to Spain (12.14–17). Now Catullus, presumably because no sympathy is forthcoming from his (internal) audience, changes tack. The conditions were not so terrible in Bithynia, he blusters, as to hinder him from obtaining a litter and eight, strong men to carry it (10.18–20). But these keepsakes are not mere table linens, and with his claim Catullus conjures himself up as a Verres figure, who, Cicero notes, traveled around in a litter with eight litter-bearers in the manner of the Bithynian kings. Catullus’ intertextual marker “dicitur” at 10.15 points us in the direction of the allusion.⁵⁴ The poet rejoices in his corruption; there, in Rome, for his friends to see, he represents himself as another Verres, dangling before our eyes his foreign, luxury imports, spoils of unprincipled provincial government. Varus’ girlfriend, however, dashes this image. She requests to borrow his conveyance, and he must admit to his lies. In doing so, however, he makes two rather interesting moves. First, he attempts to heap opprobrium on the woman, claiming that, with her request, she behaves ut decuit cinaediorem (“as befits a [male] whore,” 10.24). What should we make of this? A cinaedus, as Skinner notes, as a noun or as an adjective, is “absolutely gender specific: in all other instances of its occurrence in classical Latin, it describes a male subject.”⁵⁵ In fact, the last male subject we saw in the poem performing sexually submissive acts, the sort of passive sexuality associated with the cinaedus, was Catullus himself, the victim of his praetor’s irrumatio (10.12 in conjunction with 28.9–10).⁵⁶ Once again, mirroring the poem’s opening, he subtly blurs the lines between himself and Varus’ girlfriend throwing issues of gender and status into confusion. His second moment of confusion in the portrayal of the subject is emphatically explicit. Backpedaling hard, Catullus announces that while he might have said that he brought home a litter and litter-bearers, he must have been out of his mind. What he meant was that these possessions belong to his friend Cinna; sometimes it is just hard to differentiate. “Whether they are his or mine,” he continues, “who cares? I use them as freely as if I should have procured them for myself” (verum, utrum illius an mei, quid ad me? / utor tam bene quam mihi pararim, 10.31–2). Of course Catullus is joking, attempting as suavely as possible to get out of an awkward situation; on the

⁵⁴ See Skinner 1989: 13. ⁵⁵ Skinner 1989: 17. ⁵⁶ Consider also the comment of Skinner 1989: 17 in which she notes that cinaediorem (of the girlfriend) is an “audible echo of beatiorem seven lines earlier,” an adjective Catullus uses of himself.

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surface this is a witty tale. And yet, many interpreters point to more serious undertones when Catullus puts the woman in her place, especially by highlighting the woman’s inability to read the conversation accurately rather than by acknowledging his own lies.⁵⁷ I would like to suggest that there is something serious to note in Catullus’ choice to blur the boundaries between himself and Cinna as well, and to point out that a similar lack of delineation also occurs in poem 28. In this poem, Catullus again discusses his travels to Bithynia, and again presents himself as an exploitative imperialist manqué, bemoaning the lack of financial benefits that accrued to him for simply being a part of the governor’s retinue.⁵⁸ Once more he seems to have problems differentiating between himself and others. Here he likens himself to Veranius and Fabullus, victims of yet another praetor, Piso. The similarities are multiple, the outcome identical (pari . . . casu, 28.11–12). Like Catullus, Veranius and Fabullus did not manage to plunder the locals while the praetor turned a blind eye, remaining instead an “empty-handed cohort” (cohors inanis, 28.1). Indeed, underscoring the analogous nature of their plight by employing parallel constructions,⁵⁹ Catullus bleakly jokes that for all of them a little expenditure counts, paradoxically, in the profit column (28.6–8). In the end, Catullus even imagines the three friends suffering an identical assault on their bounded senses of gender and status. Just as the poet suffered at the hands of Memmius the irrumator (10.12 and 28.9–10), so, too, Catullus vividly conjures up the experience under Piso for Veranius and Fabullus by means of the same metaphor of sexual dominance of the praetor over the cohort—nam nihilo minore verpa / farti estis (“for you were stuffed by no less of a prick,” 28.12–13). Like the hypothetical Bithynian litter-bearers, described as slaves to Roman masters, so, too, Catullus and his friends, as members of Roman cohorts abroad, take on aspects of the locals upon whose geographical space they have encroached. For all three elite Roman men, both their masculinity and their elite male status seem less than secure, bounded, and unassailable. Perhaps the greatest disruption to the subject, however, occurs as the result of a journey that his brother, and not Catullus, undertakes. The death ⁵⁷ Woman as “a kind of secondary province, . . . the means by which an individual man singles himself out to compensate for the imbalances that have occurred within the male imperial group,” Fitzgerald 1995: 177, or as a figure through which Catullus works out power imbalances between men and women, Skinner 1989. ⁵⁸ Skinner 1979: 149 argues that Catullus’ invective is marked by “lingering undertones of anxious personal doubt” and thus reveal the poet’s emotional conflicts—moral contempt and envy, high-minded understanding of his failure yet also simultaneously a feeling of humiliation. ⁵⁹ See Thomson 2003: ad loc.

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of his brother in the Troad, far from home (Rome? Verona?—a significant question as we shall see), inspires some of Catullus’ most beautiful, but also most unsettling and unsettled, verses. As he explores the experiences of visiting his brother’s grave (poem 101), buried at Troy far from the collected bones of his ancestors (non inter nota sepulcra / nec prope cognatos . . . cineres, 68[b].97–8), or contemplates the possibilities for writing poetry after such a monumental loss (poems 65, 68), Catullus circles again and again around issues of dissolving boundaries, lack of center (at the physical level of home [domus], as well as at the individual level of the subject), seemingly shifting points of reference, the failure of reliability, and violation. And while one might argue that a brother’s death might indeed cause such profound dislocation,⁶⁰ also common to these poems is an insistent focus on the geographical distance between Catullus and his dead brother. It is as if imagining the widening geographical expanses of Roman territory causes the lens to focus on its lack of shape and coherence, which, in turn, dredges up thoughts on the nature of the subject itself. Death changes everything. When his brother dies in Asia Minor, imperial expansions, vast tracts of the inhabitable world now Roman, become suddenly not practically part of Rome—a view encouraged by the flow of foreign people and products to the center or by Pompey’s and Caesar’s self-promotion—but, on the contrary, distant, alien, and threatening. To reach the site of his brother’s grave, Catullus must travel “through many peoples and across many waters” (multas per gentes et multa per aequora, 101.1), a line acknowledged by interpreters to allude to the beginning of the Odyssey, thus drawing parallels between Catullus’ voyage and Odysseus’ epic(ally long) journey from Troy back home to Ithaca.⁶¹ Perhaps still in an Odyssean vein, Troy appears in poem 68, when Catullus interjects his brother’s death into the poem, as a quasi siren, seductively summoning men to her and, thereby, to their deaths—coeperat ad sese Troia ciere viros, / Troia (nefas!) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque / . . . quae nunc et nostro letum miserabile fratri / attulit (“[After the abduction of Helen] Troy had begun to summon men to her, Troy—unspeakable—shared tomb of Asia and Europe . . . which now brought wretched death to my brother as well,” 68[b].88–92). But most of all, the constantly repeated

⁶⁰ Indeed, most readings of poems 65, 68, 101 focus on the outcomes for Catullus of his brother’s death. Janan 1994: 122 widens the net to read poem 68 as a meditation on “loss in love and its consequences, whatever the nature of that love may be.” ⁶¹ Conte 1986: 32–9; Fitzgerald 1995: 187–9.

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Troia (five times in twelve lines, 68[b].88–100), nefas, obscena, and infelix (“unspeakable,” “vile,” and “ill-omened,” 68[b].89 and 99), an aliena terra (“foreign land,” 68[b].100), “so far away” (tam longe, 68[b].97), “detains the brother in soil at the furthest edge of the world,” “neither among known tombs nor near kindred ash,” (detinet extremo . . . solo, 68[b].100⁶² and non inter nota sepulcra / nec prope cognatos . . . cineres, 68[b].97–8).⁶³ And now suddenly territory that belongs to empire, that is not even, all expansion considered, that close to the outer imperial boundaries, is redefined, reimagined. While Catullus is busy constructing Troy as aliena, however, the allusion to the Odyssey at the beginning of poem 101 opens up the possibility of equating Troy with home. On this reading, Catullus’ journey, like Odysseus’, is a homecoming that promises reunion with a loved one. As William Fitzgerald has compellingly pointed out, in fact the Odyssean reminiscence provides many layers of richness to the Catullan text. On the one hand, Catullus’ journey becomes a tragic reversal of Odysseus’ homecoming; Catullus’ reunion is with a dead brother after all, and brings in its wake the destruction of the poet’s entire house (68[a].22, 68[b].94). Odysseus returns to his family (father, wife, and son) and to his community, all of whom, we are led to believe, will now flourish. On the other hand, Troy is Rome’s point of origin, and so Troy for Catullus, unlike for Odysseus, is home in both a national and a literary sense.⁶⁴ “It is entirely appropriate that the Roman should find his brother at the home of Rome’s great ancestor,” and in doing so he makes triumphant cultural claims.⁶⁵ And yet, is Catullus laying claim to being Roman? Where is his home? These are questions that his brother’s death, emphatically in Troy, brings to the fore. As many interpreters have noted, poem 68 relentlessly explores the notion of home, of the domus, in connection with his brother’s death.⁶⁶ ⁶² Thomson 2003 ad loc. offers this translation of extremo solo and points to Catullus 11.2 extremos Indos as well as Ovid Tristia 3.3.13 (lassus in extremis iaceo populisque locisque) as parallels. ⁶³ Feldherr 2000 examines how Catullus mediates the problems that death and burial in a distant land cause by referring to funeral rites in his poetry. He thereby creates, through his audience, a community of mourning and remembrance in Rome. ⁶⁴ In a contrary argument, Theodorakopoulos 2007 suggests that while Roman patrician families are scrambling to create genealogies with Trojan origins, for Catullus Troy is not where his family begins but rather where it is buried: “his Troy is not the cradle of civilization, it is its grave,” 324. ⁶⁵ Fitzgerald 1995: 188. See pages 187–9 for Fitzgerald’s argument about the Odyssean nuances of the passage. ⁶⁶ For example, see Miller 2004: especially 52–9, Skinner 2003: 43, Sarkissian 1983: 24–6, Janan 1994: 121–4. Armstrong 2013: 64ff. explores the shifting definitions of domus in the

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It seems that as people circulate in the increasingly large space of the Roman empire, as people die far from their family in places that Catullus’ poems identify impossibly as simultaneously aliena and familiar, home, like so much else in this poem, acquires an increasingly vertiginous definition. What should be a bounded, clearly definable space, or set of spaces, loses its fixity, reshapes itself to accommodate increasingly different and incompatible options. The first time the word domus appears, Catullus has broken off his explanation to Mallius⁶⁷ about why he cannot write the requisite poem to a man in whose debt the poet acknowledges himself to be. Grief over his brother’s death, he explains, has taken away his poetic inclinations. Catullus then launches into an apostrophe of his brother, insisting: tecum una tota est nostra sepulta domus (“together with you our whole house lies buried,” 68[a].22). Here the poet seems to define domus as the family line of the Valerii,⁶⁸ now supposedly without hope of future offspring after his brother’s demise (although this could be called into question since Catullus himself, potentially at least, might produce an heir). A mere five lines later, however, once he turns his focus back to Mallius, domus morphs into a more concrete notion of place. Catullus quotes Mallius as saying that it is disgraceful (turpe) that Catullus is in Verona (68[a].27), although, unfortunately, textual transmission makes it unclear why.⁶⁹ We shall pass over this textual uncertainty and note instead that Catullus has gone home, to Verona, in response to his brother’s death. Five lines later, however, Catullus once again redefines domus. He is currently in Verona, he explains to Mallius, and therefore cannot produce poetry. While earlier this was because his brother’s death had stripped all artistic inspiration from him, the poet now alters his explanation Catullan collection. Gardner 2010 argues that Tibullus and Propertius also work to redefine the meaning of the word domus, but that they do so in the face of Augustan social reforms. ⁶⁷ There is a great deal of scholarship about whether poem 68 actually is a unified whole or whether it should be read as two (sometimes even three) separate poems. Depending on one’s position on unity/disunity, one also believes that Mallius/Allius, the addressee(s), are one person or two. Janan 1994: 113–14 with n. 26 is a very full treatment of the issues; Theodorakopoulos 2007: 315–16, Skinner 2003: 40–4 also provide summaries of the arguments. See also Thomson 2003: 472–4. I prefer the argument that poem 68 is made of two parts to form a (problematically unified) “whole”: 68[a] 1–40 and 68[b] 41–160. ⁶⁸ Janan 1994: 115, 118. ⁶⁹ The lack of clarity hinges on how one reads the word hic in line 28. If we hear the words of Mallius quoted by Catullus, then hic is Rome and the disgrace arises from the many well-born lovers that Lesbia is enjoying while Catullus is absent. If hic is Catullus’ referent, then it signifies Verona, and the disgrace arises from the prudish, stereotypical behavior of provincial men who seem to abstain from sex. See Skinner 2003: 147–8.

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somewhat.⁷⁰ He lacks books—scriptorum non magna est copia apud me (“there is no great abundance of writings at my house,” 68[a].33); only one case, out of many, followed him to Verona (huc una ex multis capsula me sequitur, 68[a].36). And yet surely Catullus does not require a full library of texts to produce a poem. A second glance at the passage reveals a greater problem; he is not at home. The reason for lacking his library (hoc fit, 68 [a].34), he clarifies for his audience, is that: “I live in Rome,” (quod Romae vivimus, 68[a].34). Rome, he continues, is his domus (68[a].34), his sedes (“seat,” 68[a].35), where he spends his time (mea carpitur aetas, 68[a].35), and, perhaps most importantly, where he keeps his library. If the location of Catullus’s domus seems to shift—Verona? Rome? Troy?—what the word signifies remains similarly elusive. So far we have traced the word’s usage to refer to his family residence, his house and library in Rome, and the family line of the Valerii. The word, however, appears twice more in the short space of this spiraling poem, and each time its definition alters slightly. After announcing that he is currently incapable of poetic creation, the poet performs a seemingly abrupt volte-face and begins singing the praises of Allius. The man deserves immortality in Catullan verse because at a time when the poet was suffering with love, Allius “opened up a closed field by means of a wide path” (clausum lato patefecit limite campum, 68[b].67) and offered the poet a domum (68[b].68), here an actual dwelling in which he can spend time with his beloved. The metaphor of the field is somewhat jarring. We learn later in the poem, when the word domus comes up a second time to refer to the physical house that Allius provided (68 [b].144),⁷¹ that the beloved is married and thus the affair with Catullus (and also with other lovers, 68[b].135ff.) is adulterous. Is she then the “field,” property of another, formerly closed off to Catullus?⁷² Yes, in a way, but the metaphor also serves to bring to the fore questions of space and (violated) boundaries and to link these explicitly with Troy.

⁷⁰ Some interpreters argue that Mallius is making two requests, one for sexual favors and another for poetry. In this scenario, lines 15–30 constitute Catullus’ explanation for not providing munera Veneris, and in line 30 he changes course to clarify why he cannot also provide munera Musarum; see Thomson 2003: ad loc, for example. It seems more likely, however, that Mallius is referring to love poetry vel sim (Skinner 2003: 146–53). ⁷¹ Skinner 2003: 143 describes the domus as the “controlling symbol” of poem 68[b]. Lewis 2018: 134 notes that Catullus “never locates [Allius’ house] in contemporary space,” granting it thereby “no anchor in time and place.” ⁷² Skinner 2003: 44: “We must bear in mind that the closed field was another man’s private property.”

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      

As Allius offers a path through a formerly enclosed field, he allows for the crossing of a previously established boundary. This opens the floodgates. Catullus’ beloved immediately appears on the scene, deliberately emphasizing her transgression of the boundary of the domus that Allius presents by stepping rather ominously with her “shining foot” (fulgentem plantam, 68 [b].71) in a “squeaky sandal” (arguta solea, 68[b].72) on the very threshold (in limine, 68[b].71) as she crosses it.⁷³ Catullus launches into a simile to capture the moment; she is like Laodamia, who “burning with love for her husband” (coniugis . . . flagrans . . . amore, 68[b].73) comes to Protesilaus’ house (domum, 68[b].74). Here begins one of the densest, most confusing parts of the poem, as Catullus slides from simile to simile, comparison to comparison, image to image, leaving the reader scrambling to connect the dots. Indeed, several recent interpretations of this poem argue that a successful exploration of 68 requires a careful analysis of the similes and analogies that dominate the verses. Readers often remark on a sharp contrast between the surface linguistic order and structure of the simile’s overt alignment (x is like y) and the baffling confusion the images actually create (x looks suspiciously like z instead, and also maybe like something else altogether).⁷⁴ The comparisons that keep threatening to run off course enhance the boundless or unbounded identities of the various subjects and locations in the poem and seem profoundly intertwined with issues of geographical space. From Laodamia’s ill-omened marriage, we move swiftly to the plains of Troy where Protesilaus is the first Greek to die in the war. The mythical story segues into the death of Catullus’ brother, which we discussed above (68 [b].87ff.).⁷⁵ Returning to Laodamia, Catullus compares her despair and also her love to the barathrum (“drainage ditch,” 68[b].108; 117) that Hercules “is once said to have dug in the dark innards of a mountain” (quondam caesis montis fodisse medullis / audit, 68[b].111–12). Breaking down these natural boundaries, in conjunction with his famous labors, which, in this poem are reduced to a single iteration, the episode of killing the Stymphalian ⁷³ Sarkissian 1983: 17 points out that Lesbia’s ill-omened step on the threshold introduces a sinister element into a scene that otherwise seems to replicate a wedding ritual. On marriage imagery, see Quinn 1970: ad loc. See also Fitzgerald 1995: 208. ⁷⁴ Here see Feeney 1992 and consider his claim that “this dense and bizarre barrage of analogy leaves one with the sensation that similes are no added ornament to the poem, something additional to what the poem is saying. They are the poem, they are what the poem is saying” (35, emphasis his). Also consider Kennedy 1999 in response to Feeney; Janan 1994: 124ff; Miller 2004: 36–50; Theodorakopoulos 2007: 323–7; Oliensis 2009: 49–54. ⁷⁵ See pages 45–8 above.

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birds “at the behest of an inferior master” (imperio deterioris eri, 68[b].114), Hercules transitions from mortal to immortal by crossing the threshold of Olympus and receiving Hebe’s virginity as his prize (68[b].115–16). By my count, three boundaries—human/divine, physical, and bodily—are transgressed in two lines, although with the repetition of markers denoting the “Alexandrian footnote” in ferunt (“they say,” 68[b].109) and audit (“is said to,” 68[b].112),⁷⁶ it is likely that textual boundaries are also being infringed. The poem continues, but let us stop here momentarily to take stock. Not just his brother’s death, but his brother’s death in Troy, has caused Catullus to come unmoored. While Troy slides between point of origin and aliena, Catullus can no longer pin down a single, coherent meaning or location for domus. Once we recognize the slippery nature of the signifier where domus is concerned,⁷⁷ we notice that the dislocation does not end there. Each comparison that Catullus offers up confuses, rather than illuminates, the picture. Individuals meld into one another, even (and especially) across gender lines. Protesilaus, like Catullus’ brother, died at Troy; Laodamia grieves the death of her husband with almost boundless sorrow, as Catullus seems inconsolable because of the loss of his brother, who assumes the role of (lost) loved one (like Lesbia?).⁷⁸ So far, so good, but Laodamia arriving at Protesilaus’ house as a bride also appears as a doublet for Lesbia, a candida diva (“shining goddess,” 68[b].70) as she crosses the threshold to the house that Allius provides for her assignation with Catullus, and looks suspiciously, for a moment at least, like Hebe awaiting the deification of Hercules to receive her husband (68[b].115–16). Momentarily Catullus resembles Hercules, but then Catullus, awaiting the arrival of the beloved in the domus lent to him by Allius, also fleetingly resembles Protesilaus, and more lastingly, Hebe. Moreover, in yet another comparison, we learn that Laodamia surpasses the wanton-yet-monogamous dove in her passion for her husband, while Catullus’ beloved yields “nothing or little” (aut nihil aut paulo, 68[b].131) to the heroine in her yearning for the poet. Immediately thereafter, however, it is Catullus’ desire, and not Lesbia’s, that resembles Laodamia’s most closely. Identifications remain unstable as Catullus ⁷⁶ See Thomson 2003: ad loc. ⁷⁷ Here consider the elegant formulation of Miller 2004: 59: “The slippage with regard to domus reveals a gap between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, as each Symbolic marker is emptied of meaning by a subsequent identification with a different version of the same term.” ⁷⁸ Protesilaus’ lack of reciprocal passion, in stark comparison with Laodamia’s desire, and his departure to Troy without a backwards glance replicate some of Lesbia’s hallmark traits, which we can see through verbal and behavioral resemblances found in Catullus’ Lesbia poems, Janan 1994: 124–5.

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acknowledges that Lesbia, like Jupiter, engages in adultery, while he, like Juno, must swallow his anger (68[b].138–40).⁷⁹ We must acknowledge, then, that the brother’s geographically distant death, a central driving force of poem 68, brings in its wake a dissolution of boundaries, a lack of stability and fixedness on almost every level of the text. Signifiers, comparisons, subjects, and perhaps most significantly physical space and geographical place spiral together until they seemingly intertwine and then blend again, in yet different combinations—sine fine. Ultimately, no boundary is safe, unbreachable. The poem moves towards its conclusion when, after a long, winding digression through the stories of Laodamia and Hercules, it returns abruptly to Lesbia standing like a goddess on the threshold. Once again Catullus evokes wedding imagery as she advances towards the poet’s gremium (68[b].132) accompanied by a divinity wearing yellow (68[b].134). And yet, the god turns out to be Cupid and not Hymenaeus, and the candida diva turns out to be not only not Catullus’ bride, but also not Catullus’ mistress alone. The pleasures she grants him, he confesses, are snatched ex ipso gremio (“from the very lap,” 68[b].146) of her lawful husband, and these pleasures, it turns out, she shares with others, too (68[b].135). At the end of the poem, Catullus’ emphasis falls on the gremium, a place that is by definition⁸⁰ meant to be safe, enclosed, bounded but that has become almost infinitely infringed and transgressable. Indeed, as William Fitzgerald has perceptively noted, the repetition of the word gremium as the poem concludes draws the reader back, in ring composition, to poem 65.⁸¹ An argument for deliberate, aesthetic ordering of the Catullan carmina suggests that poems 65–8 form a discrete sub-unit, in which poems 65 and 66 mirror the movement of the poet in 68[a] and [b] from refusal to write poetry because of grief over his brother’s death to the production, nonetheless, of some verses. Poem 67, then, stands in between these two sets of pairs. To summarize Fitzgerald’s argument briefly, Catullus claims in poem 65 that his loss stifles all poetic creativity, but he offers his own version of Callimachus’ “Lock of Berenice” (poem 66) in order to prove that Hortalus’

⁷⁹ Much of the scholarship on poem 68 considers the varying similarities between the characters. See for example Miller 2004: 45ff., Janan 1994: 115–42, Sarkissian 1983: 18ff, Skinner 2003: 153ff., Feeney 1992, Kennedy 1999: especially 38–41. Miller 2004: 44–50 adds a whole, other allusive subtext, mapping an intertextual reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon onto Catullus and his beloved at the domus provided by Allius. He thereby introduces a new series of similarities for the characters to inhabit. See also Gale 2012. ⁸⁰ OLD, s.v. 2. ⁸¹ Fitzgerald 1995: 189–96 and 207–11.

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request for verses has not slipped from his mind “as an apple, sent as a secret gift by her betrothed, rolls out of the chaste lap of a maiden, an apple which, placed under the fine dress of the poor, forgetful girl, is shaken out when she leaps up at the arrival of her mother” (ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum / procurrit casto virginis e gremio, / quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatum, / dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur, 65.19–22). The gremium here and again in poem 68, argues Fitzgerald, is “unreliable, unretentive, robbed and violated,” and he connects the anxiety over the gremium with anxieties that this group of Catullan poems displays about the possibilities of poetic expression in the wake of a brother’s death.⁸² I want to suggest an additional meaning for the recurring image of the transgressed gremium that also does not keep safe, as it should, that which is entrusted to it. As we have seen, in poem 65 and in 68[a] and [b], the poet links the unbounded gremium not simply with his brother’s death, but more precisely with his brother’s death at Troy. In poem 65, the poet claims that the “Trojan land beneath the Rhoetean shore” keeps his brother forever from him (Troia Rhoeteo . . . subter litore tellus, 65.7), emphasizing both his loss and the geographical distance at which it occurred. The anxiety the unbounded gremium betrays is yet another expression of Catullan anxiety about imperium sine fine. Indeed, gremium can mean the heart or the bosom of a country.⁸³ Cicero, for example, in the Pro Caelio, when lamenting the death of Quintus Metellus Celer, so devoted to the Senate, the Republic, and the state, “who considered himself born to the service of the empire” (qui se natum huic imperio putavit, 59.4–5) bemoans that the great man was snatched e sinu gremioque patriae (“from the embrace and bosom of the homeland,” 59.4).⁸⁴ In the Ciceronian examples, too, the gremium is set up as a place that should be safe, enclosed, bounded, but is not. I do not mean to argue that Catullus is explicitly conflating the gremium imperii with the gremium of the maiden, of the husband, or even his own. Rather, the violated boundaries of the gremium in Catullus, along with all the other breaches of categories and boundaries in the poems about his brother’s death at Troy, indicate the poet’s anxious response to his new Roman reality. As the world opens up, as the fines once set up as the boundaries of ⁸² This is the over-arching argument of Fitzgerald 1995: 85–211. ⁸³ OLD, s.v. 4. ⁸⁴ This example is not chosen at random. Quintus Metellus Celer was the husband of Clodia, often identified as the “real” woman behind Catullus’ Lesbia. Cicero again deploys the image in De Provinciis Consularibus when he worries that the people of Thessalonica, even though they are positi in gremio imperii nostri (“established in the very heart of our imperium,” 4.8), are compelled to leave their city when attacked by barbarians.

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imperium Romanum become imagined lines beyond which Romans constantly aspired to reach, as goods and people circulate through geographical space with increasing ease, as if tangible proof of the porous nature of boundaries, all spaces and identities, previously considered securely bounded, begin to unravel at the edges.

Conclusion: Usque ad Hyperboreos et mare ad Oceanum (“all the way to the Hyperboreans and Ocean,” 115.6) The geographical focus of Catullus’ poetry resonates within the historical, political, cultural contexts of the Late Republic, as Caesar and Pompey compete for Roman hearts and minds, seeking to capture the title of most prolific and successful extender of the fines imperii (“boundaries of empire”). As the two great men focus the capital’s attention on the space of Roman empire, capacious and relentlessly increasing, Catullan verse celebrates Rome’s place in the center of this growing territorial expanse. People travel, have adventures, and return to Rome—Catullus’ home (Romae vivimus, 68 [a].34)—with stories, with luxury items. Indeed, as T. P. Wiseman notes, “whenever [Catullus] mentions faraway places (and he does it quite a lot) his instinct is to allude . . . to their produce—silphium from Cyrene, oysters from Lampsacus, boxwood from Cytorus, grain (probably) from Africa, rabbits, dyed linen and gold from Spain.”⁸⁵ News circulates and so does poetic fame, especially for and among the urbane set. Already, before Virgil has even enunciated it, we feel the heady geographical possibilities present in the triumphant prophecy of Jupiter—imperium sine fine dedi (“I have allotted to them empire without end,” Aeneid 1.279). But look a little closer and a bleaker, less celebratory sense creeps in. Sine fine is a poetic, prophetic formulation, not a real option. On further consideration, the statement implies an endless chain of boundaries established and then transgressed ad infinitum to some hyperbolic end of the world— usque ad Hyperboreos et mare ad Oceanum (115.6). Roman geographical space, in this formulation, appears infinite, formless, and ever changing. On some level, at least, this is an anxiety-provoking proposition; human beings like both control and coherent definition. Catullus marks the first step as we unpack a Roman cartographic world view through our texts. As we shall see,

⁸⁵ Wiseman 1985: 99–100.

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in the age of Augustus, as the world continues to open up, as the fines once set up as the boundaries of imperium Romanum become imagined lines beyond which Romans constantly and aggressively aspired to reach, measures of all sorts are put into place to regulate and control geographical space.⁸⁶ This impetus to assert control culminates in a world map, a device that provides a visual conceptualization of empire, inviting viewers to acquire knowledge and mastery over the land, depicted with fixed, stable boundaries and as a coherent unit.⁸⁷ The elegiac poets, each in his own way, reflect the anxieties and uncertainties of their times, as well as the overarching impulse toward order. In the 50s , however, Agrippa’s map and the impulses to erect it lie in the future. What we see in Catullus is a response to the dawning spatial conception that Roman imperium stretches with newly capacious boundaries throughout the inhabitable world. In his poetry, goods and people circulate through geographical space, often with devastating consequences, always with increasing ease, quasitangible proof of the porous nature of geographical boundaries. In the face of these geographical realities, signifiers, genders, identities, all ways by which the subject constructs itself as a coherent, unified entity for itself and for the world, suddenly seem equally precarious. As Furius and Aurelius turn away from contemplating the furthest limits of Roman imperial aspirations to focus their attention on Lesbia in the city itself, as Attis moves from Greece to Asia Minor, as Catullus travels from Bithynia to Rome, as his brother perishes at Troy, gendered subjects make manifest the spatial dislocation. Lesbia and Catullus both, in tandem, oscillate between masculinity and femininity, alternating between masculine images (e.g., of the plow, the committed imperialist, the Greek hero, Hercules, Jupiter himself) and feminine ones (e.g., the flower at the meadow’s edge, Hebe, Laodamia, Juno). Separate from Lesbia, in the aftermath of his own journeys, Catullus’ identity blurs the lines between feminine and masculine. Attis, too, obscures fixed gender categories, both a notha mulier (63.27) and a vir sterilis (63.69), whose descriptive adjectives employ both masculine and feminine endings. Simultaneously, spaces—the domus, Rome, Verona, Troy—and selves—Catullus’ own, his brother’s, his friends’, Lesbia’s, his other poetic characters’—begin to unravel at the edges, blurring with other spaces and selves, ever changing, and with ever-shifting boundaries. ⁸⁶ For example, census-taking, cadastration, writing of geographic literature, division of Rome and Italy into discrete units. See the Introduction, pages 11–14 above. ⁸⁷ See the Introduction for a fuller discussion about cartography in general and scholarship about Agrippa’s map in particular, pages 5–18 above.

2 What’s Love Got To Do With It? Mapping Cynthia in Propertius’ Paired Elegies 1.8a–b and 1.11–12

“ . . . The individual no longer has a place of his or her own; his or her identity is dissolved in the infinitely small, in the invisible, in contrast to the immensity of the continent. The individual vanishes into the collective, national, ethnic, and geographic entity.” “ . . . the map provides a great lesson in humility. To the question: ‘Where am I?’ it answers, ‘You are nothing.’” Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 338–9

Mapping the Terrain We now advance the narrative in time and in space, from the end of Republic to the early rise of Octavian, who presents himself, in image at least, as an unabashed expansionist, prepared to add countless territories to the Roman empire. With Catullus in mind, we turn to consider a handful of Propertius’ elegies from this period, which ostensibly center on a lover-poet and his erotic relationship, but on careful examination reveal a striking preoccupation with geographic space. If the Catullan poems offer insight into a Roman worldview that centers on the coming into focus of a rapidly expanding geographical world, Propertius in book 1 of his elegies indicates that, while the worldview remains the same, the potential enthusiasm it generates is waning. In Catullus, grappling with Rome at the center of a seemingly limitless empire allows for exciting new possibilities but also introduces anxieties about stable termini in the face of constant renegotiation. In early Propertius we discover that the excitement has receded, yielding center stage to the anxieties that the new Roman worldview creates.

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0003

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At the conclusion of poem 1.12 Propertius boldly lays all his cards on the table: “it is right for me neither to love another nor to dissociate myself from this woman—Cynthia was the first, Cynthia will be the end” (mi neque amare aliam neque ab hac desistere fas est: / Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit, 1.12.19–20).¹ For a poet perhaps best known for his difficult, disjunctive thought, a surprisingly clear meaning emerges; this is a love poem in which Propertius announces that Cynthia is the first woman he has ever truly loved and that, because he will remain true to her until the end of his days, she will be the last. Indeed, the first part of the pentameter, Cynthia prima, is a quotation of the first two words of the first poem in the self-contained first book of Propertian elegies.² Cynthia was literally first (prima)—the first word of the first poem of the Monobiblos. I do not wish to dispute Propertius’ romantic declaration in 1.12. His extravagant claim of eternal love must remain on the surface, front and center for all readers. And yet, even if we accept Propertius’ ardent avowal, the particular word—finis—that the poet deploys in his proclamation invites us to open up a supplemental reading. Indeed, Propertius could have expressed himself otherwise.³ In this chapter I wish to explore what happens if we train our focus closely on the word finis in elegy 1.12. Finis does indeed mean “the end,” but it also possesses geographic or cartographic definitions like “boundary” or “border.” These meanings are worth considering, since poem 1.12, as well as the three other elegies within the Monobiblos with which it is structurally and thematically paired (1.8a; 1.8b; 1.11), concerns itself to a large extent with physical space. If we pay particular attention to the constant play of geography in these texts, a similar tension emerges from the two sets of paired elegies. Propertius prefers to imagine himself in Rome,

¹ Unless otherwise indicated, I have followed Fedeli’s 1994 text for Propertius. ² Martial 14.189 calls Propertius’ first book of elegies the Monobiblos, implying a coherently demarcated collection. For discussions of the Monobiblos as a self-contained structural unit, see Skutsch 1963, Otis 1965, Courtney 1968, King 1975. See also Manuwald 2006 on Propertius 1 as a thematic and structural whole. ³ Propertius is not wedded to the word finis. Elegy 1.12 does not contain the poet’s only assertion that Cynthia will always hold the key to his heart. A particularly salient example appears in a poem intricately, structurally connected to 1.12 (as I shall discuss below). In elegy 1.8 Propertius offers up not one but two exclamations of unlimited future devotion. He begins simply illa futura mea est (“she will be mine,” 1.8a.26) and then builds to the more hyperbolic nunc mihi summa licet contingere sidera plantis: / sive dies seu nox venerit, illa mea est (“Now I can touch the highest stars with my feet; come day or night, she is mine,” 1.8b.43–4). Neither expression uses finis, though it would not have been out of place coupled with the boundless feeling of the walking on the stars, or the sense of timelessness as day crosses into night.

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highlighting his fixity in contrast to the wanderings of Cynthia.⁴ Despite his fervent desire that she, too, remain fixed in space, she journeys freely, almost wantonly, on a far-flung adventure with a rich lover (1.8a), on vacation (1.11), just beyond Propertius’ grasp (1.12). Her spatial mobility causes the amator great anxiety; as we shall see, he performs all manner of verbal pyrotechnics to rein it in. I suggest that the amator’s anxiety, prompted by Cynthia’s geographical movements and expressed in his consequent attempts to confine her, emerges from an increasing sense of disintegrating subjectivity that the amator struggles to keep at bay. The claim that elegy’s subject is destabilized has by now gained widespread acceptance, though interpreters can, and do, describe and explain the incoherence they perceive differently.⁵ Both Micaela Janan and Paul Allen Miller have compellingly deployed Lacanian theoretical insights to argue that Propertius’ elegies highlight, and grapple with, an unstable Roman masculine self that emerges as Republic yields to Augustan principate. I also believe that the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan about subjectivity and desire offer particularly productive ways to make sense of the problems with Propertius’ subjectivity in his elegies, as well as the complicated moves the poet makes to render himself coherent and unified.⁶ Propertius establishes through his poetry an “I” who is a “man,” a “Roman,” an “amator,” one “who is loyal and thus remains fixed on his puella’s threshold,” one for whom “Cynthia was first and will be the finis;” his entire poetic universe comes to make sense around, and through the eyes of, this self. And yet, constantly intruding on the ideal self-image, language always already intervenes (in particular because the images exist structured in and by language).⁷ Language, Lacan posits, dictates that the subject be fractured, lacking, and marked by alienation; for the subject is constituted by language,

⁴ Indeed, this tension recurs throughout the Monobiblos as Propertius refuses to leave Rome because of his love for Cynthia (1.6) and, more violently, as he threatens to return from the dead to be with her (1.19—semper tua dicar imago, line 11). On the other side of the coin, he imagines the horrors that face him should he decide to depart from the city (storm at sea, 1.17, or a lonely pastoral existence, 1.18). The amator’s position undergoes some change by book 3; in poem 3.21 he extols the virtues of travel to Athens. In this chapter I am interested in early Propertian reaction to the Augustan imperial project, and so I focus primarily on the Monobiblos. ⁵ To cite a few examples: Lee-Stecum 1998, Janan 2001, Wyke 2002: 155–91, Miller 2004, Greene 2005, Rimell 2006. ⁶ For a lengthier explanation of Lacan’s lacking subject, see the Introduction, pages 19–22 above. ⁷ Or, in other words, Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic realms are always already ineluctably intertwined.

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and language itself, which exists before the subject and in which s/he must take up a place, is lacking.⁸ Lacan defines the subject as “that which one signifier represents to another signifier.”⁹ But language makes each fixed and coherent self-image ultimately unravel. A signifier gains meaning only in its relation of difference to other signifiers; a “Roman” has meaning only through the existence of that which is “non-Roman.” That which is “nonRoman,” moreover, must be fixed and unalterable for “Roman” to attain meaning; there cannot be the possibility of another signifier coming along that will retrospectively change the meaning of the signifier “Roman.” But that possibility, by definition, always remains present in language, and thus the signifier can never be fixed, stable, and coherent. The same issues lurk at the heart of the “Man”/”Woman” or the “amator”/”proper citizen” dichotomies.¹⁰ Ultimately, however, what do we have other than words or language? In order to negotiate the world, an individual accepts “to submit to language, to agree to express his or her needs through the distorting medium or straightjacket of language, and to allow him or herself to be represented by words.”¹¹ To participate in the Symbolic order (the social realm of law and language), the individual cleaves to a signifier, or a set of signifiers, offering him or her a sense of self, whole, coherent, and comprehensible within his or her cultural and social institutions. Concentrating his analysis on books 1–3, Miller proposes that, as the Republic collapses, cultural values and identities are in flux; a subject’s sense of himself in the Imaginary register (in which he reassures himself, albeit falsely, of his fixed coherence) clashes with his understanding of himself in the Symbolic register. The result, for the Propertian amator, is his selfcontradictory and incoherent self-representation.¹² Janan turns her attention to Propertius’ final book of elegies. She reveals the ways in which the poems disclose tensions and fissures in the falsely stable and coherent image of the Roman subject constructed by the new Augustan imperial ideology.¹³ Like Janan and Miller, I shall suggest that Lacan has much to offer an explanation of the Propertian preoccupation with shifting subjectivity in 1.12. I would like to propose, however, that in this text the disintegrating Propertian “I” is inextricably bound to the geographic aspects of the poem.

⁸ Lacan 2006: 495. ⁹ Lacan often repeats this formulation, but see for example 1981: 207. ¹⁰ Janan 2009 similarly deploys Lacan in reading the Theban tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See the Introduction, note 73, above. ¹¹ Fink 1995: 50. ¹² Miller 2004. ¹³ Janan 2001.

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As the Romans begin to conceive of their world in cartographic terms, as an empire with Rome in the center of spaces two-dimensionally linked to one another, aggressive territorial expansion can give pause. What are the ends of the Roman world, and what do ends signify in an empire ever pushing outward? Lacan remains, in my estimation, the best way to read the disintegration of subjects in Catullan and elegiac poetry. In my discussion, however, I seek to focus our attention on two things. First, rather intriguingly, Lacanian ideas of subjectivity and cartographic theory, in particular as that theory pertains to the definition and control of physical (imperial) spaces, mirror each other. Both highlight a compulsion toward fixed, stable definition, constantly undercut by the notion that wholeness and coherence must remain no more than a tantalizing fantasy.¹⁴ Second, while the subjects reveal discontinuities and fissures in similar large-scale terms, the geographical imagery in which the disintegration occurs varies according to the historical/cultural moment, more specifically according to evolving phases of imperial expansion and responses to it in Rome. As we move chronologically from poet to poet, different vistas open up on the Roman cartographic worldview. In the late 30s and early 20s , as Propertius writes his Monobiblos, Augustus, still Octavian, fosters a growing awareness of the physical space and extent of the expanding Roman world.¹⁵ I suggest that the poet’s disintegrating elegiac subject, intertwined with issues of fines, reflects an evolving Roman understanding/construction of space that arises from the early Augustan imperial project. In Chapter One we saw the Catullan subject come apart at the seams in the face of expanding geographic possibilities. Men travel—Catullus to Bithynia and to Verona, his brother to Troy, his friends in their praetors’ cohorts, his companions (in poem 11) to the ends of the earth. Lesbia stays put, moving to the back alleys to pursue adulterous liaisons but never leaving Rome, never joining the dangerous wandering. Propertius, alone of all the poets we shall consider, partially changes the equation, imagining his puella in motion through geographic space while he himself remains fixed in Rome. Yet the difference is only partial because he wishes for her fixity, seeking, as we shall see, to anchor her in Rome and his sense of self to her (hoped-for) static position.

¹⁴ In Lindheim 2010 I also explore the collusion of Lacanian and cartographic theory. ¹⁵ Nicolet 1991.

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Focusing on the (Poetic) Fines a. Propertius 1.12 and its complementary texts (1.8a, 1.8b, 1.11) A defensive Propertius begins elegy 1.12 by correcting a misapprehension. He does not remain idle in Rome because of his affair with Cynthia. Once favored, he now suffers abandonment; she has withdrawn both her love and her physical presence. He, however, remains constant, proclaiming Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit—“Cynthia was the first; Cynthia will be the end” (1.12.20). Let us begin by considering the word finis more closely. The TLL entry for finis starts by defining the word according to space, its earliest attested, concrete meaning. Finis means the boundary—of the land, a state, a territory, a municipality, a town, a field, private property, a temple or sacred precinct, and ultimately (over time) of the world. It can also signify other spatial boundaries—the end point or margin of a body, or a body of water, or a road. Finis also, the TLL continues, pertains to time. In this category the meanings range from the end of speaking to death, from the conclusion of a particular period of time (of a month or a year, for example) to the cessation of hope, or pain, or toil.¹⁶ The romantic interpretation of poem 1.12 relies on a temporal reading of finis. I would like to propose instead that we explore the meanings that emerge if we concentrate on the geographic or spatial connotations of the noun. To do so, however, we must also briefly ponder prima; for it functions in Propertius’ verse as the carefully constructed antithesis to finis. The adjective, too, it turns out, can have a spatial as well as a temporal meaning—“the furthest in front,” or “the foremost or first to be reached.”¹⁷ Beyond this antithesis, which potentially operates in a geographical as well as a temporal register, the Propertian elegy as a whole seems to invite a consideration of spatial undertones; indeed, the first twelve lines of poem 1.12, a poem of only twenty lines in all, intriguingly contain several allusions to physical space. Elegy as a genre is urban poetry, unfolding with Rome as its all-important backdrop, even in the case of Tibullus who constructs his pastoral fantasy as the very antithesis of the big city. And yet, while constantly lurking in more or less tangible ways, Rome is not always actively conjured up as a physical, spatial presence.¹⁸ But poem 1.12 locates its speaker clearly and distinctly in ¹⁶ TLL finis s.v. ¹⁷ See especially OLD, s.v. 1 and 10. ¹⁸ Although it certainly can be—see for example Spentzou 2018.

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physical space; he is in Rome, accused of being detained there because of his intense fascination with Cynthia, the object of his desire (1.12.1–2). The speaker nicely emphasizes the city in the pentameter of the first couplet by deploying elegy’s premier play on words; allegedly, Roma causes him to linger, forces his mora[m] (“delay”) because amor (“love”) keeps him rooted to the city. While the reason (amor) remains unstated yet understood, the anagrammatic play present in the pentameter’s ending Roma moram (1.12.2) highlights the city; the wordplay, after all, centers on Roma.¹⁹ And who finds fault with the narrator’s behavior? Here we encounter a textual problem, not unusual in a reading of the Propertian corpus, but one whose potential solution has geographic undertones. While scholars contest the accuser’s identity, there is widespread consensus that all the poems in Propertius’ first book have explicitly named addressees.²⁰ So who chides Propertius in poem 1.12? The leading candidates are Roma and Ponticus. Rome has either pointed the finger at Cynthia as Propertius’ distraction (quod faciat nobis Cynthia, Roma, moram)²¹ or, all-knowing, has simply uttered contemptuous charges against the slothful amator (quod faciat nobis conscia Roma moram).²² Ponticus, should we accept the reading quod faciat nobis, Pontice, Roma moram, lays the blame squarely on Rome.²³ My argument about the poet’s emphasis on geographical space in this elegy perhaps provides some support for reading Ponticus in line 2. As the poem opens out from the first couplet, the speaker moves in his imagination through space from Rome to a variety of places around the Black Sea (Pontus), thus making Ponticus an addressee whose name foreshadows the geographical movements the poem has in store for us.²⁴ ¹⁹ Heyworth 2007b: 57–9 points to this play on words: “his desidia, his mora, is caused by love.” Moreover, he proposes to emend the second line to add the name Cynthia, on which he comments: “Cynthia, Roma, moram bring together the anagrammatic concepts of amor, Roma and mora that adorn the elegiac mode.” ²⁰ For example, see Fedeli 1980: 288–90, who cites Wilamowitz’s argument that the practice of having addressees goes back to Greek poetry, and Viarre 2005: 178, n. 90. ²¹ Heyworth 2007b: 57–9 prefers to see Roma as the addressee, thus changing conscia to Cynthia and making her the subject of faciat. In Heyworth’s reading Cynthia explicitly causes Propertius to linger and Rome becomes implicitly Propertius’ fixed geographical point. ²² Richardson 1977: 179 offers the translation “you, Rome, who are privy to what would keep me here.” For this reading to make sense, he explains: “By Roma the poet means those friends he encounters on his rounds, who talk about his dejected condition and how he ought to take himself in hand and do something positive.” ²³ Fedeli 1994 chooses this reading. Viarre 2005: 178, n. 90, Fedeli 1980: 288–90 citing Wilamowitz and Leo as precedents, Goold 1990 all accept Kraffert’s 1864 conjecture that Ponticus is the addressee in line 2. ²⁴ Stahl 1985: 15–16 however, argues against Ponticus, the choice of “conjecture-happy commentators,” since within the Monobiblos the character Ponticus, addressee of poems 1.7

 ’       ?

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The next couplet retains the focus on space. An as-yet-unnamed “she,” who will become Cynthia in line 6, does not cause the speaker’s moram in Roma. No torrid affair detains him—no embraces, no sweet-nothings delightfully whispered into his ears (1.12.5–6)—because she does not currently occupy the same particular urban space. She is, in fact, far off, physically separated, or divided (divisa est, 1.12.3)²⁵ from the speaker’s bed by as many miles (tam multa . . . milia, 1.12.3) as the river Hypanis (modern Bug) lies distant from the Venetian Po (quantum Hypanis Veneto dissidet Eridano, 1.12.4), or, less poetically, as the extent of space between the Ukraine and northern Italy. And how did such a giant chasm spring up between them, the speaker wonders. After all, once they were blissfully happy together. Did some jealous god intervene (1.12.9)? Or can one trace the rift to some magical²⁶ herb, devastatingly potent in its ability to separate lovers, plucked on the Promethean ridges (lecta Prometheis . . . iugis, 1.12.10)? Once again the speaker takes us far afield, reaching over vast geographical expanses to the Caucasus, stretching from modern-day Russia, to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, where he locates the origin of the imagined sorcery that physically separates (dividit, 1.12.10—echoing divisa est, 1.12.3) Cynthia from him. So not only does Cynthia now circulate in a space that is physically separate from the amator’s but, further, he imagines the space between them to be vast both metaphorically and geographically. He pursues the idea of extended geographical separation when he drops in yet another possible explanation for their current estrangement: mutat via longa puellas (“a long journey alters girls,” 1.12.11). This tidbit of information provokes questions. His puella has traveled a distance the amator defines as great or extensive (longa). When he pronounces her as far distant from him as the Bug from the Po, does the span represent the mileage she has covered on this longa via? Is she still off on her voyage, or has she come back? The poem does not provide answers to these questions, much to the distress and 1.9, has an established identity as an epic poet, foil to Propertius’ self-presentation as elegiac amator. ²⁵ The verb, of course, is closely connected to geographical/spatial boundaries; see Caesar, Bellum Gallicum 1.1. ²⁶ The herb, gathered up on the Caucasus mountain range, is presumably magical because of the relative proximity between the Caucasus and another well-known (mythologically, at least) destination near the Black Sea, Colchis, home of poisons and witches. In addition, as one anonymous reader of the article version of this chapter perceptively observed, the lecta herba (“plucked herb”) distances Cynthia from her lover’s lectum (“bed,” line 3).

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      

(or benefit?) of scholars who have spilled a certain amount of ink discussing where Cynthia might have gone on her trip. Indeed, the most popular hypothesis about Cynthia’s destination claims that she refuses to abandon Baiae, Rome’s vacation hotspot, where we imagined her in poem 1.11, at Propertius’ prompting.²⁷ In this elegy the simultaneously incensed yet wheedling amator demands to know whether she spares any thought for him as she relaxes on the beach besieged by his rival’s languorous attempts at seduction. Can she not spend her vacation alone, avoiding all temptation, or better still, depart altogether from Baiae, den of iniquity? Whether one accepts the suggestion that poems 11 and 12 actually constitute a single poem,²⁸ or argues that the manuscript tradition in matters of poem division remains highly suspect and one thus posits, especially with the change in addressee, a division between the two, generally the result concerning Cynthia’s location is identical. If 1.11 and 1.12 are one poem, then in 1.12 she is in Baiae; if they are not, the argument runs, they remain so closely related—an instance of dramatically paired poems²⁹—that the reader assumes that her undisclosed location in 12 must be Baiae, where she vacationed just a few lines earlier in 1.11. Certainly 1.11 and 1.12 belong together conceptually as a “dramatically paired” unit. Further, these two elegies exist as only one half of a structural unit of “dramatically paired” poems in the Monobiblos, inextricably linked to 1.8a and b (sometimes published as 1.8 in another instance of manuscript problems). I suggest, however, that the connection does not tie Cynthia down to Baiae in 1.12. Propertius feels distress precisely over the possibility that she cannot be pinned down or mapped in space; she floats nebulously, elusively in 1.12. Moreover, when we consider poem 1.12 in context with the three poems with which it forms a unit of meaning (1.11 and 1.8a and b), we discover an emphatic concern with Cynthia’s geographic movements. In all four poems Cynthia displays a disturbing tendency toward mobility through physical ²⁷ A nice example is Stahl 1985: 17–18, who confidently states in a parenthesis: “there should be no doubt that via longa in 12.11 alludes to her trip to Baiae, where she stayed longer than Propertius wished her to.” ²⁸ Butrica 1984 asserts that poems 11 and 12 make a pair with poems 8a and 8b. He argues, however, that the manuscript tradition presents neither set as divided, and therefore that modern editions should print 11–12 as a single poem, and similarly 8a–b as a single poem. While prevailing opinion concurs with the idea of pairing the poems, most editors and interpreters choose to divide the poems into two sets of paired poems; in other words, 1.8a and 1.8b become a paired unit with 1.11 and 1.12. See for example Davis 1977, Fedeli 1980: 201–8 (on 8a and 8b) and 286 (on 11 and 12), Gold 1985, Heyworth 2007b. Fedeli 1994 prints 8a and 8b as one poem, so while I follow his text, in this instance I do not follow his poem division. ²⁹ See especially Davis 1977 and Heyworth 2007b: 38.

 ’       ?

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space, in strong contrast to the poet’s fixity. In each sequence Propertius confronts his puella’s geographic peregrinations and deploys a variety of ways to keep her geographically contained or still. The final and most drastic of these attempts will be to apply the word finis to her, locating her thereby firmly and comprehensibly in space. Poem 1.11 opens with a strong concentration on geography.³⁰ Cynthia has gone to Baiae (line 1), which seems clear enough, though the following lines, which on the surface serve to specify the spot through explanatory clauses, manage instead to cast confusion on her exact location. Propertius locates her in the first line mediis Bais (“in the heart of Baiae”), but muddies the waters somewhat by defining the position with the clause qua iacet Herculeis semita litoribus (“where the path on the shores constructed by Hercules lies,” 1.11.2). Heyworth, in his commentary, insists that mediis Bais is “in conflict with” qua iacet Herculeis semita litoribus, and chooses Heinsius’s proposal, preferring to imagine Cynthia tepidis Bais (“in warm Baiae”).³¹ The causeway built by Hercules as the hero led the cattle of Geryon from Spain to Italy remains “some distance from the centre of Baiae”³² between the Lucrine lake and the sea. Let us take these observations to heart, but rather than emend the text with Heyworth, I suggest that we have our first indication of Propertius’ anxiety regarding Cynthia’s geographic location in this poem. Although he desires to imagine her in a fixed and precise spot (mediis Bais), her whereabouts turn out to be rather elusive and slippery. The next two lines create further geographic confusion. Propertius envisions Cynthia in a moment of sightseeing, “wondering that the waters just now located beneath Thesprotus’ kingdom are now next to famous Misenum” (et modo Thesproti mirantem subdita regno / proxima Misenis aequora nobilibus, 1.11.3–4). While ultimately we focus on Misenum, a town along the coast between Baiae and the tip of the promontory also called Misenum, somewhere in the vicinity, but not quite in the “heart” (mediis), of Baiae, the road there certainly meanders through space. Thesprotus hails from Epirus, land of Acheron and Cocytus, rivers associated with the Underworld. Hyginus connects Thesprotus’ kingdom with a ³⁰ Richardson 1977: 176 notices the poem’s opening “geographical catalogue.” ³¹ Heyworth 2007b: 50–1. Camps 1961, Richardson 1977, Fedeli 1980 all feel compelled to comment on the line, but all choose the reading mediis Bais, explaining the adjective as an intensifier to express indignation and censure (Fedeli), or suggesting the translation “amid the pleasures of Baiae” (Camps, 69). ³² Heyworth 2007b: 51.

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      

lake Avernus,³³ which presumably provides the reader with grounds for the mental leap that would identify it with the lake Avernus between Baiae and Cumae also linked to the Underworld.³⁴ So Cynthia contemplates waters that seem to originate in Epirus, travel under the ground, through the Underworld, and emerge in Italy, somewhere not too precisely defined near Misenum.³⁵ Where exactly is Cynthia? Not quite immobile “in the heart of Baiae,” as Propertius originally postulates. Propertius further worries that some rival has stolen her out of his poems (e . . . carminibus, 1.11.8). In an effort to put an end to her elusive movements, the poet offers two impossible wishes, both of which attempt to fix Cynthia in one, identifiable place. A small boat (parvula cumba, 1.11.10) provides the first contained location—“may her craft linger” (cumba moretur, 1.11.10) in the middle of the Lucrine lake. He ensures that she remains incapable of propelling herself anywhere quickly, for she is equipped in this fantasy only with the tiniest of oars (remis . . . minutis, 1.11.9). Should she prefer swimming to boating, the poet imagines a second option for her; again he allows her access to a body of water but then verbally transforms it into a quasi-prison. He envisions her “enclosed” (clausam, 1.11.11) by the surrounding wave.³⁶ A closer look at the restraining wave (Teuthrantis . . . unda, 1.11.11), however, an unidentifiable pool near Cumae,³⁷ reveals that the poet’s attempt to provide Cynthia with a clear location even in his fantasy begins to unravel.³⁸ As if in response to the unsettling lack of fixity that seems to belong to Cynthia, even creeping in and threatening to disrupt the poet’s fantasies of her relative immobility, ³³ Fabulae 88. So Richardson 1977: 176. ³⁴ Alternatively we can speculate with Camps 1961: 70 and Fedeli 1980: 270–1 that Propertius and his educated readers knew a mythological story by which rivers of identical names in different countries had waters that mingled underground. ³⁵ This is, of course, a vexed passage. Heyworth 2007b: 51–2 opposes Camps, Fedeli, and Richardson, and instead proposes that the text is lacunose at this point. ³⁶ A striking use of claudo, as Fedeli 1980: 274–5 notes. Propertius similarly deploys the verb to mean a physical space closing someone in at 1.8a.24, again of detaining Cynthia, (dicite, quo portu clausa puella mea est), a meaning that recurs frequently in Ovid and later writers. ³⁷ Teuthras is a widely accepted emendation, proposed by Scaliger, of an impossible text. Teuthras is associated with Cumae, near Baiae; hence its attraction. Italian Cumae was founded by colonists from Aeolian Cumae in Mysia. Teuthras was a legendary king of Mysia. See Camps 1961: 71 and, more fully, Fedeli 1980: 274. Fedeli identifies the waters of Teuthras somewhat vaguely as “a stream of water or one of the little lakes” near Cumae. ³⁸ One anonymous reader for the version of this chapter published in AJP astutely observed that Propertius constricts Cynthia in yet another fantasy of proximity and quasi-immobility, claiming that he guards her as he would his own mother (1.11.21–2) and closing himself in with her in a tight domestic space—tu mihi sola domus, tu, Cynthia, sola parentes (“you alone are home to me, Cynthia, you alone, my parents,” 1.11.23).

 ’       ?

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Propertius ends poem 1.11 by returning his attention to Baiae. In two final couplets he mentions the place clearly, without geographical circumlocution (lines 27 and 30). He insists that she is in Baiae and must leave. By the time poem 1.12 begins to unfold, however, she has completely eluded his attempts at immobilization. Within the larger framework of the Monobiblos, however, poems 1.11 and 1.12 not only belong together, but should also be read alongside a second set of dramatically paired poems, 1.8a and 1.8b.³⁹ If we now turn our attention briefly to these latter poems, we shall see that 1.8a and 1.8b replay (or, in fact, because of their order in the poetry book, first reveal) the anxieties the poet has about Cynthia’s lack of geographical fixity. The difference between the two sets of poems lies in the outcome. If Propertius cannot quite pin Cynthia down in 1.11 despite his best attempts, poem 1.12 betrays his complete failure to secure her position, leading to his last-ditch attempt in which he deploys the noun finis to immobilize his puella. In an opposite trajectory, the poet rejoices in his success at keeping Cynthia in Rome, in his bed in 1.8b, even though his puella threatened a journey in poem 1.8a. Propertius does not mince his words as he expresses his feelings about Cynthia’s upcoming sea voyage; his puella has lost her mind (demens, 1.8a.1). In poem 1.11, he fantasizes her small rowboat lingering on the lake (cumba moretur, 1.11.10). Now he asks why Cynthia herself refuses to linger—nec te mea cura moratur (“does my concern not cause you to delay?” 1.8a.1).⁴⁰ After all, the poet is going nowhere; he attributes the adjective defixus (“firmly planted,” 1.8a.15) to himself, moving to the shore only to watch her craft recede from view and then returning to the amator’s traditional spot on his beloved’s threshold (tuo limine, 1.8a.22).⁴¹ Cynthia, however, remains in motion throughout the poem. On her way to frigid Illyria (gelida . . . Illyria, 1.8a.2), she prepares to brave the wind, the seas, and even the snow (lines 4–8). Departing from Ostia (line 11), she sails past the Ceraunian rocks on the coast of Epirus (line 19), and docks at Oricos, a port in Greek Illyria (line 20). Here Propertius seems to lose track of her, hoping to find out from sailors passing through Rome what harbor hems his puella in (quo portu clausa puella mea est, 1.8a.24). Her exact location, in the end, ³⁹ See note 28, above. ⁴⁰ See Pucci 1978: 52–4 for the connections between mora, amor, and limen; amor causes happy lovers to linger within the house, to be detained. ⁴¹ On the reasons to adopt this fifteenth-century emendation, see Heyworth 2007b: 36, who explains: “the love-elegist’s generic habitat is on the mistress’ threshold, and a statement that he will remain there has considerable force.”

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      

does not matter; in the Thessalian town of Atrax, or even among the Hylaei, a people supposedly living beyond Scythia, he claims she will always belong to him (illa futura mea est, 1.8a.26).⁴² Ultimately, Cynthia does not leave. Poem 1.8b opens with an emphatic repetition of hic (“here”)—hic erit! hic iurata manet! (“She will be here! Having promised, she remains here!” 1.8b.27). Three lines later we receive yet another affirmation that Cynthia has become immobilized; his Cynthia, the poet announces triumphantly, “has ceased to pursue her journey along unknown routes” (destitit ire novas Cynthia nostra vias, 1.8b.30). Stopped dead in her tracks, instead she will remain in Roma, emphatically positioned at the end of the line (1.8b.31), more precisely in Propertius’ narrow little bed (angusto . . . lecto, 1.8b.33⁴³). The poet, unable to procure the geographically exotic (and pricey) Indian pearls (1.8b.39) or Peloponnesian kingdom (1.8b.35–6) as gifts to guarantee his puella’s affections, offers his poetry. Charmed, she seems rooted in place; despite his rival’s lucrative promises, “she did not flee my [Propertius’] lap/embraces” (non . . . meos fugit . . . sinus, 1.8b.38). The amator ends his piece exuberantly proclaiming that she belongs to him (mea est, 1.8b.42) and will for quite some time—“come day or night, she is mine” (sive dies seu nox venerit, illa mea est, 1.8b.44). The triumphant conclusion of 1.8b exudes the opposite feeling to the one that emerges from the ending of 1.12. Though both pairs of poems work through the amator’s anxiety about Cynthia’s movement, 1.8b manages to fix the puella in Rome where she will be Propertius’. By poem 1.12, however, Propertius frustratedly expresses Cynthia’s elusiveness, and in her absence he attempts to set her up as his finis. Perhaps these poems, however, are not as antithetical as they appear on first consideration. Both pairs share an emphasis on putting an end to Cynthia’s geographic wanderings with an attempt to render her “defixa,” his mirror image, either by imagining her in ⁴² The geographical location is emended by Heyworth 2007a to read Artaciis. Heyworth 2007b: 37 explains his choice to follow Palmer so that both place names conjure up mythically distant regions; the Artacian spring refers to the land of the Laestrygonians and Hylaea to a place beyond Scythia. Fedeli 1980: 222–3, however, opts for the manuscript reading, preferring the interpretation that Propertius picks two remotely distant places to emphasize the fact that no matter where she is, Cynthia will remain his. ⁴³ This phrase indicates that Cynthia will not only remain in Rome, but will also continue to be a fixture in Propertius’ elegiac poetry. The poet redeploys these very words with generic significance in his programmatic elegy 2.1. As he explains his continued allegiance to elegiac over epic themes in the manner of Callimachus, he claims angusto . . . proelia lecto (“battles in a narrow bed,” 2.1.45) as his writerly competence, verbally echoing the adjective he uses to describe Callimachus’ poetics at 2.1.40, when the poet’s words come forth from his “narrow breast” (angusto pectore). On Cynthia and Callimachus, see especially Wyke 2002: 46–77.

 ’       ?

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bed in the poet’s embraces (1.8b) or by projecting her as a finis, a firm, fixed, spatial boundary (1.12). Ultimately, both pairs of poems reveal the amator’s disintegrating subjectivity in the face of Cynthia’s freedom to move through widening geographic space as well as his anxious response to it. His search for wholeness, as Lacan explains, leads the narrator to cling to certain images; he constructs his subjectivity around his own immobility, his role as faithful, loyal lover of Cynthia. Her geographic movements, his inability to pin her down, just like the difficulty one faces in determining precisely and immutably the fines of an expansionist empire, increase the amator’s anxiety and thus provoke his (futile) attempts to contain and define her. We shall return to Propertius’ adamant insistence on Cynthia’s spatial fixedness.

b. Other elegiac fines: finis in Propertius books 1–3 It is not only in poem 1.12 that the spatial connotations of finis ask to be read into the poem. A brief consideration of the noun in elegiac poetry of the 30s and 20s  reveals that most often a geographic meaning either best suits finis or remains at play just below the surface. In a perhaps surprising contrast with the significant role the word finis, with its variegated shades of meaning, plays in Virgil’s Aeneid—indeed, in a well-known and oftquoted passage from book 1 Jupiter promises the Romans imperium sine fine (“empire without limit”)⁴⁴—the noun does not feature frequently in elegiac poetry from the late 30s and 20s . It does occur beyond poem 1.12, however, both in Propertius (six times in his first three books)⁴⁵ and in Tibullus (once in two books).⁴⁶ A brief survey of Propertius’ use of the noun reveals that in three of these six instances the poet clearly deploys finis in its most literal sense as “physical boundary.” In poem 2.19 he grudgingly endorses Cynthia’s proposed trip to the countryside; if she is not going to be in Rome, at least she will inhabit a space without suitors, where her only visual distractions will be sheep, mountains, and finis pauperis agricolae (“the boundaries of the poor farmer[’s fields],” 2.19.8). In elegy 3.1, one of the poet’s many recusationes, excusing himself from the task of writing grand epic poetry in favor of his small, trifling themes, Propertius leaves it to others to sing finem imperii Bactra futura (“that Bactra will become the boundary of the empire,” 3.1.16). ⁴⁴ Aeneid 1.279. On finis in the Aeneid, see the Introduction, pages 15–17 above. ⁴⁵ Propertius 1.16.21; 2.3b.45; 2.15.29; 2.19.8; 3.1.16; 3.5.37. ⁴⁶ Tibullus 1.3.44.

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      

Poem 3.5 also discusses Propertian aesthetics as the poet first espouses the pursuit of love, then promises at some future time to devote himself to natural philosophy—the moon, the wind, the stars, and why the water of the ocean does not overflow but remains within its “bounds” (finis, 3.5.37). The other three instances of the noun finis might best be translated by secondary meanings, although I would suggest that the spatial definition provides a rich supplemental reading. I single out here poem 2.3 because it illustrates the coexistence of this double layer of meaning in a manner very similar to the word’s deployment in poem 1.12, the elegy central to our discussion. Rather ironically, the word occurs at a moment in poem 2.3 when editors fiercely debate whether or not the poem should be divided into two separate yet somewhat related halves, traditionally numbered 2.3a and 2.3b.⁴⁷ The opening section of the elegy defies neat organization and logical progression; in a rambling and somewhat incoherent way the speaker attempts to explain the impetus for his recurring desire.⁴⁸ He has tried, he swears, to rid himself of his passion, but has succeeded, it seems, only in taking a month-long hiatus. As a fish must live in water, and a boar on land, the amator circles back, in the natural progression of things, to his puella (2.3a.3–8). And why does he love her? Not because she is beautiful, though she most certainly is (2.3a.9–16), but rather because she possesses artistic talent in dancing, playing the lyre, and composing poetry (2.3a.17–22). In fact, the narrator continues, now doubling back to the issue of beauty and reformulating the stimulus of desire (without acknowledging it), his passion blazes because she is as beautiful as Helen (2.3a.32–4), “the cause of such a great war between Europe and Asia” (tanti . . . belli / Europae atque Asiae causa puella fuit, 2.3a.35–6). Should his puella choose to model for a painter, and should the artwork be exhibited in the East or the West, the painting would surpass all others, and men in both regions of the world would burn with desire (sive illam Hesperiis, sive illam ostendet Eois, / uret et Eoos, uret et Hesperios, 2.3a.43–4). A sense of boundlessness characterizes

⁴⁷ Richardson 1977: 218 considers 2.3 one poem that should be read in close connection with 2.2 for their strong similarity of theme. That the train of thought is difficult to follow, Richardson contends, is central to Propertius’ new poetics in book 2, where the poet experiments with “lack of logical neatness” and “failure to maintain consistent point of view,” 218. Heyworth 2007b: 118–19 argues that poem 2.3 ends at line 44, and that lines 45–54 are fragmentary (representing three distinct fragments) and thus do not create a poetic unity as the appellation 2.3b would suggest. Here he follows Butler and Barber. Others like Rothstein and Enk see lines 45–54 as separate from 2.3, but instead consider them to be the opening verses of poem 2.4. ⁴⁸ For an astute reading of the poem, see Spelman 1999.

 ’       ?

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both the puella’s beauty and the masculine desire it arouses; both substantive adjectives (Eous and Hesperus) evoke a wide sweep, rather than a precise designation, of space. But in the very next line, the amator exclaims: his saltem ut tenear iam finibus! (“At least let me be held within these boundaries!” 2.3b.45). What kind of fines does he mean? Metaphorical ones—does he wish to remain within the limits or parameters of this particular love, now at least familiar to him? After all, he follows with a second exclamation: ah mihi si quis, / acrius ut moriar, venerit alter amor (“If any other love comes upon me, may I die in a more harsh manner,” 2.3b.45–6). And yet the proximity of the geographical discussion about East and West, Asia and Europe,⁴⁹ keeps the notion of spatial boundaries on the reader’s mind. Again, like poem 1.12, elegy 2.3 seems to posit a connection between maintaining firm and defined fines and keeping the amator’s disintegrating subjectivity at bay.

c. Other elegiac fines: Tibullus 1.3 and Propertius 1.12 Tibullus’ one use of the noun particularly interests us. Although we shall discuss poem 1.3 at greater length, as well as in its fuller Tibullan context, in Chapter Three, we need to consider it briefly here in its connection to Propertius 1.12.⁵⁰ Like his fellow elegist Propertius, Tibullus also feels enormous anxiety over vast geographical expanses open to Roman subjects. While Propertius roots himself in Rome (defixum, 1.8a.15) and sets Cynthia up as his finis (1.12.20), Tibullus, in response,⁵¹ fantasizes an unbounded world (1.3.43), though only insofar as an absence of travel dispenses with the need for encountering and dealing with boundaries. Elegy 1.3 opens in Phaeacia, where the amator hovers between life and death (1.3.1-5). Sick and alone, he is now “fixed geographically.”⁵² While Messalla and the ⁴⁹ Richardson 1977: 222 notes that as readers we should hear the echo of Europe and Asia in West and East. Heyworth 2007b: 126 concedes: “It is not unthinkable that this couplet belongs with 43–44, with west and east the implied limits within which Propertius wishes to be held.” This is an interesting comment to ponder, for finis, as I shall argue below, can frequently dissolve into a similarly amorphous and changeable line. ⁵⁰ See Chapter Three, pages 89–91 and 109–10 below. In Chapter Three, I also explore more fully the similarities and differences among Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus in response to their sense of the expanding geography of their world. ⁵¹ Lyne 1998 argues that Propertius published the Monobiblos before Tibullus’ first book of elegies appeared. Though he allows for the likelihood of two-way influence between the poets (522, n. 10), he posits that Tibullus 1 deliberately responds to Propertius 1. ⁵² Lee-Stecum 1998: 102.

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      

remainder of the military cohort continue their journey rather sweepingly through large expanses of water (Aegaeas . . . per undas, 1.3.1) Tibullus remains in one spot—me tenet . . . aegrum Phaeacia (“Phaeacia holds me who am sick,” 1.3.3). A closer glance, however, reveals that Phaeacia is less “fixed geographically” than it initially seems. Phaeacia detains Tibullus “in unknown lands” (ignotis . . . terris, 1.3.3), and by choosing the name “Phaeacia” (rather than Corcyra) the speaker locates himself in a literary utopia from the Odyssey, a fact underscored by the multiple allusions to the Homeric epic that proliferate within the poem.⁵³ In his active imaginings, moreover, the amator covers great geographical distances, beginning in his contemporary Rome (1.3.9–34), traveling back in time to a prelapsarian world under Saturn (1.3.35–48), making an Odysseus-like katabasis to the Elysian Fields (1.3.57–82), before reverting at last to Rome, where late at night Delia sits up weaving, his very own Penelope, awaiting his return (1.3.83–92). And what brought the amator to his current state, so far from Rome, in some never-never land of epic generically alien to any elegiac poet, mentally traversing tremendous physical distances? He provides a simple answer. Long ago, in a mythical past, when Saturn ruled the word (Saturno . . . rege, 1.3.35), there was an age of plenitude and fullness. Nature spontaneously offered up sustenance to people (1.3.39ff.) who found themselves utterly fulfilled. With no urgent demands of any kind, why travel, why face danger and/or violence? Indeed, we must imagine a time priusquam / tellus in longas est patefacta vias (“before the earth was opened up for the purpose of long journeys,” 1.3.35–6) and before sea faring (1.3.37–40).⁵⁴ Blissful satisfaction removes all compulsion for fines—“no stone was secured in the fields in order to measure off the arable lands with fixed boundary lines” (non fixus in agris / qui regeret certis finibus arva lapis, 1.3.43–4). Yet as the speaker emphasizes the past’s lack of need to divide property, or to impose clear lines of demarcation (certis finibus, 1.3.44), he does so by deploying formal, legal language for marking territorial boundaries, thus introducing them into the poetic narrative.⁵⁵

⁵³ The classic piece on allusions to the Odyssey in Tibullus 1.3 is Bright 1971, revised in Bright 1978: especially pp. 16–37. ⁵⁴ Indeed, the amator has already claimed Saturni diem (Saturday, 1.3.18) as one reason he could not leave Delia; apparently “as the Golden Age of Saturn is characterised by the absence of travel, to start a journey on this day would have been particularly unpropitious,” Maltby 2002: 190. ⁵⁵ See here Maltby 2002: 197–8 and Chapter 3, note 15, below.

 ’       ?

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The moments of intersection with Propertius 1.12, strikingly brought into focus through twin verbal echoes, are worth considering. The contemporary worlds of both Tibullus 1.3 and Propertius 1.12 encompass vast geographical expanses. Cynthia, we recall, has become as far distant from the amator’s bed as the terrain between northern Italy and Ukraine. Their relationship has changed, and the cause, Propertius explains, is a longa via (Propertius 1.12.11). Faced with the dizzying proliferation of physical space, with a world in which a puella might actually go on such a long journey, Propertius attempts to put his own foot down, to impose control: he proclaims that Cynthia will be his finis. The assertion mirrors the desire he displays in the other connected elegies to fix Cynthia in one place. Tibullus displays similar anxieties about his world’s increasing physical space, with similar vocabulary. Tibullus’ ideal world is one without travel and without boundaries (finibus). For in elegy 1.3 the concepts remain ineluctably intertwined. But now both travel and space have become unpleasant realities the speaker must confront. While Cynthia’s journey has rendered her ‘physically separated’ from Propertius (divisa, 1.12.3), Tibullus’ peregrinations divide him from Delia who remains in Rome. He has left the city, forced to join his patron, Messalla, on an eastern expedition (described in elegy 1.7.13–22),⁵⁶ along some of the world’s longas vias (1.3.36)⁵⁷ which are now a fact of contemporary masculine life. Yet, as the Tibullan amator comes face to face with the reality of Rome’s geographical expanse of empire, he responds by falling deathly ill in Phaeacia. If Propertius seeks to immobilize Cynthia, Tibullus imagines illness as a way to put a stop to his own movement through space. In addition, the Tibullan amator appears at odds with himself as he emerges in the collection’s first two poems, and seemingly incapable of presenting a linear, coherent narrative in this poem. Indeed, elegy 1.3 has long exercised scholars for questions of unity. On the one hand, some readings note the non-linear and often-interrupted flow of the poem,⁵⁸ while on the other, some focus in their interpretations on seeking the thread that holds the whole coherently together.⁵⁹ Parshia Lee-Stecum’s book on ⁵⁶ See Chapter 3, note 18, below. ⁵⁷ See Chapter 3, note 17, below. ⁵⁸ The recent interpretation of Lee-Stecum 1998 not only points out the discontinuity of the poem but further stresses the lack of unity as a central idea of the poem, a lack of unity reenforced through the discontinuous nature of the poetic progression; see the chapter entitled “Poem Three,” 101–31. ⁵⁹ For example, the Odyssey theme (Bright 1971); temporal progression from past to present to future (Campbell 1973); and Maltby 2002, who writes: “The elegy is one of T.’s best and consists of a smoothly connected series of reflections, memories, dreams, and prayers,” 183.

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      

Tibullus’ first collection of elegies, which devotes an entire chapter to poem 1.3, persuasively links 1.3 to the two elegies preceding it in book 1; the juxtaposition underscores discontinuity and foiled expectations. Though as readers we desire to construct unity of meaning and character, we are faced instead with fragmentation and “the difficulty of constructing a single, complete meaning for the elegy” but also for the collection as a whole.⁶⁰ Tibullus’ poetry swirls with what Allen Miller persuasively suggests is a “dreamlike plurality of voices,” the result of a futile, utopian search to achieve coherence in the face of the historical movement from Republic to early principate.⁶¹ The issue of the speaker’s discontinuousness and fragmentation in Tibullus will bring us back to the poem with which we began; indeed, Propertius 1.12 highlights a similar predicament for the amator, caused, as in Tibullus’ case, by the possibility of vast, geographical expanses opening up out of Rome. Propertius complains that Cynthia’s longa via has changed her (mutat, 1.12.11), but she is not alone in her metamorphosis. Anxious and distressed, the amator continues: non sum ego qui fueram (“I am not who I once had been,” 1.12.11). Cynthia’s trek over vast distances (longa via), we must assume, has been doubly potent, altering Cynthia but equally enacting a profound transformation upon the speaker. Let us now return to the word finis with which we began our consideration of physical space in the poem, and explore what acknowledging the geographical or cartographic aspects of the elegy has to offer our reading.

Focusing on the (Historical) Fines Let us turn away, for the present, from Propertius’ poetry and look to the Augustan moment in which it was produced. In this also, however, we do not reach the absolute terra firma we might like. We do not have precise dates for the Monobiblos, either its year of publication or the exact years during which Propertius wrote the poems collected in it, though approximate

⁶⁰ Lee-Stecum 1998: 101. Fineberg 1991 notes the variety of subject positions that the Tibullan subject inhabits over the course of the Tibullan collection. Johnson 1990: 108 emphasizes the multiplicity or lack of unity of the Tibullan subject within the space of a single poem. ⁶¹ Miller 2004: 129. He emphasizes the fragmented subjectivity of Tibullus as a symptom of the collapse of the Republic and the rise of Augustus in a chapter devoted to the poet, “He Do The Police in Different Voices: The Tibullan Dream Text,” 95–129. (See also my discussion of Miller, pages 58–60 above.)

 ’       ?

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dates of composition can be fairly securely fixed at between 30 and 28 .⁶² Since literature never emerges in a vacuum, and since it is well documented that Augustan literature in particular displays a significant, if complex and intensely-debated, relationship to the political and cultural moment from which it arises, I propose to consider briefly the period from 30 to 28  to see whether we can discover any reasons why Propertius chooses to draw on geographical language in love elegy. The place to begin is with Octavian (at this time not yet Augustus) and the territory he adds, or even seeks to add, to the Roman empire as he asserts sole control over the Roman world after defeating Antony at Actium. Indeed, in the years leading up to this ultimate clash between the two men who sought to rule, each one engaged in military campaigns, Antony in the East against the Parthians and the Armenians, and Octavian in the Alpine region of Illyricum, that would have expanded, had the outcomes been entirely successful,⁶³ the boundaries (fines) of Roman territory. Once Octavian emerges as victor from the civil war, the notion of territorial conquest seems part of his mandate to rule, and, further, even perhaps seems desirable both as a means to legitimize his position as ruler⁶⁴ and as a way to demonstrate explicitly, by turning Roman weapons outward against foreign foes, that civil war had reached its end.⁶⁵ In 30  after the fall of Alexandria, Egypt becomes a Roman province and Octavian makes his first significant addition to the Roman world. He does not consider Egypt the end of the line, however, since his first prefect, Cornelius Gallus, manages, before he falls out of Augustus’ good graces in 26 , to push beyond the first cataract of the Nile and extend Roman protection to the king of Ethiopia.⁶⁶ ⁶² Lyne 1998 offers a succinct look at the evidence for dating Propertius 1 and proposes, without much controversy, that the Monobiblos could not have been published before 30 , and must have been published by 28. See especially 519–24 with his notes. ⁶³ Antony suffered heavy losses and achieved no long-term gains against the Parthians and the Armenians. While Octavian fared somewhat better in Illyricum, achieving some modest territorial gains, the major Roman expansion in that area occurred later, between 13 and 9 ; see Gruen 1996: especially 171–2. I shall be drawing a great deal on Gruen’s important contribution in this discussion of early expansion. ⁶⁴ In this aspect Caesar served as a powerful exemplum for Octavian, who could observe how his great-uncle’s extraordinary political position achieved legitimacy through his conquest of Gaul in the name of Rome. ⁶⁵ Indeed, the Augustan poets echo this idea. Perhaps the best-known example occurs at Aeneid 1.286–96, when Jupiter prophesies an end to civil war together with the extension of Roman imperium. See also Horace, Odes 1.2.22 and 51, 1.35.29–40, 4.15. ⁶⁶ Gruen 1996: 148. Gruen 1996: 149 points out that there is no reason to believe that Cornelius Gallus’ ignominious end was due to his expansionist drive. After all, Augustus explicitly directed the next prefect, Aelius Gallus, to find out more about Ethiopia and to consider the possibility of expansion into Arabia.

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      

Still in 30  Octavian (and those representing him) continues to flex his expansionist muscles, extending Roman power (and his own) both with and without need for military force. Traveling to Syria, he convinces the governor, once a supporter of Antony, to switch his allegiance. Similarly Herod the Great aligns himself with Octavian, becoming a client king and in return receiving much of Palestine to rule.⁶⁷ A few years earlier, in 36  after his defeat of Sextus Pompey at Naulochos, Octavian had similarly obtained power over two African provinces, Africa Nova and Africa Vetus, while in 33 , after the death of the ruler of Mauretania, Octavian stepped in to take charge of that kingdom as well. In 29  in an effort to strengthen the Roman presence in Africa, Octavian sends in settlers, beginning with Carthage.⁶⁸ In a more overtly militaristic vein there are successful engagements in the Balkans, against tribes on the Lower Danube⁶⁹ and in Gaul, near Germany, where Agrippa, Octavian’s right-hand man, and others achieve victories against Gallic tribes receiving aid from tribes from across the Rhine.⁷⁰ While Roman territory and influence was expanding abroad, Octavian made sure that Romans at home remained well-apprised of foreign affairs. Returning to Rome after his conquest of Egypt, Octavian celebrated in 29  a three-day-long triple triumph, August 13, 14, and 15, for his victories in Illyria, Actium, and Egypt. Though there remains some debate about the extent to which Octavian wished to glorify his defeat of Antony (since, no matter how well the spin doctors worked their magic, there is ultimately no escaping the fact that this was civil war),⁷¹ his intentions to bring foreign conquest front and center, before the eyes of Romans, clearly emerge. We learn from Appian that Octavian disseminated information about his relatively modest successes in Illyria with great flourish, providing a list of some thirty tribes beaten into submission.⁷² In addition, he proudly displayed standards recovered from Dalmatia to the public in the portico of

⁶⁷ See Gruen 1996: 154–5. ⁶⁸ See Gruen 1996: 166–8. ⁶⁹ For example, the Moesi, the Getae, and perhaps the Dacians; see Gruen 1996: 174. ⁷⁰ In the late 30s  Agrippa campaigns against the Aquitani in the south-west as well as tribes in the north-east. Between 31 and 28  the Romans were fighting and winning against the Morini, the Treviri, and the Aquitani; see Gruen 1996: 178–9. ⁷¹ Gurval 1995: passim argues that Octavian himself did not make immediate use of Actium as a pivotal point in shaping the ideology of the principate. Rather the myth surrounding Actium grew slowly, in time, and in particular through the poetry of Horace, Propertius, and Virgil. ⁷² Appian, Illyrica 16–17. Gruen 1996: 174 nicely summarizes: “Propaganda value, as so often, counted for more than tangible achievement.”

 ’       ?

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Gnaeus Octavius.⁷³ The triumph itself served even more powerfully to advertise Octavian’s foreign expansion to those at home.⁷⁴ On the streets of Rome, in a long parade, the triumph included displays of weapons, treasures, and captives taken from the conquered, but also spectacular representations of conquered geography—cities, mountains, rivers.⁷⁵ The Egyptian triumph, moreover, two days after the Illyrian triumph, and the day after the Actian celebration, provided the culmination for Octavian’s festivities. On the one hand, three successive triumphs, one right after the other, must have created for Romans, through crescendo effect, the heady feeling of the world slowly giving way before their domination.⁷⁶ On the other hand, the sheer novelty and display of the Egyptian triumph brought before astonished Roman eyes a tangible sense of their latest territorial acquisition. In a very real sense, the triumph made Egypt manifest in Rome, but Egypt explicitly under Roman control. We know from Dio⁷⁷ that the third and final triumph dwarfed the other two in its lavishness, as Egyptian spoils were paraded through the city and served to adorn Rome’s temples. In addition, an effigy of Cleopatra, depicting her dead and reclining on a couch, made its way along Roman streets together with other living captives from Egypt. A multitude of animals, wild as well as tame, rounded out the spectacle, which was rendered most exotic with the appearance of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus. These animals were all slaughtered.⁷⁸ While the spectacle of triple triumph, with all the implications of Roman world dominance, would surely not fade from Roman memory for quite some time, Octavian actively pursued other means to keep notions of Roman conquest and expansion alive. Immediately after the triumphal celebrations, Octavian dedicated the newly rebuilt senate house, the Curia Julia, and placed a statue of Victory mounted on a globe⁷⁹ and decked out

⁷³ Appian, Illyrica 28. ⁷⁴ Polybius 6.15.8 calls the triumph an event “by means of which generals bring visible evidence of their achievements before the eyes of their fellow-citizens.” ⁷⁵ Here see the wonderful discussion in Murphy 2004: 154–64 about “triumphal geography.” Consider especially: “Triumphal exhibition also marks the reception of the conquered into the empire, a performance of the availability of new territory to Rome,” 157. See also Beard 2007: 143–86, chapter 5, “The Art of Representation.” ⁷⁶ Gurval 1995: 31–4 argues that by holding three triumphs in a row Octavian detracts from the civil war aspect of his victories and highlights instead the aspect of world conquest. ⁷⁷ Dio 51.21.7–8. ⁷⁸ Dio 51.22.5. ⁷⁹ Numismatists like Grueber, Mattingly, Kraft, and Sutherland believe that RIC² 268, depicting a Victory on a globe, represents the statue from Tarentum that Octavian had set up in the Curia Julia. See also Zanker 1988: 79–80. For a discussion of the consensus opinion, as well as his own opposing view, see Gurval 1995: 61–3.

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      

with Egyptian spoils, in the senate chamber.⁸⁰ At the same time, captured Egyptian spoils received pride of place as ornaments for Octavian’s newly dedicated temple of Caesar,⁸¹ and the prows of Egyptian ships added luster to the newly built speaker’s platform in front of the temple, ⁸² at the opposite end of what is traditionally called the ocular “focal point” of the Forum Romanum. Reinforcing the images and ideas visually present for all Romans to contemplate in the Forum, coins from between 36 and 27 , traditionally divided into two series, those with CAESAR DIVI F on the obverse, and those reading IMP CAESAR,⁸³ come into circulation with striking iconographic reminders of Roman imperial conquest. Romans effected their economic transactions with an abundance of images of the goddess Victory, as a bust with visible wings,⁸⁴ or more frequently standing winged on the globe carrying in her hands a victor’s wreath and palm,⁸⁵ or holding a wreath and bearing a standard on her shoulder.⁸⁶ Should Romans forget which victories, or whose, they were supposed to recall, they could flip their coins from reverse to obverse to discover Octavian’s head, or, in one very powerful image, Octavian dressed as Neptune, a heroic nude but for his flowing cloak, standing with his foot, military-conqueror style, on the globe.⁸⁷ Other coins, too, pressed home the not-so-subtle theme of Roman imperium sine fine (“empire without end”), like the iconographic reminder of the commemorative single arch erected in the Forum for Octavian’s victories shown topped by a large quadriga and with an inscription on the architrave reading IMP CAESAR,⁸⁸ or the numismatic depiction of the exotic crocodile surrounded by the inscription AEGVPTO CAPTA with Octavian’s head and the inscription CAESAR COS VI on the obverse.⁸⁹ When Propertius imagines his erotic world in elegy 1.12, I would argue that his vision reflects the contemporary political/cultural emphasis on

⁸⁰ Dio 51.22.1–2 reports both that Octavian set the statue in the Curia Julia and that Egyptian spoils adorned the statue. ⁸¹ Dio.51.22.2–3. ⁸² Zanker 1988: 79–80. ⁸³ There is some debate about the precise dating of these two series of coins. In general, there is agreement that both can be dated between 36 and 27 , though some want to date the ones that read IMP CAESAR to 29  based on Dio (21.41.3–4), who claims Octavian officially took the praenomen ‘imperator’ in 29. See Gurval 1995: 50–65 for a summary of the debate and for his own counterarguments. ⁸⁴ RIC² 256. ⁸⁵ RIC² 254a, 255. ⁸⁶ RIC² 268. ⁸⁷ RIC² 256. ⁸⁸ RIC² 267. Gurval 1995: 36–47 wants to see the arch as commemorative of Octavian’s many victories, not specifically as an Actian arch. Whether specifically commemorative of Actium or not, Gurval points out, nicely for our purposes, that the erection of arches was a new practice in Octavian’s time and thus the arch would have attracted much Roman attention. ⁸⁹ RIC² 275a.

 ’       ?

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imperial expansion, on conquest, on the image of Octavian as extender of the fines imperii (“boundaries of empire”).⁹⁰ As Octavian focuses minds on the space of Roman empire, capacious and relentlessly increasing, the poet seizes on the image of physical distance to figure the chill in relations between himself and his beloved. When he wishes to conjure up a palpable sense of the strain in their relationship, in order to render it accessible to his learned readers, and not merely a solipsistic expression of his personal turmoil, he compares the chasm that has opened between them to the extent of territory, more precisely, to the number of miles (tam multa . . . milia, 1.12.3), between northern Italy and the Ukraine. In his vision, the amator himself, ever passive and loyal, remains in Rome (1.12.1–2) while the world expands around him, vast, accessible to an adventurous puella presumably following her latest lover. Again Tibullus echoes Propertius 1.12 when he intimates in elegy 1.3 that in his ideal golden age lovers remain together; it turns out that there is nowhere to go—and thus, no need for fines.

Cynthia finis erit (“Cynthia will be the finis”) So the geographical concerns of Propertius 1.12 resonate within the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the late 30s and early 20s . If, however, expansion under Octavian produces a vision for Romans of their world holding out the promise of territorial limitlessness, poem 1.12 highlights considerable anxiety within its view of expanding territory, enfolding as the elegy does the disintegration of firm subjectivity into questions of geography, spatial distance, and ultimately fines (“boundaries”). Propertius laments a sudden destabilization in self-definition—“I am not the I who I had once been” (non sum ego qui fueram, 1.12.11). Cynthia’s imagined peregrination over vast distances, her via longa (1.12.11), has profoundly transformed him. His sense of “self” slides—he is no longer the “I” he was before, but rather has become another “I.” The signifying chain begins to unravel, leading to further slippage in the poet’s self-definition. His own elegiac poetry, the single most important element of the amator’s “I,” mutates, becomes other. Propertius complains: cogor et ipse meis auribus esse gravis (“and I am compelled to sound tedious to my own ears,” 1.12.14). ⁹⁰ See Gruen 1996: passim, who argues that while no grand strategy of world conquest drove Augustus in his plans for Roman territorial expansion, Augustus worked hard actively to cultivate the image of himself as a world conqueror for Roman consumption.

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      

Now this is a serious problem indeed! In his metamorphosis he begins to sound antithetical to “himself,” a purveyor of the ponderous, in other words, horribile dictu, like an epic poet, an artist best described by the adjective gravis or the stark, polar opposite of the elegiac poet’s epithet of choice, levis.⁹¹ The first three words of the next line exacerbate the issue, intertextually pointing the reader to Virgil’s didactic hexameters. As scholars have recognized, the formula with which Propertius launches into the concluding verses of his poem—felix, qui potuit—echoes a famous, programmatic statement from book 2 of the Georgics.⁹² The Propertian hexameter veers at its midway point from Virgil’s “lucky, he who has been able to understand the nature of things” (felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Georgics 2.490) to celebrate instead the lover who can weep in the presence of his beloved. And yet the generic cross-step, this verbal flirtation with what is gravis as Propertius gestures towards didactic epic, lingers. But the poet calls himself and us back from the potential confusion about him as an “I” and as a poet. “It is lawful/right” (fas est) for me to love Cynthia and not to desist from loving her and writing about it (1.12.19). But does he protest too much with his recourse to fas, and why is Cynthia both the cause and the cure when his own self-definition threatens to unravel? To opt out of the Symbolic order, as Lacan persuasively demonstrates,⁹³ to acknowledge and embrace the fundamental problems with language, the limits of the chain of signifiers, is a dangerous business, and one that Propertius remains unprepared to face. Having glimpsed the potential chaos that arises when images and signifiers begin to slip, in response he retreats back into this order. He clings to what is fas, to the law, and reiterates his self-construction as elegiac poet, lover of Cynthia. Moreover, Lacan offers excellent tools for explaining why Propertius turns to Cynthia ⁹¹ In terms of the aesthetic and moral vocabulary deployed in elegy, elegy is light, slight (levis) and soft (mollis), while epic is heavy, weighty (gravis) and hard (durus). Indeed, Heyworth 2007b: 59–60 notes that Cynthia’s absence “corrupts” Propertius’ style, making his elegy gravis, morphing his amores into tristia and causing him to contemplate long, epic journeys. Heyworth speculates about similar “metapoetical implications” surfacing in Propertius’ choice of rivers to describe the distance between Cynthia and himself—she is as far distant from me as the Hypanis is from the Venetian Eridanus (= Po; see page 63 above). Heyworth suggests that the Hypanis alludes to Gallus and thus symbolizes his elegy, while the Eridanus, portrayed by Callimachus (fr. 458) as too muddy for cattle to drink from, comes to figure the great, muddy rush of epic water. ⁹² Batstone 1992 examines this intertextual echo, as well as two others in the Monobiblos, to draw out how Propertius appropriates and redeploys Virgil’s words to indicate his own “generic opposition to the project of the Georgics,” 295. More forcefully, Mynors 1990: 169 refers to Propertius’ allusion as a “parody” of Virgil. ⁹³ Lacan 1992 considers the ways that Antigone exemplifies an opting out of the Symbolic.

 ’       ?

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and to fines as he seeks to establish the key to his identity. For Lacan, the fundamental lack at the heart of subjectivity results in desire, while the way in which a subject puts into play a fantasy to deny the lack indicates whether the subject has taken up a masculine or a feminine subject position. The masculine subject seeks to render the lack whole at the level of the subject; he seeks out what he lacks, that which will render him whole. He chooses an object of desire, but relates to her/it as if she/it were the object-cause of his desire, what Lacan calls objet a, the ineffable, unsignifiable, x factor, something that evades symbolization, but that comes into existence at the original moment of lack and subjectivity and that sets desire in motion.⁹⁴ In his fantasy relation to objet a, Propertius fixates on Cynthia, and insists that she guarantees his self as “Man,” as “elegiac poet,” as “I.”⁹⁵ Propertius, however, does not solely fasten onto Cynthia in his search for wholeness; indeed, a second “object of desire” plays an equally important role in the elegy. The poet clings not just to Cynthia, but to Cynthia as finis. As Micaela Janan has persuasively argued (though she writes most extensively about Propertius’ fourth book), Propertius’ poetry interpreted through a Lacanian lens reveals that various cultural signifiers and icons hold out to the masculine subject the same seductive appeal, the same vain promise of wholeness, as the beloved.⁹⁶ While Janan provides a variety of examples—Romanitas, the model citizen, a return to the mos maiorum—of “culturally freighted icons of identity,”⁹⁷ I suggest that poem 1.12 upholds physical, spatial boundaries of empire in just such a way. The concept of fines, very much alive in the Roman historical, political, and cultural imagination in the late 30s and early 20s , becomes another such touchpoint, another “icon” that holds out, on a social, cultural level, the (ultimately empty) promise of unproblematic wholeness.⁹⁸ A shifting cultural conception of space emerges under Augustus, of which expansion and a new apprehension of one’s territorial boundaries in two dimensions form an integral part. The ordering of space in a shared worldview, and more, the rendering of a coherent and seamless narrative about ⁹⁴ While Lacanian theory itself is not static or stable as he returns and reworks central concepts, key texts here are Lacan 1981: chapter 16; Lacan 1998; and Lacan 2006: 671–702. ⁹⁵ Lacan’s most often-quoted statement about objet a is the enigmatic “I love in you something more than you,” 1981: 263. ⁹⁶ Janan 2001. ⁹⁷ Janan 2001: 29. ⁹⁸ My argument intersects in various ways with the overarching argument that Lowell Bowditch makes in two articles, 2003 and 2006. She persuasively shows how Propertius, in poem 2.10 (2003) and poem 2.16 (2006), deploys the language of love and elegy to provide questions of empire with an erotic coloring.

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that space, takes on paramount importance. Imperial geographers map and measure the world.⁹⁹ Geographic texts, introducing the extent of the world, and more particularly of the Roman world, take shape as Strabo pens his seventeen-book Geographia and Augustus himself composes the Res Gestae.¹⁰⁰ Moreover, more practically, land surveyors intensify their work, measuring, dividing, bounding territory while simultaneously recording and logging these operations.¹⁰¹ Romans begin to grasp, in a unified, orderly fashion, the territorial empire that was theirs.¹⁰² A significant and recurring manner in which a nation in possession of an empire, especially a vastly and newly expanding one, seeks to fashion spatial order is by creating maps for, and disseminating them to, its citizens. Scholars of cartography have pointed out, in terms that interestingly mirror Lacan’s notions about the subject and desire, that producing a coherent and fixed visual representation of the physical space of empire serves on one level to ease the inevitable tensions that arise in the face of new infinite and formless holdings of land, just as the Lacanian subject, in the face of his/her lack, cleaves to an identity that papers over the gap(s). As one theorist eloquently claims, a map “is an attempt to impose the discipline of reason onto what is indistinct, indeterminate, and formless,”¹⁰³ and “without the map, the world has no contour, limit, form, no dimension.”¹⁰⁴ In addition, a map offers a sense, albeit a false one, of stability, rendering static and final a space that is often contested and changing.¹⁰⁵ A world map, in particular, allows for an unreal sense of mastery, a totalizing gaze, over an expanse of territory that one cannot actually grasp with the eye and that is not as coherent as its image pretends. The boundaries of empire, the fines, loom

⁹⁹ Whittaker 1994: 14; Nicolet 1991: 109–11. ¹⁰⁰ Nicolet 1991: 9 claims that the document ‘can be considered at least in its second half as a genuine geographic survey’ of Augustus’ conquests, meant to be read in tandem with Agrippa’s map of the world. ¹⁰¹ Nicolet 1991: 150–4. ¹⁰² The coherent account of territorial empire encompasses the geographical, the administrative, and even the linguistic. See the thorough study of Richardson 2008, who traces the words provincia and imperium from the third century  to the second century . He argues that the words’ meanings change over time to reveal that in the age of Augustus Romans’ conceptions of empire and imperialism shift to encompass a new account of empire as territorial possession. Similarly, see Wallace-Hadrill 2005, 2008. ¹⁰³ Jacob 2006: 30. ¹⁰⁴ Jacob 2006: 29. ¹⁰⁵ “But the map is also the ephemeral and perishable medium of knowledge that requires endless revision. It evolves along with exploration, revision, additions, and newly available evidence . . . From its beginnings, now, the history of cartography has taught us that no definite and ultimate map exists. Every map is merely a stage in the discovery and appropriation of the world,” Jacob 2006: 365–6.

 ’       ?

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large, seductively proffering the possibility of an empire with fixed shape, with precise, well-delineated contours, coherent and knowable. To help Romans conceptualize their world in an orderly, unified way, Augustus’ right-hand man, Agrippa, produced the first map of the world publicly displayed in Rome that was completed sometime between Agrippa’s death in 12  and Augustus’ death in 14 .¹⁰⁶ In poem 1.12, we discover in Propertius’ verse an echo of the anxieties and uncertainties, the impulses towards order that drive an expansionist empire to produce a map, that collapsing of object of desire and object-cause of desire that Lacan attributes to the masculine subject, yet about fifteen to twenty-five years before Agrippa’s map was first publicly displayed in Rome. Our poet anticipates very early in Octavian’s drive to construct an image of himself as an unabashed expansionist the problems an individual confronts in the face of the infinite, formless, and ever-changing world in which he now lives. For most of poem 1.12 Cynthia is unstable, lacking fixity, in motion through space, away from Propertius’ bed, a shadowy traveler eastward from Rome. Her geographic peregrinations unglue the fixed, coherent sense Propertius has of himself, as well. Faced with the specter of a fluctuating self, Propertius makes a lastditch attempt at stabilization, at papering over the incoherences.¹⁰⁷ Seeking wholeness, Propertius marks out his parameters—Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit. Faced with the unstable Cynthia he has unveiled in the poem, he first seeks to render her fixed, in service of his effort to anchor his own self-definition on her qua immovable point. Propertius locates her—solidly, constantly, stably—both at the first, and the last; he sets her up as his boundary, the one who provides him with the contours of a whole and fixed shape, relying on his puella and on the concept of imperial fines to bestow on him a(n imaginary) sense of fullness of being. In the end, however, we are faced with the impossibility of Propertius’ desire, as well as Augustus’. Augustus’s desire “to make ‘wholeness’ possible, to locate a redeemed and healed subject in a purified, coherent Roman state”¹⁰⁸ manifests itself, in one instance, as a desire for ordered space. This will eventually

¹⁰⁶ For more, see the Introduction, pages 10–12 above. ¹⁰⁷ As Miller 2004: 66 has noted, Cynthia functions in the Monobiblos like “the vanishing point in a painting that allows the other more defined shapes around it to have their form.” Stahl 1985: 20 calls this poem “a calm meditation upon the new self,” though he explores how Propertius chooses love and thus constructs a self with values antithetical to those of Roman society. ¹⁰⁸ Janan 2001: 19.

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lead to the setting up of a map, a fixed and stable visual conceptualization of empire, which invites viewers to acquire knowledge, and control, of the fines of their world. But the map is “not territory but a social, political and cultural image of the territory,”¹⁰⁹ and boundaries are not final, unmovable, fixed entities. Indeed, Augustus demonstrates this proposition by adding the greatest amount of territory to the Roman empire since the Mediterranean conquest of the third and second centuries .¹¹⁰ Similarly, Propertius’ selfdefinition, like all senses of self, can be no more than an alignment with cultural signifiers that cannot themselves be stable or fixed. For Propertius, as for Augustus, fixed fines (“boundaries”) must remain in the realm of fantasy—something we all strive for but can never really have.

¹⁰⁹ Jacob 2006: 369. ¹¹⁰ See Gruen 1996. Moreover, boundaries are frequently more fluid, less clear-cut than we would like, as Whittaker 1994 nicely illustrates. Consider, for example, the statement made by NPR commentator, Andrei Codrescu, about exchanges between citizens of Cuba and members of the Cuban-American community in Florida: “If [borders] are not there in our minds, why do they still exist on the map?” (All Things Considered, 6 April 2009).

3 On the Road Again Following the vias in Tibullus

nam cum ex omnibus civitatibus via sit in nostram, cumque nostris civibus pateat ad ceteras iter civitates, tum vero, ut quaeque nobiscum maxime societate, amicitia, sponsione, pactione, foedere est coniuncta, ita mihi maxime communione beneficiorum, praemiorum civitatis contineri videtur. “For since a road leads into our city from all states, and since the way is open for our citizens into all other states, then in truth, as each state has been joined to us most closely in alliance, friendship, contract, agreement, treaty, so it seems to me each one is embraced to the greatest extent in the share of the benefits and rewards of our community.” Cicero, Pro Balbo 12 quis enim non communicato orbe terrarum maiestate Romani imperii profecisse vitam putet commercio rerum ac societate festae pacis? “For who would not think, with the world connected together by the majesty of the Roman Empire, that life has improved because of the exchange of commodities and the alliance of blessed peace?” Pliny, Naturalis Historia 14.1

A Dream of the Golden Age Tibullus has a dream. In fact, he has many,¹ but we are going to begin this chapter by focusing on one particular fantasy, the poet’s dream of an ¹ Indeed, perhaps Tibullus’ best remembered words are haec mihi fingebam (“I was creating these fantasies for myself,” 1.5.35), and fingo (“to fashion/invent/create”) is a verb that recurs in Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0004

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imaginary Golden Age.² As we shall observe in Tibullan elegies, however, dreams, subjects, images all lack fixity and stability, appearing instead to fluctuate in the face of scrutiny. The absence of fixity complicates the task of the interpreter, who must first somewhat falsely freeze the picture in order to discuss it, before then allowing it to exist in its more complicated and nuanced organic state. With this caveat in mind, let us consider the poet’s vision of the Golden Age. Once upon a time, Tibullus’ reverie promises, in an idealized past when Saturn ruled (Saturno . . . rege, 1.3.35), people enjoyed a happy and peaceful existence. It was a world of spontaneous bounty; without any toil on the part of humans, “oaks themselves used to proffer forth honey” (ipsae mella dabant quercus, 1.3.45) and sheep, of their own free will (ultro, 1.3.45), provided milk to carefree (securis, 1.3.46) folk. The poet returns to similar descriptions of times gone by in three more of his sixteen poems. Each iteration, alluding to a past plenitude hazily defined in temporal terms, echoes the others in its emphasis on simplicity and abundance. In poem 1.10, when the “beechwood cup” (faginus . . . scyphus, 1.10.8) graced feast-tables, the shepherd slept out of doors, among his charges, without a concern (securus, 1.10.10) either for theft or, it seems, for monetary acquisition; he felt satisfied breeding his spotted animals, rather than preferring those whose pure white wool fetches the highest price.³ In poem 2.3, men of old (veteres, 2.3.69) had frugal tastes, dining on acorns and quenching their thirst with water alone (2.3.68–9),⁴ thus dispensing with any need for back-breaking agricultural toil (2.3.70).

his verse. Most scholarship on Tibullus has something to say about the dreamlike quality of Tibullus, either at specific moments, or as an overall aura. I am using the text in Maltby 2002. ² While the many interpreters of Tibullus discuss the presence of the Golden Age topos in his elegies (for example, Miller 2004: 118–28, Bright 1978: especially 22–30 and also 80–3, LeeStecum 1998: especially 44–5 and 113–16), there is still disagreement about its purpose in the poems, and even about the extent to which Tibullus fantasizes a Golden Age at all (see Boyd 1984). To be precise, Tibullus does not actually use the appellation “Golden Age,” preferring instead to speak about a time under the reign of Saturn. By identifying the period with Saturn’s rule, and by using images that recur in Latin poetry for this moment, we can name the fantasy a Golden Age vision; see Wimmel 1976: 127–8. ³ The shepherd is “free from care amidst sheep with wool of varied hues” (securus varias dux gregis inter oves, 1.10.10). See Putnam 1973 and Maltby 2002, both ad loc. Both suggest that spotless, white fleeces on sheep make the animals more profitable, but in Tibullus’ Golden Age, where simplicity reigns, the potential to make money does not rule all choices and hence spotted sheep remain desirable. Conversely, however, Tibullus could be echoing the fourth Eclogue in which the famously multi-colored sheep of Virgil’s Golden age spontaneously have varias colores (4.42, compare Tibullus’ varias oves). ⁴ These are apparently Golden Age staples; see Tibullus 2.1.38 and Lucretius De Rerum Natura 5.939 and 945–7.

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The excursus on simpler, happier, past time develops at greater length in poem 2.5. The elegy ostensibly celebrates the induction of Messalla’s son, Messallinus, as one of the quindecemviri, members of the priestly college charged with keeping the Sibylline books safe. Tibullus takes the opportunity, as he elevates his patron’s son in verse, to linger a moment on the Sibyl and her most famous petitioner in Latin literature, Aeneas. The double founding of Rome, aeternae . . . urbis (“the eternal city,” 2.5.23), through the actions of Aeneas and Romulus successively, lies in the future; for now, a pastoral fantasy of early settlement. Cows grazed on the Palatine (2.5.25), while humiles . . . casae (“humble huts,” 2.5.26) dotted the Capitoline hill. Then (tunc, 2.5.25) gods, often represented by roughly hewn wooden images (2.5.28), rejoiced in simple offerings, milk for Pan, a shepherd’s pipe for Silvanus⁵ (2.5.27–30). And suitors wooed beautiful girls with fecundi . . . munera ruris (“gifts of the abundant countryside,” 2.5.37), cheese and a gleaming white lamb (2.5.38). Tibullus’ rural and plentiful Golden Age is not an idiosyncratic poetic fantasy. In fact, the poet’s vision shares several characteristics central to one literary manifestation of the Golden Age topos. While one version of past perfection thrives on a moral narrative that pairs virtue and hard work, Tibullus opts for the alternative ideal in which abundant bounty prevails without toil, in large measure because people’s desires were simple and frugal and thus easily fulfilled.⁶ We can flesh out Tibullus’ fantasy a little bit through other poetic depictions which match Tibullus’ in their broad strokes. In Horace’s beata . . . arva (“blessed fields,” Epodes 16.41–2) the land produces grain without the plow, the vines grow flowers without pruning, and fig trees spontaneously bear fruit without grafting. Honey drips from the oak and clear streams abound (16.41–8). Herd animals, goats and sheep, also freely and willingly supply milk (16.49–50). When Saturn’s rule returns in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (redeunt Saturnia regna, 4.6), the earth, “untilled” (nullo . . . cultu, 4.18), bears “all things” (omnia, 4.39), while in a most charming image, sheep in the fields spontaneously sprout wool dyed in a miraculous array of luxurious colors (4.42–5). Lucretius, who like Tibullus emphasizes a diet of acorns and water,⁷ and like Horace conjures up an allproviding earth,⁸ additionally helps us to visualize living conditions for these ⁵ Or perhaps Pan is the silvestris deus; see Putnam 1973: ad loc. ⁶ See Reckford 1958: 79–87 for his discussion of how ancient literature distinguished between a “hard” and a “soft” Golden Age. ⁷ Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.939–40 and 945–7. ⁸ Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.937–8.

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Golden Age mortals. Unclad and without the benefits of fire, they took up residence in groves, caves on mountainsides, and forests (nemora atque cavos montis silvasque, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.955).⁹ And what explains such a blissful state of plenitude? Our poets here all seem to be in agreement. The Golden Age requires a dearth of civilization. Because in this fantasy people have absolutely all they could ever want— acorns, water, milk and honey, a cave to sleep in—they lack nothing and therefore they desire nothing. No need, then, for anything at all. Such a surfeit allows no room for longing, or looking outward; there is no drive, with so much abundance to go around, to acquire and then mark out individual possessions. Horace emphasizes that his tempus aureum (Epodes 16.64) has no place for sea travel and maritime adventuring or trading as he banishes, in sequence, the Argo (16.57), Phoenician sailors (Sidonii nautae, 16.59), and Ulysses’ crew (16.60). Lucretius, too, excludes war and sea travel from the Golden Age; since men did not lust after territorial or commercial gain, there was no impetus to fight or to sail the seas (De Rerum Natura 5.999–1001). War and mercantilism led, predictably, to an acquisition of wealth and power, then quickly, to a push towards dividing up property and land, then, finally, to the need to defend it.¹⁰ Cities, walls, carefully demarcated personal assets and holdings follow in quick succession (5.1105ff.). While Horace’s Golden Age seems to exist in temporal parallel with his present, but in a spatially remote location accessible only to some, and while Lucretius seems to offer a diachronic narrative of golden past to fallen present, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue implies that despite a lapsarian present there is hope, thereafter, of returning to a prelapsarian state. Even though Virgil seems to suggest that one can backtrack to an ideal condition, such regression is attainable (in fantasy, of course) only if one removes certain trappings of civilization. For Virgil, too, the Golden Age stands in sharp opposition to times of war, seafaring, commerce, and city building and fortification (Eclogue 4.31–9). Tibullus shares much with his fellow poets when he dreams of the Golden Age. He also introduces his own variants into the narrative. First, amor flourishes, although perhaps only hypothetically.¹¹ Against a simple rustic background he holds his beloved to his breast (1.1.45–6), wishing to be “lazy ⁹ Ovid reinforces this picture at Metamorphoses 1.89ff and 15.96ff. ¹⁰ Note especially De Rerum Natura 5.1011ff. where Lucretius explicitly links heteronormative pairings and the production of offspring with the end of the Golden Age. ¹¹ Here I disagree with the arguments (for example, Lee 1974, Gaisser 1983, Boyd 1984, LeeStecum 1998: e.g., 67–71) that suggest a division in Tibullus between the militia vs rura

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and inactive” (segnis inersque, 1.1.58) but only with Delia (tecum, 1.1.57–8). Or he would, pointedly using Saturn’s day as an excuse (Saturni . . . diem, 1.3.18),¹² remain with Delia while Messalla sails off. In elegy 1.5 he dreams of erotic fulfillment with Delia as his farm-wife (1.5.20–34), and his true hero is the old farmer in poem 1.10 who enjoys a simple pastoral life with wife and son (1.10.39–44). Moreover, if Tibullus contributes to the Golden Age narrative by adding the possibility of amor, he also supplements the list of the particular ills that accompany the onset of civilization and inhibit the fantasy. More than the other poets who imagine the Golden Age, Tibullus focuses on roads, doors, and boundaries as significant hindrances to his idealized vision. This is not to imply that war and commerce do not figure into Tibullus’ list of present-day evils as they do for Virgil, Horace, and Lucretius; indeed, Tibullus expends much poetic energy in his attempts to draw a sharp dichotomy between the poetic “I” and the soldier, instrument and spreader of empire who stands to make a healthy profit from his plunder.¹³ But the poet’s greatest emphasis, when he attempts to articulate his sense of himself in his rapidly-expanding contemporary world, returns again and again to the word via. Tibullus uses this noun markedly more often than the other elegists and almost exclusively as his choice to express the concept of “road” even though Latin possesses other words for routes or thoroughfares, all with varying shades of meaning.¹⁴ The via for Tibullus resonates deeply. Elegy 1.3 provides us with a point of entry. The poem centers on a then-versus-now comparison, a juxtaposition between a Golden Age fantasy and a discussion of the amator’s present.

dichotomy, on the one hand, and the militia vs amor dichotomy, on the other, seeing instead an ineluctable, if solely fantasized, intertwining of rura and amor. ¹² Maltby 2002: ad loc, notes that because travel has no place in the age of Saturn, then by extension travel should not begin on Saturn’s day. ¹³ The best example will be the programmatic lover vs the alius in 1.1. ¹⁴ Fineberg 1991 contains a chapter about roads and feet in Tibullan elegy. In table seven, p. 172, she counts the occurrences of via and its declined forms in his poems and concludes that Tibullus’ average of 1.53 uses per 100 lines is higher than the average in Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid’s Amores. She notes, and I agree, that the “seeming frequency of roads . . . caught my attention when I first read Tibullus,” p. 130. “The roads of the Roman empire were differentiated according to their nature. A road was a definite object to be distinguished from other forms of tracks and paths. In law a road or via had to be wide enough to drive a vehicle along it (Dig.8.1.13). If it was not wide enough for a vehicle, the way was defined as an actus, which had to be wide enough for a pack animal. If narrower than this it was simply said to be a path or right of way (semita or iter). Immediately, it can be seen that a via was defined by its ability for wheeled transport to be carried upon it,” Laurence 1999: 58.

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Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, when Saturn ruled (Saturno . . . rege, 1.3.35), travel did not occur. What a happy and peaceful existence people enjoyed priusquam / tellus in longas est patefacta vias (“before the earth was opened up for the purpose of long journeys,” 1.3.35–6) and before sea travel (1.3.37–40)! No one sought profit in distant lands, and the land itself (and the animals of the land) spontaneously gave nourishment (1.3.39ff.). In this time of plenitude and fullness, the time defined explicitly as before vias, the speaker also declares that no need for fines ever arose—no need to divide property, no need to impose clear lines of demarcation (certis finibus, 1.3.44). The use of fines with the verb regere (non fixus in agris / qui regeret certis finibus arva lapis, “no stone was secured in the fields in order to measure off the arable lands with fixed boundary lines,” 1.3.43–4) brings formal, legal language for marking territorial boundaries into the poetic narrative.¹⁵ In addition, and along the same lines, “no house possessed a door” (non domus ulla fores habuit, 1.3.43) to identify and protect private property. Tibullus’ Golden Age presents an ideal, a world without roads (viae), without desire for acquisition, and without boundaries (on land, fines, or on houses, fores). For in elegy 1.3 the concepts remain ineluctably intertwined. While travel does not exist as a possibility, while men do not seek personal gain and property, then indeed no need arises to think about, or mark off, boundaries either in the world at large, at home, or in one’s fields. Now that the age of Jupiter has arrived (nunc Iove sub domino, 1.3.49), both travel and space have become unpleasant realities the speaker must confront.¹⁶ Tibullus’ peregrinations divide him from Delia, a separation he presumably would not suffer in a prelapsarian world. He has left Rome, a turn of events, which, as he first describes them at least, both he and Delia strenuously, and at times ingeniously, opposed (1.3.9–34). He depicts himself as forced to join his patron, Messalla, in an expedition along some of the world’s longas vias (1.3.36),¹⁷ now a fact of contemporary life. Messalla’s eastern expedition, described in elegy 1.7 (13–22) and presumed to be the impetus for the longas ¹⁵ See here Maltby 2002: 197–8: “The phrase regere fines is a legal term for marking boundaries . . . The use of regere in the sense of the compound dirigere is an archaism typical of legal language, but it also serves to emphasize the literal meaning ‘rule with a straight edge.’ ” ¹⁶ Lee-Stecum 1998: 222 summarizes as follows: “the via has been described throughout the collection as an instrument for the aggressive acquisition of power. It has always appeared as a channel for military and commercial ventures, directly opposed to the rural world.” As we shall see, this is only part of the picture. ¹⁷ Tibullus uses the combination longa via three times but it seems not to become a popular turn of phrase until Ovid and Martial; see Maltby 2002: 131.

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vias of 1.3,¹⁸ compels the amator to come face to face with the reality of Rome’s geographical expanse of empire.

Viae and the Expanse of Empire A brief turn to the historical moment in which Tibullus writes will provide us with some context for the poet’s choice to link concepts of geographically expanding empire and the road. Perhaps more specifically, we are seeking to explore how and why, in Tibullus’ elegies, the idea of the via becomes a metaphorical shorthand for the ever-growing expanse of the Roman empire. As we discovered in Chapter 2 when we tried to establish a firm timeline for Propertius’ Monobiblos,¹⁹ however, precise and certain dates for the writing and publication of Tibullus’ elegies remain difficult to pin down. We can only determine “the latest date . . . before which the [first] book [of Tibullus] cannot have been published:”²⁰ September 25, 27 , the date that the Fasti triumphales Capitolini record for Messalla’s triumph over Aquitania (which Tibullus mentions at elegy 1.7.3–8).²¹ If we apply the same method to Tibullus’ second book of elegies, we note that the latest date the poet mentions falls sometime in 19 ;²² elegy 2.5 celebrates the induction of Messalla’s son, Messallinus, as one of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis in charge of the Sibylline books. So we can locate a terminus post quem for the publication of each of the two poetry books, although the latest date in book 2 may be more secure than that in book 1 because of its proximity to the poet’s death. In other words, just because we can trace no dateable reference to later than September 25, 27  in the poems of book 1, this does not necessarily mean that no poem was written later, either without mention of a date or with a reference to a date that somehow, with the passage of time, we no longer recognize. In addition, publication date does not provide us with secure information about dates of composition, which presumably span a ¹⁸ Maltby 2002: 286 states that the expedition Tibullus’ illness compelled him to abandon was in all likelihood at the time of Messalla’s command in Syria, about which, unfortunately, we know very little. Syme 1986: 209–10 suggests, on the evidence of Cassius Dio 50.7.2–7, that Valerius Messalla Corvinus was governor of Syria in 30/29 or 29/28 , before he went to Gaul in 28/27  (evidence in Appian). For exploits in Aquitania, Messalla celebrated a triumph in Rome on September 25 in 27 . ¹⁹ See Chapter 2, pages 74–5, with note 62, above. ²⁰ Lyne 1998: 520. ²¹ Lyne 1998: 521–2. ²² Probably early in 19  since we usually attribute his death to that year based on an epigram written by Domitius Marsus that suggests a close chronological proximity between Tibullus’ death and that of Virgil.

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number of years, or further, and even more difficult to ascertain, dates during which the poet thought about the material for his poems. I propose, perhaps rather conservatively, to consider the timeframe between 30  and the end of 19  as the historical and cultural context for Tibullus’ two books of elegies, locating book 1 in the first half of the 20s, say 30–26 , and book 2 in the latter half of the 20s down to the time of the poet’s death, 25–19 . In Chapter 2, we considered the expansionist drive of Octavian, not yet Augustus, as he emerged victorious from his civil war with Antony.²³ Attempting both to legitimize his position as ruler and to focus Roman minds on conquest of foreign foes as the new alternative to civil war, from 30 to 28  Octavian extended Roman holdings and influence into Egypt, Syria, Africa, the Balkans, Gaul, Germany. In an aggressive campaign to keep memory focused on his successes abroad, reminders of conquest were strategically evoked in everyday Roman life through triumphs, buildings in the Forum, and on coins. Erich Gruen cautions us that Octavian and then Augustus did not set out with a “structured blueprint for empire,” but rather proceeded variously in various regions, depending on circumstances. And yet, while Gruen notes that the plan for world domination may not have been entirely uniform and systematic, the princeps wished, without any doubt, to actualize “a systematic construct of his image as world conqueror.”²⁴ Even if we should not imagine his plans for world conquest precisely drawn up in advance, a quick rundown of continued expansionist tendencies during the period we are interested in for the works of Tibullus, 27–19 , reveals that as Augustus no less than as Octavian the leader thirsted for territorial acquisition. Indeed, we must recall that under Augustus the Roman empire experienced, on several frontiers, the greatest territorial expansion since the Mediterranean conquest of the third and second centuries .²⁵ Let us proceed more or less in chronological order. In 27 , just after the princeps received the name Augustus, two generals celebrated triumphs before the Roman people, one for his victory over the Getae in Thrace, the other, Messalla—who will be a very important figure for us—for his success in Gaul. From 26 until at least 19 , Romans also busily extended their imperial power in Spain. With much fanfare at home, Augustus himself led

²³ See Chapter 2, pages 75–9 above, for a more complete discussion. ²⁴ Gruen 1996: 147. ²⁵ Gruen 1996.

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the army for a while, and in 25  he celebrated his victory by the closing of the doors of Janus in Rome.²⁶ He was, it seems, a little premature in deeming the expansion a success since it was only in 19  that Agrippa in fact concluded the war. Although Augustus was compelled to withdraw from the fighting in Spain in 25  because of illness, nevertheless he maintained a diplomatic hand in cultivating the reach of Roman influence. Embassies from India, Parthia, and the Scythians arrived to see him,²⁷ and indeed Strabo attributes the expansion of trade into India to Augustus’ reign.²⁸ Meanwhile, in Egypt, the praefecti, who followed in the wake of Cornelius Gallus’ suicide, continued to pursue, with Augustus’ full support, the late praefectus’ vigorous drive for expansion. After a few setbacks, by the early 20s , the Romans had extended their power, as Augustus boasts in the Res Gestae, into Ethiopia, almost to Meroe.²⁹ In central Asia Minor in 25 , Galatia becomes a Roman province, resulting in even stronger ties for Rome with client kingdoms in Pontus, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, and with the provinces of Bithynia and Asia. Parthia occupied Augustus’ attention throughout the 20s . He traveled to the East in late 22 , making his presence felt in Sicily, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and then also in Cilicia, Judea, and Armenia.³⁰ The settlement in Armenia, repackaged for consumption in Rome as a military victory,³¹ led to the return of the Parthian standards. Augustus broadly trumpets the handover, cloaking it in the language of military conquest.³² Also at home, the Fasti Triumphales record that three times proconsuls received triumphs ex Africa.³³ While details concerning the first two are scarce, Pliny describes Balbus’ triumph of 19  as a celebration for expanding Roman power deep into the territory of the Garamantes.³⁴ Similarly, throughout the 20s, there existed a strong public perception, reflected in contemporary Augustan poetry, that Augustus was right on the verge of invading Britain.³⁵ The geographical spread of the Roman was vast, rapidly expanding, and potentially unstoppable. ²⁶ Dio 53.26.5. ²⁷ Orosius 6.21.19–20. ²⁸ Strabo 2.5.12 and 17.1.13. ²⁹ Augustus, Res Gestae 26. Also Strabo 17.1.53–4 and Pliny, NH 6.181. ³⁰ Dio 54.7 and 54.9.1–3. ³¹ See the coins proclaiming ARMENIA CAPTA or ARMENIA RECEPTA, BMCRR, II, nos. 301–8. ³² See, for the most obvious examples, the coins with the slogan signis receptis and, very famously, the cuirass of the Prima Porta statue, in Zanker 1988: 186–92. See also Rose 2005. ³³ Gruen 1996: 167. ³⁴ Pliny, NH 5.35–7. Also see Virgil, Aeneid 6.792–5. ³⁵ For example, see Virgil, Georgics 3.25; Propertius 2.27.5; Horace, Odes 1.35.29-30, 3.4.33 and 3.5.2–4. In addition, Dio reports that Augustus claimed to be preparing an expedition three times—in 34, 27, and 26 ; see Gruen 1996: 189.

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The ability to bring vast swaths of territory under Roman sway, all the while making sure that Romans at home were well aware of their conquests, however, represents only one piece of the puzzle. In order to rule effectively over an increasing geographical expanse, Augustus needed to establish ways to govern efficiently and coherently.³⁶ He sought to acquire control over physical space, people and resources, and thus administer a unified empire. His methods were varied, and we shall continue the discussion in later chapters. For now, it is perhaps enough to mention some of the processes the princeps put into place and honed. Centrally controlled and unified record-keeping was a priority. Augustus determined that documents recording locally taken censuses or land measurements or military details should all flow to a central repository in Rome. Dio’s vignette of a notable occurrence from 23  (53.30.1–2) reveals how Augustus himself scrupulously tracked these documents. Dio explains that Augustus, suffering from a prolonged illness that he could not shake off and fearing that he was about to die, summoned magistrates, important senators, and knights to his bedside. He discussed public affairs with them and then handed over to his fellow-consul, Calpurnius Piso, a book in which were recorded “the military forces and the public revenues” of the empire.³⁷ In a similar overarching pursuit for centralization, organization, and control of the space of empire, Augustus understood that roads would play a vital role. As early as 27 , Augustus had already recognized that “road-building came in the wake of conquest and the subsequent political unification and economic development” since the time of the Republic.³⁸ Roads do significant work of empire. They promote a sense of community, while quietly establishing a hierarchy among physical spaces. All roads, as the Golden Milestone reminds us,³⁹ lead to Rome, and they do so because it is the hub, the center of empire, although unlike many other empires, Roman roads also connect secondary hubs and crisscross the peripheries.⁴⁰ Roman roads come into being in strategic networks that extend eventually throughout the empire and that allow for flow of armies, of money, of communication (political, military, personal), of people (traveling for business or for pleasure), of goods (through trade and commerce), and even of

³⁶ The best treatment of these two approaches to empire is Nicolet 1991. ³⁷ Dio, 53.30.2. ³⁸ Chevallier 1976: 132. ³⁹ “In 20 B.C., as part of his program of road building,” Augustus placed the milliarium aureum in the Roman Forum, Zanker 1988: 143. ⁴⁰ Bekker-Nielsen 2012: 5852.

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ideas.⁴¹ Perhaps most importantly, extending a system of roads creates a sense of spatial unity, so crucial to Augustus who embraced the idea of “becoming” an empire.⁴² Dio, discussing how Augustus “administered the empire,”⁴³ observes that beginning in 27  the princeps turns to the restoration of roads as a prime way for senators to engage in the business of the res publica. Encouraging them to use their own resources to refurbish neglected roads, he himself leads the way repairing the Via Flaminia, the road from Rome to Arminium, with his own funds. He boasts of this achievement in the Res Gestae.⁴⁴ Also in 27, an arch at the junction of the Via Flaminia and the Via Aemilia publicly and permanently commemorates his restoration of the Via Flaminia as well as other most frequented viae of Italy.⁴⁵ Agrippa, following Augustus’ suggestions, constructs a network of roads throughout Gaul and Germany that employ Lugdunum (modern-day Lyons) as their hub.⁴⁶ Marcus Valerius Messalla takes on the task of paving the Via Latina in 27  from his own extensive resources; as Tibullus’ patron, who features as a character in his elegies, Messalla and his road will be especially important to us. Other senators are less enthusiastic in their commitment, so Augustus picks up the slack, frequently using his own personal wealth to finance the projects.⁴⁷ Sometime before 20 , Augustus officially steps into the position that he had de facto been fulfilling, taking on the post of curator viarum (“commissioner of the roads”) after the Senate decrees that the office should be his. His active involvement in the maintenance of the roads, should the public fail to notice as they travel them, is highlighted on coins and in inscriptions.⁴⁸ Integral to Augustus’ selfrepresentation in the 20s, an aspect fairly unique to the princeps and not emphasized to the same degree by his successors, is an interconnection between his role as restorer of the res publica and as repairer of the roads.⁴⁹ ⁴¹ Laurence 1999: 187. Consider Laurence 1999: 188: “from the first century BC through to the second century AD, we see the creation of a unified Italy alongside the improved network of roads.” He is discussing Rome and Italy, but one can easily extend this to the empire as a whole. ⁴² On networks of connected roads as a means of creating spatial unity, see Laurence 1999. On “becoming” rather than simply “having” an empire, see Nicolet 1991. ⁴³ Dio 53.22.1. ⁴⁴ Augustus, Res Gestae 20.5. ⁴⁵ ILS 1.84. ⁴⁶ Strabo 4.6.11. In Rome, however, Agrippa preferred building projects to roads: Dio 53.22.2–4. ⁴⁷ Dio 53.22.2. ⁴⁸ RIC I2 68 no. 360–2. One coin from 16  depicts an inscribed column that was set up in Rome that reads: “The Senate and the people of Rome to Imperator Caesar because the roads have been paved out of money which he gave to the treasury.” Indeed, arches at either end of the Via Flamina honored Augustus’ involvement in road construction for travelers to note, as Laurence 1999: 42–3 observes. ⁴⁹ See Laurence 1999: 39–57, chapter 4, “The Politics of Road Building.”

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“The road was fundamental for the production of territorial space in the creation of the Roman empire.”⁵⁰ The question that arises here is whether Tibullus’ seeming obsession with the road points to a very different production of space in his elegies from the worldview that emerges from the poems of Catullus and Propertius. Is the conception of space in the Tibullan elegies largely a hodological one? I suggest not, particularly because the “road” does more than link places to one another in some sort of one-dimensional, linear route. In the first two chapters we have observed that space is imagined cartographically. Catullus’ world spreads out geographically, highlighting movement of people and goods over wide swaths of territory, usually ending up in Rome. Individual subjects both rejoice in the expansiveness of imperium sine fine and seem to lose their own moorings as if in response. Propertius, as we have just seen, shares the worldview that looks from Rome on a rapidly widening empire, but prefers to think about establishing fixed and stable fines in the face of potential limitlessness. Cynthia, like the furthest territories of empire, acquires special status as a finis—a fixed, bounded point on which the amator seeks to pin his own self-definition. We shall see that Tibullus, too, like his predecessors, reveals an intense interest in the space of empire and in particular its effect on the subject. The road (via) catches his imagination, but not so as to necessitate primarily a hodological production of space. Instead, the via in Tibullus, associated as it is in his verse with the large expanse of the Roman world, comes to represent empire almost in a Tibullan shorthand, for fairly logical reasons. The road system, as Augustus masterfully understood and demonstrated, emphasizes both the dominance of Rome—the place to which all roads lead—and the interconnection of places along the route. The space the road connects becomes both bounded (physically by the extent of the road) and ordered (politically, culturally, and economically, with respect to Rome). The roads serve to underscore the notion that disparate places belong to a larger, Roman network; they unify potentially fragmented spaces, connecting them together with Rome as the central, dominant point. Networks of roads replicate the impulses at the core of the idea of empire itself. And here we return to Tibullus who seems to focus keenly on this intimate interconnection. If it is a truism of scholarship on Roman elegy to note that Tibullus, unlike his counterparts Propertius and Ovid, never refers to Augustus, it is by now also a truism to note that an absence of the

⁵⁰ Laurence 1999: 197. In this paragraph I draw on Laurence 1999: 197–9.

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princeps’ name in Tibullan verse does not mean that the poet ignores his contemporary reality.⁵¹ Quite the contrary. In this chapter I wish to suggest that the space of empire, rapidly expanding and unifying under Augustus, centrally preoccupies Tibullus in his two books of elegies. The theme emerges in particular, I argue, through the poet’s frequent deployment of the word via, and his best attempts, which will all end up thwarted, to maintain a healthy distance between himself and the road. Propertius, as we explored in the last chapter, envisions a world in which his puella spins out of control through space, along a via longa to be precise (Propertius 1.12.11), causing such anxiety that he attempts to pin her down as a stable and fixed finis. Conversely, for Tibullus, mobility belongs to the male world, although, as we will observe, he seeks to disengage himself from such activity, at least as far as overt self-definition goes. One of the problems with the via and its attendant vices, the door and the boundary, as we shall see, is that, try as Tibullus might to banish them from his corner of the world, they remain ineluctably intertwined. We shall discover Tibullus simultaneously upholding a via-free Golden Age fantasy while embracing a world of love and desire that is overrun with viae. From the very opening poem, the “I” comes into being through opposition to his constructed antithesis, or rival, almost invariably the wealthy, mercenary soldier, who embodies the values of war and commerce, and, rather pointedly, the via. It will become clear, however, as we read Tibullus that in order to consider the dichotomies that the elegist establishes, it is necessary as a first step to view the poetry in a kind of freeze-frame, to take a snapshot of the most polarized expressions of self-construction. We will then return to set the images in motion as they should be, so that we can examine how the oppositions in Tibullus are all fleeting, how self-construction in Tibullus is always already unraveling.⁵²

⁵¹ Scholars suggest many reasons for Tibullus’ ostensible silence on the subject of Augustus. Many read the poet’s reticence as an expression of hostility towards the princeps, although some suggest that perhaps he sympathizes instead with Messalla; for example, Riposati 1945: 58–67 and Putnam 1973: 8. Conversely Bright 1978: 74–5 and 88–9 argues that, when Tibullus praises Messalla’s family, he does so to praise Augustus, even while eliding mention of the latter. ⁵² This places me at odds with the Tibullan scholarship that argues for 1.1 as programmatically setting up basic antitheses, ethical or moral choices, that are played out over the course of book 1. For example, see Gaisser 1983, Boyd 1984, Leach 1980. Lee-Stecum 1998: 67–70 argues that earlier critical attention to ethical oppositions set up in Tibullus 1.1. between ideals of farming, soldiering, and love overlooks the similarities among them. For Lee-Stecum the goals of each individual ideal are achieved by means of a manipulation of “power.”

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Via vs Amor: Establishing a Clear Dichotomy Poem 1.1 sets the Tibullan stage with a sharp contrast between an “I” and another man (alius, 1.1.1).⁵³ The first-person narrator establishes his ideal world, a setting that approximates the fantasy of the Golden Age, yet provides us with our first glimpse at Tibullan lack of fixity. Although the dream of the Golden Age involves produce flowing from the earth without any human toil, poem 1.1 seems to introduce a slight variation, acknowledging that some small modicum of effort remains unavoidable. While pointing to his vitae . . . inerti (usually translated as “life of inaction,” 1.1.5), the ego realizes that he will occasionally have to graft vines (1.1.7–8), wield a hoe (1.1.29), or gently goad his oxen (1.1.30). In return, however, a personified “hope” will deliver unto him “heaps of grain” (frugum . . . acervos, 1.1.9) and “rich wine in full vats” (pleno pinguia musta lacu, 1.1.10).⁵⁴ This dream of plenitude works, as we have just seen with the Golden Age, because the one harboring this fantasy, “lazy and ineffective” (segnis inersque, 1.1.58), claims to hanker for very little (contentus vivere parvo, 1.1.25), beyond, perhaps, some shade by the river to avoid the summer heat (1.1.27–8) and a small bed (1.1.43–5) shared by a “mistress” (dominam, 1.1.46), to whom we shall return. Meanwhile, in stark opposition, another man (alius, 1.1.1) should acquire wealth—treasure as well as tracts of land—a reward for the constant terror and activity of his military service (1.1.1–4). Let the man who crosses the sea in stormy weather be rich (dives, 1.1.49); let him acquire gold and emeralds (1.1.51). Like the poet’s patron, Messalla, let him make war on land and sea and bring home great spoils to exhibit in his vestibule (1.1.53–4). This alius presents us with the antithesis of the “I,” a counterbalance to the ideal inhabitant within the fantasy of the Golden Age. A second glance at the description of this “someone else” reveals a further, interrelated, characteristic that we should note well; as a mercenary, a soldier constantly traveling and accumulating riches, he spends his time on vias. Differentiating himself from this man, the first-person narrator staunchly proclaims that no puella

⁵³ Here Tibullus makes use of the alius-ego formula, frequent in Augustan poetry; see Ball 1983: 20. For an excellent reading of this poem, and of Tibullus in general, see Miller 2004: 95–129. ⁵⁴ A similar variation on the fantasy occurs at 2.1.37ff. Here also we find the need for some work—farming, planting—enough to make a man tired but nothing described as too arduous. For women, some occasional spinning seems required. On the plus side, acorns no longer seem to be the staple diet, and wine flows.

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should ever have to shed tears ob nostras . . . vias (“on account of my marching along roads,” 1.1.52), as she certainly would if the alius were her lover. Indeed, he has already staked out for himself a definition of a man content with little, more specifically, a man “not always enslaved to the long road” in search of enrichment (nec semper longae deditus . . . viae, 1.1.26). Adding marked emphasis to the association between the alius and the viae, in the span of six lines, the poet links two other words ending in “vias” with his antagonist, the rhyming word ending the couplet directly before (1.1.50) and directly following (1.1.54) the couplet that concludes with vias (1.1.52). With an echoing wordplay that commentators single out as “remarkable,”⁵⁵ Tibullus attributes an ability to endure pluvias (“rain storms,” 1.1.50) as well as the propensity to acquire exuvias (“spoils,” 1.1.54) to the one who spends his time traveling the vias (1.1.52). The other is most emphatically a man with an intimate connection to viae. The rival reappears in poem 2, this time not an alius but an equally distancing ille (“that man,” 1.2.67). He is iron-hearted (ferreus, 1.2.67), pursuing “plunder and weapons” (praedas . . . et arma, 1.2.68) rather than staying home with a puella. In what seems to be a reprise of many of the ideas in poem 1,⁵⁶ the soldier seeks military glory and wealth far from home, having traveled this-time-unmentioned longas vias to Cilicia to set up camp (1.2.69–70), while in contrast the amator imagines himself fixed in geographical space, a shepherd with his flock in solito . . . monte (“on [his] accustomed hill,” 1.2.74). The differentiation between the amator and men who belong to the world of military activity, enrichment and roads—in other words, the world of empire—continues in poem 3, as we have already noted. Here Messalla again re-enters the narrative, clothed in the trappings of the other. While Messalla rightly wages war (te bellare decet, 1.1.53) throughout the world (literally “on land and on sea,” terra . . . marique, 1.1.53) without the amator in poem 1, in poem 3 the poor amator has been dragged along the vias (1.3.14) with his patron. Ever true to his most innate nature, however, the amator has become deathly ill because of the experience and must be left behind while the cohort continues its travels Aegeas . . . per undas (“through the Aegean seas,” 1.3.1) without him. Messalla returns again in poem 7, where he emerges as a powerful figure of empire, the amator’s antithesis.⁵⁷ A birthday poem, the elegy begins with ⁵⁵ Lee 1982 and Maltby 2002, both ad loc. ⁵⁶ See Maltby 2002, ad 67–80. ⁵⁷ Lee-Stecum 1998: 205–6 focuses his chapter about poem 1.7, like his entire book on Tibullus, on questions of power. Konstan 1978 argues that the poem celebrates Messalla’s work

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a celebration of Tibullus’ patron’s defeat of the Aquitanians “by means of strong military force” (forti milite, 1.7.4), for which he celebrated a triumph in September of 27 . Triumphs, as we have seen, serve to recreate a spectacle of empire for the viewers⁵⁸ and Tibullus’ poetic reimagining verbally replicates the triumph’s power to offer up to its viewers a representation of Roman expansionary might. First we see Messalla, crowned with the victor’s laurel and riding in an ivory chariot alongside captive, chained leaders of the defeated enemy (1.7.5–8). The poet then shifts the focus to Transalpine Gaul more generally, drawing our attention to specific geographical features of the landscape (lines 9–12). He mentions mountains and rivers, and his choice is deliberate, “suggesting the iconography of an actual triumph.”⁵⁹ Triumphal processions often feature graphic representations of conquered territories, especially central or striking landmarks, visual aids to encourage viewers to conjure up the defeated land. Suddenly then, the poet turns his attention eastward, as if himself caught up in the celebration of expanding Roman holdings. Without much warning we end up in Cilicia, Syria, Phoenicia, and then Egypt, all lushly evoked through alluring visual images of blue expanses of sea, cloud-covered mountain summits, white doves flying over cities,⁶⁰ high towers, and fertile waters of the Nile (1.7.13–22). The poet lingers for a while in Egypt, drawing a complicated and carefully nuanced comparison between Messalla and Osiris.⁶¹ Most importantly, Tibullus underscores what Lowell Bowditch has persuasively argued is a “colonialist representation . . . of Roman imperial power,” turning a poem that begins with “a tone of empire’s inevitability”⁶² into an fuller as conquering general and peaceful overseer of civil works, both achievements necessary for the spread of Roman empire. See Johnson 1990: 95 on Messalla as “Romanitas incarnate,” and also, in a more Lacanian vein, Miller 2004: 117–28. ⁵⁸ On the triumph, see now especially Beard 2007. For a more complete discussion of Octavian/Augustus projecting a self-image idea as an active expander of empire, see Chapter 2, pages 75–9, and Chapter 3, pages 91–101 above. ⁵⁹ Bowditch 2011: 96. See also Beard 2007: 109–10 and 178–80 for a discussion of the representation of conquered lands in triumphal processions. Bright 1978: 37 n. 16 suggests that Tibullus is conjuring up a triumph in this part of the elegy, although, in general, Bright prefers to read Tibullus’ evocation of geography as means of creating exotic “atmosphere” and “not context” (p. 8). ⁶⁰ “The reference to the dove . . . points up the ‘bird’s-eye view’ of this landscape, a common device in triumphalist geographical passages in Roman imperial literature that ‘allows the reader’s eye to sweep over the orbis terrarum as a thing to be possessed,’ ” Bowditch 2011: 113 with n. 54. ⁶¹ See especially, Gaisser 1971: 221–9, especially 226–8; Bright 1978: 51–62; Konstan 1978; Bowditch 2011. ⁶² Bowditch 2011: 96.

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exploration of Rome’s power over Egypt. From Egypt and Osiris Tibullus transitions back to Rome, to Messalla’s birthday, and more specifically to the road from Rome to the countryside that Messalla restored, according to Augustus’ wishes, from his own wealth (opibus . . . tuis, 1.7.59). The Via Latina, making its appearance at the poem’s conclusion, becomes ineluctably bound with the empire-building that precedes it. Messalla’s financial resources for the road come from plunder in war, thus intertwining roadbuilding and military conquest.⁶³ In addition the natural progression of the poem, from a discussion of geographic expansion to the mention of monumenta viae (“your memorial, specifically the road,” 1.7.57), points to the joining, in Tibullus’ imagination as well as Augustus’, of road construction and the process of empire-building. Tibullus has many ways of separating the amator and the space of empire. Sometimes he points to their antithetical natures in subtle fashion. For example, in elegy 1.5, the amator famously fantasizes about an ideal life of love and rural simplicity with his beloved Delia. After fifteen lines of agricultural and romantic bliss, he acknowledges the unreality of the images he conjures up—haec mihi fingebam (“I was creating these fantasies for myself,” 1.5.35). In fact, his reverie of a sedentary life of love does not merely dissipate, but rather gets dispelled in the winds odoratos . . . per Armenios (“among the perfumed Armenians,” 1.5.36). Exotic and vaguely distant,⁶⁴ the poet’s specific choice to name Armenia as the place where his dreams evaporate connects the notion of vast expanses of geographic space with the erasure of amor. In a similar vein, when Priapus speaks in poem 1.4 as some sort of praeceptor amoris, instructing the lover-poet on how to win over a boy’s heart, he, too, sets love and traveling through geographical space at odds. May the one who does not prioritize poetry and amor, but who instead greedily seeks acquisitive gains, “follow behind the chariot of Idaean Ops and travel through 300 cities in his wanderings” (Idaeae currus ille sequatur Opis / et ter centenas erroribus expleat urbes, 1.4.68–9). Casting the other as an Attis figure who leaves home to travel east as a frenzied priest of Cybele,⁶⁵ Priapus emphasizes a well-worn Tibullan trope: love and empire do not mix. And the poet reiterates the opposition in poem 2.2. Cornutus, the birthday boy, makes a wish; he asks for nothing more than uxoris fidos . . . amores (“the faithful love of his wife,” 2.2.11). This amor is so precious to him that he would not trade it for anything. In particular he does not want the most ⁶³ See Maltby 2002: ad 59–60. ⁶⁴ See Putnam 1973 and Maltby 2002, both ad loc. ⁶⁵ For Attis in Catullus, see Chapter 1, pages 39–41 above.

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exotic, far-away luxuries that the economy of empire affords its subjects, pearls from India where “the wave of the Eastern Sea blushes red” (Eoi qua maris unda rubet, 2.2.16). Tibullus does not shy away, however, from quite explicitly setting amor and the geographic space of empire at odds. He can, as in poem 1.7, compose a poem for his patron, highlighting Messalla’s activities in the various projects of Augustus, while virtually banishing all aspects of love from his elegy. By maintaining silence about the amator, he thus implicitly divorces him from the world of empire-building.⁶⁶ Alternatively, he prefers, as we have seen in poems 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, thematically to construct the amator and the soldier/Messalla as polar opposites. He makes a concerted effort to continue this pattern through the rest of book 1 and throughout book 2. The via longa and the one who chooses to travel along it appear as the antitheses to love once more in poem 1.9. Threatening the puer who has sold his love to the highest bidder, a man who offers the boy the kinds of monetary rewards acquired only in a post Golden Age world of hard work (durum . . . opus, 1.9.8) in agriculture (1.9.7–8) or on sea voyages (1.9.9–10), the amator predicts the puer will pay a penalty for scorning the amator’s love (persolvet poenas, 1.9.13). Should the boy rejoice in the ill-gotten gains of the postlapsarian world, gains resulting from laborious acts of tilling, war, and commerce (1.1 and 1.3 especially), and, more significantly, should he choose these profits over amor, he will be compelled to join that world as his fitting punishment. He will suffer the rains, the wind, and the sun (1.9.13–15) as the longa via wears down his invalidos pedes (1.9.16). The metapoetic references perhaps enhance the meaning of this line. As a metaphor for poetry, the longa via points to the genre epic, not elegy, while the one suited to the practice of amor rather than war would be the one in possession of invalidos pedes (“unwarlike feet”—both metrically and literally).⁶⁷ Once again amor and the amator stand at odds with the values of empire, embodied by the via. Poem 10, creating ring composition with poem 1, seems to establish an opposition between wars (bella, 1.10.7), fueled by violence as well as desire for gold, and pax (“peace,” 1.10.45) marked by rural simplicity, piety, and ⁶⁶ “The specifically Tibullan Arcadia . . . is wholly absent here,” Johnson 1990: 105. Also consider Gardner 2013: 85–112, who suggests that Delia is banished from the poetry of Tibullus after the appearance of Messalla in 1.7. ⁶⁷ Maltby 2002: ad loc notes that Livy uses the adjective invalidus to indicate “soldiers unfit for military service.” For a recent discussion of the use of pes in Tibullus, see Henkel 2014: 451–75.

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love.⁶⁸ Returning to the strategy of his opening two poems, Tibullus constructs a foil. In his first incarnation, the other, once again both labelled ille and characterized as ferreus (“iron-hearted,” 1.10.2), invents the sword, and in breathlessly swift succession come wars, greed, fortifications—tunc brevior dirae mortis aperta via est (“then a shorter road to dire death opened up,” 1.10.4). Later he comes back as alius (1.10.29)⁶⁹ and his appearance, as Lee-Stecum astutely points out, triggers recollections of Messalla in both the first and the seventh elegies as a man of war, of empire, of the road. The “I,” in stark contrast, sits back, drinks, and draws images in wine on the tabletop (1.10.31–2)—in other words, takes on the guise of the amator.⁷⁰ The opening of poem 2.6 reiterates the antithesis, as the lover and the soldier take their places in opposing camps.⁷¹ Forsaking love, Macer joins the army (castra sequitur, 2.6.1). The amator is dismayed and wonders if amor will follow along as Macer’s companion (comes, 2.6.2) “whether the long road on land or wandering seas will lead the man” (seu longa virum terrae via seu vaga ducent / aequora, 2.6.3–4). He dismisses this notion with alacrity; the longa via over land and sea is not compatible with love. Poem 2.5 provides us with one final example to consider. Like poem 1.7, elegy 2.5 overtly celebrates Tibullus’ patron, this time honoring the induction of Messallinus, his son, as a member of the quindecemviri sacris faciundis. In his commentary, Putnam calls this “Tibullus’ most ‘Roman’ poem,”⁷² a hymn to a very Augustan Apollo.⁷³ The elegy glorifies the continuity of Rome’s past, present, and future as an eternal city (aeternae . . . urbis, 2.5.23), a phrase that echoes Virgil’s famous promise from Jupiter that he has placed neither spatial nor temporal limits on Rome’s power, but rather has granted imperium sine fine (“boundless empire,” Aeneid 1.278–9). And it is not only the phrase about Rome’s long-lasting empire that suggests

⁶⁸ See especially Boyd 1984, Gaisser 1983, Leach 1980. Gaisser further argues that in these poems rura takes over as more thematically significant than amor. ⁶⁹ Wimmel 1976: 3. ⁷⁰ Lee-Stecum 1998: especially 273–4. Although conversely one might also wonder about the possible intersections between drawing images on a table in wine and making a map. ⁷¹ Gaisser 1977 argues that Tibullus sets himself up as the Gallus figure in 2.3. This intertext equally colors the Tibullan rival, suggesting that he resembles the soldier who steals away Lycoris, pp. 138–9. The argument about the contrast between the “I” and Macer works equally well if one imagines the antithesis to lie in poetic choices, with Macer defecting to epic while the “I” remains steadfastly devoted to elegy. ⁷² Putnam 1973: 182. ⁷³ Miller 2009: 262. Although, as Lee-Stecum 2000: 204 points out, the Apollo of poem 2.3, abandoning Olympus for his amatory pursuit of Admetus, might color the reader’s view of the new Augustan Apollo here in 2.5.

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Virgil’s epic; indeed, the Tibullan poem features episodes central to the Aeneid: Aeneas’ movements from Troy to Italy and the prophecy he received at Cumae from the Sibyl.⁷⁴ Just as Virgil does, so Tibullus subtly interweaves references to Romulus and his heroic status as cofounder, or perhaps double-founder, with Aeneas of Rome. This Rome belonging to Aeneas, Romulus, Messalla, Messallinus is emphatically not the Rome of the amator. We learn this early in the poem when we discover ourselves firmly in a postlapsarian world; long ago Saturn, king during the Golden Age, has fled (Saturno rege fugato, 2.5.9). Before Aeneas arrived, in fact, Rome was not a powerful seat of empire, but instead a place of rural simplicity replete with grazing cows, huts for dwellings, wandering shepherds, rustic piety, and agricultural abundance (2.5.25–38). Indeed the mighty city overruns the ideal Golden Age locus that the amator yearns for; carpite nunc, tauri . . . . dum licet (“graze now, bulls, . . . while it is still possible,” 2.5.55–6). No longer under the sway of Saturn, the world yields to Jupiter who promises Aeneas a Roman future (2.5.41), a city that with the passage of time will rule “where Ceres from the sky looks down on her fields, both where the East extends and where the river washes the breathless horses of the Sun in flowing waves” (qua sua de caelo prospicit arva Ceres, / quaque patent ortus et qua fluitantibus undis / Solis anhelantes abluit amnis equos, 2.5.58–60). In other words, Rome’s empire stretches geographically from the rising of the sun in the East to its setting in the West where at the end of the day the Sun bathes his horses in Ocean—imperium sine fine. The amator sets himself apart from this world, promising only, with the leave of his puella, to honor Messallinus as he participates in empire’s unending geographical reach, celebrating a triumph and driving before his chariot “conquered towns,” “the spoils of war” (praemia belli . . . oppida victa, 2.5.115–16). And it all begins with a via, the longa via from Troy towards Rome (2.5.62) of Aeneas, epic, not elegiac, hero extraordinaire.

Via and Amor: When the Clear Dichotomy Unravels As many interpreters of Tibullan poetry have noted, however, the poet’s careful oppositions and unambiguous attempts at self-construction often ⁷⁴ There is considerable scholarly debate about whether Tibullus and his readers had read the Aeneid or heard it recited; see Bright 1978: 67–71, Ball 1983: 213–16, with a review of earlier scholarship on the topic. Moreover, Ball 1983: 66–98 and Bright 1978: 185–217 suggest that Tibullus pays homage to all three Virgilian poems throughout the course of elegy 2.5.

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run amok.⁷⁵ The lover-poet’s voice remains polyphonic and fragmented, proffering visions and desires that appear conflictual and often selfcontradictory. I do not wish to dispute this. Instead, I suggest that both Tibullus’ attempts to differentiate between love and the space of empire, and the ultimate impossibility, despite his best efforts, of keeping the two categories separate, once again give us access to something of the Roman worldview in the early Augustan period. The issues of imagining the world cartographically, at the very time boundaries and limits are put into question because of rapid imperial expansion, find expression at the level of the individual subject—always itself a problematic whole whose nature the space of empire brings into focus. We have already traced the responses of both Catullus and Propertius to different moments of this developing political and cultural situation. For Catullus, the early, heady rush of imperium sine fine creates the anxious dissolution and unboundedness of the subject. For Propertius, unstoppable geographical expanse drives the subject to establish and cling to the possibility of known, definable boundaries. As we consider Tibullus, we find yet another response. On the one hand, we see a conscious struggle, as we have just traced, to divorce amor and the amator from the stuff of empire, in particular from the viae, a separation, we must acknowledge, that functions only if we consider the text in a series of frozen snapshots, as if it were an ever-unchanging map on which we could trace out ever-fixed boundaries. On the other hand, a text (much as an actual map of aggressively expanding empire) is always in motion, defying stasis, demanding a processual reading, one that follows the images and tropes as they develop within and through the poems. Such a reading reveals a constant merging of the supposedly antithetical categories. Indeed, before we focus on Tibullus’ text, let us return briefly to consider its historical and cultural context. With Tibullus we get closer in time to the production of Agrippa’s map, the first publicly displayed map of the world in Rome, than we have been with the works both of Catullus, that we read in Chapter 1, and the particular poems of Propertius we looked at in Chapter 2. For now it is not the map per se, which surely did not exist for Tibullus to see, that interests us, but rather the impetus to make such an artifact, arguably in the air at the time when Tibullus was composing his elegies, ⁷⁵ Most influential here, perhaps, are Fineberg 1991, W.R. Johnson 1990, Lee-Stecum, 1998, Miller 2004, and now Taynton 2018. I choose to highlight those who seek to explore the potential of Tibullus’ dreamlike paradoxes rather than those who see the poet’s affinities for the non-linear as artistic incompetence or worse, as a “brain disfunction,” (Bright 1978: 9–10 with n. 23, summarizing the argument of J. van Wageningen).

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especially if one considers the creation of a world map one tangible outcome of a specific, cartographic worldview.⁷⁶ As we noted earlier,⁷⁷ Romans under Augustus in the late 30s and 20s  both added vast amounts of geographical territory to their empire and, equally importantly, sought ways in which to establish and maintain control over the increasing geographical expanse. This urge to order space—by counting people and resources, by developing trade and moving especially luxury items from the geographic peripheries to Rome, by building and maintaining viae—reveals a way of thinking about the world that one can also point to in the decision to produce a world map, namely the desire to impose fixed and stable boundaries, to separate the inside from the outside in a coherent, unmessy fashion. When Tibullus attempts to establish a clear dichotomy between the amator and the man of empire, between a Golden Age of amor and a postlapsarian world of longae viae, his narrative offers us a glimpse into the cartographic worldview of his contemporary moment. The problem is, as we shall see in Tibullus’ elegies and as Lacanian theory cautions us, fixed and stable categories, in particular where self-representation is concerned, always come unraveled in the end. That a “contradictory and schizoid discourse . . . lies at the heart of erotic elegy”⁷⁸ seems a given. The subject is unquestionably a mess, but what interests us here are the different ways in which our poets pull back the veil on the tangle by focusing on issues of geographic space. What we see in Tibullus, that we do not discover in either Catullus or Propertius, is the acknowledgement of a dark and unholy alliance between the spread of empire and the poet’s constructions of amor. While the poet, on the one hand, carefully divides the lover from the masculine subject who participates in Roman imperium, as he sets them side by side, on the other hand, he suggests that the antithesis is less unassailable than it appears at first blush. The “other” turns out not to be a single, stable character against whom to

⁷⁶ See the Introduction, pages 5–19 above. ⁷⁷ See pages 91–101 above. ⁷⁸ Miller 2004: 4. I single out for particular mention Lee-Stecum 1998 precisely because it is a book-length study on Tibullus 1. Lee-Stecum’s monograph on Tibullus centers around a process of rereading informed by reader-response theory. For him, the reader of Tibullan elegies must accept a shifting, destabilized meaning with multiple competing interpretive possibilities, despite a very real impulse to limit the multiplicity of interpretations. Lee-Stecum, therefore, as other readers of Tibullus, sees some of the problematic issues of a stable univocal alius in poem 1.1 and some of the ways in which amor and militia are occasionally different from, but sometimes similar to, each other. He frequently unpacks the possibilities of the text with great sensitivity, and yet we differ fundamentally on how to interpret and where to locate the text’s self-contradictions.

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define oneself, but instead to have a precarious and shifting identity. Moreover, the violence, greed, and celebration of luxury trade items that Tibullus has carefully allotted to the participant in empire crop up with surprising frequency in association with amor. The doors and other boundaries banished from Tibullus’ Golden Age turn out to have a very powerful role in the creation of the amator’s desire. Most strikingly, the viae associated with empire show up, very unexpectedly, on the body of the amator’s puella (2.3.54). Tibullan love, like the movement of the other through the Augustan empire, it seems, depends on viae and fines. Looking at the poetry through the lens of Lacanian theory helps us to trace both Tibullus’ resignation in the face of the subject’s disintegration and his bleak understanding of what that disintegration signifies. Subjectivity, Lacan tells us, hinges on an impossible division, a fundamental lack. Seeking to paper over this lack and to present him/herself as a coherent whole, the subject cleaves to both image and signifier (or several) that s/he hopes will provide a complete identity. As we have seen, there are (a few fleeting) moments when the self-depiction of the amator seems clear, although, as we are about to note, the instances of uncomplicated self-representation turn out to demand a certain willful blindness to complicating factors. Indeed, the moments when the dichotomy falters, even as it is being set up, remain far more numerous, making the antithesis an impossible one even as Tibullus proceeds to construct it. On one side of the dichotomy we have the amator who desires a life of rustic simplicity, while he rejects profit, violence, and longas vias. On the other stands “the other,” a soldier who greedily acquires spoils in far-flung places, while he travels the vias, fighting as he goes. Ultimately, however, the signifier, any signifier, fails the subject because language itself is lacking. On the one hand, language’s construction of meaning is not finite; the possibility constantly exists that a new signifier will come along that will retroactively require all other signifiers to shift their meaning. On the other, signifiers acquire meaning through a relation of difference with other signifiers (e.g., amator acquires meaning through establishing differences between amator and rival/participant in empire), for which one must posit a complete and closed system of signifiers to which nothing new can be added. As Tibullus, therefore, struggles to present amator and alius, each as an unproblematic totality, contradictions, divisions, and incoherence emerge. Oppositions, Lacan points out, are neither fixed nor stable; in Tibullus’ poetry both the “other” and the amator collapse into incoherence, although in different ways.

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The “other” turns into a moving target as we seek to offer a fixed definition. Even in our attempts to name him so far, to affix a signifier to him, the issues brew not far below the surface. That he is “other” (alius, 1.1.1) emerges right from the start—in the poem’s second word. But otherwise images, representations, and signifiers shift. He appears in multiple poems, always recognizable, vaguely familiar, yet simultaneously and disconcertingly in a constant state of flux. Sometimes alius, sometimes ille ferreus (“that hard-hearted man,” 1.2.67),⁷⁹ he is rich (1.1.1.; 1.2.68), in possession of many acres (1.1.2; 2.3.1-3), a terrifying soldier (1.1.3–4; 1.2.68), a traveler along vias (1.1.52; 1.2.69–70), on land and on sea (1.1. 47–52). In poem 1.1, there is slippage between the alius and Messalla, who fixes spoils on his doors after victorious campaigns on land and sea (1.1.53–4) and later builds roads from his military winnings (1.7.59). Like ille ferreus at 1.2.70ff., Messalla, too, gleams as he parades in public (1.7.5–8). Messalla is a triumphant general (1.7; but also 1.3.55–6 and 2.5) expanding the geographical territory of the Roman empire with the support of his soldiers. Again, like the alius, Messalla commands fear with “strong military force” (forti milite, 1.7.4).⁸⁰ In his incarnation as ferreus ille, warrior and plunderer, the other (but not Messalla?) is rival for Delia’s love, who in poem 1.2 could have been successful in his amorous pursuits (1.2.67) but chose a different path,⁸¹ although, in poem 1.5.17–18, as alter and dives amator (1.5.47), he enjoys her favors. Or perhaps he is the figure lurking in the shadows, crossing back and forth before Delia’s doors, coughing to make his presence known, patiently waiting his turn while inside another man enjoys her favor (1.5.70–4).⁸² In book 2 the “other” returns, a praedator (2.3.41), wealthy from war, but this time a freedman once sold at auction as a foreign slave (2.3.59–60).⁸³ If the alius does not emerge coherent and intact, the amator does not fare much better. He blends and merges with his seeming opposites, paradoxically both identical to, yet simultaneously different from,

⁷⁹ Lee-Stecum 1998: 93 also sees the similarities between these two, although he then argues that all assumptions must remain unstable, p. 94. Scholars have spilt a certain amount of ink trying to identify the ferreus man; see especially Zelzer 1988, Brouwers 1978, Bright 1978: 144. ⁸⁰ To be fair, Messalla himself is not that stable a figure, morphing as he does into Osiris in elegy 1.7. See pages 99–101, with note 61, above. ⁸¹ Indeed, see Ball 1983: 42 who discusses various examples of scholarly desire to identify the figure of the other, all to no avail. ⁸² Here see Bright, 1978: 165–6, for a summary of arguments that try to pinpoint the precise identity of this man, including the suggestion that it is Tibullus himself! ⁸³ Although the amator also frequently attributes to himself the role of slave: 1.1.55–6; 1.5.30 and 60–6; 1.6.23–4 and 37–8; 1.8.5–6; 2.3.5–10 and 79–80; 2.4.1–6.

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the other, and in the tensions and complexities that arise we can tease out “the hidden commerce between seeming antitheses.”⁸⁴ Paul Allen Miller argues that Messalla represents the clearest intrusion of the Symbolic, the realm of law, languages, and normative communication, into Tibullus’ world.⁸⁵ Indeed, Tibullus sees his patron as a representative of masculine, Roman values of empire, introducing him into his second collection of poems with the honorific shorthand—gentis Aquitanae celeber Messalla triumphis / et magna intonsis gloria victor avis (“Messalla, renowned for his triumphs over the Aquitanian people and, as victor, a great glory to his unshaven ancestors,” 2.1.33–4). So let us look again at elegy 1.3 in which the poet seemingly abandons his own world of the amator to accompany his patron on a military expedition.⁸⁶ Tibullus has traveled away from Rome with Messalla, even though Delia long protested and cried over his vias (1.3.14). He acknowledges that he also tried to delay his journey, to return to a fantasy moment of the Golden Age with his puella priusquam / tellus in longas est patefacta vias (“before the earth was opened up for the purpose of long journeys,” 1.3.35–6). But now, for him caedes, vulnera (“slaughter” and “wounds,” 1.3.49), open sea, and leti mille repente viae (“a thousand roads to sudden death,” 1.3.50). By joining Messalla’s cohort he crosses over into his patron’s world, the world of empire. And at first it seems that new circumstances, so contrary to those he prefers for himself, have a strongly negative effect on the poet, inducing illness and feverish imaginings of himself in mythological worlds (Phaeacia, and then, Elysium). Elegy 1.3 opens in Phaeacia, where the amator hovers between life and death (1.3.1–5). Sick and alone, he now attempts to define himself once again as “fixed geographically,”⁸⁷ while Messalla and the military cohort to which the amator belongs travel off across the Aegean (Aegaeas . . . per undas, 1.3.1). But the lack of geographic mobility he attempts to ascribe to the amator slowly falls away as the poem continues. “Fixed geographically” only means, it turns out, that for now he remains in one spot—me tenet . . . aegrum Phaeacia . . . (“Phaeacia holds me who am sick,” 1.3.3)—in stark contrast to the movement that characterizes Messalla and his men.⁸⁸ ⁸⁴ I borrow here the astute formulation of Micaela Janan, writing about Propertius book 4, 2001: 7. Indeed, in a fascinating argument, to which I do not entirely subscribe, Kennedy 1993: 14–15 suggests that the narrator of poem 1.1 is himself a soldier, deploying optative subjunctives to convey his wish to be a farmer, thus making sense of his campaigning with Messalla in 1.3. ⁸⁵ Miller 2004: especially 117–28. See also Johnson 1990. ⁸⁶ For a first discussion, see pages 89–91 above. ⁸⁷ Lee-Stecum 1998: 102. ⁸⁸ Consider Bright 1978: 41–2, who notes that activity (especially vigorous motion) is Messalla’s most prominent characteristic for Tibullus.

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Indeed, although being on death’s doorstep does seem to grant him temporary physical immobility, he cannot, nor does he desire to, erase the via he is already on. The amator specifically claims that Phaeacia detains him “in unknown lands” (ignotis . . . terris, 1.3.3), while by choosing the name “Phaeacia” (rather than Corcyra) the speaker locates himself in a literary utopia from the Odyssey, a fact underscored by the multiple allusions to the Homeric epic that proliferate within the poem.⁸⁹ Through these allusions he marks himself out as an Odysseus figure, a hero known perhaps best of all for his long wanderings (longas vias?) home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. In his mind, moreover, the amator continues throughout the poem to move himself and the reader over great geographical distances, remembering various scenes in Rome before his departure on the sea voyage with Messalla (1.3.9–34), imagining the prelapsarian world under Saturn (1.3.35–48), conjuring up visions of the Elysian Fields, the Fields of Mourning, Tartarus (1.3.57–82), and bringing his feverish hallucinations to a conclusion back in Rome, where late at night Delia sits up weaving, Penelope-like, awaiting his return (1.3.83–92).⁹⁰ So for one who staunchly refuses the possibility of viae for himself, or perhaps in a softer vein, acknowledges that he might have to travel them with his patron, though not voluntarily, the viae in the end become, rather contradictorily, the stuff of his self-definition. As his wanderings come to an end, Delia, too, seems altered, if only slightly, as she, too, now becomes affiliated with the trappings of empire. With unadorned and messy hair, and on “naked foot” (nudato . . . pede, 1.3.92), she comes along the way to meet him (obvia, 1.3.92) in the fantasized scene that provides the elegy with its unexpectedly happy ending.⁹¹ If poem 1.3 stood on its own, one might be tempted to argue that one can pinpoint the contact with Messalla as causing the image of the amator

⁸⁹ On allusions to the Odyssey in Tibullus 1.3, see Bright 1978: 16–37, and also Ball 1983: 50–65. In addition to pointing out how the utopian aspect of Phaeacia renders the speaker’s geographical positioning ambiguous, Lee-Stecum suggests that the references to Isis and Delia’s worship of the Egyptian goddess perform a similar dislocation. “Like the allusions to the Odyssey, which notionally set the poet in a mythic-heroic world, the mention of Isis links him with a divine-mythic world, which is all the more distant (and mythical) because it is a foreign cult” (p. 110). Lee-Stecum proposes that Tibullus wishes to be rescued from his sure death by Delia just as Isis managed to resurrect her husband, Osiris. ⁹⁰ In contrast, see Keith 2014: 483, who argues that Tibullus here displaces Roman military expansion in the East onto Homeric geographies. ⁹¹ Fineberg 1991: 138 sees distinction between via and obvia; she explains that “when the narrative voice in this poem uses obvia to describe wished-for reunions, he is asserting his preferred world of pastoral and erotic harmony against the losses and disruptions that have been brought about by the viae of the real world.”

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standing firmly against the viae to blur. But Messalla is not the sole character to bring the trappings of empire, the Symbolic, with him into the Tibullan elegies. It turns out that Amor itself, and all its players—amator, puella, rival—despite Tibullus’ best efforts to construct a contrary narrative, already share characteristics of various aspects of empire’s ever-expanding push. Indeed, as the Tibullan Sibyl’s oracular pronouncements to Aeneas disclose, Amor is always already—from its very founding—implicated in the story of Rome and her viae. The Sibyl hails Aeneas as volitantis frater Amoris (“the brother of flying Love,” 2.5.39) and then reminds us that Romulus will be born because Ilia, in a very elegiac formulation, “will (erotically) please” Mars (placitura, 2.5.51).⁹² Many scholars have already pointed out the problematic relationship that emerges between love and war in elegy, a connection that the elegiac poets frequently draw to our attention as they manipulate the term militia amoris. On the face of it, the amator claims that he is a lover not a fighter, that he chooses to forego Symbolic norms of masculine virtus, opting instead to engage, against society’s expectations and codes, in the “wars of love.” But the choice of the word militia to describe amor, as Duncan Kennedy has so brilliantly pointed out,⁹³ does not in the end serve to create distinctions between the two elements, but instead draws our attention to the complex and interrelated relationship between them.⁹⁴ While we would be most comfortable dismissing militia amoris as simply a metaphor, brushing off to the side the implications of violence, aggression, conquest, domination that it imputes to the realm of amor, we thereby expose our own assumptions, or fantasies even, about amor. After all, Ovid himself very baldly states: militat omnis amans (“every lover is a soldier,” Ovid, Amores 1.9.1). Not surprisingly, Tibullus is not as explicit as Ovid. And yet his elegies, too, set forth the breakdown in the distinctions he tries to uphold between violence, conquest, and acquisition, the stuff of empire, on the one hand, and love, on the other. Tibullus does not, as I have opted to do for clarity’s sake, first lay the foundations of the opposition, only to erode them later in his poetic oeuvre. ⁹² See Lee-Stecum 2000: 203. ⁹³ Kennedy 1993: 46–63. Also see Kennedy 2012. O’Rourke 2018 provides a fascinating exploration of “the extent to which [love’s] violence is to be considered metaphorical” (p. 112), examining both “elegy’s militarization of love and sex” balanced against “its eroticization and sexualization of war” (p. 128). ⁹⁴ In a further complication, with intriguing implications, military camps share the impulse to order space with a world map. Consider the observation of an anonymous reader of the manuscript: “Roman military camps were gridded enclosures obsessional in their organization of space.”

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The attempts to forge a divergence between “I” and “other” together with moments when one can see the dichotomy crumbling in on itself emerge simultaneously from the very first elegy. On the one hand, he sets himself up against the social, imperial norms. He insists that neither all the money in the world, nor pointedly all the emeralds (1.1.51) could make him turn his back on love. Emeralds, luxury items in Rome from the farthest reaches of the empire,⁹⁵ call to mind empire’s expanding geographic reach which the amator renounces because he does not want any puella to weep ob nostras . . . vias (“on account of my journeys,” 1.1.52). He then assures Messalla that the front of his patron’s house is fittingly decorated with spoils of enemies defeated on sea and on land (1.1.53–4); Messalla, unlike the amator, but appropriately for a masculine, Roman subject, participates in the activities of empire, moves along its vias, collects rich spoils. But then the amator returns to self-description, locating himself in his generically correct position “before the (closed) door” (ante fores, 1.1.56) of his puella. As one image gives way to the next, the amator takes the place of imperial spoils, as chains hold him fixed before the mistress’s house (1.1.55).⁹⁶ Tibullus’ metaphorical chains suggest fettered captives of war⁹⁷ and the verb the poet chooses for holding back (retinent, 1.1.55) is “a military word for holding back troops.”⁹⁸ In the end, the spoils of empire and the spoils of love might not be so different. As the poem reaches its conclusion, the two spheres both diverge and conjoin again. The amator claims no concern for military or civic glory (non ego laudari curo, 1.1.57), and opts instead for a life of love and rustic simplicity with Delia. So far so good, but it turns out to be not quite the whole truth. The amator proclaims he is in fact worthy of glory, a dux milesque bonus (“a fine military leader and soldier,” 1.1.75), but in the realm of Venus. He then banishes military standards and trumpets, trappings of war, from his corner of the world and instructs them to inflict wounds on cupidis viris (1.1.75–6). It is the adjective cupidis (“desirous”) that gives pause, making these men both greedy imperialists but also simultaneously linked to Cupid and therefore to amor.⁹⁹ ⁹⁵ Maltby 2002: ad loc, citing Pliny, NH 37.65, notes that emeralds came from Scythia, Bactria, and Egypt, and “suggest spoils from military campaigns in the East.” ⁹⁶ Putnam 1973: ad loc. ⁹⁷ Maltby 2002 ad loc suggests that Tibullus moves in his mind from chained prisoners of war to the enchained Tibullus, slave to his mistress, bound by chains of love. ⁹⁸ Maltby 2002: ad loc, although he also goes on to say, in a manner that Kennedy 1993 would underscore, that it is also used in erotic contexts. ⁹⁹ Consider here 1.9.58 where the amator curses his rival with the words: et pateat cupidis semper aperta domus (“may your house always be wide open to greedy, desirous men”). Desire

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Venus, we discover in elegy 1.2, is born from “blood” (sanguine, 1.2.41) and the “raging sea” (rabido . . . mari, 1.2.42), and therefore, the poet suggests, no one should hinder love in any way. The image suggests the possibility that Venus will unleash a terrifying, crushing force against those standing in her way,¹⁰⁰ rendering her perhaps like to an imposing imperial power. She rages furiously when neglected (saevit . . . relicta Venus, 1.5.58). When the amator pledges her his eternal service at the poem’s conclusion (1.2.100–1), how different is it from yielding before the inexorable march of empire? The Underworld scene in poem 1.3 confirms the violence of her punishment as Ixion, Tantalus, and the Danaids face eternal torment for their erotic trespasses (1.3.73–80).¹⁰¹ Tibullus keeps circling back to the violence associated with amor, with references to the proelia it generates (“skirmishes,” 1.3.64), the Veneris bella (“wars of Venus,” 1.10.53) that erupt, the “tongues that do battle” (pugnantibus . . . linguis, 1.8.37), and the “marks” (notas, 1.8.38; also 1.6.13–14, bruises made by teeth) that lovers leave on each other’s bodies.¹⁰² His Cupid, despite the poet’s fervent wish to see him “unarmed” (modo in terris erret inermis Amor, 2.5.106), brandishes weapons (2.1.67–72; 2.5.105–8; 2.6.15).¹⁰³ In poem 1.6 Tibullus contemplates Delia’s infidelity and imagines different possible consequences for all the actors involved. In one scenario the amator explicitly claims that he hopes Bellona will be levis (“gentle,” 1.6.56) in leveling punishment against Delia. And yet, while he openly embraces a lenient and meek self-representation, it is hard to ignore the bodily violence against women that lurks at the heart of the elegy. In fact, the amator’s

seems once again to fuse imperialism and amor, as the men are greedy to acquire spoils and to sleep with women, both taken from others. In a similar fusion of appetites, an amorous Mars is called a cupidus deus at 2.5.54. ¹⁰⁰ Lee-Stecum 1998: 85 briefly discusses how love and war are similar in this poem because of the processes by which they operate. ¹⁰¹ In case the reader does not catch the full erotic implications for the torments, the poet is more explicit leading in and out of his examples. He begins by setting the elegiac context as Cerberus is strikingly ante fores (“in front of the doors,” 1.3.72). He concludes the passage by wishing a similar punishment on “anyone who has desecrated my love” (quicumque meos violavit amores, 1.3.81). See also Lee-Stecum 1998: 119–23. In poem 1.4, however, the amator is advised that perjury in Venus’ name goes unpunished. Suggesting that the lover swear oaths to Venus that he has no intention of honoring is perhaps not the volte-face that it seems. The speaker of the words, Priapus, acts as focalizer at this point in the elegy and whether he is a trustworthy narrator remains, as Lee-Stecum 1998: 142–3 argues, unclear. ¹⁰² Lee-Stecum 1998 focuses quite heavily on the ways that the amator manipulates images of militia to acquire power for himself, or conversely, to prove that he has none. ¹⁰³ Maltby 2002: ad 2.1.69–70 notes that Tibullus’ Cupid only wields weapons in book 2.

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prayer that Bellona ultimately be levis follows directly on the heels of his announcement that her priestess promised that the puella would suffer nescioquas poenas (“some sort of punishments,” 1.6.55). The lack of specificity in nescioquas encourages the imagination to run wild; the mind veers, almost immediately, towards more rather than less ominous possibilities. Moreover, just before he petitions the goddess for a gentle form of retribution (and it seems fair to wonder what exactly this would amount to) the amator describes the priestess as she prepares to speak Bellona’s oracles. In lively detail he calls before the reader’s eyes the priestess’ self-mutilation. This vivid description of her acts of bodily violence provides inspiration for our own fabrications inspired by nescioquas. We watch her slice her arms with a double-edged axe, bathe the image of the goddess in blood from these wounds as well as wounds from her chest and sides (1.6.47–9), and then insist that no one should violare the puella whom Amor protects (1.6.51). Should this report make the puella feel safe? Perhaps more significantly, what is Bellona, Roman goddess of war, doing issuing prophecies regarding love?¹⁰⁴ The amator magnanimously proclaims that he wants to spare his puella from violence because of his attachment to her mother, an aurea anus (“a golden old woman,”1.6.58). And yet, has he not proven his contempt for gold as a valuable commodity along with other items acquired through warfare?¹⁰⁵ Delia, because she is, in the end, her mother’s blood (sanguis, 1.6.66), must always remain the object of the amator’s affection. But the word sanguis echoes its usage twice just above to describe the blood pouring from the violently self-inflicted wounds of the priestess (1.6.48 and 54). Finally the amator promises: “I would not wish to beat you, but if that frenzy should come upon me, I would wish not to have had hands” (non ego te pulsare velim, sed venerit iste / si furor, optarim non habuisse manus, 1.6.73–4). He then continues that he wants her to want to be faithful, but not because of fear (metu, 1.6.75). The subjunctive nature of his utterances, however, is hardly reassuring. Violence dogs amor at every turn. The conclusion to poem 1.10 is equally dark and disturbing. After offering a ¹⁰⁴ Cairns 1979: 41 attempts to alleviate the discomfort here. He suggests that Bellona was identified with the Cappadocian goddess Ma. Since sacred prostitutes served her temple, Ma/ Bellona therefore becomes a suitable instructor in erotic affairs. But see now O’Rourke 2018: especially pp. 120–2 on this poem. ¹⁰⁵ Wimmel 1976: 92 with n. 19 observes that aurum always has a negative connotation for Tibullus. Bright 1978: 175 with n. 115 argues that if the negative shading were absent here, this would be the only favorable use of the term in the Tibullan elegies. Therefore, he suggests instead that the adjective casts aspersions on the mother and, further, reveals that she acts as lena for her daughter (p. 176).

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description of a farmer physically abusing his wife, tearing her hair (1.10.53), bruising her cheeks (1.10.55) under the influence of alcohol and lascivus Amor (1.10.57), the amator seemingly intervenes. Such violence has no place in love (although, in an impossible contradiction, “wanton Love” urged him into these Veneris bella [1.10.53]). He insists that the man who beats his puella is made of stone and iron (ferrum, 1.10.59—like ferreus ille?). Pax (“peace,” 1.10.45 and 67) comes to stand against war; the savage man should bear weapons in war, far off from now “gentle Venus” (miti . . . Venere, 1.10.66). And what should the amator do instead? “Let it be enough to tear her thin garment from her limbs, enough to have messed up her neatly coiffed hair, to have moved her to tears” (sit satis e membris tenuem rescindere vestem, / sit satis ornatus dissoluisse comae, / sit lacrimas movisse satis, 1.10.61–3). In the end, Venus is not so gentle, despite the poet’s protests, and the amator in times of peace suspiciously resembles the man with savage hands so well suited to war.¹⁰⁶ In addition, if we continue to explore Tibullan elegy for the moments when the “hidden commerce between antitheses” come to light, and the “I” begins to unravel through contradiction, we notice that the desire for controlled and controlling boundedness that define empire and its cartographic conception of space (as an interconnected whole, but bound by fixed limits) show up equally at the heart of amor. In the fantasized Golden Age, Tibullus insists that “no house had a door” (non domus ulla fores habuit, 1.3.43), or again that “no door was about to lock out pained lovers” (nulla exclusura dolentes / ianua, 2.3.73–4), presumably thus allowing the amator to flourish because of unimpeded access to love. And yet, “Delia can only be Tibullus’ in a world that recognizes boundaries, that has doors (and hence paraclausithyra).”¹⁰⁷ Elegiac love, generically, cannot exist without spaces like doors, thresholds, and ultimately even viae. As the collection of poems begins it is clear that a locked door, that opens occasionally, furtively, to allow the amator rare access, fuels the poet’s verse. In poem 1.1, the amator sits ante fores (“in front of the door,” 1.1.56), locked out of his puella’s house. Poem 1.2 opens with the amator addressing the closed door

¹⁰⁶ Conversely, for example, Leach 1980, Boyd 1984, Lee-Stecum 1998 see a resolution at the end of 1.10 in favor of pax, or at least, of a milder version of violence. Indeed, it is perhaps interesting to note here that Tibullus’ intertwining of peace and war resemble Augustus’ own formulation that peace is born from military victories (parta victoriis pax, Res Gestae 13). See Konstan forthcoming and Borgna 2015. ¹⁰⁷ Miller 2004: 124–5. Also see Fineberg 1991: 136–7. Desire requires obstacles to fulfillment, or, in other (Lacanian) words, desire needs lack to exist.

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of his puella, either literally or in a drunken hallucination.¹⁰⁸ Venus herself, the poet proclaims, assists the puella in opening the fores to her lover (1.2.16–18).¹⁰⁹ Or maybe he himself taught her how “to be able to open doors while keeping the hinge silent” (cardine tunc tacito vertere posse fores, 1.6.12), and thus potentially to open up a space for the amator and his erotic desire.¹¹⁰ In a metageneric moment that Ovid will exploit in his Amores,¹¹¹ the Tibullan amator threatens to abandon elegy for epic, only to be reminded of his poetic calling when “slammed doors cause epic words to fall away” (excutiunt clausae fortia verba fores, 2.6.12). As the doors slam shut, the amator becomes himself once more. Conversely, the lover can break down the closed door in order to force access, as the rusticus of poem 1.10 seems to do (1.10.51–4)¹¹² in the rush of Veneris bella (“the battles of Venus,” 1.10.53), for which he is given the appellation victor, like Messalla in the very next poem for his success in Gaul (1.10.55 for the rusticus; 2.1.34 for Messalla). The door, like any boundary necessary to the functioning of an expansionist empire, that which both simultaneously marks the limit of space and offers the potential for going beyond, becomes a sine qua non for the amator, despite, or in addition to, all his loud protestations to the contrary. Elegy 1.5 also seems to unfold before a closed door—nec . . . patescit / ianua (“the door does not open,” 1.5.67–8). Here we find the amator bemoaning the success of his wealthy rival who showers rich gifts upon the puella. But the amator insists that he, too, has something to offer; he will lead her through a crowd and will make her a viam by means of his hand (1.5.64). And so the via and the erotic relationship become intertwined, no longer just the property of empire, a fact reinforced by Priapus’ instruction to the amator in poem 1.4. “Do not refuse to go as a companion, even if a long journey is prepared” (neu comes ire neges quamvis via longa paretur, 1.4.41), comes the command, as the opposition between amor and longa via, elsewhere so carefully constructed, falls away. It is in the second book of ¹⁰⁸ Bright 1978: 134, Kennedy 1993: 21, Lee-Stecum 1998: 72–3, Miller 2004: 102. ¹⁰⁹ Lee-Stecum 1998: 81 notes that Tibullus emphasizes Venus’ control with the repetition of illa in lines 17–21. ¹¹⁰ Again in poem 1.8, Marathus, playing the role of the lover-poet, proclaims his ability “to unlock doors furtively with no sound” (strepitu nullo clam reserare fores, 1.8.60). See Drinkwater 2012 for the argument that Marathus assumes the position of lover-poet. Bright 1978: especially pp. 247–8 argues that the Marathus–Pholoe relationship serves as an exemplum for the Tibullus–Delia relationship. ¹¹¹ Ovid, Amores, 2.1.17–20, a programmatic poem. ¹¹² Indeed, at 1.1.7–8, perhaps further inviting the comparison, the poet fantasizes about himself as a rusticus.

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elegies, however, that the viae become fully and more complicatedly interwoven with amor. The acquisition of foreign, luxury goods, things that flow along viae from the peripheries to the imperial center begins to become a primary concern not of the rival, as before, but of the amator himself. In the collection’s opening, and therefore programmatic poem, Tibullus remains largely preoccupied with a celebration of country life, simple, pious, and agricultural. As we have come to expect, we find virtuous people eating acorns and dwelling in thatched huts (2.1.37–40). At first the poet recreates a ritual festival from which he bans lovers; “let him to whom Venus brought joys last night go far off from the altars” (discedat ab aris / cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus, 2.1.11–12). But love, like any good imperial power, creeps in anyway, forever overstepping its boundaries. Cupid appears on the scene, because, we now learn, he was originally “born among the fields and herd animals” (inter agros interque armenta Cupido / natus, 2.1.67–8), and among the beasts he first honed his archery skills (2.1.69). Once truly accomplished, he branches out to humans, discovering new victims to conquer.¹¹³ The god becomes a dux (“military leader,” 2.1.75¹¹⁴) and now teaches the puella to escape her guards in the darkness, and to venture forth and explore caecas vias (“roads/paths difficult to see,” 2.1.78). The verb Tibullus selects to conjure up the girl’s exploring—explorat (2.1.78)—is commonly found in military narratives, with the meaning “to reconnoiter,” and joins a constellation of military imagery.¹¹⁵ The viae, too, roads along which imperial armies, goods, and information flow, join the cluster of accoutrements that attaches itself to Cupid, the puella, and the lover, asserting themselves as central also to the world of amor. Poem 2.3 begins with movement, presumably along viae, though they remain unmentioned. The puella has moved house, abandoning the city for the countryside, and anyone who is not ferreus (2.3.2.), or in other words, anyone who is like-minded to the amator, including Venus and Amor, has migrated (migravit, 2.3.3) along with her. So at the outset, amor and viae belong again on the same side of the equation. After an excursus about Apollo’s love for Admetus, that caused the god also to move house, taking

¹¹³ Tibullus chooses the verb gestit (2.1.72) to describe Cupid’s movement from hunting animals to wounding humans. Maltby 2002: ad loc notes that it “suggests both eagerness and joy in the task.” ¹¹⁴ Maltby 2002: ad loc observes that by using an ablative absolute, hoc duce, Tibullus calls to mind military narratives. ¹¹⁵ See Maltby 2002: ad loc.

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up residence in the countryside in service to Venus,¹¹⁶ Tibullus turns on his rival. The poet tries to align him with acquisition instead of love (non Venerem sed praedam, 2.3.35) as the postlapsarian Iron Age (ferrea . . . saecula, 2.3.35) requires of its inhabitants. The connections are loose, and the textual break after line 34 increases the feeling of disjointedness. Cupid appears in his military garb as he “orders” (imperat, 2.3.34) the rival to take up camp (tua castra, 2.3.34) in Tibullus’ dwelling (nostra domo, 2.3.34). We should note, before we continue, Tibullus’ attempts to align the military metaphor with his rival while distancing it from himself. The word choice, as well as the word order, reinforces his efforts. With Cupido / imperat ut nostra sint tua castra domo (2.3.33–4) Tibullus both emphasizes the differences between their worlds by juxtaposing his rival’s castra with his own private, domestic domo, and visually highlights the intrusion of the rival by inserting tua castra in between the adjective nostra and domo, the noun it modifies. The direct address of the rival—tu and tua—then stops, and therefore a textual lacuna is posited.¹¹⁷ The military imagery, however, continues, suggesting that we link the rival with the man Tibullus now chastises, the one motivated by desire for acquisition, the praedator (2.3.41). Through slaughter and seafaring the praedator acquires large tracts of land and brings to Rome copious amounts of marble to set up columns before his home. The marble is pointedly described as foreign—lapis externus, 2.3.43—and arrives with great chaos into the city transported in wagons (2.3.43–4). Military success allows for the importation of foreign luxury items into Rome along the network of roads—viae—that connect the space of empire, but only for those, like the rival and unlike the amator, who participate successfully in the Symbolic world of empire. The couplet at lines 49–50 “marks an abrupt change in Tibullus’ position.”¹¹⁸ This statement is true enough at the particular juncture in the poem, but it is not so simple, overall or even in this particular poem, to attribute to Tibullus a clear and fixed “position.” Indeed, the amator now claims to have seen the light; divitibus video gaudere puellas (“I see that girls rejoice in rich men,” 2.3.49). Venus and praedae, set up as antitheses in line 35, now become ineluctably intertwined. Playing on one etymology of Venus as derived from the verb venire, Tibullus exclaims: iam veniant praedae si Venus optat opes (“Now let loot come to the fore, if Venus chooses wealth,”

¹¹⁶ Here compare the end of elegy 1.2, line 99 where Tibullus swears to serve Venus; Maltby 2002: ad loc. ¹¹⁷ See Maltby 2002: ad 35–6. ¹¹⁸ Maltby 2002: ad loc.

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2.3.50).¹¹⁹ Tibullus now promises to procure for Nemesis all manner of luxury, ut . . . per urbem / incedat donis conspicienda meis (“so that she may advance through the city, a sight to see in my gifts,” 2.3.51–2). Luxury items imported from far reaches of the empire, associated elsewhere in Tibullan verse with the rival who acquires luxurious spoils through war, here become presents the amator wishes to offer his puella. And he has moved, once again, through space, out of his beloved rustic countryside to Rome (urbem). Nemesis will don the very flimsy (elegiac) clothing (vestes tenues, 2.3.53), diaphanous Coan silks (2.3.53–4), erotic, luxury staple in the wardrobe of the puella of Augustan elegy, and a perennial turn-on for the amator.¹²⁰ Exotic, foreign dyes (revealing a desire for color diametrically opposed to the vision of the Tibullan Golden Age in which sheep of natural hues populate the countryside) will be hers as well, either Carthaginian red or Tyrian purple (2.3.57–8). Indeed, in the very next elegy, 2.4, which should be read, according to Cairns, as a companion piece to poem 2.3,¹²¹ the amator experiences the same conflicting feelings about a now familiar set of luxury items. He curses the collector of emeralds (2.4.27),¹²² the one who “dyes snow-white sheep’s wool with Tyrian purple” (niveam Tyrio murice tingit ovem, 2.4.28), Coan silks, and pearls from the Red Sea (2.4.29–30).¹²³ The possibility of acquiring gems and dyed, fancy clothing makes puellae greedy. Moreover, the poet associates the items with caedes and facinus (“slaughter” and “crime,” 2.4.21), misdeeds that Tibullus’ foil(s), the soldier and the rival, commit(s) with regularity (1.3.49; 1.10.3; 2.3.38). And yet, in elegy 2.4, Tibullus bemoans: at mihi per caedem et facinus sunt dona paranda (“gifts must be acquired by me through slaughter and crime,” 2.4.21). Venus herself prompts the amator to turn to “heinous crime” (illa malum facinus suadet, 2.4.25). And why must he commit these offences that he has tried so hard to attribute to the mercenary soldier, to confine to the world of war and commerce? In his effort to open Nemesis’ locked door (2.4.22; 31–4)—an activity iconically connected to elegy and to the amator. Indeed, he concludes resignedly: illius est nobis lege colendus Amor (“Amor must be

¹¹⁹ See Maltby 2002: ad loc. The etymological play doubles the connection between Venus and praedae. ¹²⁰ Although they focus on Propertius, Bowditch 2006 and Keith 2008 consider the foreign appeal of both the puella and elegiac discourse, and hence their implication in Roman imperialism. On Tibullus, see Keith 2014. ¹²¹ Cairns 1979: 209–12. ¹²² At 1.1.51–2 Tibullus also rails against emeralds. ¹²³ Pearls from Red Sea are a matter of concern also at 2.2.15–16.

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worshipped by me according to the laws of that woman,” 2.4.52). So amor, its players, and now, too, its rules once again seem to be much less fixed than the amator would like. This puella now appears to be in control, although also working hand in glove with Venus, and under her law amor and the amator see their stable definitions unravelling. Amor looks uncomfortably similar to other imperial impulses, warlike, greedy, violently acquisitive, eager to push past physical boundaries—with the amator falling into step, a triumphalist foot soldier. As we conclude, let us return to poem 2.3. After he imagines Nemesis in Coan silks and dyed finery, he then aligns her even more closely with the space of empire. Tibullus dreams of providing Nemesis with servants from India, whose geographic distance and exoticness are emphasized when the poet vividly portrays the country by conjuring up the land’s proximity to chariot of the sun (2.3.55–6). Most importantly, the viae, that have been lurking, an absent or unspoken presence, the means for transporting the rich praedae of both rival and amator, finally make their appearance. The woman of Cos, who has woven the diaphanous silks for Nemesis to wear, has not left out intricate ornamentation; indeed, she “has set out golden vias” in the cloth (auratas disposuitque vias, 2.3.54). The meaning is clear enough. The golden viae on the silk clothing must indicate some sort of striped pattern.¹²⁴ And yet the usage is “virtually unparalleled.”¹²⁵ The reader draws up short; she would be remiss, given all that comes before, if she did not consider the effect of the poet’s choice to opt so strikingly for the word viae. I suggest that, on the one hand, we have been thinking about viae throughout the poem, though they have not been mentioned. There has been emphasized movement of people from city to country, and of goods from peripheries to imperial center. The strange usage—the vias as stripes—draws the reader’s attention. We cannot but notice that the viae have made an explicit entrance into the poem. On the other hand, the explicit connection here between Nemesis and the viae climactically deconstructs Tibullus’ careful opposition

¹²⁴ Fineberg 1991: 148–54 argues that when he has a Coan woman weave vias into Nemesis’ dress, Tibullus is taking the vias of Messalla’s Roman, epic world and rewriting them into his world. She suggests that he transforms them to participate in his elegiac world. ¹²⁵ Fineberg 1991: 147 n. 60. And indeed, this is the second strange usage of the noun in the poem. In line 16, Apollo, in his rustic pursuit of Admetus, invents cheese, using a basket in which a rara via (“narrow path”) is left for the whey to exit. Scholars explain the occurrence of the word poetically, and generically, as a reference to the Apollo of Callimachus’ Aetia who insists that the poet tread along the narrow, least-worn path. I suggest that there is a slippage at this point in the poem, too, and that the via we expect earlier as everyone moves to the countryside makes its appearance at this rather unexpected moment.

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between Amor and the stuff of empire, to which the viae belong. Although it is by no means, as we have seen, the only moment that the intertwining of these opposites occurs, it is arguably the most dramatic. In the final analysis not only does the dichotomy unravel, but the puella’s very body, her unmistakably elegiac covering, emerges marked with the emblems of empire.

Tibullus’ incerto Somnia nigra pede (“black dreams with uncertain foot,” 2.1.90) Propertius imagines Cynthia journeying away from Rome, away from him. She travels just down the road to morally bankrupt Baiae for a sybaritic holiday, or she follows her wealthy lover vast distances across the sea, across snowy lands. Her movement through geographical space threatens the amator’s subjectivity. Once she starts traveling, her location becomes shadowy; it is difficult to pinpoint her exact geographical position, to know where she is and what she is up to. Propertius desires that she become an immobile and stable finis around which he can define himself. In Lacanian terms, he looks to the Symbolic for a solution, or perhaps to a combination of the Symbolic, realm of law and language, and of the Imaginary, realm of images. He chooses a signifier, finis, and the image of whole bounded fixity it conjures up; and then he puts his faith in them. Tibullus’ elegies suggest that this does not constitute a winning strategy. Cartographically speaking, the fines on a map themselves do not firmly demarcate definable limits. A line on the map represents a border on the ground, which is rarely a clear, indisputable mark. Moreover, for a rapidly expanding empire the pressure frequently exists to push beyond the current fines, erasing those that exist at the moment and re-establishing others in their place in the future. In Lacanian terms, the Symbolic constantly shifts; language (like the finis) is not fixed but pushes and expands outward. Tibullus’ elegies attempt to carve out a space for amor that excludes the Symbolic, a space without boundaries, without acquisition, without roads (viae). The other becomes the amator’s opposite, representative writ large of the Symbolic, of normative, masculine, Roman, imperial language and values. This man, sometimes a soldier, sometimes a merchant, sometimes a wealthy freedman, stands at odds with the amator, on the vias (1.1.52), enduring pluvias (“rainstorms,” 1.1.50), amassing exuvias (“spoils,” 1.1.54) in far-flung places, seeking at every moment to snatch away the object of the

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amator’s desire. The amator and his idealized puella refuse longas vias, crying, protesting, even becoming deathly ill, at their very possibility. And yet, as we watch, the viae begin to turn up in unexpected places. The puella comes to meet her returning lover (obvia, 1.3.92) and she wraps herself in her elegiac Coan silk intricately embroidered with golden stripes (vias, 2.3.54). The Symbolic overruns amor, reterritorializes it at the very level of language.¹²⁶ Amor, in and of itself, turns out to be violent, grasping, rapacious, and as the amator embraces the violence and acquisitiveness, the viae become his. What emerges is a profoundly bleak sense that in the Augustan world as Tibullus knows it, in an age of imperial conquest and expansion, a time dominated by impulses to bound and control space, the masculine Roman subject cannot but share in the values of his age, despite his best efforts. If one follows the viae carefully through the Tibullan elegies, they end up at the very heart of desire, on the elegiac Coan silks of the amator’s puella. Despite a fantasy of re-establishing a prelapsarian Golden Age of rustic simplicity and free love, the stuff of empire—its violence, aggression, penchant for expansion—cannot be contained or limited. No masculine Roman subject, not even (especially not?) the amator, can escape participation. Ultimately, Tibullus’ text suggests, both the amator and even Amor itself belong inextricably to the world of empire from which they emerge.

¹²⁶ Here the Symbolic seems to be working in ways that Lacan imagines for the Real, which haunts and hollows out the Symbolic. I want to thank Mario Telò for pushing me to formulate this more forcefully.

4 Painted Worlds and Porous Walls Propertius 4.3 with 4.2 and 4.4

“One gate there only was, and that looked east On th’ other side: which when th’ arch-fellon saw Due entrance he disdaind, and in contempt, At one slight bound high over leaped all bound Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within Lights on his feet.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4.178–83

Propertius Redux The Roman empire experienced intense territorial growth in the early 20s . Octavian emphasized a vast movement through geographical space, especially concerned to project, in Rome, the image of himself as an unabashed expansionist. As we explored in Chapter 2, the possibility of an infinite, formless, ever-changing world causes anxiety for the Propertian amator in elegy 1.12. The distress manifests itself at the level of the subject. Struggling to establish and cling to known and definable boundaries, the “I” seeks to render Cynthia fixed and definable—more precisely, his finis (1.12.20)—and to anchor his self-definition to her. Our second foray into Propertius’ elegy brings us to a text written over a decade later—and we shall discuss the dating of Propertius’ fourth book of elegies in a moment. It will not surprise us when we discover that the poet continues to harbor anxieties about the construction of the Roman self in an ever-shifting world that results from continuous conquest. But the response, the manifestation of the anxieties that we can read in the Propertian text, finds different expressions in the elegist’s fourth book from those in his earlier poems. Fixed fines, even imagined as in 1.12, no longer emerge as potential solutions in book 4. In the later elegies we learn that boundaries, on careful examination, turn out to be, always already from the very origins of the city of Rome itself, porous or Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0005

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otherwise suspect and untenable. If the road emerges from the elegies of Tibullus as emblematic of empire, the opening poems of Propertius book 4 suggest a connection between map and wall, fines imperii and moenia surrounding the brand-new city of Rome. Tibullus obsesses about the spread of the via into amor; Propertius, in book 4, worries over the wall’s ultimate inability to keep anything or anyone out. Propertius’ fourth collection of elegies stands apart from the previous three. In the book’s programmatic opening poem Propertius boldly promises to focus his artistic talent on aetiological verse about Rome, singing about “sacred rites, festival days and the earliest names of places” (sacra diesque . . . et cognomina prisca locorum, 4.1.69). A second speaker then interrupts the narrative. Horos, the astrologer, reins in Propertius’ newfound enthusiasm. He declares that the poet cannot escape his elegiac affiliation, opening up a path for a new sort of elegy, one that pushes the boundaries of the genre as it stretches to encompass aetiology.¹ Book 4’s programmatic elegy suggests that one must be wary of neat dichotomies. At the same time, however, a new dichotomy creeps in. If book 4 acknowledges the fluidity between Roma and amor in elegiac poetry, it also seems, from the very beginning, to hold firmly to the distinction between ancient Rome and contemporary Rome. To the past belongs rural simplicity from which springs present splendor and greatness. The poet claims: “today’s Roman possesses nothing ancestral other than the name [Roman]; he would not believe that a she-wolf is the wet nurse of his bloodline” (nil patrium nisi nomen habet Romanus alumnus / sanguinis altricem non putet esse lupam, 4.1.37–8). In this chapter we shall consider the three poems that follow the programmatic elegy. Propertius’ focus on the city, both at its inception (4.2 and 4.4) and in its Augustan present (4.3), is what draws our attention.² We shall concentrate on the echoes and reminiscences, on the similarities in issues, between the two Romes, that emerge despite the programmatic

¹ There are many discussions about the new poetics of Propertius book 4. To cite a few examples: Van Sickle 1974, Miller 1982: especially 380–6, Stahl 1985: 245–305, Wyke 1987: 153–6, Fox 1996: 141–81, DeBrohun 2003, Günther 2006: 353–95, especially 353–7. ² There are many other combinations in which these three poems are read. Interpreters frequently see in elegy 4.2 a reprise of the central idea of 4.1; 4.2 indicates once again the poetic variety of book 4 as set out in 4.1. (For a fuller bibliography, see note 41, below.) Elegies 4.3 and 4.4 are often discussed together as evidence of Propertius’ new-found interest in detailing women in love; for example, see DeBrohun 2003: 146–51, Welch 2005: especially 62–5, James 2012. For Arethusa as a version of the Propertian amator, see note 29, below; for Tarpeia, see note 66, below.

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poem’s insistence on divergence.³ To be honest, poem 4.3 demands our attention for another significant reason as well. Indeed, of all the poems that I consider in this study of the geographical space of empire and Latin elegy, it is the only one that mentions a map. The mere mention then demands the poem’s inclusion. Poem 4.3 is a fictional letter from a Roman wife in Augustus’ capital city to her soldier-husband abroad. She complains of her loneliness, and explains how she whiles away the time in his absence. A primary activity involves tracking his movements with the army. Her focus frequently turns to the spaces beyond the fines of empire on a map; the worldview that the text reveals is explicitly cartographic. A map, by definition, as we have seen in the introductory chapter, establishes a clear (if false) sense of order, uncomplicatedly defining “in” and “out,” separating “Roman” from “non-Roman.” But as we shall see as we examine the elegy more closely, the illusory dichotomies that a map seems to promise turn out to be messier, more blurred than the fantasy conveyed by clearly drawn lines on a wooden panel, on which the map is painted in 4.3. If “inside” and “outside,” “Roman” and “non-Roman,” no longer exist as clearly bounded, stable categories in opposition to one another, unsettling questions arise about what it means to be Roman in the time of Augustus, in particular as his empire expands to incorporate more and more places previously defined as “non-Roman.” By placing poem 4.3 between elegies 4.2 and 4.4, however, and intricately threading through the sequence recurring themes and characters, Propertius suggests that the problem does not originate in the Augustan present but in fact dates back to the very moment of Rome’s foundation under Romulus.⁴ Propertius’ attempts to maintain a clear ancient/contemporary Rome dichotomy in his elegies begins to falter. For the city’s founder a wall served a similar purpose to the more contemporary map; it created in clear, visual terms the divide between “out” and “in,” “Roman” and “non-Roman.” But Romulus’ wall, just like the map, holds out the illusion of clearly bounded antitheses that turn out, in fact, to be messy, blurry, more hybrid than distinctly divided categories. And, as we shall see, in all three poems, the problems inherent in the wall/map manifest themselves in various ways, at the level of the individual subjects in the elegies. ³ Alternatively, Fantham 1997: 124: “the poetic city Propertius creates is a nostalgic counterpart of Augustus’ physical creation of the new monuments.” ⁴ Scholarly consensus is that Propertius himself, and not a later editor of his work, is responsible for the ordering of the poems in book 4 to highlight both connections and purposeful disjunctions; for example, see Richardson 1977: 12; Hutchinson 2006: 1–2 and 16–21; but also Fantham 1997; Janan 2001; DeBrohun 2003; Miller 2004: 184–9.

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Arethusa Studies “Painted Worlds”: Maps and Geographical Writing in Augustan Rome Let us begin our exploration of Propertius book 4 with the poem we can no longer ignore. Elegy 4.3 purports to be a letter in elegiac couplets from a young wife, Arethusa, who sits at home in Rome writing to her husband, Lycotas, a Roman soldier out fighting wars of conquest on the empire’s peripheries. Interpreters have not generally paid much attention to this particular poem,⁵ with the exception of Arethusa’s strange mention at line 37 about consulting what seems to be a map. Arethusa announces that she studies “worlds painted on a wooden panel” (tabula pictos . . . mundos, 4.3.37) to understand better her husband’s movements through geographical space. Her statement raises eyebrows. “The idea that she should have a map of the world at hand to pore over on lonely evenings is amazing,” explains one commentary, since, the argument runs, we possess no other evidence that private, individual homes boasted such possessions,⁶ or, more sweepingly, that Roman conception of space was cartographic rather than hodological.⁷ I would like to suggest, however, that we look again, closely, at what Arethusa’s casual reference to a map seems to indicate about a Roman citizen’s awareness of geography in the 10s . What are we supposed to imagine that Arethusa is looking at? On the one hand, the heroine’s mention of a map sheds light beyond the poem on a shared, elite Augustan Roman worldview at the time Propertius writes his fourth collection of elegies. Could Arethusa’s cartographic activities reveal that citizens in Rome, more regularly than previously imagined, came upon maps of empire, or consulted geographical texts? On the other, however, once we recognize what elegy 4.3 can tell us about Roman awareness of the geographical space of empire, we also need to consider how the space of empire plays out within the poetic narrative. We shall find that the tensions that a cartographic understanding of the world produces emerge in many guises as we read elegy 4.3. In particular we shall trace how the inherent complications of mapping territorial limits on an expanding empire become, in the Propertian narrative, an insistence on clearly bounded binary oppositions, and simultaneously, an understanding that these dividing lines are, for many reasons, neither as fixed nor as stable as we want them to be. ⁵ The exception here is Janan 2001: 53–69, “The Ethics of Evil: Arethusa to Lycotas (4.3).” ⁶ Richardson 1977: ad 37. Also see Janan 2001: 65–6, with n. 39. ⁷ Especially Janni 1984, Brodersen 2003.

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Our first step requires that we attempt, as best we can, to work out what Arethusa may be looking at, or may have consulted, when she speaks of examining “worlds painted on a wooden panel” or when she contemplates her husband’s military expeditions. We must acknowledge that while, at first blush, Arethusa’s potential reference to large-scale cartography is enticing, on further consideration she probably does not provide us with a clear and specific allusion to the first public world map in Rome, the map of Agrippa. It comes down to timing, and once again, unfortunately, we cannot pinpoint a precise date for the publication of Propertius’ fourth book. Datable references in the poems themselves seem to provide 16  as a terminus post quem,⁸ and traditionally scholars offer 16  as the publication date. If the date is correct, then Arethusa cannot refer to Agrippa’s map in its completed form, although she would be consulting it according to the objectives set forth by its originator; Pliny tells us that Agrippa conceived of the map as a tool “for the city to survey” (urbi spectandum, NH 3.17). Augustus, however, brought this project to completion only after Agrippa’s death in 12 .⁹ And yet, even if we are left about ten or so years too early for the likelihood that Arethusa has slipped into the Porticus Vipsania in the manner of a good citizen seeking to learn from the public map about the world that belongs to Rome, it is important to remember here that Agrippa’s map belongs to a larger-scale conceptualization of space that occurs in the Augustan age. In the introductory chapter of this book, we considered that Agrippa’s public world map belonged to, or was the culmination of, a series of interrelated phenomena, a “mapping impulse” which comes to the fore as an imperial power seeks to impose control on its rapidly expanding geographical holdings. Arethusa’s geographical leanings, therefore, are “amazing” and striking, but not for the reasons usually offered. Her words provide us with a glimpse into the emergence, in the Augustan age, for elite Romans, at least, of a broad cultural preoccupation with apprehending the physical extent of empire within a sweeping cartographic worldview. In Rome, Arethusa spends much of her time, at least according to her own account, imagining the movements of her husband, Lycotas, as he pursues ⁸ Two references in particular stand out: 4.6.77 refers to actions against a German tribe, the Sugambri (Hutchinson 2006: ad 4.6.77–8), and 4.11.65–6 refer to the consulship of P. Cornelius Scipio (although cf. Hutchinson 2006: ad 4.11.65–6). ⁹ Pliny, NH 3.17: is [= Augustus] namque conplexam eum porticum ex destinatione et commentariis M. Agrippae a sorore eius inchoatam peregit (“For he [Augustus] completed the portico that enclosed the map, the portico begun to the plan and notes of Marcus Agrippa by his sister”). Nicolet 1991: 99 suggests that Augustus completed the project sometime between 7 and 2 .

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the wars of empire abroad for long stretches of time. If we train our gaze more precisely on Lycotas’ whereabouts, we discover that she locates him not simply away from the city, but at the very furthest (imagined) limits of Roman power. We learn in the poem’s early verses that his travels have taken him to Bactra, the Black Sea, Britain, India, and, depending on what one reads in line 8, China, Poland, Persia, or Parthia (4.3.7–10, with textual problems especially at line 8).¹⁰ Descriptive adjectives accentuate the exotic and foreign nature of the locales; she conjures up horses in chain-mail armor (munito . . . equo, 4.3.8), the Getae who are so distant that they live in constant winter (hiberni Getae, 4.3.9), Britain’s painted chariots (picto Britannia curru, 4.3.9), and the “dark-colored Indian” (decolor Indus, 4.3.10). About twenty-five lines later, Arethusa provides a fuller account of her obsession with her husband’s movements through physical space. She has already, in lines 7–10, tipped her hand in a preliminary fashion, revealing both a spatial interest in the fines of imperium and the lands just beyond Roman reach, as well as some ethnographic knowledge about the peoples in these lands. Now Arethusa reveals just how diligently she struggles to maintain connection with her husband by acquiring some insight into the places through which he journeys. Once again she purports to track his movements, and she seems to revisit a second time many of the same territories just beyond the fines of empire. Her slightly more expansive explanation of her studies provides us with a better sense of where she is getting her information: et disco, qua parte fluat vincendus Araxes, quot sine aqua Parthus milia currat equus; cogor et e tabula pictos ediscere mundos, qualis et haec docti sit positura dei, quae tellus sit lenta gelu, quae putris ab aestu, ventus in Italiam qui bene vela ferat. And I learn in what part of the world the Araxes, that must be conquered, flows, and how many miles the Parthian horse gallops without water; and I am driven to learn thoroughly

¹⁰ Is the enemy Neuricus (Fedeli 1994), Sericus, Persicus (Hutchinson 2006 and Goold 1990), or simply ferreus (Heyworth 2007a)? For our purposes, no one text is better than any other; in all cases the enemy, whatever his ethnic identity, is far distant from Rome.

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worlds painted on a wooden panel and what is the nature of the clever god’s arrangement [of the world] as we have it, what land is sluggish because of icy cold, what land is crumbling because of sweltering heat, what wind bears sails favorably to Italy. (4.3.35–40)

Setting her two discussions of Lycotas’ movements beyond the fines of established Roman power side by side, we can discern a pattern of duplication. If we read either Persicus hostis (“Persian enemy”) or ferreus hostis (“savage enemy”) in line 8,¹¹ coupled with the horse in chain-mail armor, Arethusa refers to the Parthians, who return in line 36. The wintery landscape of the Getans (hiberni Getae, 4.3.9) re-emerges when she reveals that she learns “what land is sluggish because of icy cold” (4.3.39), and her mention of the land crumbling from sweltering heat (4.3.39) recalls her earlier mention of the inhabitant of India “burned by the eastern wave” (ustus et Eoa . . . aqua, 4.3.10). We discover one significant difference between Arethusa’s two versions of her husband’s peregrinations. In her first imagined itinerary, he visits Britannia (4.3.9), while in the second, he seeks to occupy Armenia, land of the flowing Araxes river (4.3.35). If we are looking for similarities between the two locations, we might suggest that, while on different frontiers, both Britannia and Armenia represent actual areas of potential conquest on the Roman radar in the Augustan age, as opposed, say, to the more hyperbolic imagined expansion into India. But what exactly does Arethusa consult for information about Lycotas’ travels? Or perhaps a better version of that question is instead: what are readers supposed to visualize as sources for the geographic information she gleans? On the one hand, she clearly refers to “worlds painted on a wooden panel” (4.3.37), presumably some kind of map, and her ability to follow Lycotas’ movements to various locales beyond the fines of current imperial holdings may well suggest the possibility that she has access to visual, cartographic depictions (of parts?) of the orbis terrarum. Perhaps we are meant to imagine that she has seen, in various temples or triumphs, what Nicolet calls “ostentatious” “graphic representations of countries,”¹²

¹¹ See note 10, above, and Hutchinson 2006: ad 7–8 for the equivalence of “Persian” and “Parthian.” ¹² Nicolet 1991: 72. Similarly, Riggsby 2019: 177ff. mentions Tiberius Gracchus’ triumphal tablet, in the shape of the island of Sardinia and decorated with images of battles, set up in the temple of Mater Matuta. (The story is from Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 41.28.8-10.)

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map-like representations of conquered nations or alternatively, as Varro mentions, “painted Italy” (pictam Italiam—like Arethusa’s pictos mundos) on the wall of the temple of Tellus (Mother Earth).¹³ We certainly cannot rule this out. And Agrippa’s first public world map, while not yet on view, surely, as Nicolet argues, is but one, albeit very significant, instantiation of a desire to establish visual control over far-flung Roman conquest. On the other hand, Arethusa’s imaginations of her husband’s world comprise more than just what one can see on a graphic, visual representation. She locates the Araxes river (image/map) but also learns how many miles the Parthian horse goes without water (4.3.36). This is not something one finds on a simple map, but rather suggests that some text accompanies the image. Similarly, the land that is sluggish in the cold or crumbling from the heat (4.3.39) emerges from textual description, possibly accompanying a map, about land and climate, while knowledge about favorable sailing winds (4.3.40) also probably requires textual explanation. Her elaborate discussions about physical places indicates that she probably spends a good deal of her spare time consulting ethno-geographic writings.¹⁴ We know, for example, that Greek geographical writers from as early as the fifth century , but with increasing accuracy in the third and second centuries, created maps of the surface of the oikoumene (“inhabitable world”) in both words and images—geographein encompasses both graphic and verbal representations of the world.¹⁵ Often map and text went hand in hand, as maps accompanied texts, and texts explained concepts drawn on maps.¹⁶ The Augustan polymath Vitruvius, in his treatise On Architecture, seems to point to the existence of such “illustrated” geographies in a section where he discusses river water. He informs his reader that “in works of geography” (chorographiis, 8.2.6) one can learn about the location of the sources of rivers which are both “drawn” (picta, 8.2.6) and “described ¹³ Varro, De Re Rustica, from the 30s , begins with a discussion in the temple of Tellus in Rome in which the speakers contemplate picta Italia on the wall and geographical references abound in the conversation (1.2.1). ¹⁴ See Hutchinson 2006: ad 35–40. ¹⁵ See both Dueck 2010 and Cole 2010 for some conjectures about Greek literature and geographical writing, along with its audience’s spatial, map-like understanding. Geography in Greece and Rome is a notoriously hard genre to define, but geographical writings come in four basic categories: periploi (“seafaring routes”), itineraria (information about linear routes on land), periegesis (surveys of landscapes, inhabitants, topographies), chorographia (detailed descriptions of specific places); see Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 6–7. ¹⁶ See Nicolet 1991: 57–84, chapter 3, “Errors and Truths: The Geographical Knowledge of the Time.” Talbert 2012: 3 bemoans the loss “of so much Greek geographic writing and the maps associated with it.” Also Irby 2012.

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verbally” (scripta, 8.2.6).¹⁷ Learned, elite Romans had certainly read Greek geographical texts, even if Latin geography was somewhat slow to follow suit.¹⁸ Even before Agrippa’s map goes up in the Porticus Vipsania, Propertius 4.3 suggests, the desire to apprehend the fines of one’s empire, as well as to know which lands lay just beyond these fines, next in line for conquest—the same impetus that led to the existence of the map itself— pushed citizens, who had the time and the means, to peruse geographical texts. We must momentarily suspend the disbelief that may well bubble up at the thought of a young Roman wife consulting learned geographic works (and we shall return to this point). In the world of Propertius 4.3, this knowledge is available to those who seek it out.

Vanishing Lines So we learn that Arethusa potentially consults a variety of media to acquire ethno-geographic knowledge, from public maps on walls (in temples or other public monuments) to learned treatises (possibly from Hellenistic Greece as well as from the hands of Latin authors or even Greek authors writing in Rome). We should not lose sight, however, of the fact that Propertius 4.3 is an elegiac poem and not a historical document—although it has plenty to tell us about the historical moment in which it was produced. Let us turn, then, from its very exciting implications about Roman awareness of geographical space to a consideration of the various ways in which an apprehension of imperial conquest and fines filter through the poem. Again, as throughout this book, we are interested primarily on the ways in which a geographical sense of empire has an effect at the level of the individual subject. We shall discover a twofold movement in the poem: on the one hand, an attempt to delineate firmly into bounded categories—at Rome/ beyond the fines, Roman/non-Roman, man/woman—and on the other, a persistent failure of boundaries to remain stable and fixed. ¹⁷ The commentary on Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 1999: ad 8.2.6, suggests that Vitruvius here refers to the map of Agrippa. This would not seem, however, to take into account the plural “works of geography” (chorographiis). ¹⁸ Nicolet 1991: 66–9 concedes that Latin geography really gets going with Pliny and Pomponius Mela, but cites both the geographic work of Caesar and Varro as significant, and suggests the importance of Vitruvius and Greek geographers in Rome (e.g., Strabo) during the time of Augustus. Moreover, as Dueck and Brodersen 2012: 18 points out, “some important geographical works written in Greek . . . are so imbued with Roman political orientation that classifying them as ‘Greek geographies’ is almost meaningless.”

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Poem 4.3 offers us a ventriloquized letter in elegiac couplets from a young wife, Arethusa, who sits at home writing to her husband, Lycotas, a Roman soldier out fighting wars of conquest on the empire’s peripheries. If book 1 reveals Cynthia in motion, always traveling out of Rome just beyond the amator’s reach while he remains rooted, to the extent that he can, in the city, poem 4.3 reverses the pattern. From the very opening verses, gender roles seem to realign to a more normative scheme as the woman, a young bride, occupies the domestic sphere, spinning, weaving, writing late into the night, while her husband is long-absent, off seeking military glory in foreign soldiering adventures. Moreover, in many ways Arethusa’s choice to address her husband in letter form underscores the same clear gender polarity: man/ woman. Not only does she send a letter, often deemed a woman’s mode of self-expression,¹⁹ but further she highlights a feminine tendency in amorous epistolary discourse to conflate text and body. Studies of women’s love letters argue that women who write amorous epistles frequently emphasize that the blood, tears, and other physical manifestations of their suffering with which they stain or mark their letters constitute an alternative but valid symbolic system for expressing pain.²⁰ Implicitly acknowledging that perhaps her command over language is not as authoritative as it could be to convey meaning, Arethusa points to non-linguistic bodily traces that she has incorporated into her missive that will serve, more effectively, to express the distress she feels at his absence. “The stain created by [her] tears” (e lacrimis facta litura, 4.3.4), coupled with poorly traced letters (incerto . . . littera tractu, 4.3.5), misshapen because she herself writes in the very act of dying (morientis, 4.3.6), might obfuscate the script (4.3.3), but demonstrate more directly than any words her state of suffering. A letter, by generic convention, affords the writer the opportunity to tell her own story, accentuating the parts of the narrative she most wants her correspondent to focus on. Perhaps most significantly, she has a chance to construct her own self-portrait.²¹ If we consider Arethusa’s self-representation, we discover a repeated and insistent depiction of herself as an Augustan matron. ¹⁹ Ovid suggests letters as a persuasive medium of self-expression to women in love, Ars Amatoria 3.473–98, and highlights it as a mode through which abandoned heroines attempt to bring about the return of the heroes who have left them behind in the Heroides. Also see Spentzou 2003: especially 123–7, about the connection drawn in ancient and modern thought between letter-writing and femininity. Janan 2001: 65–9 juxtaposes the feminine letter and the masculine map in her reading of this poem. ²⁰ An excellent example is Kauffman 1988: 36–7. ²¹ I consider the generic expectations and possibilities of letter-writing at length in Lindheim 2003: 13–77.

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After a brief but vivid reference to the suffering she endures because of Lycotas’ absence, she considers the ill omens that must have been present at their wedding. In doing so she manages to highlight the importance to her of “marital loyalty and devotion” (marita fides, 4.3.11) and to remind him of her virginal purity and submissiveness on their wedding night “when [she], inexperienced, surrendered to [him] eagerly desirous” (cum rudis urgenti bracchia victa dedi, 4.3.12). As she recreates an account of her daily life at home, while he travels the world, she describes her own activities by maintaining a sharp focus on her existence as his wife. If she leaves the confines of the house, according to her narrative, she moves into public spaces only to perform the duties of a soldier’s spouse. All the city gates (omnibus . . . portis) reveal evidence of vows she has affixed either for, or on, his safe return home (4.3.17),²² and she anticipates yet one more visit to the gate at the head of the Via Appia when his current tour of duty in the East comes to a successful close (4.3.70–1). Occasionally she ventures out to neighborhood shrines at crossroads (compita, 4.3.57) and ancient hearths (veteres . . . focos, 4.3.58), but only to perform rituals to ensure his safe return, thus demonstrating her wifely piety.²³ Otherwise she remains emphatically in the domestic sphere where, we learn, she spends a great deal of time weaving. In the manner of the most chaste matronal heroines, Penelope and Lucretia,²⁴ Arethusa whiles away the nocturnal hours (noctibus, 4.3.33) performing “women’s work,” in this case fashioning cloaks to keep her soldier husband warm (4.3.18 and again 4.3.33–4). And lest Lycotas even imagine that the company his wife keeps might corrupt her, she reassures him that she sees no one other than an all-female cast of characters, her “sister” (soror, 4.3.41), her “nurse” (nutrix, 4.3.41), and “a single slave girl” (una puella, 4.3.54). Alternatively, she spends her nights all alone, “bitter” because of his absence (noctes . . . amaras, 4.3.29) tearfully kissing the weapons he happened to leave behind (4.3.29–30),²⁵ sleeplessly awaiting the dawn (4.3.31–2), or consulting ethno-geographic writings (4.3.35–40).

²² There is some debate in the commentaries about whether Arethusa placed votive offerings on city gates as Lycotas ventured forth on campaign to ensure a safe return (Richardson 1977: ad 17) or conversely when he came home safely as a thanks-offering (Hutchinson 2006: ad 17). ²³ Indeed, Hutchinson 2006: ad loc points to Cicero Ad Familiares 14.7.1 for a parallel construction of “an assiduously pious wife” who is singled out for much praise. ²⁴ On Lucretia, see Janan 2001: 62–4. ²⁵ Richardon 1977: ad loc nicely suggests that the reader is meant to think about Penelope and Odysseus’ bow that remains in the house.

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If Arethusa locates herself resolutely in Rome, and more particularly, at home, performing the role of faithful wife, she sets Lycotas up as her binary opposite. The city gates explicitly mark the extent of her movements; she has visited all the gates as his various campaigns have taken him out of Rome in all directions (4.3.17), and she will journey to the porta Capena as soon as he next returns (4.3.70–1). She never ventures beyond the limits of the city, although in a moment of fantasy she betrays a longing to, as she exclaims: “Would that military camps had been opened up to Roman girls” (Romanis utinam patuissent castra puellis, 4.3.45). Travel, then, is for soldiers, not for Roman girls (Arethusa) but for Roman men (Lycotas). Further, Lycotas does not find himself constrained, as his wife does, when he reaches a marker of boundary. If she stops at the city gates, she imagines him unimpeded even by the fines of Roman imperium. At every opportunity, he finds himself beyond the boundaries of Roman territory, in Bactra, Parthia, Dacia, Britannia, India (4.3.7–10), Armenia and Parthia again (4.3.35–6), and Bactra once more (4.3.63). Moreover, not only does she carefully set Lycotas up as her antithesis but further she sets up a clear opposition between her husband (Roman) and his barbarian enemies (other). While she accessorizes her husband in a military cloak (lacerna, 4.3.18) and a breastplate (lorica, 4.3.23) as he brandishes a spear (hasta, 4.3.24), the Bactrian enemy seems to wage war doused in perfume (odorato, 4.3.64) and flouncing about in “fine linen” (carbasa lina, 4.3.64).²⁶ Their military tactics, too, are distinctly un-Roman; the enemy feigns retreat on “backwards-turned horses” (versis . . . equis, 4.3.66) while raining down arrows from his sneaky bow (subdolus . . . arcus, 4.3.66). Although Arethusa strives to create neatly bounded binary categories for the characters in her narrative, simultaneously, however, the oppositions become less stark and the antitheses begin to unravel. Each component of a binary opposition seems to contain within it shared elements or characteristics, thus undermining the certainty that one can ever establish firm and fixed boundaries between the two opposites. The collapsing categories of Roman and non-Roman will be, of course, most significant for our reading of the elegy, but a similar dissolution of stable dichotomies emerges at every turn throughout the poem, as if to underscore the interpretive centrality of the idea to the narrative. The names of our central characters, prominently ²⁶ Richardson 1977: ad loc describes the prince as “the quintessence of oriental luxury,” and Janan 2001: 58–9 notes that the depiction of Lycotas’ “curiously seductive enemy” is both effeminate and erotic.

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highlighted in the poem’s opening line, immediately provide us with our first inkling that unequivocal classification might prove problematic. Lycotas, a decidedly Greek name, introduces our leading man, a Roman soldier.²⁷ His faithful wife takes the name Arethusa, perhaps gently prodding the reader to think about a geographically elusive spring of the same name with a well-known mythological backstory.²⁸ In an attempt to evade a rapist, the reader recalls, the nymph Arethusa, who dwells in the forests of Arcadia, metamorphoses into a spring, travels vast distances underground, and emerges in Syracuse. So from the very beginning, many categories seem in flux. Further, much as the letter-writing Arethusa desires to establish herself as a demure, Roman matron, her inner elegiac amator keeps emerging from just below the surface. Indeed, the scholarship on Propertius 4.3 notes that Arethusa frequently resembles the narrator or the “I” of earlier Propertian elegy,²⁹ holding up militia as the antithesis of amor, complaining about bitter nights (noctes amaras, 4.3.29) bereft of her beloved, and fantasizing about the existence of potential rivals (4.3.25–8). She even momentarily fancies herself a poet, proposing to compose a short verse herself to accompany the votive arms she will hang up as a thanks-offering for Lycotas’ safe homecoming (4.3.72). Her overlap with the elegiac amator invites us to see the breakdown of the Man/Woman binary as already present, from the very beginning of her letter, within her character, for interpreters of elegy have convincingly shown us that the genre destabilizes the categories of masculine and feminine in particular via the lover-poet.³⁰ She causes further disruption of the narrative’s gender binary when she utters a wish that she be able to join her husband on his military campaigns. While, at first blush, she seems to want only to accompany the army as “faithful baggage” (sarcina fida, 4.3.46), unobtrusive, passive, not part of the fighting force, and therefore perhaps feminine, she also chooses Hippolyta as her role model. “Lucky Hippolyta! She, with one breast uncovered, brandished weapons and, a barbarian, covered her soft head with a helmet,” (felix Hippolyte! nuda tulit arma papilla / et texit galea barbara molle caput, 4.3.43–4) Arethusa exclaims. Hippolyta is an Amazon, no mere camp follower, the role that Arethusa wishes for “Roman girls” in the very next ²⁷ Hutchinson 2006: ad 1 notes that Greek names refer to upper-class Romans in this text. He suggests that the choice of Greek “more likely” reveals an “elegant fiction” than a decision to opt for pseudonyms. ²⁸ For a full version of the narrative, see Ovid’s Metamorphoses 5.572–641. ²⁹ See for example Wyke 2002: 90–1, Lilja 1965: 234–5, Dee 1974. ³⁰ To provide a few examples: Miller 2004, Janan 2001, Gold 1993, Ancona and Greene 2005.

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line (Romanis . . . puellis, 4.3.45), but a full-fledged warrior wielding arms. The very category “Amazon” disrupts the Man/Woman binary, making the antithesis less starkly defined, bearing arms and wearing a helmet into battle, yet also revealing a naked breast and possessing a “soft/feminine head” (molle caput). When she conjures up the presence of Hippolyta, Arethusa in fact blurs lines that divide several of her carefully constructed dichotomies. If at first Arethusa wants to distinguish between barbara Hippolyta and Roman girls, by the next couplet she imagines herself as a quasi-second Hippolyta, as capable as the Amazon of enduring harsh rigors. Hippolyta bears arms and places a(n implicitly hard) helmet on her (explicitly soft—molle) head. Similarly, Arethusa (implicitly soft herself as a Roman matron unused to the rigors of foreign campaigns) prepares to suffer the harsh mountain ranges of Scythia (Scythiae iuga, 4.3.47) and icy waters (4.3.48).³¹ Hippolyta, qua Amazon, introduces complications to setting up Woman as defined in opposition to Man. But when Arethusa openly labels Hippolyta with the modifier barbara and then proceeds to emulate her (at least in her mind), Arethusa also throws into confusion the uncomplicated distinction between barbara and Romana. Moreover, and here we move back to questions of gender, on careful rereading, Lycotas, and not Arethusa, most resembles Hippolyta. Arethusa frets about her husband’s abilities to endure the harsh demands of warfare. She wonders “whether the breastplate burns [his] tender arms, whether the heavy spear blisters [his] unwarlike hands” (num teneros urit lorica lacertos? / num gravis imbellis atterit hasta manus? 4.3.23–4). His “tender arms” and “unwarlike hands” render him like to a woman, but also to a barbarian woman. Arethusa’s fantasized warriorhusband, carrying out military duties, is almost a doublet of her portrayal of Hippolyta. Both seem to emerge as a collection of body parts³²—”soft head,” “tender arms,” “unwarlike hands”—in their very essence too soft and effeminate for the weaponry that accessorizes them. Additionally, Barbarian Woman and Barbarian Man seem more similar than one might like. The barbarian chieftain who makes an appearance after the walls of Bactra are scaled (ascensis . . . Bactris, 4.3.63), dresses for ferocious military combat steeped in perfume and trailing fine linen (4.3.64), as we have already noted. ³¹ Here Arethusa renders herself like Cynthia whom Propertius envisions as a similarly “tender” girl in a harsh, foreign environment in 1.8a.5–8. Propertius imagines Cynthia as she prepares to sleep in a “hard ship” (dura nave), tread on harsh frost with her “tender feet” (pedibus teneris) and endure “unaccustomed snows” (insolitas . . . nives). ³² Janan 2001: 67 describes Lycotas as a “fetishized set of disembodied limbs.”

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If we continue to explore Arethusa’s narrative for the various mixture and blending of formerly opposed categories, we also discover that the Roman/non-Roman dichotomy as a whole, and not just where gender overlaps, is not safe either. After all, Arethusa seems to accuse her Roman husband of so coveting the fine linen of the enemy leader that the very opportunity to acquire this plunder “would be of such great value” (tanti sit, 4.3.63) that he would forget to defend himself sufficiently in the face of hostile weapons (4.3.63–6). Not only do we find a Roman as enamored of a barbarian’s luxury cloth as his enemy, but further, although the text is somewhat problematic at this juncture, it is possible that the cloaks his good Roman wife weaves for him at home already contain within them the seeds of barbarian luxury. “On winter nights I toil on weaving for the camp,” she boasts in her most Lucretia-like incarnation (noctibus hibernis castrensia pensa laboro, 4.3.33). So much is clear, what follows, less so. Editors do agree, however, that Arethusa makes use of Tyrian wool (Tyria vellera, 4.3.34) which she (most likely) sews into cloaks for Lycotas.³³ Whatever the purpose of the Tyrian wool, what interests us is its foreign provenance, the whiff it carries with it of foreign luxury,³⁴ and, more importantly, the fact that it emerges from within the domestic sphere in Rome. Lycotas does not need to chase down enemy princes steeped in Eastern luxury to acquire fancy clothes; his Roman wife sends them to him from his Roman home. And indeed, Arethusa possesses her own foreign luxury items, despite her attempts to embody Lucretia. Roman conquest and the growing expanse of empire, as we shall see most clearly in Chapter 5, brings an increased flow of foreign, luxury items to the city, introducing yet another set of issues in differentiating Roman and nonRoman, peripheries and imperial center. She insists to Lycotas that in his absence she has no need to gleam bright in purple from Punic garments (4.3.51) or to adorn her hands with clear crystal (4.3.52). But in denying

³³ So read Goold 1990 (et Tyria in chlamydas vellera secta suo), Heyworth 2007a, with minor variation (et Tyria in chlamydas vellera lecta tuas), and Hutchinson 2006, again with minor variation (et Tyria in chlamydas vellera +secta+ tuas). Fedeli 1994 reads: et Tyria in gladios vellera secta suo[s] which might mean “and Tyrian wool/fleece cut for your swords’ (as a sort of swordbelt, suggests Richardson 1977: ad loc). ³⁴ Aeneid 4.261–4, when Mercury discovers Aeneas, dressed in Carthaginian finery, immediately comes to mind: ‘His sword was starred with tawny jasper, and a cloak, cast down from his shoulders, blazed with Tyrian purple, a gift that rich Dido had made’ (atque illi stellatus iaspide fulva / ensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laena / demissa ex umeris, dives quae munera Dido / fecerat).

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their current usefulness, she reveals that she, a Roman matron in Rome, possesses just such luxury accessories. No need to go beyond the fines for the foreign luxury items that tempt non-Romans; in fact they exist at the very heart of Rome, ornaments for the Roman cultured elite.

In quamcumque voles verte, decorus ero (“Turn me into whatever you wish, I shall be seemly,” 4.2.22) At a moment of such increasing awareness of the geographical extent of empire that Propertius might imagine a character at home, alone, consulting maps and other ethno-geographic texts, to trace her husband’s military campaigns beyond Roman fines, we discover in poem 4.3 the tension inherent in the production of a map for an aggressively expanding empire. A strong desire to imagine a whole, coherent space with fixed boundaries that one can trace on a map always already comes into conflict with the fact that boundaries are never as firm as they seem, and that they might even invite their own dissolution. Arethusa sets up a series of binary oppositions, constructed from categories one desires to believe are whole, separate, and clearly bounded: at Rome/beyond the fines, Man/ Woman, Roman/non-Roman. And yet each carefully established duality reveals in the end not just that the fines are not stable and fixed, but worse, that each of the two categories is wont to blend with the other into an uneasy hybrid. What happens when Rome expands geographically, when capaciously, voraciously it incorporates the non-Roman within itself? Studying a map of empire with successful aspirations to constant conquest, an activity reflected in Arethusa’s nocturnal studies, demands that the viewer contemplate the lack of fixedness that expansion by definition assigns to fines. The uncomfortable question invariably arises: what does it mean to be Roman, how does one define Rome, if both can ever be, and constantly are, reconstituted to include what was just recently non-Roman or non-Rome? If these are the large, looming questions that emerge from elegy 4.3, the poem’s placement between elegy 4.2 and 4.4 suggests an answer: from its very origins, Rome and Roman were always already ineluctably intertwined with non-Rome and non-Roman. The story of Rome’s beginnings—in any telling, and Propertius’ is no different—centers on a wall. Indeed a wall, long before the map, fulfills the same function as a map does, encouraging a viewer to imagine visible dividing lines, boundaries separating “in” and “out,” “us” and “them.” And the wall, just like

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boundary lines on a map, also turns out to be more porous, less fixed than one would like.³⁵ In the opening, and therefore programmatic, poem of his final collection of elegies, Propertius announces his intentions as the Callimachus Romanus (4.1.64) to make maxima Roma (“mightiest Rome,” 4.1.1) the central theme of his aetiological verse (4.1.67–70). We should linger on this poem briefly before we look carefully at the elegies framing the Arethusa letter; for 4.1 does indeed set the stage for the elegies that follow. We want, in particular, to observe the poet’s focus, when discussing Rome, on the city’s walls. Propertius begins by adopting the role of guide to a stranger arriving in the city (4.1.1). With a sweep of his hand he gestures towards Rome and asks his addressee to imagine the now great city’s humble origins. “Hill and grass” (collis et herba, 4.1.2) provided homes to cattle, while artless shacks housed clay images of the gods (4.1.3–6). When “one hearth was the entire kingdom of the brothers [Romulus and Remus]” (unus erat fratrum maxima regna focus, 4.1.10), the Tiber river constituted a wall (murus, 4.1.8), a natural frontier, for the city.³⁶ Romulus’ wall, built after his decision to divide his hearth from his brother’s, when he wishes to define the parameters of his newly established city and to separate the Romans inside from the non-Romans without,³⁷ receives praise forty-five lines later. “What great walls grew up!” (qualia creverunt moenia, 4.1.56)—so great, in fact, that they become shorthand for the city itself. “I shall attempt to set forth the walls in my pious verse,” exclaims the poet, in the very next line, repeating the word “walls” for emphasis (moenia namque pio coner disponere versu, 4.1.57). But already, in poem 4.1, hand in hand with walls comes the specter that they might not separate and differentiate as they should. We can never forget, after all, despite the fact that Propertius here elides it, that Remus overleapt the physical boundary that his brother was laying down in order to avoid this very outcome; walls, it seems, may not be as fixed and impermeable as ³⁵ Indeed Konstan 1986 notes the “elastic” nature of walls in Livy’s narrative in book 1. Konstan suggests that the stories of the first Roman kings reveal a paradoxical tension in which the city both invites invasion by outsiders through gaps and other unfinished parts of the walls, but then expands the walls once the enemy has been defeated. ³⁶ The attractive reading murus at 4.1.8 is proposed by Heyworth 1986: 208–9, and accepted by Goold 1990 in his text. It makes sense of an otherwise difficult pentameter. In addition, Heyworth adduces several parallel passages where rivers stand in as walls, while the mention of Romulus and Remus united in the next couplet points to the fact that Romulus’ protective citywall has not yet come into being. ³⁷ Compare here Goldhill 2007: 128: “The Berlin Wall remains a potent symbol of man’s ability – or desperate need – to construct boundaries that organize the world into self-defining antitheses.”

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we may wish.³⁸ In the text of Propertius 4.1, the Tiber, for example, offering up protection as a natural murus, is also described as “foreign” (advena, 4.1.8), thus confusing its status as boundary between “(proto-)Roman” and “non-Roman.” And Romulus’ Romans, despite their walls, we are reminded, merged with Tatius and his Sabines (4.1.30), preparing us, as one commentary notes, for the recurring presence of the foreign king and his people in poems 4.2 and 4.4.³⁹ The god Vertumnus, or rather, the statue of the god, takes center stage in elegy 4.2. For a collection of poetry avowedly about Rome Vertumnus, at first glance, seems a strange place to begin. As 4.2 opens, he declares himself emphatically Etruscan, “Etruscan myself, sprung from a line of Etruscans” (Tuscus ego Tuscis orior, 4.2.3), although immediately thereafter he concedes that he felt no great distress when he “deserted Volsinian hearths” (Volsinios deseruisse focos, 4.2.4) for his current Roman residence. Later he informs us that “his Etruscans” (meis . . . Tuscis, 4.2.49) received honors from Rome— verbally highlighting the division between tu, Roma and meis Tuscis— because a fighting force of Etruscans allied themselves with Romulus and helped him to defeat “the Sabine arms of savage Tatius” (Sabina feri . . . arma Tati, 4.2.52). The god seems particularly pleased by Rome’s honorific naming of the street on which the statue finds itself located. His statue stands along the Vicus Tuscus (4.2.50), his location seemingly reaffirming his identity. Moreover, the first etymological explanation he offers for his name links him to the Tiber, the Etrucsan “foreigner,” as the river was pointedly referred to at 4.1.8 (advena), that flows through Rome. “I am called the god Vertumnus from the diverting of the river,” (Vertumnus verso dicor ab amne deus, 4.2.10) he exclaims, intertwining at a linguistic level his own shape-shifting nature with his native river’s changing its course.⁴⁰ And yet, it turns out that the speaking statue has provided us with a false explanation for its name, or rather, several. Vertumnus has only been reporting “rumor,” and rumor can be misleading, even “duplicitous” (mendax fama, 4.2.19). Now the statue starts afresh: ³⁸ It is perhaps interesting to note here how Vasaly 1993: 52–4 considers that Cicero represents himself in the First Catilinarian as a Romulus figure. The particular reason behind the orator’s decision to portray himself in this way is the fact that the enemy—Catiline and his co-conspirators—have entered the city walls and even dared to appear in the Senate. Because of this complete breach Cicero orders “the conspirators to depart, and in so doing, imagines the walls of the city as a physical and moral boundary between patriots and traitors, between good men and evil” (p. 53). ³⁹ Hutchinson 2006: ad loc. ⁴⁰ See Richardson 1977 and now Hutchinson 2006, both ad 7–10.

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opportuna mea est cunctis natura figuris: in quamcumque voles verte, decorus ero. indue me Cois, fiam non dura puella: meque virum sumpta quis neget esse toga? da falcem et torto frontem mihi comprime faeno: iurabis nostra gramina secta manu. arma tuli quondam et, memini, laudabar in illis: corbis in imposito pondere messor eram. My nature is suitable to all shapes. Turn me into whatever you wish; I shall be seemly. Clothe me in Coan silks, and I shall be a compliant girl. And who would deny that I am a man when I have put on a toga? Give me a sickle and bind my forehead with twisted hay: you will swear that grass has been cut by my hand. Once I took up arms, and, I remember, I was praised in them. I was a reaper with the weight of a basket placed upon me. (4.2.21–8)

The admissions are striking. The god seems to be telling us that s/he possesses the ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change.⁴¹ A dress of Coan silk suffices to make her a puella, while conversely, when he dons a toga, he becomes a vir. We wonder what underpins the binary opposition between Man and Woman in such circumstances. Similarly, is the only difference between the soldier and the farmer the object he happens to wield in his hands—a basket, a sickle, some weapons? One couplet later the statue suggests that a headdress (mitra, 4.2.31) transforms Vertumnus into Bacchus, a plectrum (4.2.32), into Apollo. Another traditional antithesis (between rationality and irrationality) breaks down as Vertumnus posits that differences center on replaceable accoutrements. Are Bacchus and Apollo otherwise the same, but for the symbol each one bears? More importantly, perhaps, how do we marry this admission of intense changeability with Vertumnus’ claims to be Etruscan (as opposed to Roman)? It turns out that a fixed and stable Etruscan/Roman polarity is as difficult to maintain in the face of everyday existence for Vertumnus as any

⁴¹ It is precisely this emphasis on changeability that has led many interpreters to read the passage as a reiteration of the poetic program in Propertius’ fourth book as he challenges traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. For example, see Dee 1974, Marquis 1974, Deremetz 1986, Shea 1988, DeBrohun 1994: 53–6 and 2003: 169–75, Wyke 1994a: 122–3, Welch 2005: 42–4.

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other dichotomy. Although Vertumnus begins the elegy by suggesting that the viewer/reader learn the “ancestral signs” (signa paterna, 4.2.2) of the statue by understanding his Etruscan origins first and foremost—Tuscus ego Tuscis orior (“Etruscan myself, sprung from a line of Etruscans,” 4.2.3)—we soon discover that Etruscan roots do not entirely define him. He long ago moved to Rome (4.2.4), to the edge of the Forum (4.2.6), where he seems happily ensconced; “this crowd of mine is pleasing,” (haec mea turba iuvat, 4.2.5)⁴² he announces. In fact, he never wants to leave, praying that “the toga-wearing Roman crowd always pass before [his] feet” (ut Romana per aevum / transeat ante meos turba togata pedes, 4.2.55–6). And if Rome has long been, and will forevermore be, his home, he also lets slip that he has adopted the language of Rome as his own. As the poem moves towards its conclusion, the statue offers one final etymological explanation for his name, Vertumnus: “but because I could change my single self into any and all forms, from this outcome my native tongue gave me my name” (at mihi, quod formas unus vertebar in omnis, / nomen ab eventu patria lingua dedit, 4.2.47–8). What jumps out immediately is the realization that his “native tongue” (patria lingua) in this instance is Latin, not Etruscan, a contradiction of the earlier “ancestral signs” (signa paterna, 4.2.2) which pointed to Etruscan origins.⁴³ The poem moves on, but we are left with a Vertumnus who is at one moment Etruscan and at another Roman—just as he alternates between man and woman, Bacchus and Phoebus, soldier and farmer. In a poetry collection that promises to be about Rome bounded by her great moenia, our first glimpse, in elegy 4.2, is at the difficulty, despite the walls, of separating out the defining categories of Roman/non-Roman. The categories are not separate, bounded, fixed even in the Rome that Romulus just founded, and Tatius and his Sabines, the primary cause of Vertumnus’ relocation, reveal the early pressure points.

⁴² Although there is some dispute about the text here, the meaning does not really change much. I have gone with Fedeli 1994, haec mea turba iuvat (“this crowd of mine is pleasing”), while the variant chosen by Goold 1990, Heyworth 2007a, and Hutchinson 2006 reads haec me turba iuvat (“this crowd pleases me”). ⁴³ Both Richardson 1977 and Hutchinson 2006: ad loc note that the wordplay in line 47 necessitates that patria lingua refer to Latin. Heyworth 2007a tries to solve the problem by moving line 48 to follow a conjectured lacuna after line 54; see Heyworth 2007b: ad 4.2.47–54. Welch 2005: 35–55, chapter 2, “Shifting Vertumnus: Plurality, Polysemy, and Augustan Rome in 4.2,” links Vertumnus’ shifting identities as Roman and Etruscan, insider and outsider, with a larger Propertian point about the lack of fixed meaning of monuments in Augustan Rome, as the city’s “splendors appeared differently to different audiences” (p. 55).

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Tatius, Tarpeia, and the Walls of Rome Let us follow Tatius, then, to his next appearance, in poem 4.4, whose story centers on Rome’s moenia. I want to suggest that elegy 4.4 should be read with 4.2 as a meaningful framework surrounding Arethusa’s letter. Propertius 4.4 describes the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia’s betrayal of Romulus’ newly founded Rome to the Sabine enemy, and like elegy 4.2, leaves the reader aware that the city’s protective walls offer a false sense of security, although Tarpeia’s tale more patently calls our attention to their porous nature. Once again we discover that the wall is permeable rather than clearly dividing in and out, and the significance of this discovery is underscored by the instances throughout the poem of unraveling/amalgamating dichotomies. It is perhaps interesting to note here briefly that while Tatius features openly in poem 4.2 and 4.4 he is not entirely absent from 4.3, although he is not explicitly named; in fact, we are prepared for the return of the Sabine king in 4.4 by a strange, passing reference towards the end of elegy 4.3. In an otherwise innocuous moment, as Arethusa summarizes her pious actions to ensure Lycotas’ safe return home, she describes the offerings she leaves, flowers at small sanctuaries, vervain at public crossroads (4.3.57), and herba Sabina on ancient hearths (4.3.58). Although, of course, Arethusa’s narrative takes places in Propertius’ contemporary Rome, and therefore, historically, long after Tarpeia’s betrayal, the epistolary heroine draws our attention to the presence of herba Sabina in the city before Tarpeia, according to the order of poems in Propertius’ fourth book, opens the gate to let in the Sabine enemy. As the poetic sequence unfolds, as we move from elegy 4.2, to elegy 4.3, and finally to elegy 4.4, to varying degrees the Sabines remain alive in our contemplation of Rome and its walls. Many excellent scholarly interpretations of Propertius 4.4 exist. I would like to work with a handful of these,⁴⁴ seeking to bring together some of their observations with my overarching interest in how the trio of Propertian poems we are considering shed light—through the pressures they place on the security and fixity of boundaries, through the complexity and contradictions they draw out in carefully demarcated terrain—on an emerging Roman cartographic imagination of space. Walls, physical barriers erected to mark the distinct, and antithetical, categories of “in” and “out,” “self” and “other,” dominate a close reading of elegy 4.4. The poem opens with a

⁴⁴ Miller 2004: 189–203, Janan 2001: 70–84, Welch 2015: 167–202.

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description of a makeshift military camp that Tatius has set up in what will become the Roman Forum (4.4.12) but is now a lush, leafy grove. Shepherds drove their sheep there, simultaneously a refuge from the heat (ab aestu, 4.4.5) and a place for sheep to slake their thirst (4.4.5–6). As “a place to which the sweet shepherd’s pipe used to order sheep to go and drink” (quo dulcis . . . / fistula poturas ire iubebat ovis, 4.4.5–6), we must assume that the grove contains a source of water. It makes sense then, when, in the very next line, we learn that Tatius, setting up his camp in this very grove, “walls off this spring with a maple palisade and rings his camp, in order that it be trustworthy, with heaped-up earth” (hunc Tatius fontem vallo praecingit acerno, / fidaque suggesta castra coronat humo, 4.4.7–8). So far, so good, but then we learn, after a bit more ecphrastic description,⁴⁵ that Tarpeia, one of Rome’s Vestal Virgins, drew water for religious purposes from this spring (4.4.15), and in doing so caught sight of (vidit, 4.4.19) Tatius and fell madly in love. The problem, much vexing to readers, is how Tarpeia can possibly access a spring around which the enemy has built a walled camp. Textual solutions abound. For example, some emend the verses to remove the spring from within Tatius’ camp.⁴⁶ Others assert, without much solid textual evidence, that there are, in fact, two different springs, one that Tatius walls off and from which his war horse drinks (4.4.14) and a second one, in the pastoral grove from which Tarpeia draws her water for Vesta.⁴⁷ Recent literary interpretations argue that the “illogicality of geography”⁴⁸ belongs at the heart of a reading of the elegy, and therefore should not be emended or explained out of existence. Most compellingly, Micaela Janan and Paul Allen Miller point out that the poem, dramatizing feminine desire, refuses “the binary logic of masculinist Roman ideology.”⁴⁹ The result for the spring is that “we can neither locate it entirely within, nor entirely without, Tatius’ barricade.”⁵⁰ Viewed from this angle, Tarpeia’s elusive spring recalls the illogical ability of the spring Arethusa to be in multiple places at once and provides the reader with another link between elegies 4.3 and 4.4. I do not

⁴⁵ Both Goold 1990 and Heyworth 2007a reorder the lines of the poem to remove the ecphrastic interval. See Heyworth 2007b: ad 1–16 for his explanations. The reordering has the interesting effect of presenting the image of Tarpeia drawing water at the spring that Tatius has walled off in the very preceding couplet. ⁴⁶ Here Goold 1990 reads contra with Camps 1965 in place of fontem in line 6 so that Tatius sets up his forces “opposite” the grove with the spring. Another option is Heinsius’ montem in place of fontem. ⁴⁷ For a full discussion, see Heyworth 2007b: 448. ⁴⁸ This is Miller’s fortuitous phrasing, 2004: 196. ⁴⁹ Miller 2004: 197. ⁵⁰ Janan 2001: 71.

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wish to disagree, rather I suggest that we shift the conclusion slightly for a different take on Tatius’ makeshift walls. It is not that the spring is neither in nor out, but rather that a wall, despite the fantasy that it achieves separation, is never, ultimately, as impermeable as it should be. Although he establishes a palisade around his camp, Tatius seems already to know that this barrier is not as impregnable as he would like; after all, he immediately sets up a second makeshift wall, an earthen rampart so that his camp will be “trustworthy” (fida, 4.4.8). It should not surprise us then, given what we have already seen about boundaries in elegies 4.2 and 4.3, to discover Tarpeia has breached Tatius’ fortifications to get her water. Moreover, I would like to suggest that an exploration of elegy 4.4 reveals that Tatius’ camp is not the only instance in which we discover that walls established as barriers appear both there and not there at the same time, always ultimately too porous to be counted on. On the one hand, the poem opens with an evocation of ancient Rome. The poet focuses on the moment at which Rome, newly established under Romulus, comes under attack by the Sabines (4.4.9–10). The location is emphatically pastoral, pre-urban. We hear about groves, rocks, sheepfolds, a spring and we learn that “mountains formed the wall” (murus erant montes, 4.4.13). The implication here seems to be that actual walls did not exist, but in their place a natural barrier, the “mountains” or more accurately the hills, performed a similar function, just as the Tiber seemed to form such a barrier at 4.1.8. On the other hand we know, from a brief glance at Livy, that one of Romulus’ first acts as legendary founder of Rome was to construct walls or fortifications, thus creating a physical boundary around the periphery of his city (Ab Urbe Condita 1.6.3–7.3). Indeed, the famous story of fratricide ends as Romulus exclaims over his slain brother: “Thus then will he perish, whosoever else will leap over my walls” (sic deinde, quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea, 1.7.2). His first act as leader thereafter involves fortifying the Palatine (1.7.3). As the story progresses, Romulus continues to expand the city outward, protecting it anew with each increase by constructing walls (munitionibus . . . munirent, 1.8.4). We arrive fairly quickly thereafter at the rape of the Sabine women and the war with the Sabines and their king, Tatius, more precisely at the moment when Tarpeia proceeds down from the citadel on the Capitoline hill and ventures out extra moenia (“beyond the walls,” 1.11.6) to fetch water for a religious ritual. Although, as Ogilvie points out, the Capitol was not historically incorporated into the city until the seventh century , Livy explicitly gives to Tarpeia’s father the title “commander of the Roman citadel” (Sp. Tarpeius Romanae praeerat arci, 1.11.6), thereby rendering

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the Capitol already part of Rome in his historiographical narrative.⁵¹ Perhaps one might argue that we should not assume that all readers come to elegy 4.4 with a detailed knowledge of this elaborate backstory. For the readers who do not have their Livy fresh in their minds, however, Propertius’ elegy itself actually refers to the existence of the city’s fortifications. The poet chooses a specific time frame for the culminating action of the narrative. We hear that Tarpeia’s betrayal of the arx Romana occurs on the festival day of the Parilia, an annual celebration of the day that Romulus marked out the lines of his new city with a furrow, “the birthday [of Rome’s] walls” (primus . . . moenibus . . . dies, 4.4.74).⁵² The festival itself gives rise to the opportunity of Tarpeia’s betrayal because in honor of the holiday “Romulus decreed that the watches be relaxed at ease and that the camp be silent with the trumpet blasts ceased” (Romulus excubias decrevit in otia solvi / atque intermissa castra silere tuba, 4.4.79–80). So we should imagine walls surrounding Romulus’ Rome, which for Livy and for Propertius ostensibly includes the Capitol, even if once in Propertius’ poem the hills seem to step into the place of fortifications— murus erant montes, 4.4.13. Or perhaps, since Tarpeia seems to acknowledge that city and surrounding hills are virtually one and the same when she apostrophizes her home as ‘Roman hills and Rome perched atop hills’ (Romani montes, et montibus addita Roma, 4.4.35), the hills provide a natural level of defense which we should visualize then duplicated by man-made fortifications. No matter how many layers of entrenchment we envision, what the story of Tarpeia all too clearly illustrates is that one cannot ultimately count on walls to separate in from out, Roman from non-Roman. Or, to put it another way, the walls may be there, but do not obstruct passage in any meaningful way. As if acknowledging the lack of reliability of the walls, Propertius reminds the reader that Romans deploy other, additional precautionary measures—sentries (4.4.79), trumpets (4.4.80), watchdogs (4.4.84)—to bolster the fortifications of the city. Unfortunately these methods also fail to provide the intended protection. In the end, one girl, a Vestal Virgin, opens the door and invites the enemy into the heart of Rome; “she had betrayed the trust of the gate and her homeland, lying prostrate” (prodiderat portaeque fidem patriamque

⁵¹ Ogilvie 1965: ad 1.11.6. ⁵² On the Parilia, see Beard, North, and Price 1998: 174–6. In addition, see Heyworth 2007b: ad 73–7 for the argument about whether lines 74–5 should be deleted. Heyworth, as most other editors, does not find the evidence for excision compelling.

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iacentem, 4.4.87). The use of fidem reminds us of Tatius’ camps twice fortified in order to be fida (“trustworthy,” 4.4.8)—which we discover they turn out not to be when we learn that Tarpeia has infiltrated them in order to collect water. Both the enemy’s palisade and the Romans’ walls, intended to separate “self” and “other,” do not succeed. Meanwhile, if we explore the rest of the elegy, we discover that the failure to maintain divisions between antitheses—a failure most clearly underscored by the ultimate impotence of city walls and camp palisades to obstruct passage—in fact manifests itself in multiple guises throughout Propertius 4.4, as it did in poems 4.2 and 4.3. Indeed, the most compelling interpretations of the poem highlight the frequency in elegy 4.4 with which stable, bounded dichotomies come apart, although they do not anchor their explanations to anxieties about the walls around Rome. Micaela Janan, for one, draws the reader’s attention to the recurring images of water in the poem, which she connects, via Luce Irigaray’s concept of “fluid mechanics,” to the elegy’s depiction of feminine desire.⁵³ Water cannot be confined or contained; it transgresses boundaries undermining strictly divided categories, just as the feminine undermines a masculine tendency towards binary logic. Paul Allen Miller discovers in water’s opposite, fire, a second element performing similar work in the poem, equally disruptive and uncontainable.⁵⁴ Again, I do not wish disagree with either reading, but instead suggest that we train our gaze primarily on the walls around Rome for our explanation. Containment is eluded, boundaries undermined throughout the elegy in many instances; they are part of a ripple effect, spiraling out from a central understanding that while the very walls of Rome exist to contain and bound, they might only perform this function in fantasy. Let us consider then, briefly, the other significant antitheses that are both constructed and undermined in the elegy around the central characters of Tarpeia and Tatius. Propertius’ Tarpeia is a Vestal Virgin. This tells us many things; she is a woman, a virgin, a Roman and she performs a public, religious duty for her city. The goddess Vesta symbolizes Rome itself, though she herself is a foreign transplant,⁵⁵ standing at the city’s center, representing its communal hearth. The Vestal Virgins tend the eternal fire, warding off its extinction which foretells the destruction of Rome. The Vestal’s virginity, then, figures Rome; “her unpenetrated body was a metaphor for the unpenetrated walls of Rome.”⁵⁶ But we have just discovered that the walls are not ⁵³ Janan 2001: 70–81. ⁵⁴ Miller 2004: 197–203. ⁵⁵ On this, see Janan 2001: 78. ⁵⁶ Parker 2004: 568. On the virginity of the Vestals, see Parker 2004: 566–71.

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impermeable. So what about other seemingly bounded categories—the virgin, the Roman, the public priestess? If we consider the broader historical narrative surrounding Tarpeia’s story, we remember why Tatius has arrived on the scene. Rome, newly a city, suffers from a shortage of marriageable women. When marriage by diplomacy fails, Romulus and his men seize the neighboring Sabine women, an act of aggression that leads directly to the war that Tatius wages against Rome. In such a crisis, when we see the extent of Romulus’ unconstrained manner of acquiring brides, the fact that Tarpeia escapes the fate of marriage to one of the mateless Romans underscores her status as a chaste priestess of Vesta, representative of the entire city. From the moment we meet her in the poem, however, the emphasis is on the ways in which she does not cleave to her status as Vestal Virgin. Propertius’ elegy centers on her erotic desire for a man and how, from the onset of her desire, she betrays her ritual duties to pursue it fully. She falls in love with Tatius at first sight, watching him practice war maneuvers on the sand (4.4.19–20); “she was awed by the face of the king and his regal weapons” (obstipuit regis facie et regalibus armis, 4.4.21). The moment desire strikes, she drops the urn she is carrying—a simple earthenware vessel used in the cult of Vesta (fictilis urna, 4.4.16)⁵⁷—from her hands that immediately forget their ritual roles (oblitas . . . manus, 4.4.22). She frequently (saepe, repeated at 4.4.23 and 25) invents religious pretexts for leaving the Capitol to get a better look at her beloved (4.4.23–6).⁵⁸ In her fantasy, she aspires to be Tatius’ bride, requesting that Hymenaeus provide nuptial music (4.4.61). If the defining dichotomies virgin/bride, priestess of Vesta/secular woman seem muddled, Tarpeia further complicates matters when she reaches for identities other than Roman to cloak herself in. “So that the Sabine women’s rapes not go unpunished, rape me and settle the score with the law of retaliation in kind,”⁵⁹ (at raptae ne sint impune Sabinae, / me rape et alterna lege repende vices, 4.4.57-58) she exclaims. She seems to imagine herself as a textual doublet of a Sabine woman, a confusion she underscores when she pictures herself brokering a treaty on the battlefield between warring Romans and Sabines (4.4.59–60).⁶⁰ At an earlier moment in the elegy, she likens herself to specific Greek literary heroines.⁶¹ She resembles either Scylla or Ariadne who choose to betray Megara and Crete, respectively, for ⁵⁷ Hutchinson 2006: ad loc. ⁵⁸ See Welch 2015: 171ff. on “Elegiac Tarpeia.” ⁵⁹ See Richardson 1977: ad loc on alterna lege. ⁶⁰ Despite textual uncertainties, the overall meaning remains. ⁶¹ Miller 2004: 193 astutely observes that Tarpeia’s “status as a foundational figure of Roman mythic identity is portrayed in terms that are recognizably Greek.”

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love of a foreign man (4.4.39–42). It is perhaps interesting to note here that Tarpeia’s version of the narrative of Scylla itself already presents the woman as a hybrid of multiple, unreconcilable identities. The stories of two different Scyllas refuse to remain bounded and separate but rather merge into one in Tarpeia’s telling as she fuses the woman who betrays her father and country with the woman whose lower half of her body turns into barking dogs.⁶² Just as the Roman/non-Roman and chaste/bride dichotomies unravel, so, too, there are moments when the depiction of Tarpeia raises questions about our abilities to differentiate clearly and without reservations between Man and Woman.⁶³ Although she does remind us, as John Warden has pointed out, of Virgil’s Dido at several key moments in the elegy,⁶⁴ perhaps never more than when Vesta culpam alit et plures condit in ossa faces (“feeds her fault and plunges many torches into her bones,” 4.4.70),⁶⁵ the portrait of a furor-filled woman in love also calls to mind, at different moments, the more gender-ambiguous Amazon and elegiac amator. In many ways, like Arethusa in the previous elegy, Tarpeia resembles the male lover, the “I” of elegiac poetry.⁶⁶ She mirrors the exclusus amator issuing speeches to a locked door in front of the puella’s house.⁶⁷ She sits on the Capitol and looks down at Tatius’ fortified camp below, weeping (flevit, 4.4.29) on account of her love-wounds (vulnera, 4.4.30). She fantasizes about being his slave (captiva, 4.4.34) and spending her time gazing upon his face (4.4.34), ultimately sleepless in her unrelenting desire (4.4.63-65). Prepared to give up everything, home and duty, for Tatius (4.4.35-6), she sounds like the Propertian amator who declares that Cynthia “alone [is his] home and [his] parents” (tu mihi sola domus, tu, Cynthia, sola parentes, 1.11.23). And the lover-poet, as Propertian scholars tend to agree, manages to throw into disarray the sense of distinct and stable gender categories.⁶⁸ At the height of her frenzy, however, Tarpeia “rushes like a woman of Strymon, ⁶² One should also note here that the hybrid Scylla mirrors the hybrid Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, brother of Ariadne (4.4.41). ⁶³ Vestal Virgins, in and of themselves, blur the Man/Woman divide. Parker 2004: 572–4 explains that a Vestal Virgin’s legal status renders her like a man; removed from the potestas of her own father, yet not falling into the manus of any other male, “she ceased to be like any other woman” (p. 572). ⁶⁴ Warden 1978: 177–87. ⁶⁵ Compare Aeneid 4.2 (where Dido “feeds the wound in her veins and is consumed by an unseen fire,” vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni) and 172 (where she obfuscates her culpam, “fault,” with the pretense of marriage). Hutchinson 2006: ad loc. ⁶⁶ Indeed some have argued that Tarpeia speaks for Propertius; e.g. Wyke 1994a: 122, Stahl 1985: 279–305, La Penna 1977: 87, Sullivan 1984: 30–4. ⁶⁷ Miller 2004: 187. ⁶⁸ See note 30, above.

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near the swift-running Thermodon river, with bared breast and torn garment” (illa ruit, qualis celerem prope Thermodonta / Strymonis abscisso pectus aperta sinu, 4.4.71–2). The confusion that arises from the simile is twofold. First, the reader must untangle the geographical references to determine what comparisons the poet is drawing. Once she has realized that the woman of Strymon refers to a Maenad while the Thermodon river is home to the Amazons,⁶⁹ the reader must somehow figure out, and then reconcile, the points of intersection between the two different kinds of women. And we are left unable to pin Tarpeia down. The comparison of the Vestal Virgin to an Amazon continues to problematize gender categories, as we see Tarpeia through the lens of the mythical heroines whose naked breasts make them (feminine) objects of desire and the gaze but whose warlike feats on horseback, on the battlefield masculinize them. Her furor drives her to forge a compact with Tatius; “she ratifies a pact, she herself about to be part of the pact” (pacta ligat, pactis ipsa futura comes, 4.4.82). Strikingly, because she is a woman engaged here in man’s work, she has negotiated her own marriage, in exchange for which she brings her betrayed city as a dowry (4.4.87–8). And yet, she seems to blur gender boundaries rather than simply to assume the role of father or male relative. While “women were normally not enactors but objects of treaties,”⁷⁰ Tarpeia locates herself in both roles, as enactor and as object. By virtue of the fact that she is a Vestal Virgin, Tarpeia already exists in an ambiguous state of classification, possessing “masculine” rights and privileges, operating outside of patria potestas as well as the power of any other male.⁷¹ When, in elegy 4.4. she enters into a marriage negotiation in which she will be the bride, she causes category confusion, embodying both masculine and feminine roles, performing as both exchanger and object of exchange. We have primarily focused on Tarpeia as the elegy’s central character. We should note briefly, however, before we conclude, that the depiction of Tatius that emerges from the Propertian elegy, especially in contrast to other versions of the narrative,⁷² also blurs the boundaries, in particular between other and Roman. Early in the elegy, as Tatius fortifies his camp, the poem seems to draw clear lines between Roman and Sabine. The poet asks the reader to imagine newly established Rome when the “trumpeter of

⁶⁹ See Warden 1978: 182–6; Janan 2001: 76–8; Miller 2004: 197–8; Welch 2015: 180–2; as well as Richardson 1977 and Hutchinson 2006, both ad loc. ⁷⁰ Welch 2015: 179. ⁷¹ Here see Parker 2004: 572–4. ⁷² See Welch 2015, a book-long account of the version of the Tarpeia myth.

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Cures” (tubicen Curetis, 4.4.9) announced war and when “Sabine javelins stood in the Roman Forum” (stabant Romano pila Sabina Foro, 4.4.12). Tarpeia sees the enemy leader, and his “painted armor” (picta . . . arma, 4.4.20) captures her gaze. Indeed, twelve lines later, in her monologue about Tatius, she seems again to reveal her attraction to his weapons, speaking of “Sabine arms beautiful in my eyes” (formosa oculis arma Sabina meis, 4.4.32). We have seen embellished weaponry of war highlighted as distinctly non-Roman before; Arethusa pointedly refers to “Britain with its painted chariots” in her catalogue of foreign places that Lycotas and the Roman army visits (4.3.9). Certainly Sabine armor differs from Roman military equipment.⁷³ In addition to his painted armor, however, Tarpeia is mesmerized by “the appearance of the king and his regal weapons” (regis facie et regalibus armis, 4.4.21). We seem a far cry from “the Sabine weapons of savage Tatius” (Sabina feri . . . arma Tati, 4.2.52) that we happened upon under Vertumnus’ guidance. Indeed, Tarpeia goes one step farther. Justifying her betrayal of the citadel, she exclaims: “The painted royal toga suits you, not him whom, motherless, the harsh teat of the inhuman shewolf suckled” (te toga picta decet, non quem sine matris honore / nutrit inhumanae dura papilla lupae, 4.4.53–4). Romulus and Tatius switch places. Tatius becomes the one worthy of Roman kingship while Romulus emerges feral, as if savagery came part and parcel with the milk of his wolf-nurse. Let us conclude this section by considering briefly one aspect of the Tarpeia and Tatius story that Propertius seems to elide. We have already noted that the story is an important one for Romans, significant to their foundational mythology and therefore frequently retold.⁷⁴ We are then probably safe in assuming that Propertius would expect that at least some of his readers would turn to his text with other versions of the tale in mind. Tarpeia’s immoral greed is a well-known highlight of the story, yet conspicuously absent in the Propertian elegy. In most tellings, she betrays the Roman citadel because of her lust for gold. In a particularly non-Roman fashion, the Sabine warriors accessorized in the precious metal. According to Livy, they sported “golden bracelets of great weight on their left arms and rings encrusted with jewels of magnificent appearance” (aureas armillas magni ponderis bracchio laevo gemmatosque magna specie anulos, 1.11.8).⁷⁵ Tarpeia offers the Sabines entry into Rome provided that in return they give her what is on their left arms as payment. The Sabines then ⁷³ See Hutchinson 2006: ad 21. ⁷⁴ Welch 2015. ⁷⁵ Also Plutarch, Romulus 1.17, Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.38ff.

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outsmart the girl by burying her alive under their shields, which they also carry in their left hands. In Propertius 4.4 we never hear about the striking non-Roman gold jewelry of the Sabines. They do not defeat her, in the end, by resorting to (non-Roman) tricks. Tatius rejects her offer of treason by assuming the moral high ground. If this alternative outcome to the story remains in our minds, the Propertian Tatius appears more Roman than not. At the moment of truth, Tatius, though the enemy, in a most Roman way, “did not grant honor to treachery” (neque . . . sceleri dedit hostis honorem, 4.4.89) and punishes the “wicked girl” (mala . . . puella, 4.4.17) with death.

The Walls of Rome and a Cartographic Worldview Propertius’ responses to the ever-expanding space of Roman empire alter over the course of his elegy collections. If early on, in book 1, he clings to a fantasy that one can establish meaningful fines on which to anchor definitions of identity, the three-poem run in book 4 that we have just been exploring, elegies 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4, reveals a less optimistic vision. At the center, the Roman wife, Arethusa, relies on a map and ethno-geographic writings to trace the travels of her husband, Lycotas, fighting wars of conquest just beyond the edges of empire. Her subjective epistolary narrative allows her to establish a series of rigorous dichotomies; she clearly distinguishes between Roman woman in the domestic sphere and Roman man at war abroad, between her Roman soldier-husband and his non-Roman enemy, between Romanae puellae and barbarian, Amazon Hippolyta. And yet, just as Roman imperial conquest reveals that lines indicating fines on a map must ultimately remain fluid and unstable in dividing “in” from “out,” “Roman” from “non-Roman,” so, too, Arethusa’s bounded, antithetical categories begin to bleed into one another. Matters become more complicated when we read Arethusa’s elegiac epistle together with the poems that surround it in Propertius’ fourth book. The simultaneously Etruscan and Roman Vertumnus, who also reveals that ascribing any identity may rest a bit too heavily on the accessories an individual happens to choose at a particular moment, takes questions about the hybridization of categories that should be fixed and separate back to the time of Romulus, more specifically to the time of the military encounter between Romulus’ newly established Romans and Tatius’ neighboring Sabines. The same enemy king and his people return in elegy 4.4, as Propertius relentlessly continues to explore a concurrent desire to differentiate self and other, made manifest in

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city walls, and a realization that the boundary between the two categories is permeable at best. Finally, we need to consider what we make of Propertius’ decision to equate boundary lines on a geographic map in his contemporary Rome and walls fortifying the ancient city. Although we cannot know for sure, I would like to suggest that when the poet traces the questionable nature of fixed boundaries back to the very origin of Rome, the text does not, in fact, propose that the anxiety about the wall/finis qua (ultimately porous) barrier against the other looms from the time of Romulus and continues on under Augustus. On the contrary, Propertius, in sending his readers back to the very beginnings of the city, cannot but reconstruct spatial questions in the Romulean past as already overrun by the constitution of space in the symbolic of his Augustan present. As Propertius binds together the stories of Vertumnus and Tarpeia to the narrative of Arethusa, the issues that his contemporary Augustan Rome was wrestling with are so pervasive that they pop up in many guises and in all sorts of stories; in this case the Augustan preoccupation with mapping and boundaries gets cast back into originary tales as retrospectively reconstructed by the poet. One can isolate a similar impetus in Augustan retellings of twin killing twin at the moment of Rome’s foundation. The recent violence of civil war colors versions of the narrative. Further, it explains the frequency with which Augustan writers touch upon the act of fratricide. I do not mean to suggest here that early Romans did not struggle with questions about defining Roman identity, even problems that include dividing “Roman” from “foreigner”; rather, the elegies 4.2 and 4.4 do not provide evidence for these conflicts. Instead, Vertumnus, Tatius, and Tarpeia reveal the vital centrality of questions about identity in Augustan Rome, questions that arise in the face of the expanding geographical space of empire, as the poet, in the grip of his contemporary production of space, textually refracting the current worldview, casts early Rome’s wall as an analogy for imperial fines.

5 Sine finibus Imports and Exile in Ovid (Amores 1.14, Ars Amatoria 3, Remedia Amoris, Medicamina Faciei Femineae, Tristia, Epistulae Ex Ponto)

pars minima est ipsa puella sui “the girl herself is the smallest part of herself ” Ovid, Remedia Amoris 344 The first part of this chapter features the flow of luxury goods from the peripheries of empire to Rome, the second, Ovid’s unexpected and undesired permanent relocation in the opposite direction, from center to periphery. The two sections intersect in their focus, at their core, on the ways that imperium sine fine plays out in Ovidian elegy vis-à-vis the individual subject. Luxury goods from the edges of empire journey to its center and alter the women there; the space of empire, never a static or passive backdrop, actively asserts itself on the subject. We begin with an exploration of the feminine subject in the poet’s early erotic elegies, in particular what happens when she puts onto herself the trappings that enter Rome from all corners of the empire without any impediment of geographical boundary. We shall then switch gears for something of a coda, turning our attention away from the imperial center to its outermost frontiers, away from women’s cosmetics to Ovid’s relegation to Tomis. The poet’s epistolary elegies from the Black Sea, the Tristia and the Epistulae Ex Ponto, also reveal the anxieties of a boundless empire, raising questions about how to define Roman and non-Roman, Tomitan and barbarian, inside and outside. As categories collapse one into the other, as separate, bounded entities become a melange, we shall consider the consequences of the lack of fines on the masculine subject, Ovid in exile.

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0006

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Natura versus Cultus: Ovid and the Anti-Cosmetic Tradition The ancient, highly moralistic, anti-cosmetic tradition is both rich and long. We begin by examining where and how Ovid’s early elegiac portrayals of puellae, adorned in finery from the edges of empire, intersect with it. Scholars often quote Ischomachus’s famous, though by no means idiosyncratic, diatribe against woman’s cosmetics from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a Socratic dialogue about household management, to sum up antiquity’s prevailing view about the deceitful nature of (feminine) adornment (10.2–9). When his wife appears before him wearing high-heeled boots, her looks enhanced with a whitening foundation on her face and some rouge on her cheeks, Ischomachus upbraids her for her intentionally artificial self-presentation: “Tell me, my dear, how should I appear more worthy of your love as a partner in our goods, by disclosing to you our belongings just as they are, without boasting of imaginary possessions or concealing any part of what we have, or by trying to trick you with an exaggerated account, showing you bad money and gilt necklaces and describing clothes that will fade as real purple?” (10.3).¹ When she wholeheartedly proclaims that she could only love honesty, he continues his harangue now shifting his focus from his household possessions to his physical looks. Would she prefer his body naturally hale and hearty or cosmetically enhanced to appear so (10.5)? After she, for a second time, immediately espouses the correct preference for what is natural, he goes in for the kill: “Then please assume, my dear, that I do not prefer white paint and dye of alkanet to your real colour; but just as the gods have made horses to delight in horses, cattle in cattle, sheep in sheep, so human beings find the human body undisguised most delightful. Tricks like these may serve to gull outsiders, but people who live together are bound to be found out, if they try to deceive one another. For they are found out while they are dressing in the morning; they perspire and are lost; a tear convicts them; the bath reveals them as they are” (10.7–8). Game, set, and match to Ischomachus. He forcefully condemns clothing and cosmetics as pernicious, artificial, and deceitful diversions that somehow distract from the natural woman underneath. “From that day forward,” he concludes smugly, “[she] tried to let me see her undisguised and as she should be” (καθαράν and πρεπόντως ἔχουσαν, 10.9, emphasis mine). ¹ I quote the Loeb translation for the Oeconomicus because it embodies the right mixture of condescension and moral censure.

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Xenophon’s indictment, as I have already mentioned, hardly stands alone. Many ancient writers, Greek and Roman, in poetry and in prose, expend tremendous energy excoriating any feminine cultivation of self as a sinister ploy to put a veil over (some underlying and unpleasant) corporeal reality.² Self-adornment goes against the laws of nature, offering up deceitful enhancements that serve to blind men to all but the shiny and captivating surface. As Amy Richlin has astutely pointed out, the medicamina of woman’s toilette suspiciously resemble the potions and brews of magical spells, creating the impression that adornment is the province of the witch, who ensnares her unsuspecting lover through the dark arts.³ While, on the one hand, the moralizing tradition reveals anxiety about a woman’s power to deploy self-adornment for deceitful purposes, on the other, it also betrays disquiet about a woman’s impetus to self-display. Propertius provides rich material for our purposes. He opens the second elegy of his first collection of poems with a series of loaded questions: Quid iuvat ornato procedere, vita, capillo et tenuis Coa veste movere sinus, aut quid Orontea crinis perfundere murra, teque peregrinis vendere muneribus, naturaeque decus mercato perdere cultu, nec sinere in propriis membra nitere bonis? What use is it, my life, to sally forth with adorned locks and to set in motion thin folds of Coan silk? Or to soak your hair in Syrian myrrh, and to set off/sell yourself by means of foreign gifts? Or to destroy natural charm with purchased adornment, and not to allow your limbs to shine forth with their own merits? (1.2.1–6)

One could suggest that he is simply a doting amator, so besotted with his puella that he cannot imagine any adornment that would enhance her own natural beauty (naturae decus). After all, he continues, non ulla tuae medicina figurae (“there is no improvement [possible] to your appearance,”

² I provide a few examples here most pertinent to the material that I shall be focusing on in Ovid: Plautus, Mostellaria lines 258–78; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 4.1121–91; Horace, Satires 1.2.123–4 and Epodes 12.10–11; Propertius 1.2 and 2.18b; Tibullus 2.3 and 2.4; Seneca, De Beneficiis 7.9; Pliny, NH, e.g., on perfume 13.20–5; Martial, e.g., 2.41.11–12 and 9.37; Juvenal 6.457–507. ³ Richlin 1995: especially 186 and 189–90.

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1.2.7). And yet, complications multiply as the poem unfolds. When the amator offers a list of many wonders from the natural world (flowers, ivy, strawberry bushes, stones on a beach, 1.2.9–13) that culminates in birds that sing nulla arte (“with no art,” 1.2.14), he tips his hand. He is not so much enchanted by the pure and natural as he is anxious about the artificiality of any and all enhancements; “naked Love does not like the artificer of beauty” (nudus Amor formae non amat artificem, 1.2.8). Hippodamia, after all, did not seduce Pelops with “artificial whiteness” (falso candore, 1.2.19) and an appearance “enhanced by jewels” (facies obnoxia gemmis, 1.2.21).⁴ Moreover, it is not merely the deception inherent in Cynthia’s choice to enhance her beauty through ars or cultus that upsets Propertius, but rather the motivations the amator attributes to the drive for subterfuge. The puella who seeks to improve her appearance through hairstyles, makeup, and fancy clothing does so for meretricious purposes. One may perhaps gloss over the first hint that the amator’s anxiety really focuses on insinuations of the puella’s self-prostitution; indeed he is still warming to his subject in line 4 when he asks: “what use is it to sell yourself with foreign gifts?” ([quid iuvat] teque peregrinis vendere muneribus?, 1.2.4). However, once he has set up a dichotomy between transparent, natural beauty and deceptive, artificial adornment more fully, he concludes the elegy by contrasting women from each of the two categories. For the natural beauty, “chastity is appeal enough” (ampla satis forma pudicitia, 1.2.24), while the decked-out puella seeks “to pick up lovers in the crowd” (vulgo conquirere amantes, 1.2.23). In the end, rather self-servingly, he asserts that “if she pleases just one man, the puella is sufficiently civilized,” (uni si qua placet, culta puella sat est, 1.2.26), which by a deft sleight of hand he redefines as skill in poetry, lyre playing, and speaking instead of bodily self-adornment (1.2.27–30). Indeed the same underlying accusation, that the woman who adorns her body actually signals her meretricious aspirations, re-emerges in elegy 2.18b as the amator takes the puella to task for dyeing her hair and putting on makeup in terms usually reserved for discussions of virtue. Not only is fake color morally wrong (turpis, 2.18b.26), but further, in sharp contrast, “every feature that nature has given is ethically correct” (ut natura dedit, sic omnis recta figura est,

⁴ It is interesting to note here, with Sharrock 1991: especially 39–41, that Propertius’ preference for the natural seems to fall apart in the poem. After all, he praises Hippodamia’s natural facies and then renders it vivid for us with a comparison that hardly emphasizes naturalness: qualis Apelleis est color in tabulis (“an appearance like the color in the paintings of Apelles,” 1.2.22).

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2.18b.25).⁵ Moreover, the puella who dyes her hair is characterized in strongly judgmental language as “a liar” (mentita, 2.18b.28) who will suffer “many evils” (mala multa, 2.18b.27) as a payback for her sins. And once again, veiled insinuations of sexual availability accompany the accusations of deceit. On the one hand, she should stop coloring her hair, and spend large swaths of time with the amator; her natural self, ineluctably tied to her faithfulness to the amator, renders her beautiful enough (formosa sat, 2.18b.30). On the other hand, he fervently hopes that her bed will act as a guardian of her faithfulness. And he can only imagine that her lectus will succeed in keeping her chaste, if she does not widely signal her availability by opting to sit (on the bed) with an overly-elaborate hairstyle (2.18b.35–6).⁶ Before we move on to the adorned puella in Ovid’s early erotic elegy, we must make a further observation about bodily embellishment and moralistic discourse. If we return to look closely at the Propertian elegies that we have just been discussing, we notice that the enhancements the puella makes to her appearance rather specifically involve foreign luxury items. It is a fact that, like any discourse, the ancient, anti-cosmetic moral tradition that Propertius taps into alters slightly as historical circumstances vary. While a woman’s propensity to dress up in finery and apply cosmetics is always suspect, in Roman texts we observe a focus on the foreign, imported nature of the cosmetic items that promote dissipation. In fact, as Maria Wyke points out, Roman writers’ conceptions of the adorned female body remain intertwined with other prevalent Roman discourses about social decline. The more time that passes since the origin of the Roman state, the more that Rome comes into contact with other cultures, the more that it incorporates these foreign peoples and lands into its imperium, the greater the social decline. The woman’s body increasingly adorned with foreign imports simultaneously participates in, and embodies, this social decline.⁷ In the Latin texts that belong to the anti-cosmetic tradition, adornment, unnatural in and of itself, comes from outside Rome, infiltrates the city, becomes ⁵ See Heyworth 1995: 168–71 for the manuscript issues with this elegiac fragment. ⁶ The strange notion of the bed as guardian leads to interpretive pyrotechnics and textual emendation. Goold 1990 changes lectus to vultus. The puella’s makeup-free face will be the guardian of her virtue, again in tandem with her unadorned hair. Compare Richardson 1977: ad loc. To him, the poem “has to do with dyes and cosmetics, not with infidelity” (emphasis mine). He keeps lectus but offers an interpretive translation. Propertius does not set up the bed as a “watchdog,” but rather suggests that the puella be most concerned about her appearance in her bedroom (where her lectus is), i.e., where she is most likely to spend her time in private, unadorned. ⁷ Wyke 1994b: 140. See also Bowditch 2012: 127 on “feminine vanity” and “the ensuing decadence of the body politic.”

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increasingly coveted by increasingly degenerate women. Silk from Cos (1.2.2), perfume from Syria (1.2.3), hair dye in a Belgian hue (2.18b.26)⁸ cause distress when Propertius denigrates particular feminine beautification trends; when he opts for a general shorthand to dismiss feminine practices of bodily enhancement, we read about the evils of foreign gifts (peregrinis muneribus, 1.2.4) or exotic sheen (externo nitore, 2.18b.24). Propertius, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, writes his elegies as Octavian, then Augustus, achieves control over Rome with the single greatest expansion of the Roman empire since the third and second centuries , an extension of territory that brings with it a full realization of the extent of the world now under Roman control. As we noted in Chapter 2, Propertius’ early elegies reveal how he pushes his anxiety about ever-expanding geographical territory off onto his puella, attempting to immobilize her in space and then to use her as a fixed point for his own self-definition. It should not surprise us then that the increasing circulation of goods, in particular the import of foreign luxury items into Rome that accompanies conquest and expansion, causes anxiety especially around issues of self-definition. In these early elegies (books 1 and 2) about feminine self-adornment, the poet attempts to ease his anxieties about the increase in the circulation of foreign luxury imports by linking their presence in Rome to the deceitful, meretricious nature of puellae, in particular his own. Should puellae simply revert to an older, more morally upright preference for natural beauty, all would be well. Ovid’s early erotic elegies date to the end of the final decade  and the first few years . Most recent scholarly assessments contend that when Ovid turns his attention to women’s cosmetics, in sharp contrast to other ancient writers, he diverges from the established moral tradition. In a famous passage in the third book of the Ars Amatoria, instructions on snagging and keeping a lover addressed to women, the poet launches into what has become known in shorthand as “the hymn to cultus” (Ars Amatoria 3.101–28). We shall certainly return to discuss these lines in greater detail, but for now I wish to rehearse briefly a significant underpinning of the current scholarly argument about Ovid and feminine selfadornment.⁹ Most importantly, interpreters of Ovid suggest that the poet ⁸ See Camps 1966 and Richarsdon 1977, both ad loc, on spuma Batava. ⁹ I am not suggesting that these scholars are running similar lines of interpretation, merely that they share underlying assumptions about Ovid’s stance towards the anti-cosmetic moral tradition. I cite a few examples, Rosati 1985, Gibson 2003: especially 21–5, Rimell 2006: especially 41–103, Gibson 2006: especially 123–7 and 131–7, Bowditch 2012, Johnson 2016.

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does not consider feminine adornment evidence of moral dissoluteness. Quite the contrary. “Now Rome is golden and possesses within it the great resources of a conquered world” he proclaims exuberantly (nunc aurea Roma est / et domiti magnas possidet orbis opes, Ars Amatoria 3.113–14). Simplicity, in other words, the choice to wear rough, undyed wool, and to eschew jewelry and fancy hairstyles, belongs to the past, a time when people lived in straw huts and went about their business amid cow-strewn fields (Ars Amatoria 3.107–20). Now that Rome is in possession of an empire sine fine and luxury items from foreign places flow into the capital, itself decked out to match its role as imperial hub, the city’s female inhabitants quite naturally seek out, and then display on their bodies, the commodities of empire. Women, in Ovid’s texts, become consumers par excellence in a new global economy fueled by foreign conquests, improving their appearance, and hence their desirability, in lockstep with Rome’s imperial expansion. I want to suggest that we reconsider Ovid’s poetic response to the anticosmetic tradition. We shall find that his work does indeed betray great anxieties about woman’s self-adornment, but not at the level of her moral character. His disquiet focuses on the specific ways in which the increased trade that accompanies imperial expansion takes its toll on the feminine subject in Rome.

Imperial Luxury Imports, Feminine Cosmetics, and the Expanse of Empire Before we pivot to consider the Ovidian texts, however, let us step back briefly and cast a glance towards Ovid’s anxieties about increasing empire and feminine subjectivity in their historical, social context as well as in relation to the responses we have been tracking in other love poets. Catullus, writing his verse at the heady moment towards the end of the Republic when it seemed that Roman imperium might actually extend itself to the boundaries of the known world, reveals a fractured subject in the wake of Rome’s geographical expansion. Thoughts about the physical extent of Rome, sprawling and without any bounded ends, lead to the dissolution of

Rimell 2006: 49 offers a nice summary of this view, referring to “Ovid’s most explicit and concentrated packaging of a twisted moral code, which not only privileges contrivance and novelty over primitiveness and tradition, but also markets cultus as a means to improve and emancipate nature” (emphasis in the original).

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the Catullan ‘I’ as a fixed entity. After Octavian defeats Mark Antony to end the cycle of civil wars, he begins to consolidate his power as Augustus, seeking legitimacy by emphasizing his expansionist credentials (true or not). In this context, Propertius imagines his puella moving through space beyond his control. Her capacity for movement causes him such anxiety that he attempts to immobilize her, in Rome, with him, so that she can constitute a fixed and stable finis according to which he can then define himself. Tibullus, whose two books of elegies span about a ten-year period of concerted Augustan expansion, offers a bleaker vision than Propertius. The male ‘I’ who belongs to this historical moment cannot escape the violent, all-grasping impulses of empire, much as he wants to, much as he tries to. In the end, like the empire itself, ever seeking to expand its boundaries, to increase its geographical holdings, the impulses that drive it overrun the subject, revealing both lover and other, amator and soldier, in the grip of empire’s impulses. By his fourth and final collection of elegies Propertius has given up on the fantasy of stable fines. In his aetiological imagination, he cannot but see that in Rome from its very founding, despite its boundary walls, the mingling of ‘in’ and ‘out’ has always already occurred. In Propertius’ hands, legends about the city’s origins already disclose the porous tendencies of boundaries that should be firm, already betray the anxieties that imperial expansion brings forth. Ovid writes the elegiac poetry that we are discussing in this chapter after Propertius and Tibullus, probably in the last decade of the first century , possibly also in the first few years .¹⁰ In terms of expansionist policy, as Erich Gruen compellingly argues, Augustus continues throughout most of his reign to project an image of himself as systematically involved in relentlessly pushing the boundaries of Rome outward: ‘the regime thrived on expansionism – or at least the reputation of expansionism.’¹¹ In the time between the elegies of Tibullus and those of Ovid, there are continued celebrations for the return of the Parthian standards, and while Agrippa spends three years in the East, engaging in political activity in Pontus, Argos, North Africa, Syria, and Judea, Augustus himself takes part in the subjugation of Spain and the pacification of Gaul.¹² Within the city itself, the princeps deploys public space and public monuments in a concerted

¹⁰ Tarrant 2002: 13–14 provides a brief overall chronology of Ovid’s works. For the dating of the Amores, see McKeown 1987: 74–89. On the Ars Amatoria 1–2 and 3, and the Remedia Amoris, see Gibson 2003: 37–43. ¹¹ See Gruen 1996; the quotation is from p. 189. ¹² Res Gestae 12.2.

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campaign to reinforce the image of Rome as expansionist empire and, of course, of himself as conqueror. Primary examples—but by no means the only ones—are the Augustan Forum, completed in 2 , the statue of Augustus at Prima Porta, and the Ara Pacis, voted by the Senate in 13  and erected in 9 . Public space, statue, and moment all herald Roman imperialist power. The Augustan Forum, focused on the temple of Mars Ultor, which becomes the place where the Senate declares war and from which generals lead out their troops, highlights the military achievements of great men (summi viri), culminating in the statue of Augustus in the center, in a triumphal chariot. Similarly triumphal, the statue of Augustus at Prima Porta depicts the princeps in military garb, while the engravings on the breastplate tell a cosmic tale of a world pacified under, and because of, Roman might. Roman imperium stretches from the East, represented by the return of the Parthian standards in the center of the cuirass, to the West, alluded to in the conquered female figures on the sides around the central image. But now we notice a new aspect added to the visual narrative of military conquest. The earth, an all-bountiful female figure, reclines in the lower section of the breastplate, in her arms peaceful images of plenty: babies and fruit.¹³ The Ara Pacis, too, combines the idea that triumphant Roman military conquests abroad lead to prosperity and bounty at home, as children and abundant fruits of the earth join together with images of military might.¹⁴ After the social reforms of 18  and the Secular Games of 17 , the public, monumental imagery of the Augustan age begins to change in subtle ways. The idea of a pax augusta (“Augustan peace”) comes to the fore, introducing the notion that with expanding empire comes prosperity and concord at home, in Rome in particular. Augustan military conquest, reminders of which were earlier proudly emblazoned on the city’s public spaces,¹⁵ morphs slightly in conception, as we see on the Ara Pacis or the Prima Porta breastplate, to encompass and highlight the peace that the princeps brings to Rome, a peace avowedly “born from military victories”

¹³ Rehak 2006: 122 suggests that the fruit in the female figure’s lap are those typically represented in a cornucopia, and therefore point to this traditional image expressing abundance. ¹⁴ The central text remains Zanker 1988. For the statue of Augustus at the Prima Porta, especially pages 188–92; for the Ara Pacis, 172–9; and for the Augustan Forum, 210–15. In addition, see Galinsky 1996: especially 141–64 and 197–213; Rehak 2006: especially 96–146, Pollini 2012: especially 204–41; Rose 2005; Castriota 1995. ¹⁵ See Chapter 2, pages 74–9 above.

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(parta victoriis pax, Res Gestae 13).¹⁶ Expansion of Roman imperium into the eastern Mediterranean and the peace that was established along with the geographical push east had tangible benefits beyond the sphere of the public, visual arts. The new circumstances created new, safe trade opportunities for merchants as well as opened the Roman markets to an increasing number of Eastern luxury items.¹⁷ We are particularly interested, in this chapter, in products for feminine adornment or enhancement, like silk or cotton, gems, ivory, perfumes, unguents, frankincense, myrrh, but also culinary items, such as cinnamon, cassia, nard (occasionally used in recipes for cosmetics). While we know that upper-class Romans had been pursuing such luxury items with great appetite from the time of the early Republic (and moralizing discourse had been railing against them for just as long), the peace and prosperity brought by the Augustan age, intertwined with its military conquests, substantially increased the availability of, and markets for, trade in luxury items. Ovid’s women are a product of their times. The increasing volume of luxury items and the increasing ease with which they move through geographical space to Rome play a striking role in Ovid’s early erotic elegies. The poet’s explicit enthusiasm for boundless acquisition and accretion as a central tenet of what it means to be Roman recurs in various guises. In the Ars Amatoria he relishes future conquest: “Behold, Caesar prepares to add that which was lacking from our conquered world; now furthest Orient, you will become ours” (ecce, parat Caesar domito quod defuit orbi / addere: nunc, Oriens ultime, noster eris, 1.177–8). A decade later, in the Fasti, he rejoices in the fact that there exists nothing more to add: “to other nations territory is granted with fixed boundaries; the extent of the city of Rome and of the world is one and the same” (gentibus est aliis tellus data limite certo: / Romanae spatium est Urbis et orbis idem, 2.683–4). No more need to expand (by war or negotiation) because Rome is already the whole world. Peace and prosperity encourage a marked increase in the availability of luxury items. Everything flows to Rome, becomes part of Roman life. And yet, even as Ovid’s elegies celebrate how consumer goods from various distant, previously non-Roman, places on the peripheries make their way with ease to the center of empire, a familiar anxiety about bounded, fixed definition arises

¹⁶ For a full discussion of the notion of the pax augusta, see Rich 2003. See now Cornwell 2017: 121–86 (chapters 4 and 5) on Augustus and the evolving role of pax in the discourses of empire. ¹⁷ See Young 2001: especially 14–26, and Dalby 2000.

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once again. While Propertius and Tibullus express anxiety about the enhanced flow of luxury items to Rome, and in particular about the puella’s propensity to be attracted to expensive foreign goods and those who offer them as gifts, Ovid’s simultaneous fascination and disquiet surrounding the relationship between women and their items of adornment stand out. A marked increase in imported luxury items, an influx of goods from various far-flung places of empire, provides a reminder of the ultimate porousness and redefinability of boundaries. For Ovid, in his early elegiac works, “the urban, sophisticated woman” is the magnet for these luxurious cosmetic enhancements, and yet, as she adorns her body with these items, we shall discover that the amator increasingly reveals divisions and incoherence at the puella’s core. “The hymn to cultus” is hardly the only moment in Ovid’s early erotic works at which the poet contemplates the puella’s attempts to improve her appearance. The entire third book of the Ars Amatoria professes to teach women the skills necessary to ensnare, and then keep hold of, a lover, and two hundred of its lines offer advice about clothing, hairstyles, makeup, and other accoutrements. In a striking elegy in the first book of the Amores, the amator addresses a sorrowful puella, without displaying a great deal of compassion for her plight. The woman, it turns out, must appear in public in a wig made of hair formerly belonging to women of the Sygambrian tribe (1.14.45ff.); her own hair has all fallen out because of excessive dyeing and styling (1.14.43–4). The Medicamina Faciei Femineae, a fascinating text of which, sadly, only 100 lines are extant, promises to teach puellae “what type of care enhances their appearance” (quae faciem commendet cura, line 1) and further “in what way you must preserve your beauty” (quo sit vobis forma tuenda modo, line 2). After a fifty-line opening proem about the wonders and benefits of feminine self-cultivation, the poet launches into a series of “recipes” for various facial cosmetics. In a clever reversal of the underlying conceit of the Ars and of the Medicamina, Ovid proposes to cure wretched male lovers of their passion in the Remedia Amoris. The poet provides thirteen lines, 343–56, focusing on the puella’s daily beauty regime. He carefully instructs the man who wishes to be free of his amor to arrive unexpected (improvisus, line 347) when she is in the midst of performing her toilette so that he can witness the (disgusting) process that leads to such a stunning result. In all of these Ovidian texts we can observe shared attitudes towards, and descriptions of, the puellae and their bodily treatments and adornments; feminine self-enhancement and luxury items imported from the imperial

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peripheries go hand in glove. Ovidian Rome is a city adorned in foreign trappings (domiti magnas possidet orbis opes, Ars Amatoria 3.114)—marble, gold, art plundered from captive places—and his women truly belong in such a metropolitan center. Gems from the East adorn their necks and ears; treatments from Germany color their hair. They sport wondrous colors on their clothing thanks to Tyrian murex shells. Ingredients from Greece, Arabia, Illyria, Libya, to name but a few places, mix to create unguents and other cosmetic treatments. The opening part of this chapter explores the feminine subject, most often the puella, in Ovid’s early elegiac works, specifically in terms of her encounter with foreign, luxury items intended to enhance her physical appearance in some way. We must consider what Ovid’s position is vis-à-vis the moral discourse surrounding the cosmetic tradition. Does he really, as many recent interpreters claim, divorce feminine self-adornment with luxury accoutrements and moral judgements? Or should we perhaps come at this question from a different angle? I would like to explore here the effects on puellae of their choice to opt for exotic beauty treatments and fancy foreign garments. I shall suggest that when the poet carefully examines his puella culta we do not see evidence of moral repugnance but rather of profound anxiety, although neither about her power nor about her tendencies toward prostitution. Instead what emerges is the disquieting sensation that, should one remove all her imperial finery, one would discover an emptiness or an absence instead of a natural, chaste beauty. Deceit and artifice are not the poet’s underlying concern; instead he worries about the inability to rediscover a puella’s natural, underlying self underneath once adornment has been stripped aside.

Nunc tibi captivos mittet Germania crines (“now Germany will send captive women’s hair to you,” Amores 1.14.45): Imported Hair and Ovidian Anxiety in a Nutshell “Stop dyeing your hair,” the amator pleads with the puella in Amores 1.14 (medicare tuos desiste capillos, line 1). He is concerned that with all the curling and coloring she inflicts upon her locks, they will all fall out. By the end of the poem, his words appear prophetic; the puella sits blushing tearfully, her eyes cast down on her former hair now strewn across her lap (1.14.51–4). We do not, in fact, need to wait until the elegy concludes to learn the outcome of the narrative. The amator’s words take shape, from the first, as a potential morality tale. The amator begins with a somewhat

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triumphant “I told you so.” He reminds the puella of his past anti-cosmetic stance: “I used to say over and over again” (dicebam, 1.14.1)—the first word of the poem an iterative imperfect—that you should not use hair dye; “now there is no hair at all left for you, that you can dye” (tingere quam possis, iam tibi nulla coma est, 1.14.2). Is he joking? She cannot really be bald, can she? We must wait until the end of the poem to learn for sure. Let us begin by assessing how Amores 1.14 fits into the anti-cosmetic discourse. On the surface we seem to read an all-too-familiar story. Once the puella turned heads with her “natural locks” (nativa coma, 1.14.56). Thick and long, her hair spilled far down her back (1.14.3–4). Easy to dress, however, it did not require any special treatment. “Uncoiffed” (neglecta, 1.14.21), her hair “in a natural state” (sponte, 1.14.28), the puella took the spectator’s breath away, simply lying on her couch in the early morning (1.14.19–21). But she could not leave well enough alone. Seeking to enhance her appearance, the “hard-hearted” (ferrea, 1.14.28) puella forced her hair to submit to a variety of beauty treatments—in particular curling irons and hair tinctures described by the amator in vivid language befitting bodily violence and torture (ferro, 1.14.25; igni, 1.14.25; vim, 1.14.29)¹⁸ and witches’ brews (mixta venena, 1.14.44).¹⁹ “How many evils your harassed locks endured!” he exclaims (mala vexatae quanta tulere comae, 1.14.24).²⁰ Smugly, he points out that she has no one but herself to blame for her current predicament. Her beautiful locks “have perished” (repeated twice, periere, 1.14.31; periisse, 1.14.35), a clear consequence of her seeking to dress them up in the latest styles. But does such a traditionally moralistic reading of the elegy hold up to closer scrutiny? After all, Ovid’s readers are fairly consistent in acknowledging the poet’s more urbane and sophisticated embrace of cultus, at least in his other elegiac treatments of feminine self-adornment.²¹ Unlike other

¹⁸ See McKeown 1989: ad 25–6. ¹⁹ McKeown 1989: ad loc. ²⁰ McKeown 1989: ad loc points out that while vexata can mean “disordered,” the verb also introduces connotations of torture, and this meaning is developed by Ovid over the following few couplets. ²¹ It is true, however, that many interpreters find Amores 1.14 different from, rather than in line with, Ovid’s other elegiac output on women’s cosmetics in its seemingly moralistic stance. See, for example, McKeown 1989, in his comments about the poem, and also Johnson 2016: 87ff. Pandey 2018 discusses women’s hair and its various treatments in Ovidian love elegy as a means of offering commentary on “broader cultural dynamics within Augustan Rome” (456). She reads the violence that the puella perpetrates upon her hair as a reflection on “Rome’s exploitation and importation of foreign resources to supply the urban demand for cultus” (470). Papaioannou 2006 suggests that Ovid is commenting on his own elegiac poetics via his discussion of the puella’s hair.

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writers, Ovid prizes ars or artificiality, so ineluctably intertwined with selfadornment, provided that, in true style, it remain unobtrusively hidden; ars surpasses, yet also enhances, the natural, but only if it looks natural.²² Moreover, in response to the hair-dyeing catastrophe that seems to have left her bald, the puella dons a wig. And, as it turns out, the solution is a successful one. In an imperial consumer culture, in which the areas of the world under Roman imperium funnel luxury items into the city for purchase, a woman can obtain the best wig money can buy. The puella’s new hairstyle will come from Germany, a conquered race (1.14.45–6), in particular from the shorn locks of captive women of the Sygambri tribe (1.14.49), with whom the Roman army battled on and off between 16 and 8 . And in opting for a wig, the puella will continue to turn heads, just as before when she reveled in her own hair. She will blush, but not because she has become unsightly, rather because her new, artificial coiffure goes unrecognized as such. Or gazers just do not care whether the hair is natural as long as it is beautiful, and “the hair of German women was particularly admired.”²³ As Ovid himself reminds us at Ars Amatoria 3.165–7, “a woman goes out with a very fulsome head of purchased hair, and she makes the locks of others her own, in place of her own, with money. Nor is it shameful to have purchased a wig. We see them sold publicly” (femina procedit densissima crinibus emptis / proque suis alios efficit aere suos. / nec rubor est emisse: palam venire videmus). Indeed, in Amores 1.14, while the puella feels shame (at least in the amator’s focalization of events), the amator attempts to shake her out of it. He insists that she calm down, that the problem is not a permanent one (reparabile, 1.14.55). Soon the admiring looks will once again be for “your own hair” (nativa coma, 1.14.56). The source of the hair changes, but the admiration remains constant. So the amator does not adopt a straightforwardly moralistic, anticosmetic stance. He stops short of praising, in an uncomplicated way, natural beauty in preference to beauty enhanced or created through cosmetic artifice. And yet, his confrontation with (possibly foreign) hair dye and (explicitly German) wigs does betray anxieties on his part. The poem provides us with a series of snapshots of the puella. We begin with an image ²² Rimell 2006: 50 notes “authenticity in Ovid is always an act” (emphasis in the original). She goes on to discuss the analogy Ovid draws between writing poetry and “creating a look” (p. 52); both are similar projects that require ars dissimulata (Ars Amatoria 3.210). Arguably Ovid’s most famous line expressing this idea appears in the story of Pygmalion at Metamorphoses 10.252: ars adeo latet arte sua (“so art is concealed by its own artifice”). ²³ McKeown 1989: note to lines 45–50.

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of her with dyed tresses. The amator describes the process of coloring with words that evoke magic (medicare, 1.14.1; mixta venena, 1.14.44). Witches appear in the text just before the poet deploys the term venena for hair dye. While he overtly dismisses the notion that magic causes the puella’s hair loss, his vivid mentions of cantatae paelicis herbae (“enchanted herbs of a rival,” 1.14.39) and old crones trafficking in Thessalian water (1.14.40) intertwine barbarian Medea and foreign Thessaly with hair dye in the mind of the reader.²⁴ Moreover, and more significantly, many of the products that constitute hair dyes are foreign, often luxury products, imported to Rome from various parts of the empire.²⁵ If Ovid nudges the reader to consider linking the puella’s hair dye with the foreign and with exotic consumer items, he is explicit that her wig is an imperial product. In another snapshot, we see the puella decked out with (presumably blonde) hair that is not her own, “purchased merchandise” (empta merce, 1.14.48), “a gift of a race that Romans have triumphed over” (triumphatae munere gentis, 1.14.46), a commodity available in Rome because of territorial conquest. If Ovid were espousing the party line of the moralistic tradition within the anti-cosmetic discourse, we would expect some combination of two moves on the part of the amator. On the one hand, he would find some way to detract from the possibility that beauty can belong to the adorned body. On the other, he would find ways to describe and praise instead the natural beauty of the puella, or what is natural in general,²⁶ with vivid images for the audience.²⁷ The various snapshots we get of the adorned puella, however, highlight how good she looks. The hairdressing slave remains safe from all bodily harm when, with her mistress’ compliant locks, she creates elaborate hairdos with curls and pins. We know that the puella looks great when she is ornata (1.14.17) because the amator explicitly claims that she “also” (quoque, 1.14.21) appeals to the eye when she lies disheveled on the couch (1.14.19–21). After her hair-dye disaster, when she puts on a wig to go out in public, she receives nothing but admiring comments which cause her to blush in the knowledge that the real praise belongs to another woman ²⁴ Cf. McKeown 1989: ad loc where he ponders the possibility that we should read Medea into the word paelex, but then dismisses the reading. I think that once it emerges as one option among many, it is hard to dismiss entirely, especially in conjunction with the rich evocation of witchcraft in the surrounding lines. ²⁵ Here see Olson 2008: 72–3. ²⁶ As, for example, with Ischomachus in Xenephon’s Oeconomicus, with whom we began this chapter. ²⁷ And here we must remember, as Fear 2000 has observed, the line between praising and pimping the puella is difficult to draw in elegy.

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(1.14.47–9). She pleases others, and could be worthy of her own admiration, if only she could manage to forget her former looks—“you must erase the memory of your former self in order that you please” (ut placeas, debes immemor esse tui, 1.14.38). In other words, she looks different from her natural self, but no less attractive. When we try to envision the puella without any cosmetic enhancements, without the hair dye and the fancy hairstyles, however, the snapshots do not come clearly into focus, do not allow us to see a sharp picture. While the amator assures us that “she was quite a sight to behold with disheveled hair” (erat neglecta decens, 1.14.21) because “her unadorned locks are exquisite” (sponte decent, 1.14.28), in fact we struggle mightily in the elegy to get a clear image of what exactly the puella, and particularly her hair, looks like. The problems begin for us at the most basic level of hair color. Describing her earlier, natural hue, the amator offers a baffling sketch that largely relies on the negative. Her hair “was neither black, nor, however, was it golden, but rather, although neither color, it was a mixture of both” (nec tamen ater erat nec erat tamen aureus ille / sed, quamvis neuter, mixtus uterque color, 1.14.9–10). Seemingly aware that the depiction might not serve its full function of allowing a clear picture to materialize for the reader, the amator continues with a simile; her hair is the color of a cedar tree on Mount Ida with its bark removed (1.14.11–12). But is the simile really all that helpful? Does he expect that his readers can all call up one and the same vivid image of a particular tree, at a particular moment with its bark split open, on Mount Ida, in the Troad? Although in his commentary McKeown confidently states “the colour meant is auburn,” citing a former director of the Cambridge Botanic Garden as his source, he continues the note by conceding that there exists confusion between the cedar and some species of the juniper tree, allowing the possibility that the simile’s reference to a tree does not provide us with an uncomplicated point of comparison.²⁸ Further bewilderment, moreover, comes directly from the Ovidian text, since auburn is not really the obvious shade one would choose for that which is “neither black nor gold, but both.”²⁹ In fact, it remains very difficult to come up with a specific color that matches his description, both because one wonders what is both black (ater) and golden (aureus) and because we get more emphasis ²⁸ McKeown 1989: ad loc. ²⁹ For example, Melville 1990 translates: “Its colour wasn’t black, it wasn’t golden; / Though it was neither, gold was shot with dark” (p. 25), implying something like highlights rather than the mingling of black and gold (which, for the record, is more likely to become some hideous muddy gray color than auburn).

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on the colors the locks are not than on the color they are. And other Ovidian poems reveal he can be less ambiguous should he so choose.³⁰ If we set aside the specific color of her hair, we still have no more luck in our search to discover what the puella “really looks like” before she dyes her hair and it all falls out. It used to be long and full, the amator begins (1.14.3–4), but then immediately the image becomes more hazy. In addition to being thick, her locks were also “fine” (tenues, 1.14.5), a notion he seems to repeat almost twenty lines later when we learn they are “fine and like down” (graciles . . . et lanuginis instar, 1.14.23). Should we seek something more substantial, perhaps, for our imaginings, we can turn to two similes the amator launches into. Unfortunately, they do not provide us with much solid information. Her hair resembles “cloth that the dark-skinned Chinese possess” (vela colorati qualia Seres habent, 1.14.6) or the gossamer threads that a spider spins (1.14.7–8). What do we learn? Perhaps that her hair is silky, although more pronounced is the difference, rather than the similarity, between a spider’s web and fine, imported, luxury silk.³¹ Moreover, neither material makes for a particularly apt or visualizable image for hair. But Ovid does not seem to be in the business of making our job easy. A bit later in the elegy, he launches into yet another encomium of her natural locks. The puella had hair that both Apollo and Bacchus would wish for (1.14.31–2). Gods known for their androgynously flowing locks, true, but available to the mind’s eye of the reader only through representation, literary or artistic, and therefore not natural but instead, to be very literal about it, artificially created. And indeed, this very point is explicitly highlighted in the very next couplet, when the amator proclaims: “I could compare [your hair] to the hair that naked Dione in a painting held up once in her dripping wet hand” (illis contulerim, quas quondam nuda Dione / pingitur umenti sustinuisse manu, 1.14.33–4). The image that the amator conjures up is not natural, but rather springs from the world of ars; the puella’s hair resembles the hair of Aphrodite in the famous painting of Apelles.³² And finally, on a careful second examination, the amator also chooses to imagine his beloved’s disheveled hair, as she rises from her couch in the morning, visually

³⁰ For example, see Amores 2.4.37–44, where the amator claims that various complexions and hair colors attract his eye. ³¹ On vela and the colorati Seres, see McKeown, 1989: ad 5–6. Boyd 1997: 121–2 argues that Ovid parades his sophisticated poetics through his similes about Corinna’s hair. ³² See McKeown 1989: ad loc. Moreover, we should note here that Sharrock 1991 points out, in her discussion of Propertius 1.2, that Propertius undermines his celebration of natural beauty with a reference to this very same painting.

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through a comparison to yet another well-known artistic image; the puella resembles an exhausted Bacchant, carelessly lying in the grass (1.14.21–2). While the “actual, natural” puella, divorced from the imperial commodities that make up her toilette, recedes into the shadows even as we attempt to peer at her, it turns out that the puella who has turned to, and will continue to use, imperial cosmetic luxuries suffers from a similar problem of (lack of) identity and subjectivity. After her final and disastrous attempt to color her hair, she gazes into her mirror, then casts it aside distraught at the bald reflection that catches her eye (1.14.35–6). Seeking to cheer her up, the amator offers the following words of consolation: “It is no good that you are viewed by yourself with eyes that are accustomed (to looking at yourself): in order that you please yourself, you must be unmindful of your (former) self” (non bene consuetis a te spectaris ocellis: / ut placeas, debes immemor esse tui, 1.14.37–8). This is certainly convoluted language, difficult to unpack, the strain most apparent in the passive voice of the verb of looking and in the seeming separation of the “you” who looks and the “you” who constitutes the reflection in the mirror. To state this somewhat more coherently, there seem to be (at least) two different “yous” in this couplet. “You a” is viewed by “you b” with eyes accustomed to seeing an unspecified you (perhaps “you b” or perhaps “you c”) and not the “you” actually seen (“you a”). Further, in order that some “you” please herself, the “you” must forget a(? or the?) former “you.” Even if we decide that there are only two “yous,” a reflection with a separate identity from the “real puella,” floating around this couplet³³— and I think it is somewhat problematic to narrow down the field so completely—it remains difficult to shape a distinct and coherent identity for the puella now bald as a result of intense application of hair dyes who is somehow other than the puella with natural-color hair. Moreover, we have just seen that asking the question “what does the puella look like before she starts dyeing her hair?” does not lead to a clear answer. In both versions, we discover a troubling lack of precise definition and fixed stability in the puella’s subjectivity. Amores 1.14 poses the problem for us on a small and subtle scale. Once the puella buys into the imperial economy of Augustan Rome, applying foreign, imported hair dye and doing up her locks in all the latest, fancy imperial styles, with pins and curls, she starts down the slippery slope that leads to the loss of her hair, an unfortunate baldness that she covers over

³³ McKeown 1989: ad loc.

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expertly and successfully with a German wig. Her enthusiasm for cosmetic enhancements and adornments, however, causes her to lose more than just her hair. There is a sense in this poem that—and we shall see it recur, with even greater clarity, in other Ovidian elegiac texts of this period that focus on women and cosmetics—once a puella comes into contact with, dresses herself up in, has placed upon her person, luxury consumer items made to enhance her looks, the majority of which are imported from places of foreign conquest, she begins a masquerade that cannot be undone. The possibility of disentangling a former or real self from her adorned self, the possibility of rediscovering some original self to which the puella should return, vanishes as the poet attempts to articulate it. The permeability of the fines of empire becomes evident in the presence in Rome (empire’s center) of the puella’s various imported luxury products (from empire’s peripheries). When she embraces the benefits of Roman imperial expansion through her economic choices, this unboundedness rubs off on the feminine subject. Until we can no longer find her.

Cultus Makes the Puella: The Woman and Her Imperial Accoutrements in Ovid’s Erotic Poetry “Crude simplicity was a virtue once upon a time. Now Rome is golden and possesses the great riches of the conquered world,” crows Ovid near the opening of the third book of his Ars Amatoria (simplicitas rudis ante fuit; nunc aurea Roma est / et domiti magnas possidet orbis opes, 3.113–14). The book is addressed to women, a self-proclaimed companion to the first two books addressed to men. As we begin the advice to puellae on the subject of seducing men, we are reminded that the woman has every conceivable resource from all over the world at her disposal. All materials flow to Rome for woman to consume as Rome pushes the boundaries of its imperium ever outward. Further, it is possible, if we want to read both carefully and literally, to think that the third book in and of itself exists as an instance, writ large, of pushing the boundaries, going beyond the fines. As he reaches the concluding couplets of the second book, having laid out for a man how to capture and then hold on to a puella, the praeceptor amoris signals that his work is done. Explicitly choosing the word for “end” but also for physical or geographical “limit,” he announces: finis adest operi (“the end point is at hand for my work,” 2.733). Claiming great success for himself as lover and instructor in the arts of love, he puts a final seal (a poetic sphragis) on his

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work: let the man who conquers a woman mark his triumph by hanging up spoils bearing the inscription “Naso was my teacher” (NASO MAGISTER ERAT, 2.744). In case we are not sure that these words mark an end (finis), we can look quickly to the conclusion of book 3—lusus habet finem (“the game reaches its end point,” 3.809)—where we discover Ovid, in the final line of the poem, instructing women who succeed in love to quote the men of book 2 verbatim: “Naso was my teacher” (NASO MAGISTER ERAT, 3.812).³⁴ So we are surprised in book 2 when, after the finis is announced and the sphragis written, we suddenly come upon two more lines, seemingly tacked on as an afterthought, as if beyond the boundary of the book, announcing the arrival of another book, this one addressed to women (2.745–6), one that by its very existence questions the notion of the fixed stability of a finis.³⁵ In her quest to seduce a man, Ovid makes fairly clear that the puella’s best chance for success relies on cosmetic, bodily enhancement or adornment of various kinds. Whether the poet is instructing his male pupils to fall out of love in the Remedia Amoris or his female students to snare a lover in book 3 of the Ars Amatoria or the fragmentary Medicamina Faciei Femineae, his attention inevitably turns to aspects of personal feminine cultus as the focal point of the puella’s captivating allure. And feminine cultus in Ovid’s early erotic works leans heavily on foreign, luxury items imported from the far reaches—especially, but not solely, eastern—of the empire, as we just saw with the hair dyes, styles, and wig of the puella in Amores 1.14. Ovid celebrates women as “consumers” in a “celebration of the imperial cornucopia,”³⁶ a process that, like empire itself, the poet recognizes, is sine fine—“nor can I count up all the fashions there are: each day adds more adornments” (nec mihi tot positus numero comprendere fas est: / adicit ornatus proxima quaeque dies, Ars Amatoria 3.151–2).³⁷ In times of old,

³⁴ We should be aware, however, as Rimell 2006: 5, reminds us, that the Remedia Amoris and the Medicamina can both be construed as continuations of Ars Amatoria 3, thus belying once again the notion of a firm, uncontested ending. Indeed, we experience a similar dislocation when we consider Propertius’ unfulfilled promise that Cynthia finis erit (1.12.20); she will not, in fact, constitute the end of his poetry. Konstan 2001 examines a comparable moment of an end that is not an end in Horace Odes 1.10. ³⁵ There is some debate about whether Ovid produced two separate editions of the Ars Amatoria, one of two books, and a later one with the addition of book 3, or whether the version we have, with three books, is the sole edition. For example, see Holzberg 2006: 41–2 with nn. 1 and 2, and McKeown 1987: 74–89. ³⁶ Rimell 2006: 51. See also Habinek 2002: 50. ³⁷ The poet is considering hairstyles at this point in the text, although the idea of a constant proliferation of fashions is present in all aspects of feminine adornment.

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the Medicamina teaches us, perhaps women “preferred to cultivate paternal fields rather than themselves” (maluerint quam se rura paterna coli, 12). But now, Rome houses “sophisticated young women” (teneras puellas, 17) who dress in gilded clothing (inaurata veste, 18), try out various hairstyles on their perfumed locks (odoratos positu variare capillos, 19), bedeck their fingers with gems (gemmis, 20), and hang large Eastern stones (lapides Oriente petitos, 21) from their necks and ears. In the Ars, however, Ovid will remind puellae to avoid luxury for the sake of showing off wealth (too much gold, excessively large Indian jewels, 3.129–32), and to opt instead for displaying their taste and refinement (munditiis, 3.133) through their cultus. Ars Amatoria 3 provides our fullest look at the clothes, hairstyles, and accoutrements of the Ovidian puella. While the praeceptor amoris constrains men in their choice of hairdo, allowing them but one traditional Roman cut in book 1 (lines 517–18),³⁸ the women are given almost free rein. Women must find a style to suit their face, and the praeceptor proceeds to offer a wide sweep of possible options—ranging from the Roman nodus style (Ars Amatoria 3.139),³⁹ to the more exotic and foreign coifs: the flowing locks of the Greek god Apollo (3.141–2), the disheveled look of the abandoned Ariadne (3.157–8) or captive Iole, grieving for the destruction of her home and people in war (3.155–6), a wave-like style held in place with combs made of the tortoise shell that Mercury, born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, fashioned into a lyre (3.147–8). Unlike for men, for puellae options exist to keep the gray at bay and to hide hair loss. While men must simply suffer what nature unleashes upon them, the puella should look to German hair dyes (Germanis herbis, 3.163) when her hair whitens; when it begins to fall out, a wig is a shame-free and readily available option (3.161–8). And as we have already seen, hair imported from Germany is particularly prized for wigs, a fact Ovid may not feel the need to repeat since Germany is already on the reader’s mind from the previous couplet about hair dye.⁴⁰ In addition, as we know from the opening of the Medicamina, women perfumed and styled their tresses (odoratos capillos, line 19). Consisting of ingredients imported

³⁸ Gibson 2003: ad 135–6 and Wyke 1994b: 134–8. ³⁹ “The nodus style, without obvious Hellenistic precedent, appears to have become something of a Roman cultural symbol,” Gibson 2003: ad 139–40. ⁴⁰ See Amores 1.14.45ff.; Gibson, 2003: ad 145–6; Bartman 1999: 38ff. Olson 2008: 74 discusses wigs, noting the preference for German hair as well as a predilection for black hair called “Indian” (capelli Indici).

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from all over the Roman empire—myrrh, cassia, balsam, storax,⁴¹ to cite a few⁴²—hair scents, like all perfumes, fall into the category of the most extravagant foreign luxury items possible; for, as Pliny the Elder caustically observes, the concoctions rarely last for more than an hour.⁴³ After his discussion of hairstyles, the praeceptor amoris shifts the conversation about feminine cultus to clothing. While in the Remedia Amoris and in the Medicamina the poet celebrates golden raiments, in the Ars Amatoria the praeceptor proposes a wide range of colors for the puella’s garments.⁴⁴ Each woman should choose the color that best suits her complexion. Although the praeceptor explicitly discourages Tyrian purple because of its exorbitant price (3.169–72), he nevertheless recommends rich, vibrant colors which in and of themselves were expensive to produce.⁴⁵ Many of the deep hues not only herald the puella’s lavish consumption, but further suggest foreign luxury imports in their production.⁴⁶ As one commentator notes: “Ovid’s long and approving list of colours and insistence on individual choice . . . conveys an image of (and a preference for) a society that is unconfined and culturally confident.”⁴⁷ In a brief catalogue of color options, certainly not intended to be all-encompassing, the praeceptor suggests: sky-blue, cloud-white, the blue-green of the sea, saffron-yellow-orange, the color of Paphian myrtle (green?), amethyst purple, white/pink rose color, the color of the Thracian crane (grey?), chestnut (dark) and almond (light) brown, wax yellow (3.173–84). While in some cases the praeceptor points to the foreign nature of the color with a geographical adjective

⁴¹ “An Anatolian aromatic,” Olson 2008: 76. ⁴² See Olson 2008: 76–8 on perfumes and hair unguents. ⁴³ Pliny’s oft-cited attack on perfume as the most extravagant of luxuries is at NH 13.20: haec est materia luxus e cunctis maxume supervacui; margaritae enim gemmaeque ad heredem tamen transeunt, vestes prorogant tempus, unguenta ilico expirant ac suis moriuntur horis (“Of all luxury items, perfumes are the most superfluous; for pearls and jewels nevertheless do pass on to the wearer’s heir, and clothes last for a period of time, but unguents lose their smell at once and die in the very hour they are used”). The opening of book 13 discusses the exotic ingredients of perfumes and unguents. ⁴⁴ Croom 2010: 24–5 explains that wool takes dye much better than linen, and somewhat better than silk and cotton. Women’s garments, however, were made of all four fabrics, three of them imports: linen from Egypt, and also Syracuse, Gaul, and Spain, cotton from the eastern Mediterranean, and silk from Cos, Assyria, and even China. Golden embroidered fabric, repudiated in Ars 3, seems to have been introduced to Rome from Pergamum. See Sebesta 1994. ⁴⁵ Croom 2010: 25 suggests that poor people wore woolen garments of natural colors. ⁴⁶ “During this time, the first century B.C., the continuing expansion of the empire brought Romans into contact with new sources of dye and gave them the means to obtain them. New dye hues transformed any fabric into a luxury item,” Sebesta 1994: 68. ⁴⁷ Gibson 2003:163.

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(Paphian, Thracian), for other hues he relies on the reader’s knowledge for their provenance. Purple dye, Vitruvius explains, is an expensive Eastern import, even if one explicitly excludes Tyrian purple, while under Augustus varying shades of blues were first produced by indigo imported as a mineral from India.⁴⁸ When Ovid speaks of saffron-yellow, he seems to champion a dye that “is like to that of the crocus flower” (crocum simulat, 3.179), thus avoiding the incredibly costly saffron. Simultaneously, however, he draws our attention to his chosen dye’s Eastern provenance by linking the color to Aurora, goddess of the dawn (3.179–80). Ovid, after a brief reminder that puellae should brush their teeth and remain alert to body odor (3.193–8), then turns his attention to cultus and cosmetics. His advice is succinct; he mentions the desirability of whitening the face, applying rouge, filling out the eyebrows, covering blemishes, and highlighting the eyes with eyeliner (3.199–204). And again, with a combination of geographical references and a general knowledge of the most sought-after ingredients for feminine cosmetics, we find ourselves awash in foreign, imported products. Chalk, available locally, offers the puella a lovely pale complexion, although white marl or melinum (naturally occurring in clay from Melos, Samos, and Chios) was also used.⁴⁹ If she does not possess a naturally rosy complexion, rouge provides the necessary look, available in many guises,⁵⁰ from the local ingredients like faex (wine dregs) or morum (crushed mulberries) to exotic, imported materials like rubrica (red ochre),⁵¹ purpurissum (a mixture of chalk and Tyrian purple), cinnabar (from Spain or India), or even crocodilea (crocodile dung).⁵² Antimony is the best material for lengthening and darkening eyebrows to achieve the desirable unibrow look,⁵³ although in a pinch soot or ash from rose petals does the trick. Antimony, Pliny the Elder explains to us, comes from silver mines (NH 33.102), which are found in almost all the provinces, but the best ones are in Spain (NH 33.96). After suggesting that skin blemishes can be easily covered up with small patches of leather, the praeceptor concludes with praise for eyeliner fashioned either out of “ash” (favilla, 3.203), presumably local, or out of luxurious, exotic “saffron” (croco, 3.204), imported from the East, more precisely “born near you, shining ⁴⁸ Sebesta 1994: 68–9. ⁴⁹ Olson 2008: 61. ⁵⁰ See Stewart 2007: 42–3 and Olson 2008: 61–2. ⁵¹ Vitruvius On Architecture 7.7.2, discussing natural colors, tells us that rubrica, while extracted in many places, is best if it is from Pontus, Egypt, Spain and Lemnos. ⁵² Thus evoking Egypt; Pliny, NH 28.184–5. ⁵³ Gibson 2003: ad 201–2 collects the references.

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Cydnus,” a river in Cilicia (prope te nato, lucide Cydne, Ars Amatoria 3.204). The praeceptor then points the puella to his Medicamina Faciei Femineae for further instructions on self-adornment and enhancement (3.205–8). If we follow the textual trajectory Ovid has set out for the puella, we discover, after about fifty introductory lines, a series of “recipes” for face creams (for removing blemishes and enhancing complexion) until the text abruptly breaks off. What we glean—beyond the somewhat unusual ingredients Roman women relied on for self-beautification—is that, once again, as was the case with makeup, clothing, and hair styling, many of the materials, or the finest versions of them, reveal the puellae to be frontrank consumers of goods imported from the far reaches of the empire. Promising that “any woman who will apply such a treatment to her face will gleam brighter than her own mirror” (quaecumque afficiet tali medicamine vultum, / fulgebit speculo levior illa suo, lines 67–8), the poet lays out the ingredients necessary as well as step-by-step directions for creating such potions. In the first “recipe” he calls not simply for barley, but explicitly for barley “that Libyan farmers have sent [to Rome?] on ships” (quae Libyci ratibus misere coloni, line 53). In order to provide the mixture’s astringent quality as well as to enhance its spreadability, Ovid recommends the addition of cummi (line 65), thought to be either gum arabic, an import from the Near East or North Africa, or gum tragacanth, acquired from Greece and Asia Minor,⁵⁴ as well as honey (line 66), the best of which was Attic. The second cream requires “ruddy natron scum” (nitri spuma rubentis, line 73), presumably for its cleansing properties, a mineral which “occurs naturally in saline river beds,” but famously comes from Egypt,⁵⁵ as well as irises specifically from Illyria (Illyrica quae venit iris humo, line 74). The third recipe is entirely exotic, requiring the mixture of alcyonea (line 78) and honey from Attica (line 82) to create a treatment to remove spots. Scholars now believe that alcyonea are forms of soft coral; Pliny the Elder discusses four different types, the best of which was purple and Milesian, and Dioscorides speaks of five types, one of which was Milesian, another found in Propontis.⁵⁶ Similarly heavy on the imports, recipe 4 demands frankincense and myrrh from Arabia (lines 85 and 88, respectively) mixed with more natron (line 85), more gum (cummi, line 87), and more honey (line 90). Myrrh (line 91) and frankincense (line 94) return in the final complete recipe, along with fennel (line 91), rendered foreign by the use of ⁵⁴ Johnson 2016: 65–7. ⁵⁵ Johnson 2016: 70. ⁵⁶ Johnson 2016: 72–4. Pliny, NH 32.86–7; Dioscorides 5.118.

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its Greek name, marathus, and which one must mix with the even more foreign and exotic salt of Ammon (Ammoniaco sale, line 94), a salt obtained in Egypt near the shrine of Ammon. Again, none of these texts openly espouses the negative responses to artificial adornment that prevail in the anti-cosmetic discourse. And yet, I suggest that one discovers traces of Ovidian anxiety about feminine selfenhancement not far from the surface. The puella culta is a smooth-skinned, nattily dressed, artfully coiffed, elegantly bejeweled, tastefully made-up spectacle, a highly desirable object of the gaze, a product of her time. The poet and his audience rejoice in the notion that there is nothing natural about her.⁵⁷ Or do they? The moralistic, anti-cosmetic discourse posits the existence of natural beauty that a chaste woman should embrace by eschewing all artificial beauty enhancements, some pure core of woman that emerges when all the accoutrements and adornments are removed, to which writers point as most desirable. The Ovidian woman, though celebrated for her artifice, discovers that when her foreign, imported ornamentations are stripped from her, nothing much definable remains. As we saw in the case of the puella who loses all her hair in Amores 1.14, the attempt to divorce a woman from her beauty products leaves the uncomfortable feeling that such a process is no longer really an option. The possibility that a lover might enter the boudoir unannounced as a puella performs various aspects of her toilette appears as a recurring trope in these texts. The praeceptor warns women to be wary of such intrusions; nec nisi summotis forma paranda viris (“and you should not be making yourself up except when men are at a distance,” Ars Amatoria 3.234). He even offers a few diversionary tactics. After all, he insists that beauty comes from the gods, but not to the masses. “A great majority of you (women) lack such a gift” (pars vestrum tali munere magna caret, 3.104). The puella, therefore, is encouraged to allow her lover to believe she is sleeping so that she can attend to her beautification rituals in peace (3.225), or at the very least to make sure to close her bedroom door for privacy (3.228). A series of vaguely unsettling comparisons serve as further explanation. Myron’s famously exquisite statues take shape from inert and lifeless mass, while lumps of gold become rings and filthy fleece gets spun into clothing (3.219–22). “It is proper for men to be ignorant of many things” (multa viros nescire decet, 3.229), like ⁵⁷ Indeed, Rimell 2006: 42 describes the Medicamina as “a poem that instructs on perfecting facades.” See also Downing 1999 who suggests Ovid acts like an anti-Pygmalion in Ars Amatoria 3, transforming “real” women into works of art, and Wyke 1994b.

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the fact that golden statues in the theater actually feature gold leaf overlaying plain, unsightly wood underneath (3.231–2). So what will the lover see, we wonder as we try to follow out these comparisons, if he manages to peer into the boudoir before the puella has put the finishing touches on her toilette? What is the unadorned state of woman equivalent to inert mass of stone, lump of gold, or greasy fleece? What constitutes the rude opus (“the rough, unfinished work,” 3.228)? What lurks beneath the ars? How can we resist? Let us take a peek. While we expect to discover the praeceptor advising that the puella take good care to keep her “natural,” unadorned self out of her lover’s sight, instead he admonishes her to maintain her various cosmetics out of view. In order to ensure that the ars she lavishes upon her appearance remain “concealed” (dissimulata, 3.210), “let the lover not catch small makeup boxes left out on the table” (non tamen expositas mensa deprendat amator / pyxidas, 3.209–10), with the pyxidas (“small boxes”) delayed over the line break. Anticipation rises as we wonder what it is that must remain hidden; we wait a full verse to discover what exactly she should not leave expositas on the table, only to have our wildest imaginations dashed with a thud as the rather prosaic and untitillating “makeup boxes” appear before us. Further, she must hide not only the containers, but also their contents, as the praeceptor instructs the puella to conceal not her face but instead the “muck/dregs” (faex, 3.211) and “the sheep’s grease” (oesypa, 3.213) she smears upon it.⁵⁸ He concludes by banning cover-up and tooth-brushing, although the focus here, too, rests not so much on the “natural woman herself” (what is being enhanced) as on the products she deploys for enhancement (3.215–16). Indeed, a second attempt on the part of the reader to peer into the boudoir and to catch the “natural woman” before she has completed her beauty regime becomes similarly diverted away from a fleshly vision, as we are left instead viewing her instruments and cosmetics in the Remedia Amoris. Armed with an injunction to arrive unexpectedly (line 347) the lover who wishes to shed his passion bursts into the bedroom to catch his puella “unarmed” (inermem, line 347). The praeceptor dangles the prospect of emotional detachment: “she herself, poor girl, will fall away (from your mind/heart) on account of her own flaws/imperfections” (infelix vitiis excidet illa suis, line 348). “The girl is ‘felled’ on being surprised during her toilette because her

⁵⁸ We should note here that Ovid reminds us that the best oesypum comes from Attic sheep (Ars Amatoria 3.213–14), and Pliny, NH 29.35–7 echoes the poet’s appraisal.

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vitia (‘imperfections’) are revealed—she is devastated at being viewed in her uncultivated state.”⁵⁹ We follow the lover, eager to partake, only vicariously of course, in this spectacle. What imperfections will be unveiled before our eyes if we, according to instruction, dispose with all sense of shame and decency (line 352)? What does the puella look like in her “uncultivated state?” Again, at the last moment our gaze gets redirected and we see not feminine bodily imperfections but instead “potions” or “cosmetics” (medicamina, line 355), more specifically, “makeup boxes,” “a thousand colors,” and “sheep’s greasy wool” (pyxidas, mille colores, and oesypa, lines 353–4). No doubt these items repulse, like the putrid food on the table of Phineus befouled by the Harpies (lines 355–6),⁶⁰ and feminist interpretations convincingly draw parallels between the woman’s body and the unsightly boxes that open to reveal greasy, smelly substances.⁶¹ And yet, I suggest, what is most striking about these two passages about lovers arriving unexpectedly while the puella performs her toilette is the absence of the woman we have been led to expect to see. In her place stand her cosmetics, now described in ghastly terms. If we back up a few lines in the Remedia Amoris, we discover further striking evidence that the poet draws an explicit link between a puella’s decision to adorn her body with a variety of foreign luxury items and her resulting loss of “self.” Indeed, as he begins the section of the poem about the benefits of a surprise and unannounced incursion into the boudoir, the praeceptor highlights the necessity to appear “when she has not fashioned herself for anyone,” (cum se non finxerit ulli, line 341). The verb, se fingere, is noteworthy here, underscoring the artistic and creative nature of the puella’s process of self-adornment. The praeceptor worries that her lavish selfpresentation snatches away the lover’s ability to see anything beyond the gleaming surface. “We are swept off our feet by cultus; all things are swathed in jewels and gold,” he warns (auferimur cultu; gemmis auroque teguntur / omnia, lines 343–4). “Rich Love” (dives Amor, line 346), we learn, blinds a man to the ‘reality’ of his beloved, although dives stands out as a strange adjective for love, and, in fact, seems more properly to modify the puella in all her finery.⁶² The amator who seeks to shed his passion must therefore find a way to penetrate the surface; the praeceptor suggests: “you should often enquire, where it is, that thing you love, amid so many (objects of ⁵⁹ For example, see Johnson 2016: 127, although she is by no means alone in her interpretation. ⁶⁰ Consider also Gibson 2003: 183: the boxes or jars are “not only unwelcome evidence of the application of ars, but a repository of revolting substances.” ⁶¹ Wyke 1994b:142–4; Richlin 1995: 190–2; Rimell 2006: especially 41–69. ⁶² Henderson 1979: ad loc.

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cultus)” (saepe, ubi sit, quod ames, inter tam multa, requiras, line 345). It turns out, unfortunately, that getting beyond the facade is much more difficult than one anticipates. Even before we suddenly open the door on the puella’s toilette to discover only makeup containers and glutinous fluids, we have been warned that nothingness or absence is what we are going to find. Our problem, as the praeceptor has already cleverly and pithily summed up for us, is that “the girl herself is the smallest part of herself” (pars minima est ipsa puella sui, line 344). Although we continue to strain for a glimpse of “the girl herself,” there is too little there to see, for she has been swallowed up or become one with her attentions to her hair, complexion, clothing, and other adornment. Quo non ars penetrat, the praeceptor asks about feminine self-fashioning in the Ars Amatoria (“where does art not make its way in?” 3.291); it is everywhere where the puella is concerned, in the way she does her hair, her makeup, her clothes, but also in the way she walks, talks, sits, dances, cries, laughs, sings. But with all the application of ars and cultus, the puella gets lost, and any injunction to come upon the puella ipsa, the “real” girl, remains doomed. Just as Myron’s statues can never return to their original status as “inert weight” and “hard mass” (pondus iners and dura massa, 3.220), and the sculpted gem cannot revert to the “rough stone” (lapis asper, 3.223) from which it was carved, so the puella, after she has applied the finishing touches (summa manu, 3.226), can never regain her initial state. Once the puella puts on her body the foreign luxury products, that circulate seamlessly through porous boundaries to Rome and into her boudoir, her very self seems to take on a similar permeability. The things she originally puts on herself fuse with her, become all that we can see. For what exactly is a work of art before it is art? And once it has become art, can one rediscover the rude opus?⁶³

Ultima me tellus, ultimus orbis habet (Epistulae Ex Ponto 2.7.66): Ovid at the End of the World In 8 , the unthinkable happens: Augustus sends Ovid to live out his days far from Rome, in Tomis, on the edge of the Black Sea.⁶⁴ As we have just seen, the poet explores the concept of imperium sine fine in his erotic works ⁶³ At Ars Amatoria 3.228 the praeceptor warns the puella to keep her bedroom door shut; for “why do you reveal an unfinished product” (quid rude prodis opus)? ⁶⁴ There are a minority of scholars, however, who believe that Ovid’s exile is an elaborate fiction that the poet constructs in his final works while he remains ensconced in his armchair in his Roman study. See Fitton Brown 1985 and, recently, Bérchez Castaño 2015.

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by considering the flow of luxury items for women’s cosmetics from distant imperial holdings to Rome. Orbis and urbs present wonderful opportunities for punning, for verbal exultation in an elimination of boundaries that would allow Rome to be coterminous with the entire world—ingens orbis in Urbe fuit (“the great world was in the city of Rome,” Ars Amatoria 1.174). For the puella, however, as the edges of empire end up in the Roman boudoir, staying home can be a problem. Ovid, as he travels elsewhere, does not fare much better. Suddenly he finds himself transported in the opposite direction, from center to periphery, to the very fines of empire. At the edge of the Roman world, the poet discovers that a fate awaits him eerily similar, although not identical, to the one that befell his women in Rome. As Ovid’s Roman women adorn themselves in luxury items imported from the far reaches of empire, they seem to embody the dissolution of geographical boundaries that belongs to ever-expanding Roman imperium as they experience an equivalent loss of the boundaries of their subjectivity; the “natural” woman, once she performs her luxurious toilette with foreign products, seems to merge with a “made-up” woman and then disappear as a separate entity. The exiled Ovid is, of course, not dyeing his hair and putting on foreign cosmetics; his problems are transferred out of the “feminine” realm of the boudoir into the “masculine” realm of politics. But the problem is a recognizable one. Sent to experience the fines of empire up close, the poet discovers boundaries are not all they are cracked up to be. Rather than firm and impermeable, they are porous and ultimately quasi-imaginary. Imperium sine fine takes on a new meaning; boundaries fall away not because they remain inconceivable but rather because they have become unenforceable. Instead of signaling an inability to imagine an end to one’s power, sine fine comes to mean the impossibility of establishing a line that firmly serves to divide “out” from “in.” Once again, the geographical uncertainties take their toll at the level of the subject, as Roman poet, inhabitants of Tomis, and the “barbarians” beyond find their identities ineluctably intertwined. Let us now turn to Ovid’s epistolary exilic output, the five books of the Tristia and the four books of the Epistulae Ex Ponto, elegiac compositions that the poet writes from Tomis, his place of relegation, and sends back to Rome. As he narrates his physical transfer from beloved, urban center to the “uncivilized” edge of the Black Sea, in modern-day Romania, he invites us to think with his text about the subject’s experience regarding the expansion of Roman imperium, its fines, and what is means to be “Roman.” I propose to trace one of the overarching narratives that he carefully weaves for us

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throughout the two collections. We should, at the outset, acknowledge that we focus on Ovid’s story with a clear-eyed understanding that it, like any story, offers its own version of events and circumstances, shaped in this case by the strong first-person narrator who has a stake in providing a particular version of the narrative. Indeed, he does not disguise the fact that a desire for Augustus to rescind his order of banishment drives his poetic correspondence, or, as he becomes less optimistic, at least a preference for a less remote place of relegation. Since as good readers of Augustan poetry we know that Ovid is a recognized master of generic rules and possibilities, we should not ignore his decision to couple once again, as he did so successfully in the Heroides, epistle with elegy; his elegiac laments from Tomis are letters sent to various first unnamed (Tristia) and later named (Epistulae Ex Ponto) addressees. In choosing the epistolary form for these poems Ovid avails himself, according to the rules at least, of a genre that grants significant power to the writer. First and foremost, the letter appears to be a straightforward medium revealing the authentic thoughts and emotions of the writer, seductively offering, by generic conventions, a transparent window into the writer’s mind. His words are considered honest revelations. But just because the writer has the floor, it does not necessarily follow that what he says is “true.” He provides us with much material about himself, but no “true glimpse” into his soul. Without the impediment of an external narrating voice, the letter writer can provide a subjective representation of events and emotions, putting forth his own perspective, highlighting or suppressing as he sees fit. Without other voices to serve as corrective, to argue about details, spin, or even significance, a letter provides the writer with the space to offer a selfportrait, a version of himself and his life that he has carefully constructed and edited.⁶⁵ It is no surprise then that scholars often point out the historical or literary inaccuracies in Ovid’s exilic, elegiac epistles.⁶⁶ Though it will occasionally be important to note discrepancies, I propose to focus not on where Ovid deviates from the “facts” but rather on why he actively opts to do

⁶⁵ I have written at greater length on the complexities of epistolary narrative in Lindheim 2003: especially 18–35. ⁶⁶ To cite a few various examples, Williams 1994 argues that the Tristia and the Epistulae Ex Ponto provide multiple, highly literary constructions of Ovid’s exiled self. See also Claassen 1990. Tissol’s 2014 commentary on the first book of the Epistulae Ex Ponto emphasizes the poet’s use of hyperbole, while others, like Gaertner 2005: 16–22, point out deviations from historical facts. Podosinov 1987 argues that Ovid cannot be used as a historical source for information about Pontus.

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so. In other words, we shall be less concerned with what is “true” and more interested in the picture Ovid himself seeks to paint.⁶⁷ Although Tomis, in the region of Moesia, was a Greek city, founded by Milesian colonists in about 650 , and came to be surrounded in the next century by many more Greek settlements, Ovid chooses to emphasize its political, economic, and cultural alterity. Banished from Rome on account of carmen et error (“a poem and a mistake,” Tristia 2.207), the elegiac poet undertakes an epic voyage, during which he endures more sufferings than Ulysses (for example, Tristia 1.2 and Tristia 1.5.57ff.), over land and sea to Tomis. The Odyssean intertext lends to Ovid’s destination the sense of mythical distance and otherness that marks the epic hero’s various adventures. More often than not, the poet insists that his location is not Tomis but instead Scythia (e.g., Tristia 1.3.61, 1.8.40, 3.2.1–2, 5.1.21), Roman shorthand for “strange place at the end of the world.”⁶⁸ Moreover, he does not simply rely on the reader’s ability to catch an allusion to pinpoint his location on the very outermost edges of civilization. At every possible opportunity, he reminds us that he now lives not just away from Rome, but very far away from Rome (quam procul, Tristia 1.7.10; also tam procul, Ex Ponto 1.3.84). He has been relegated “to the furthest extremity of the world” (extremum . . . in orbem, Tristia 4.9.9), where he takes up residence in a land “that barely clings to the margins of the empire” (vixque / haeret in imperii margine, Tristia 2.199-200), “practically the outermost reaches of the great wide world” (magni paene ultima mundi, Tristia 4.4.83; or equally terrarum pars paene novissima, Tristia 3.13.27). “In the furthest away sectors of an unknown part of the world” (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tristia 3.3.3), “among the most distant people and places” (in extremis . . . populisque locisque, Tristia 3.3.13), Ovid languishes at the “final frontier” of Roman imperium (either ultimus orbis, e.g. Tristia 1.1.127–8, Ex Ponto 2.7.66, or ultima tellus, e.g. Tristia 1.3.83, Ex Ponto 2.7.66). So distant is Tomis from Rome that a single exchange of correspondence, an initial letter and a response, takes a year to complete (Ex Ponto 3.4.59–60; 4.11.15–16). And Cupid complains that he must now travel per inmensas . . . vias (“along vast roads,” Ex Ponto 3.3.78) to visit with his poet.⁶⁹ ⁶⁷ This is also the position of Habinek 1998: 151–69, “Pannonia Domanda Est: Constructing the Imperial Subject Through Ovid’s Exile Poetry,” although ultimately we do not agree about why Ovid describes Tomis and his experience of exile as he does. ⁶⁸ See Williams 1994: 8–26. ⁶⁹ Once again the viae represent the space of empire. See Chapter 3, passim, above, for my reading of the importance of the viae in Tibullus’ elegies.

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Pontus, “a land far remote from my own land” (a terra terra remota mea, Tristia 1.1.128), Ovid emphatically proclaims, plagues its inhabitants with winters that last all year round (e.g., Tristia 3.2.8, 3.4b.47–51, 5.2.65–6, Ex Ponto 1.2.24, 1.3.49–50). Winds, snow, and ice (Tristia 3.10 especially) constantly threaten the landscape. Tomitans enjoy no local wine, and no local fruit, since the sterile soil allows neither vineyards nor trees of any sort to grow (Tristia 3.10.71–6, Ex Ponto 1.3.51, 3.8.13-14). The sole exception is bitter wormwood plant (absinthia, Tristia 5.13.21, Ex Ponto 3.1.23, 3.8.15). As J. M. Claassen notes, Ovid’s place of exile strikingly resembles the mythical house of Famine in Metamorphoses 8, a “place on the farthest shores of icy Scythia, barren ground, sterile, a land without produce, without trees” (locus extremis Scythiae glacialis in oris, / triste solum, sterilis sine fruge, sine arbore tellus, 788–9),⁷⁰ a dystopic dwelling place fit only for Cold, Pallor, Terror, and Famine (790–1). And indeed, Tomis makes Ovid sick (Tristia 3.3.1–4, 4.6.39ff.), partly from lack of sustenance; the water seems suspect (e.g., Tristia 4.8.26, 5.7.1ff., Ex Ponto 2.7.74) and he is wasting away from lack of appetite (Tristia 3.8.28ff., 4.6.39ff., Ex Ponto 1.10.7ff.). Most distressing of all, however, in this land so far from Rome, on the very edges of the world, quasi-mythical in its dystopia, is the constant threat of barbarian attack. Like the landscape from which they spring, the marauding enemies represent barbarism and alterity writ large. Ovid makes no bones about this, announcing that in Tomis he finds himself situated “smack dab in the midst of barbarity” (in media . . . barbaria, Tristia 3.10.4). The poet experiences constant terror, hemmed in “by belligerent peoples” (belligeris a gentibus, Tristia 3.11.13). Farming becomes an impossible occupation for Tomitans because the barbarus hostis (“barbarian enemy”) leads incursions that prevent work in the fields (Ex Ponto 2.7.69–70). Outside the walls, armed hostile horsemen constantly patrol, armed with taut bow, launching arrows tipped with poison at men and dwellings alike (Ex Ponto 1.2.13ff.).⁷¹ Sometimes, it seems, they even manage to penetrate the city’s defenses temporarily, riding up and down city streets on their steeds, bearing quivers full of poisonous arrows, with shaggy hair and beards (Tristia 5.7.13ff.). “Savage in voice and in expression” (vox fera, trux vultus, Tristia 5.7.17) every single barbarian (barbarus omnis, Tristia 5.7.20) arms himself with a

⁷⁰ Claassen 1990: 80. ⁷¹ These torments appear to Ovid, he claims, in “dreams that imitate real life” (somnia . . . veros imitantia casus, Ex Ponto 1.2.43). Epistulae Ex Ponto 1.3.57ff. threatens enemies on all sides with lances and arrows.

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knife that he eagerly draws and puts to use (Tristia 5.7.19–20). These wild warriors on horseback with poison arrows, constantly recurring attributes in the description of the enemy that threatens Tomis, are hardly novel creations, but rather take their place in a long line of literary representations of the barbarian.⁷² In his quest to prove neighboring peoples’ otherness⁷³ Ovid chooses to emphasize one alarming local religious custom. In Tristia 4.4, the poet introduces us to peoples ‘around’ Tomis (sunt circa gentes, 4.4.59) who “avidly seek plunder through bloodshed” (praedam sanguine quaerunt, 4.4.59) and who equally rejoice “in the blood of humans” (hominum . . . cruore, 4.4.61). Close by Tomis (nec procul a nobis, 4.4.63),⁷⁴ Ovid explains, lies the kingdom that Thoas once ruled, a realm “not shunned by villains, nor sought by good men” (non invidiosa nefandis / nec cupienda bonis, 4.4.65–6). His land boasts the altar of Artemis, where Iphigenia, rescued from sacrifice at the hands of her father by the goddess’ last-second substitution of a deer, was doomed to preside as priestess over the grisly human sacrifice of any stranger who found himself in those parts (4.4.67ff.). Ultimately Iphigenia escapes, returning to civilized Greece with the image of Artemis who, it turns out, herself “despised the uncivilized sacrifices” (deae . . . crudelia sacra perosae, 4.4.81). The altar and the practice of human sacrifice, Ovid insists, remain in Tauris (4.4.63–4), as if the place rather than the goddess were somehow responsible for the barbarous slaughter (dira / caede, 4.4.63–4). Ovid returns to the story a second time in Epistulae Ex Ponto 3.2. Again he emphasizes the proximity of Tauris to his place of exile—longe non distat (“it is not too far away,” 3.2.46). He rehearses the story of human sacrifice, this time describing the acts as “grim rituals” (tristia sacra, 3.2.66) and then also sacra suo . . . barbariora loco (3.2.78). Iphigenia focalizes the last description that translates “rituals more barbarous than the place in which they occur.” This phrase again shifts the blame for the savagery of human sacrifice away from the goddess Artemis. Iphigenia

⁷² Williams 1994: 8–25 discusses the literary pedigree of Tomis and the Tomitans. He draws especially on the work of Hartog 1988 and Thomas 1982. Claassen 1990 argues that Ovid’s Pontus belongs predominantly to the world of myth. Ovid himself helps us make the connections between Pontus and the literary world, pointing out, for example, in Ex Ponto 4.10.21ff., that the attacking enemy surpasses the Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes in barbaric violence. ⁷³ Ovid questions the humanity of his place of exile at Epistulae Ex Ponto 1.3.47–8. See also Ex Ponto 4.9.81ff., especially line 84 where we learn that sacrificial victims are frequently human heads. ⁷⁴ We should perhaps note here that in fact hundreds of miles separate Tauris and Tomis, and that Ovid draws on a story from the mythic past.

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follows up with the explanation that “the practice belongs to the local people” (ritus is est gentis, 3.2.79), thus clearing Artemis herself from the implication that she desires human sacrifice and transferring the impetus squarely to the bloodthirsty locals. As if to underscore this point, the poet puts the narrative into the mouth of a local man, from whom we get an overall sense, as Elaine Fantham has observed, that “the human sacrifice is simply mos maiorum.”⁷⁵ Ovid now exists at the fines of Roman imperium, and the proverbial barbarians are at the gate. A city wall (moenia, Ex Ponto 1.2.17), equipped with a garrison (custodia muri, Tristia 3.14.41), surrounds Tomis to defend the inhabitants from external invasion, and a closed city gate (clausa porta, Tristia 3.14.42) offers further protection from intruders. Additionally, a natural geographical boundary, the Danube river, provides yet another safeguard (Tristia 2.192), but only barely (vix). A boundary, as we noted in the case of maps and empires with dreams of conquest, always both attempts to delineate firm division and yet simultaneously invites its own dissolution. Much as one part of the Ovidian narrative stresses the barbarian tendencies just beyond the fines of empire, the reader can also observe a potentially more alarming strand of the story. The intruders have actually already breached the boundaries. Not only do defenses not hold, but in a more problematic turn of events, defining categories of identity similarly seems porous. In Ovid’s text it proves difficult to distinguish between the inhabitants of Tomis and other surrounding areas within the imperial fines and the savages without. Two poems in particular, Tristia 5.7 and 5.10, provide us with nice examples to consider. Although, as we have seen, the poet proclaims that walls and the Danube river provide Tomis with a double defense against the invading hordes, he elsewhere acknowledges that both the man-made and the natural protective barriers remain suspect. The city relies on “inadequate/small walls” (moenibus exiguis,⁷⁶ 5.10.18), while the Danube freezes over for long stretches of time, thus allowing passage to enemies and their horses (Tristia 3.10.25ff.).⁷⁷ And the population of Tomis reflects the porousness of its fortifications. As P. J. Davis notes, “Tomis is a multi-cultural place.”⁷⁸ In fact, it is often hard to differentiate the poet’s ⁷⁵ Fantham 1992: 276. ⁷⁶ Or perhaps, if we choose to emphasize the generic connotations of the adjective, Tomis has misguidedly erected “elegiac” walls to perform an epic job. ⁷⁷ Such conditions would have greatly benefited Leander, who, now unable to drown, would certainly have reached his beloved on the opposite shore (Tristia 3.10.41–2)! ⁷⁸ Davis 2002: 264.

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descriptions of the Tomitans and his depictions of the barbarian invaders. Ovid defines the people among whom he dwells alternatively as a “mixed crowd of Greeks and Getans” (mixta . . . inter Graecosque Getasque, 5.7.11) or as “a barbarian crowd intermingled with Greeks” (mixta . . . Graecis barbara turba, 5.10.28).⁷⁹ Clearly the barbarians that the poet at times carefully locates beyond the boundaries of Tomis have long ago also moved into the city and an intersection of cultures has already taken place. Scholars take pains to point out that the picture Ovid paints is not historically accurate;⁸⁰ indeed, epigraphical evidence reveals a mostly Greek population, carrying on a mostly Greek life under Roman rule.⁸¹ But let us instead explore the description of the local Tomitans that the poet quite emphatically conjures up in his epistolary narrative. After he has described the unshaven barbarians who enter Tomis on horseback brandishing quivers full of poisonous arrows on their shoulders and knifes easily accessible at their sides (5.7.13ff.), about thirty lines later he seems to turn his illustrative powers to the inhabitants of Tomis, the men among whom he lives. And here we discover a representation strikingly similar to the one he has provided for the marauding barbarians. The poet begins by questioning his fellow townsmen’s humanity, allowing that “they are humans hardly worthy of the name” (vix sunt homines hoc nomine digni, 5.7.45) since they are more feral than wolves (5.7.46). Unlike civilized men, they do not yield to laws but instead to force (5.7.47–8). And like the barbarians without, they wear—horribile dictu—animal skins and baggy pants, and they sport long hair and shaggy beards (5.7.49–50). A mere three poems later Ovid issues a reprise. He disparages their “chests covered with animal skins and long hair” (pellibus et longa pectora tecta coma, 5.10.32) as well as their choice to turn away from native garb and to embrace Persian trousers instead (pro patrio cultu Persica braca, 5.10.34). And indeed, the poet’s take on Tomitans as a Barbarian-Greek melange both makes sense of, and is re-enforced by, his strange elegy in which he offers a fake etymology for the name Tomis, Tristia 3.9. The very opening lines of the poem announce Tomis’ Greekness with the repetition of an adjective indicating ethnicity; it is one of a series of Greek cities in the area (Graiae . . . urbes, 3.9.1), established by Milesian colonists who set up “Greek seats” (Graias . . . domos, 3.9.4). And ⁷⁹ Here consider Videau-Delibes 1991, who argues for the importance of the word mixta for reading Tristia 5. ⁸⁰ For example, see Gaertner 2005: 22–3: “Ovid’s description of the political, economic and cultural situation in Tomis is often incompatible with the historical facts.” ⁸¹ Again, see Gaertner 2005: 20.

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yet this Greek outpost receives a most unusual name. Medea, mythical native of Colchis, which happens to be one of the barbarian settlements that currently threaten Ovid’s Tomis,⁸² passed through Tomis as she escaped from her father with Jason and the Argonauts. Here her father began to catch up with the fugitives. “With a hand that had dared and would dare again many unspeakable acts” (ausa atque ausura multa nefanda manu, 3.9.16), Medea slaughtered her own brother and tore him limb from limb, scattering his parts so that her father had to slow down and retrieve each bit (3.9.17–28). Medea, foreigner, witch, barbarian par excellence, provides the inhumane act that names the Greek city; Tomis derives its ancient name (vetus . . . nomen, 3.9.5) from the Greek verb τέμνειν, “to cut” (3.9.33–4) because Medea chopped up her sibling’s lifeless corpse. The city, it turns out, has always already been both Greek and barbarian. Once again Lacanian theory helps to explain Ovid’s narrative. A subject desires nothing more than to provide a coherent story of self as a totality, a complete whole (Roman). He must achieve his goal through language, choosing one or more signifiers among the vast network of signifiers in the Symbolic as his point(s) of alignment. Often his sense of self also depends on the narrative he constructs about an other, usually against whom he can define himself (Tomitan or barbarian). But signifiers are doomed to fail because language itself is lacking, and no signifier, by definition, can ultimately provide a coherent identity; contradictions and division ultimately emerge. In the case of our poems, Ovid reaches the periphery of empire with a strong sense of not belonging, of being Roman despite his relegation from the city. As we have seen, he finds himself constantly under threat of marauding, very un-Roman, barbarians who live in the surrounding areas.⁸³ Although Rome remains barred to him (e.g., Tristia 1.1.1–2, 57–60, 1.3.62, 1.5.67–70, 1.8.38, 3.1.1ff.), he nevertheless imagines his poetry books enjoying an urban reception, indulging in his own precisely imagined fantasy tours of significant Roman landmarks (e.g., Tristia 3.1, 4.2.55ff.), while Tomis, even after many years of relegation, remains a shadowy locale.⁸⁴ And he insists on his linguistic isolation. ⁸² Or so Ovid says, although clearly there is a sense in which the poet lumps together all the barbarian enemies who dwell at various points across a vast geographical area. They cannot all, therefore, have stationed barbarian warriors just outside of Tomis. See Williams 1994: 6. ⁸³ Similarly consider Barchiesi 1997: 34, who focuses on how Ovid differentiates himself from the other by emphasizing poetic allegiances: the poet “has been uprooted from Rome and represents the barbarian scene in terms of an alien literary code [= epic].” ⁸⁴ “In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of Rome,” Walker 1997: 1.

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“There exists for me no fellowship of language with the savage people” (nulla mihi cum gente fera commercia linguae, Tristia 3.11.9) because “the barbarian tongue is alien to Latin” (nesciaque est vocis quod barbara lingua Latinae, Tristia 5.2.67) and not one single person is capable of even a few Latin words (Tristia 5.7.53–4). He can communicate only “through gesture” (per gestum, Tristia 5.10.36). Indeed, as if in an attempt to prove Habinek’s recent assessment of Ovid’s exilic elegies as “doing the work of empire” by providing to a Roman audience “a paradoxical reassurance of the possibility of maintaining one’s Romanness in the farthest reaches of empire,”⁸⁵ Ovid promises that even after death “my Roman ghost will wander among Sarmatian spirits, and amid the savage shades will eternally remain a stranger” (inter Sarmaticas Romana vagabitur umbras, / perque feros manes hospita semper erit, Tristia 3.3.63–4). We have already seen that the Tomitans against whom Ovid strives to define himself collapse as a clearly defined category, simultaneously Greek and different from the wild barbarians who constantly threaten attack, yet also always already inextricably mingled with them. The melange, it turns out, occurs not only at the level of grooming, clothing, and choice of weapon, but more fundamentally at the level of language. If there is no commercia between Latin and the barbarian tongue(s?), the same does not hold for Greek and the local lingo—“those people enjoy a fellowship of common language” insists our poet, deploying the very same word for connection (exercent illi sociae commercia linguae, Tristia 5.10.35). The “barbarian horde mixed with Greeks” that inhabits Tomis constitutes the illi here (mixta . . . Graecis barbara turba, Tristia 5.10.28). Not only, however, can Greek and local tribespeople understand one another, but they seem to have forged some sort of hybrid language. At first we learn that “Greek speech is mastered by/joined to Getic sound” (Graecaque quod Getico victa / iuncta⁸⁶ loquella sono est, Tristia 5.2.68), suggesting some sort of conjoining of the two languages at the very least in terms of aural quality. The problems worsen a few poems later when we find a greater extent of linguistic amalgamation: “for a few traces of the Greek language remain, but these also have already become barbarous because of the Getic sound” (in paucis remanent Graecae vestigia linguae, / haec quoque iam Getico barbara facta sono, Tristia 5.7.51–2). Traces, vestigia, of Greek imply a linguistic melange, out of which one can still perhaps separate some words ⁸⁵ Habinek 1998: 153. ⁸⁶ Both manuscript readings exist, although Hall 1995 and Owen 1963 both opt for victa.

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or phrases according to their origins, although with increasing difficulty. The sound of Getic seems to muddy distinctions between Getic and nonGetic words. By poem 5.10 Ovid speaks of a “shared or common language”, suggesting that the merger is complete (sociae commercia linguae, Tristia 5.10.35). And if the inhabitants of Tomis and the barbarian invaders manage to slip and slide, constantly evading coherent definition, occasionally separate entities defined against one another, more often merged into one uneven and indiscriminate smorgasbord, so, too, Ovid’s own self-definition suffers.⁸⁷ For how can Romanness or Roman man stand up as coherent totalities when the linguistic signifiers against which they become defined (Tomitan, barbarian, for example) are themselves incoherent and unstable? For Ovid, a poet, the dissolution is most marked at the level that most affects him, at the level of language. On the one hand, we have seen Ovid insisting that he is the only person in Tomis capable of speaking Latin, and that, in fact, it is the only language he can communicate in since he must interact with others “through gesture” (per gestum, Tristia 5.10.36). As a Roman, as a poet, his scintillating and artistic manipulation of the Latin language provides a core aspect of his self-definition. You can drive a poet out of Rome, but you cannot subtract thereby his Romanness from the poet. And while this is a nice, tidy narrative, it cannot stand; for, on the other hand, the poet also provides much in the way of contrary evidence. Our first inkling that knowledge of Latin does not belong to Ovid as a unique characteristic, despite his frequent claims that he cannot find any audience to listen to him recite his poems (Tristia 3.14.39–40, 4.1.89–92, 5.12.53–4, Ex Ponto 4.2.33–4), comes in the third poem of Tristia 3. Addressing the poem to his wife, he suggests that she might be surprised that the hand of another has written the epistolary verses. He has fallen “ill in the most remote parts of the unknown world” (aeger in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, 3.3.3) and someone else has acted as his scribe (3.3.2). So at least one other person knows Latin. He does not acknowledge this self-contradiction. And although one could argue that perhaps he refers to a member of his household, some slave sent with him from Rome and therefore not a local, ⁸⁷ It is perhaps interesting to note here that my reading runs parallel to, but does not really intersect with, the excellent analysis that Martelli 2013: 145–87 offers of the Tristia. Martelli also argues for the presence of an Ovidian identity crisis, although her interest locates the unravelling of identity at the level of Ovid as author. As he revises and edits his own poetic output, he becomes simultaneously author, reader, and editor of his own works, and the authorial function “Ovid” comes undone as a unifying or organizing sign.

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we discover in addition towards the end of the Epistulae Ex Ponto that the poet has avid admirers, presumably of his work, and therefore capable of reading Latin verse, among the inhabitants of Tomis.⁸⁸ Poems 4.9.101–2 and 4.14.47ff. both refer to public decrees praising Ovid’s poetry and offering him immunity from paying taxes, honors that Hellenistic Greek cities often extended to distinguished Romans and other visitors.⁸⁹ “Neighboring towns” (proxima . . . oppida, 4.9.104) follow suit. In addition, poem 4.14 reveals that the Tomitans ceremonially placed “a wreath” around his temples (sacrata . . . corona, 4.14.55) as a “tribute to him as a poet.”⁹⁰ So frequently described by Ovid elsewhere as barbarians, we learn here that this action proves “such gentle men are [fundamentally] Greek” (tam mites Graios . . . esse viros, 4.14.48). And what is more, we also learn that these faithful (4.14.46) people, as compassionate as those dwelling in the poet’s hometown of Sulmo (4.14.49–50), have inspired feelings of love (4.14.24) in Ovid. Upon further consideration, then, Ovid’s claim that knowledge of Latin defines him as “Roman,” and thus different from all others around him, seems less than secure. Further, as it turns out, he takes great pains to point out that in his new environment so far away from Rome, his own Latin, in fact, is slipping. Without others with whom to converse his Latin gets rusty, the poet insists, beginning at the level of words—“a word, a name, a place” escape his memory (verbum nomenque locumque, Tristia 3.14.43) as “words fail” him (verba . . . desunt, Tristia 3.14.46). Indeed, he laments: “with long lack of practice, these days Latin words occur with difficulty even to me” (iam desuetudine longa / vix subeunt ipsi verba Latina mihi, Tristia 5.7.57–8). In dismay he announces that “I the Roman poet” (ille ego Romanus vates, Tristia 5.7.55) “seem now to myself to have unlearned Latin” (ipse mihi videor iam dedidicisse Latine, Tristia 5.12.57).⁹¹ The process of “unlearning”

⁸⁸ Alternatively, it is possible that the inhabitants of Tomis honor Ovid in an effort to achieve some sort of favor in the eyes of Rome. One wonders, however, how honoring a man on whom Roman leaders look with such obvious disfavor might work to the Tomitans’ political advantage. Moreover, even if the honors were cynically bestowed to achieve a link with Rome, ostensibly they must have been granted for his poems—which means someone, at least, can read Latin. ⁸⁹ On inscriptional evidence pointing to other cities of Pontus granting such honors to visitors, Lozovan 1961. See also, for example, the decree from the city of Apollonia proclaiming honors for Philo, L. and J. Robert, La Carie II, n.166, and SIG 177 about honors for a Roman astrologer at Delphi. ⁹⁰ Green 2005: 376 note 55. ⁹¹ Much scholarship, with Williams 1994 leading the way, points out that Ovid most certainly has not lost his ability to write Latin verse, and of course I agree. My focus, however, is on why he chooses to make the (spurious) claim.

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Latin, however, seems for Ovid directly correlated with learning local tongues. He explains his problems with his mother tongue in the very next line thus: “for I have learned to speak Getic and Sarmatian” (nam didici Getice Sarmaticeque loqui, Tristia 5.12.58). The connection he sees clarifies for the reader with the repetition of the same verb, once with addition of de as a prefix to indicate reversal⁹² (dedidicisse Latine / didici Getice Sarmaticeque), as if the increase in knowledge of Getic and Sarmatian corresponds inversely to a decrease in knowledge of Latin. The poet fears lest his reader discover “Pontic words mingled with Latin ones” in his poems (mixta Latinis / . . . Pontica verba, Tristia 3.14.49–50). He does not doubt that “a great number of barbarian words” have crept into his poetry (non pauca . . . / barbara [verba], Tristia 5.7.59–60) since he now finds himself compelled “to speak most things in the Sarmatian way” (Sarmatico cogor plurima more loqui, Tristia 5.7.56). Just as Ovid’s Tomitans produce a verbal amalgamation of Greek and Getic, so, too, now the poet himself participates in the linguistic melange adding Latin to the mix. Ovid even suggests that his poems, “no more barbarous than the place in which they were conceived” (non . . . suo barbariora loco, Tristia 5.1.72), render him ineligible to be considered any longer a poet of Rome, although he stands out among the Sauromatae (Tristia 5.1.73–4). And if this does not sufficiently point to problems with maintaining the category “Roman” for Ovidian self-definition on account of his geographic dislocation to the periphery of empire, the poet has one more devastating admission in his final collection of elegiac letters from exile. He provides foreshadowing of what is to come in the second poem of Epistulae Ex Ponto 4. He claims that his physical location directly induces a waning of his poetic talent. Such a fate, he insists, indicates no failing on his part but surely would occur to anyone, even the great Homer—“if anyone had settled Homer himself in this land, even he, believe me, would have become a Getan” (si quis in hac ipsum terra posuisset Homerum, / esset, crede mihi, factus et ille Getes, 4.2.21–2). Ovid’s statement betrays him, even as he utters it. His choice of Homer brings with it inherent questions of fluid identity into the mix. Of all poets, Homer is the one whose identity is least fixed, least stable, least unitary. From the archaic and early classical traditions, as Barbara Graziosi has shown, Homer was an itinerant figure, linked to various geographical locations and local traditions, possessing “a special

⁹² OLD s.v. de-.

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connection with every place, and, therefore, with no place at all.”⁹³ So why not Getan Homer? A mere eleven poems later, the fate Ovid only imagined in a contrary-to-fact condition for his Homer becomes Ovid’s “reality;”⁹⁴ we learn that our Romanus vates has composed a poem in Getic. He stresses the hybrid nature of his composition, when he explains that he wrote the words “in the Getic language” but set them “to our [Latin] meters” (Getico sermone and nostris . . . modis, respectively, Ex Ponto 4.13.19 and 4.13.20). And Augustus’ apotheosis provided his subject matter (4.13.23). Exilic Ovid’s metamorphosis is now complete, as he assumes a new identity, at least for now, as paene poeta Getes (“pretty much a Getic poet,” 4.13.18).

Barbarus hic ego sum (‘Here I am the barbarian,’ Tristia 5.10.37) Almost quoting Propertius 1.12.11 verbatim, Ovid declares that after several years in Tomis “I am not that which I had been” (non sum ego quod fueram, Tristia 3.11.25).⁹⁵ He elaborates a few lines later: “Remember that I, too, whom you knew once upon a time, am no more: this likeness remains from that man” (me quoque, quem noras olim, non esse memento: / ex illo superant haec simulacra viro, 3.11.29–30). On the periphery of empire, at its very margins—in margine imperii—the subject metamorphoses, becomes but a pale copy of his former, Roman self. We come face to face with yet another sharply focused statement of the decenteredness of the subject, a reiteration in the masculine this time of the puella who must not recall herself or who is only the smallest part of herself.⁹⁶ At the edges of Roman geographical holdings, a significant truth about an imperium sine fine sets in. Without finibus—strong, stable, fixed, definable—entities do not stay separate, hybridization and melange take over. In the process, not only do Greeks and barbarians live together, look alike, begin to share characteristics, but the one Roman in the mix cannot, in the end, sustain his unique Romanness. ⁹³ Graziosi 2002; the quotation here is from p. 85. ⁹⁴ Again, we are concerned not with whether or not Ovid speaks the truth, but instead with what narrative he conveys. For discussions about the historical value of Ovid’s claim to have written a poem in Getic, see for example Williams 1994: 91–9 who emphasizes “strategic dissimulation,” or Habinek 1998: 161 who refers to the claim as a “joke.” ⁹⁵ Propertius uses qui instead of quod for a less distancing effect. For my discussion of this line in Propertius 1.12, see Chapter 2, pages 74–79ff. above. ⁹⁶ Respectively, Amores 1.14.38: debes immemor esse tui, and Remedia Amoris 344: pars minima est ipsa puella sui.

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He begins to forget his own language as he learns the native Getic and Sarmatian tongues. He even offers up a Getic poem to the approval of his local audience. And yet the poem is not altogether Getic, for he uses Latin meters to convey a most Roman topic, the apotheosis of Augustus. At this point of cultural intersection, at the outermost edges of the imperium Romanum, in the frontier province of Tomis, Ovid offers us no sense of his “ability to sustain his Romanness.”⁹⁷ As fixed boundaries fall away, all that is left is the melange for our Getic/Roman poet. In the end, even while he becomes no longer Roman, he does not manage to fit in neatly to the category “Tomitan” either. He remains other—barbarus hic ego sum. One might argue that alone, in a hostile and alien borderland, Ovid stands no chance. Yet Ovidian women, in Rome, fare no better. The subject can stay home or travel to the very peripheries; the result looks similar. Either static or peripatetic, both suffer the consequences of understanding space cartographically, of apprehending their world as if confronting it on a map. Questions of boundaries and limits come to the fore, in turn directing attention to the constitution of the subject. The puellae experience the sine fine of empire in the foreign luxury items that they employ for their daily toilette. Cloth, dyes, perfumes, jewels flow from all corners of the empire to Rome in economic transactions that flout the existence of boundaries. Roman women don wigs made of hair from captive Germans, adorn their ears and necks with Indian pearls, paint their faces with materials from the Far East. They display on their bodies the boundlessness of empire. But there is a cost. The mere presence of these items in Rome allows for a heady feeling. All the world comes to Rome. But once everything arrives in the city, it mixes with what is originally ‘Roman,’ breaking down barriers between categories, between Roman and non-Roman, foreign and not foreign. When Roman women adorn themselves with foreign items, when they make these foreign items part of their presentations of “self,” then what? Ovid’s women embody the anxiety that the mixture takes its toll on the subject. Once she no longer leaves her boudoir without accessorizing herself in an amalgamation of items, it is impossible any longer to access a plain, simple, “natural” self. As fixed boundaries fall away, all that is left is the melange ineluctably intertwined with a profound sense of the subject’s alienation—for the Getic/Roman poet and for his adorned women.

⁹⁷ Habinek 1998: 153 has a different view.

Conclusion The Amator, the Puella, and the Space of Empire

non sum ego qui fueram “I am not the I I once had been.” Propertius 1.12.11 “The limit does not exist.” Answer to many calculus problems My reading of Ovid offers a fitting conclusion for two separate and significant reasons. On the one hand, as the Ovidian woman adorns herself with foreign luxury items, the poet provides us with a starker look than we get in his poetic predecessors at empire’s toll on the puella’s body. On the other, as the exilic “I” in Tomis comes face to face with the porous geographical fines at the edge of empire, a more complex and nuanced view of the dissolution of the subject emerges. First, the juxtaposition of the puella of erotic elegy with the exiled Ovid in the Chapter 5 diptych highlights the differences between the ways the aggressive pressure on Roman fines affect our textual characters. Rather strikingly, for the Ovidian women, as indeed for most of the puellae we have come across, the encounter has consequences at the level of the body. In Catullan poems men actively confront the space of empire. Arrius travels to Syria, while Mamurra moves with the army first under Pompey and then under Caesar. Veranius and Fabullus bring home napkins and stories from Spain. When Catullus considers the effects of travel, he focuses most often on the consequences for the “I.” When he travels abroad with the cohort to Bithynia, and again especially when he considers his brother’s peregrinations in Asia Minor, the journey and adventure in foreign lands challenge Catullus’ sense of self, render him an incoherent, unstable subject. While men roam seemingly untethered, by contrast Lesbia remains largely immobile. Furius and Aurelius might, hypothetically, travel to the very edges of empire to deliver a message to her, but, in fact, when push comes to shove, they do not need to leave Rome. Unlike the masculine Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire. Sara H. Lindheim, Oxford University Press (2021). Sara H. Lindheim. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871446.003.0007

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subject, however, Lesbia’s physical, corporeal self bears the traces of the expanding empire. In Catullus’ poetry, Lesbia, like the imperium Romanum, is voracious, all-consuming. Her libido, insatiable, acquisitive, drives her ever onwards, as she, in the back alleys of Rome, shares her body with countless men, of all sorts, and from all over. The text seems to suggest some equivalence between the empire’s aggressively porous boundaries and the woman’s body. In the first book of Propertius, the traveling roles reverse. The amator remains fixed in Rome while Cynthia ranges across the space of empire. In these poems, too, the expanding territory blends into the woman’s body. We have reached the moment in the response to increasing empire when the fantasy that one can establish control over its extent sets in. As limits and boundaries succumb to pressure with domino-like effect, as territory moves ever outwards, the desire to create fines comes to the fore. This impulse to set down clearly defined lines as if on a map, to impose one’s control over physical space, plays out in the amator’s urge to pin down the puella. She first moves untethered through space and Propertius feels his own identity in flux. To achieve control, he must gain mastery over her bodily movements. Ultimately projecting Cynthia as fixed and stable in order to anchor his own subjectivity, he stops her journeying and imagines her instead as an immobile physical boundary, a territorial finis. Like Lesbia before her, Tibullus’ puella remains (mostly) in Rome, while men move through physical space pursuing the tasks of empire, as soldiers, men of politics, merchants. Delia in book 1 is a creature of the night-time Roman streets, except when the amator loses himself in elaborate fantasy and displaces her, in his poetic dreams, to the countryside. Nemesis, darker and more sinister, never travels far from the city, but her body, like Lesbia’s, bears the mark of aggressively expanding empire. Somewhat less crudely than Catullus’ assessment of Lesbia’s promiscuity, Tibullus underscores the presence of rival lovers for Nemesis by drawing attention to the gifts they exchange for her favors. Once again the woman’s body recalls the existence of permeable, porous, imperial fines. Luxury goods flowing wantonly to Rome from the edges of empire adorn her; Nemesis demands (and dresses up in) emeralds from Scythia, Bactria, or Egypt,¹ pearls from the Red Sea, purple dye from Tyre, and, at the height of both her transgression and her desirability, she dons Coan silks emblazoned with golden viae. And yet,

¹ Pliny, NH 37.65.

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while the Tibullan amator deplores her grasping covetousness, he knows that somehow his poetry nevertheless depends upon her, pledging: usque cano Nemesim, sine qua versus mihi nullus / verba potest iustos aut reperire pedes (“I always sing of Nemesis, without whom no verse of mine can discover the proper word or the right [metrical] foot,” 2.5.111–12). Ovid’s puellae take Nemesis’ corporeal mingling one step further with products from every corner of the empire. No longer does the masculine subject wring his hands over morally bankrupt cosmetics, jewels, and tinctures from far-flung places. On the contrary, he seems to revel in them as the stuff of his poetry. He celebrates his puellae as consumers par excellence in an imperial hub, joyously adorning their bodies in any and every thing from all over the empire that can serve to enhance their appearance. This seems sophisticated, worldly, but watch out for the sting. The flow of luxury items from peripheries to center, the presence in the heart of Rome of products from the empire’s edges, raises questions about the possibility of fixed, controlled boundaries. This uncomfortable sense of porousness and permeability plays out on the bodies of the puellae. Once they adorn themselves in foreign products, they mix with these items until that is all you can see. In new imperial Rome can we ever find again or reconstruct the city of old? If we enter the puella’s boudoir unexpected and unannounced, can we discover an “original” puella? Ovid’s answer, for the puella, is an emphatic no. As Ovid’s Roman women adorn themselves in luxury items imported from the far reaches of empire, they seem to embody the dissolution of geographical boundaries that belongs to ever-expanding Roman imperium as they experience an equivalent loss at a corporeal level. Like Lesbia before them, Ovid’s puellae are acquisitive and voracious in bodily terms, merging with luxurious and foreign adornments rather than lovers. The outcome for the Ovidian puellae seems most dire. For once she performs her luxurious toilette with foreign products, the “natural” woman seems to merge with all her accoutrements, until, at the most basic physical, corporeal level, only melange exists and “the girl herself is the smallest part of herself” (pars minima est ipsa puella sui, Remedia Amoris 344). My reading of Ovid’s exilic “I” in Tomis moves us away from the puella and towards the second significant point I mentioned at the outset of the conclusion, about the ultimate dissolution of the subject in response to empire’s porous geographical fines. The ordeal of the exilic “I” serves to focus our attention, in a very Ovidian way—more strikingly and more baldly than in other elegiac poetry—on the dislocation of the subject. From Catullus to Ovid we have seen some incarnation of the subject’s

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decenteredness that we have traced to his/her now dynamically evolving sense of his/her geographic world. Literary texts are products of, and participants in, monumental cultural changes; it is no surprise that these engage in discussing and shaping the late Republican and Augustan imperial worldview. Indeed, a cartographic worldview is not a monolithic phenomenon. One does not simply wake up one day with the notion “to exhibit the entire world for the city (of Rome) to examine.” Creating and then displaying Agrippa’s world map is but one instantiation of a social, cultural, and political push to characterize, define, and demarcate peoples, places, behaviors. For Romans of the Augustan age the world map is a development out of, or a response to, periods of expansion and conquest in which a heady sense emerged that only the end of inhabitable space could put the brakes on Roman geographical increase. In this book, I have tracked, from Catullus to Ovid, the various phases along the road to a cartographic understanding of Roman space, in particular the effects of new spatial dislocation on the subject. At the level of image and signifier, the elegiac subject, like the mapping of expanding empire, can only be fractured and divided. Catullus’ poetry reveals an acute awareness of the increasing geography of the imperium Romanum. What we see in Catullus is a response to a dawning understanding that Roman imperium stretches with newly expansive boundaries throughout the inhabitable world (orbis terrarum). In his poetry, goods and people circulate through geographical space, often with devastating consequences, always with increasing ease, manifest proof of the porous nature of geographical boundaries. Faced with these realities, signifiers, genders, identities, all ways by which the subject constructs itself as a coherent, unified entity, seem equally precarious. Simultaneously spaces— the domus, Rome, Verona, Troy—and selves—his own, his brother’s, his friends’, Lesbia’s, his other poetic characters’—begin to blur with other spaces and selves, ever changing, and with ever-shifting boundaries. Like Caesar and Pompey before him, Octavian, too, pursues intense expansion abroad, coupled with a (perhaps even more intense) program to construct for himself the image of an unabashed expansionist in Rome. In one otherwise unprepossessing poem in the Monobiblos, Propertius makes a strikingly romantic assertion: Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit (1.12.20). She was the first and will be his last—the alpha and the omega of his love. But 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

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Propertian amator. He remains rooted in Rome. She journeys freely, and frequently, on an adventure with a rich lover, on vacation, just beyond Propertius’ grasp. Her spatial mobility causes the lover-poet great anxiety; her peregrinations destabilize Propertius’ sense of self. With equal measures of self-indulgence and self-pity, the amator bemoans non sum ego qui fueram (“I am not the I I once had been,” 1.12.11), and perhaps worse, confesses that he has begun to sound gravis even to himself (1.12.14), deploying a generically loaded adjective to indicate his poetry no longer belongs in the realm of elegy. Propertius’ elegies, like Catullus’ poems, reveal the anxieties of an individual faced with an infinite, formless, ever-changing world. While the Catullan subject comes undone, the Propertian subject has a different response. He struggles to establish and cling to the possibility of known and definable boundaries. He seeks to render Cynthia fixed and definable—his finis—and to anchor his self-definition on her. 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. Roads connect places, allow movement, create order, but also display hierarchy; indeed, all roads lead to Rome. Augustus, understanding the significance of the road, stepped in as curator viarum (“commissioner of the roads”) officially some time before 20 , although unofficially he had long since been performing the job. On the one hand, for Tibullus, the road and by extension the geographic expanse of empire are the root of all evils. If Propertius stays fixed in space while Cynthia roams, for Tibullus 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 stuff of empire, in particular from the road, we discover in the end that the two remain ineluctably entangled. 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 amator’s puella, the pattern on her most elegiac Coan clothing. If Propertius insists on fines in a world sine fine, Tibullus offers up a vision of the fallibility of fines, where things spill over the boundaries into places they are least welcome. If early on, in book 1, Propertius clings to a fantasy that one can establish meaningful fines on which to anchor definitions of identity, a three-poem run in book 4—elegies 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4—reveal a less optimistic vision. With

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Propertius’ fourth and final collection of elegies we move well into the Augustan age, closer and closer in time to when the map of Agrippa became available for general viewing in the Porticus Vipsania. In poem 4.3, Arethusa traces the travels of her husband, Lycotas, fighting wars of conquest just beyond the edges of empire. In a line that has caught the surprised eye of many scholars, she refers to what seems to be a map (4.3.37) that she consults for precise information. The poem offers a first-person narrative in Arethusa’s voice in which she laments her status as bereft wife through a series of carefully established dichotomies; she clearly distinguishes between Roman woman in the domestic sphere and Roman man at war abroad, between her Roman soldier-husband and his non-Roman enemy, between socially constrained Romanae puellae and the more free barbarian, the Amazon Hippolyta. And yet, just as Roman imperial conquest reveals that lines indicating fines on a map, those dividing “in” from “out,” “Roman” from “non-Roman,” are more fluid and unstable than fixed, so, too, Arethusa’s bounded, antithetical categories begin to bleed into one another. The poems that surround Arethusa’s elegy, which Propertius invites us to read (also) as a unit through both verbal echoes and thematic continuity, underscore the problematics of boundaries and further locate the problem not in the age of Roman expansion but at the very founding of Rome, drawing fascinating parallels between fines on a map and the wall Romulus built around Rome. The simultaneously Etruscan and Roman Vertumnus of elegy 4.2, who throws identity into question by suggesting that it relies a bit too heavily on the accessories an individual happens to choose at a particular moment, takes questions about the hybridization of categories that should be fixed and separate back to the time of Romulus, more specifically to the time of the military encounter between Romulus’ newly established Romans and Tatius’ neighboring Sabines. The same enemy king returns in elegy 4.4, a poem about Tarpeia, the Vestal Virgin who betrays Romulus’ Rome to Tatius, as Propertius relentlessly continues to explore the desire to differentiate self and other, made manifest in city walls, and the concurrent realization that the boundary between the two categories is, like the wall that does not ultimately keep the enemy out, permeable at best. The story comes to an end with Ovid and a diptych that juxtaposes his erotic and his exilic elegy. We have arrived at a time during which people in Rome could visit and examine Agrippa’s map, a time when expansion and conquest sit hand in glove with powerful fantasies of imposing order, control, and hierarchy. Ovid spends a great deal of time and energy in his

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early elegiac works contemplating feminine self-adornment. Luxury goods from foreign places flow to the capital, itself decked out to look its part as imperial hub. The city’s female inhabitants quite naturally seek out, then display on their bodies, the commodities of empire—clothing, jewels, makeup, hair dye. Once the Ovidian women, consumers in a new global economy fueled by foreign conquests, cloak themselves in the trappings of empire, we discover that we can no longer access their pre-adorned selves. 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 boundaries—when he discovers that the furthest edge of imperium at Tomis is, in fact, a very porous place—the exilic “I” feels the pressure at the level of signifiers and images (Lacan’s Symbolic and Imaginary registers). 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 walls around Tomis seem incapable of holding back the hybridization of peoples. The Greeks, the Getans, the barbarians have already mixed together despite the walls’ existence, and even the one Roman cannot sustain his Romanness. Ovid, Roman on arrival, becomes equally barbarus and Getic within the city walls, composing poetry hybrid in language and meters. A cartographic worldview opens up and takes hold for the Romans, as elegy emerges, flourishes, and then essentially ceases to be written. The lack of fixity in elegiac subject and space of empire go hand in hand. In this book, I have suggested that the subject in Latin elegy, beginning with the work of Catullus, constitutes itself in relation to the dynamically evolving production of the space of empire from the late Republic to the end of the Augustan age. Questions of geographical space time and time again become questions about the de-centred, dislocated subject, as if in imagining geographical space our very nature as subjects comes to the fore. Indeed, the poetry of Catullus and the elegists runs the full gamut of responses to the expanding geographical empire. The narrative we have traced from the texts of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid shows that they conceptualize space cartographically; their literary imaginings of geographical space and the individual’s relationship to it both resonate with the impetuses behind the creation of a public world map and simultaneously reveal in their spatial experiences the tensions and contradictions inherent in such a cartographic venture. The process towards map-making, or even towards conceiving of

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Roman imperial holdings in a map-like way, advances in stages. First comes the dream of Roman imperium sine fine, an empire that widens out unfathomably to the ends of the inhabited world. Relentlessly capacious as this may seem, imperium sine fine requires the existence of some sort of fines, even if the fantasy demands that they be overrun, as well as some overall, cartographic conception of the territory imperium now encompasses, and, in its rapid expansion, will encompass in swift succession. Formlessness, or worse, rapidly alternating forms, give rise to anxieties and desire to set down some fines, to establish with cartographic sense where, exactly, the boundaries of empire are, what belongs “inside” and what can be relegated to “outside.” But fines, cartographically speaking, are never as stable as we want them to be, and, for a rapidly expanding empire, are always under pressure. Each poet offers his own unique expression of the gendered subject vis-àvis a particular moment in the journey from production to contemplation of the world map. The very constitution of the elegiac subject mirrors, anticipates, runs parallel to the problems and anxieties that the map of expanding empire both tries to solve, yet simultaneously uncovers in its production of space. In the end Ovid’s exilic “I” represents the only viable version of the Roman subject at the beginning of the first century —a hybrid, impossible to disentangle, always already alienated from one’s “self.” And perhaps elegy reveals itself to be, fundamentally, the imperialistic poetic genre par excellence. Or, at the very least, it matches Ovid’s all-encompassing epic, whose poetics mimic imperial expansion with an unbounded narrative that samples all literary genres and that spills voraciously over the breaks at the conclusion of books, with a tangle of beginnings and endings, fines that we seek avidly to define but that, in our seeking, recede from our grasp. For the dissolution of the elegiac subject reflects empire’s restless and unceasing movement outward beyond its (current and temporary) borders, the ultimate expression of imperium’s essential and intrinsic excess.

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Index Locorum For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Appian - Illyrica 16–17 76–7 28 76–7 Augustus - Res Gestae 12.2 161–2 13 115n.106, 162–3 20.5 94–5 26 93 26.1 1–2 Caesar - Bellum Gallicum 1.1 63n.25 Callimachus fr. 458 Pf 80n.91 Cassius Dio 21.41.3–4 78n.83 50.7.2–7 91n.18 51.21.7–8 77 51.22.1–2 78n.80 51.22.2–3 77–8 51.22.5 77–8 53.16.7–8 13n.35 53.17 22n.74 53.22.1 94–5 53.22.2 94–5 53.22.2–4 95n.46 53.26.5 92–3 53.30.1–2 94 53.30.2 94 54.7 93 54.9.1–3 93 55.6.6 13n.35 55.8 11n.26 56.33.3 15n.50 56.33.5–6 16n.53

56.34.3 15n.50 67.12.3–4 12n.31 Catullus 9.7 31–2 10.2 42–3 10.3–4 41–2 10.6–8 42–3 10.10 41 10.12 43–4 10.13 41, 43 10.14–15 43–4 10.15 43–4 10.16 43–4 10.18–20 43–4 10.24 43–4 10.31–2 44–5 11.1 35–6 11.2 36–8, 47n.62 11.3–4 36–7 11.3–5 36–7 11.7–8 36–7 11.9 36–7 11.11 36–7 11.11–12 36–7 11.14 38 11.22–4 37–8 12.14 31–2 12.14–17 43–4 16.1 43n.53 22.10 31–2 22.14 31–2 28.1 44–5 28.6–8 44–5 28.9–10 43–5 28.11–12 44–5 28.12–13 44–5 29.3–4 34 29.16 34–5

224

 

Catullus (cont.) 29.18 34 29.19 34 31.2 41 31.4 41 31.5 41 31.6 41 31.7 41 31.8–9 41 31.12 41 31.13 41 39.13 30n.12 39.17–21 31–2 46.1–3 41 46.7 41 46.8 41 46.9 41 46.10 41 50.19 41n.46 62.39–40 37–8 63.1 39 63.4 39 63.6 39 63.8 39 63.11 39 63.13 39–41 63.25 39–41 63.27 39–41, 55 63.30 39–41 63.31 39–41 63.32 39 63.42 39 63.45 39 63.49 39 63.52 39–41 63.54 39 63.58 39 63.60 39–41 63.63 39, 39n.39 63.69 39–41, 55 63.70 39–41 63.70–1 39–41 63.78 39–41 63.80 39–41 63.86 39–41 63.88 39–41 63.89 39–41 63.91 39–41 65.7 53–4 65.19–22 52–3 68[a].22 47–8

68[a].27 47–8 68[a].33 48–9 68[a].34 48–9, 54 68[a].35 48–9 68[a].36 48–9 68[b].67 49 68[b].68 49 68[b].70 51–2 68[b].71 50 68[b].72 50 68[b].73 50 68[b].74 50 68[b].87ff. 50–1 68[b].88–92 46–7 68[b].88–100 46–7 68[b].89 46–7 68[b].94 47 68[b].97 46–7 68[b].97–8 45–7 68[b].99 46–7 68[b].100 46–7 68[b].108 50–1 68[b].109 50–1 68[b].111–12 50–1 68[b].112 50–1 68[b].114 50–1 68[b].115–16 50–2 68[b].117 50–1 68[b].131 51–2 68[b].132 52 68[b].134 52 68[b].135 49, 52 68[b].138–40 51–2 68[b].144 49 68[b].146 52 75.3–4 27–8 84.10 32–3 84.12 32–3 85.1 27–8 95.1–2 33–4 95.3 33–4 95.5 33–4 95.6 33–4 95.7 33–4 95.8 33–4 95.10 33–4 101.1 46–7 114.4 34–5 115.6 34–5 115.8 34–5

  Cicero - De Provinciis Consularibus 4.8 53n.84 31 29n.8 - Epistulae ad Familiares. 14.7.1 133n.23 - Pro Caelio 59.4–5 53–4 Dionysius of Halicarnassus - Roman Antiquities 1.3.3 16n.55 2.38ff. 151n.75 Dioscorides 5.118 177–8 Horace - Epodes 12.10–11 156n.2 16.41–2 87–8 16.41–8 87–8 16.49–50 87–8 16.57 88 16.59 88 16.60 88 16.64 88 - Odes 1.2.22 75n.65 1.2.51 75n.65 1.10.5 173n.34 1.35.29–30 93n.35 1.35.29–40 75n.65 3.4.33 93n.35 3.5.2–4 93n.35 4.15 75n.65 - Satires 1.2.123–4 156n.2 Hyginus 88 65–6 Juvenal - Satires 6.457–507 156n.2 Livy - Ab Urbe Condita 1.6.3–7.3 145–6 1.7.2 145–6 1.7.3 145–6 1.8.4 145–6 1.11.6 145–6 1.11.8 151–2 41.28.8–10 129n.12

Lucretius - De Rerum Natura 4.1121–91 156n.2 5.937–8 87–8 5.939 86n.4 5.939–40 87–8 5.945–7 86n.4, 87–8 5.955 87–8 5.999–1001 88 5.1011ff. 88n.10 5.1105ff. 88 Martial - Epigrammata 2.41.11–12 156n.2 9.37 156n.2 14.189 57n.2 Orosius 6.21.19–20 93 Ovid - Amores 1.9.1 110–11 1.14.1 165–8 1.14.2 165–6 1.14.3–4 166, 170–1 1.14.5 170–1 1.14.6 170–1 1.14.7–8 170–1 1.14.9–10 169–70 1.14.11–12 169–70 1.14.17 168–9 1.14.19–21 166, 168–9 1.14.21 166, 168–70 1.14.21–2 170–1 1.14.23 170–1 1.14.24 166 1.14.25 166 1.14.28 166, 169–70 1.14.29 166 1.14.31 166 1.14.31–2 170–1 1.14.33–4 170–1 1.14.35 166 1.14.35–6 171 1.14.37–8 171 1.14.38 168–9, 194n.96 1.14.39 167–8 1.14.40 167–8 1.14.43–4 164 1.14.44 166–8 1.14.45ff. 164, 174n.40

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 

Ovid (cont.) 1.14.45–6 166–7 1.14.46 167–8 1.14.47–9 168–9 1.14.48 167–8 1.14.49 166–7 1.14.51–4 165–6 1.14.55 166–7 1.14.56 166–7 2.1.17–18 115–16 2.4.37–44 170n.30 - Ars Amatoria 1.174 181–2 1.177–8 163–4 1.517–18 174–5 2.733 172–3 2.744 172–3 2.745–6 172–3 3.101–28 159–60 3.104 178–9 3.107–20 159–60 3.113–14 172–3 3.114 164–5 3.129–32 173–4 3.133 173–4 3.139 174–5 3.141–2 174–5 3.147–8 174–5 3.151–2 173–4 3.155–6 174–5 3.157–8 174–5 3.161–8 174–5 3.163 174–5 3.165–7 166–7 3.169–72 175–6 3.173–84 175–6 3.179 175–6 3.179–80 175–6 3.193–8 176–7 3.199–204 176–7 3.203 176–7 3.204 176–7 3.205–8 176–7 3.209–10 179–80 3.210 179–80 3.211 179–80 3.213 179–80 3.213–14 179n.58 3.215–16 179–80 3.219–22 178–9

3.220 180–1 3.223 180–1 3.225 178–9 3.226 180–1 3.228 178–9, 181n.63 3.229 178–9 3.231–2 178–9 3.234 178–9 3.291 180–1 3.473–98 132n.19 3.809 172–3 3.812 172–3 - Epistulae Ex Ponto 1.2.13ff. 185–6 1.2.17 187–8 1.2.24 185 1.2.43 185n.71 1.3.47–8 186n.73 1.3.49–50 185 1.3.51 185 1.3.57ff. 185n.71 1.3.84 184 1.10.7ff. 185 2.7.66 184 2.7.69–70 185–6 2.7.74 185 3.1.23 185 3.2.46 186–7 3.2.66 186–7 3.2.78 186–7 3.2.79 186–7 3.3.78 184 3.4.59–60 184 3.8.13–4 185 3.8.15 185 4.2.21–2 193–4 4.2.33–4 191–2 4.9.81ff. 186n.73 4.9.84 186n.73 4.9.101–2 191–2 4.9.104 191–2 4.11.15–16 184 4.13.18 193–4 4.13.19 193–4 4.13.20 193–4 4.13.23 193–4 4.14.24 191–2 4.14.46 191–2 4.14.47ff. 191–2 4.14.48 191–2

  4.14.49–50 191–2 4.14.55 191–2 - Fasti 2.683–4 21n.72 - Medicamina Faciei Femineae 1 164 2 164 12 173–4 17 173–4 18 173–4 19 173–5 20 173–4 21 173–4 53 177 65 177 66 177 67-8 177 73 177 74 177 78 177–8 82 177–8 85 177–8 87 177–8 88 177–8 90 177–8 91 177–8 94 177–8 - Metamorphoses 1.89ff. 88n.9 5.572–641 134–6 8.788–9 185 8.790–1 185 10.252 167n.22 15.96ff. 88n.9 - Remedia Amoris 341 180–1 343-4 180–1 343-56 164 344 180–1, 194n.96, 199 345 180–1 346 180–1 347 164, 179–80 348 179–80 352 179–80 353-4 179–80 355 179–80 355-6 179–80 - Tristia 1.1.1–2 189–90 1.1.57–60 189–90

1.1.127–8 184 1.1.128 185 1.3.61 184 1.3.62 189–90 1.3.83 184 1.5.57ff. 184 1.5.67–70 189–90 1.7.10 184 1.8.38 189–90 1.8.40 184 2.192 187–8 2.199–200 184 2.207 184 3.1.1ff. 189–90 3.2.1–2 184 3.2.8 185 3.3.1–4 185 3.3.2 191–2 3.3.3 184 3.3.13 47n.62, 184 3.3.63–4 189–90 3.4b.47–51 185 3.8.28ff. 185 3.9.1 188–9 3.9.4 188–9 3.9.5 188–9 3.9.16 188–9 3.9.17–28 188–9 3.9.33–4 188–9 3.10.4 185–6 3.10.25ff. 187–8 3.10.41–2 187n.77 3.10.71–6 185 3.11.9 189–90 3.11.13 185–6 3.11.25 194–5 3.11.29–30 194–5 3.13.27 184 3.14.39–40 191–2 3.14.41 187–8 3.14.42 187–8 3.14.43 192–3 3.14.46 192–3 3.14.49–50 192–3 4.1.89–92 191–2 4.2.55 189–90 4.4.59 186–7 4.4.61 186–7 4.4.63 186–7 4.4.63–4 186–7

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 

Ovid (cont.) 4.4.65–6 186–7 4.4.67ff. 186–7 4.4.81 186–7 4.4.83 184 4.6.39ff. 185 4.8.26 185 4.9.9 184 5.1.21 184 5.1.72 193–4 5.1.73–4 193–4 5.2.65–6 185 5.2.67 189–90 5.2.68 190–1 5.7.1ff. 185 5.7.11 187–8 5.7.13ff. 185–6 5.7.17 185–6 5.7.19–20 185–6 5.7.20 185–6 5.7.45 188–9 5.7.46 188–9 5.7.47–8 188–9 5.7.49–50 188–9 5.7.51–2 190–1 5.7.53–4 189–90 5.7.55 192–3 5.7.56 192–3 5.7.57–8 192–3 5.7.59–60 192–3 5.10.18 187–8 5.10.28 187–8, 190–1 5.10.32 188–9 5.10.34 188–9 5.10.35 190–1 5.10.36 189–92 5.10.37 194 5.12.53–4 191–2 5.12.57 192–3 5.12.58 192–3 5.13.21 185 Plautus - Mostellaria 258-78 156n.2 Pliny the Elder - Naturalis Historia 3.17 8n.14, 10–11, 10n.24, 11n.26, 14–15, 127 3.86 10n.23

5.35–7 93 6.139 10n.24, 11n.28 6.181 93n.29 7.95 29–30 7.99 29–30 13.20 174–5, 175n.43 13.20–5 156n.2 28.184–5 176n.52 29.35–7 179n.58 32.86–7 177–8 33.96 176–7 33.102 176–7 36.7 34n.24 37.65 112n.95, 198n.1 Plutarch - Life of Pompey 45.5 29n.10 - Life of Romulus 1.7 151n.75 Polybius 6.15.8 77n.74 Propertius 1.2.1–6 156 1.2.2 158–9 1.2.3 158–9 1.2.4 157–9 1.2.7 156–7 1.2.8 156–7 1.2.9–13 156–7 1.2.14 156–7 1.2.19 156–7 1.2.21 156–7 1.2.22 157n.4 1.2.23 157–8 1.2.24 157–8 1.2.26 157–8 1.2.27–30 157–8 1.6 58n.4 1.8a.1 67–8 1.8a.2 67–8 1.8a.4–8 67–8 1.8a.5–8 136n.31 1.8a.11 67–8 1.8a.15 67–8, 71–2 1.8a.19 67–8 1.8a.20 67–8 1.8a.22 67–8 1.8a.24 67–8 1.8a.26 57n.3, 67–8

  1.8b.27 68 1.8b.30 68 1.8b.31 68 1.8b.33 68 1.8b.35–6 68 1.8b.38 68 1.8b.39 68 1.8b.42 68 1.8b.43–4 57n.3 1.8b.44 68 1.11.1 65 1.11.2 65 1.11.3–4 65–6 1.11.8 66–7 1.11.9 66–7 1.11.10 66–8 1.11.11 66–7 1.11.21–2 66n.38 1.11.23 66n.38, 149–50 1.11.27 66–7 1.11.30 66–7 1.12.1–2 61–2, 79 1.12.2 61–2 1.12.3 63, 73, 79 1.12.4 63 1.12.5–6 63 1.12.9 63 1.12.10 63 1.12.11 63–4, 73–4, 79, 194–5, 200–1 1.12.14 79–80, 200–1 1.12.19 79–80 1.12.19–20 70–1 1.12.20 61, 71–2, 123–4, 173n.34, 200–1 1.16.21 58n.5 1.17 58n.4 1.18 58n.4 1.19.11 58n.4 2.1.40 68n.43 2.1.45 68n.43 2.3a.3–8 70 2.3a.9–16 70 2.3a.17–22 70 2.3a.32–4 70–1 2.3a.35–6 70–1 2.3a.43–4 70–1 2.3b.45 62n.21, 70–1 2.3b.45–6 70–1 2.15.29 58n.5 2.18b.24 158–9 2.18b.25 157–8

2.18b.26 157–9 2.18b.27 157–8 2.18b.28 157–8 2.18b.30 157–8 2.18b.35–6 157–8 2.19.8 69–70 2.27.5 93n.35 3.1.7 23 3.1.14 23 3.1.16 23, 69–70 3.1.18 23 3.2.1 23 3.4.1 23 3.4.3 23 3.5.37 69–70, 69n.45 3.21 58n.4 4.1.1 139–40 4.1.2 139–40 4.1.3–6 139–40 4.1.8 139–40, 145–6 4.1.10 139–40 4.1.30 139–40 4.1.37–8 124–5 4.1.56 139–40 4.1.57 139–40 4.1.64 139–40 4.1.67–70 139–40 4.1.69 124–5 4.2.2 141–2 4.2.3 140 4.2.4 140 4.2.5 141–2 4.2.6 141–2 4.2.10 140 4.2.19 140 4.2.21–8 141 4.2.31 141 4.2.32 141 4.2.47–8 141–2 4.2.49 140 4.2.50 140 4.2.52 140, 150–1 4.2.55–6 141–2 4.3.3 132 4.3.4 132 4.3.5 132 4.3.6 132 4.3.7–10 127–8, 134 4.3.8 127–9 4.3.9 127–9, 150–1

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 

Propertius (cont.) 4.3.10 127–9 4.3.11 132–3 4.3.12 132–3 4.3.17 132–4 4.3.18 132–4 4.3.23 134 4.3.23–4 136 4.3.24 134 4.3.25–8 134–6 4.3.29 132–6 4.3.29–30 132–3 4.3.31–2 132–3 4.3.33 132–3, 137–8 4.3.33–4 132–3 4.3.34 137–8 4.3.35 129 4.3.35–6 134 4.3.35–40 128–9 4.3.36 129–30 4.3.37 126, 129–30, 201–2 4.3.39 129–30 4.3.40 129–30 4.3.41 132–3 4.3.43–4 134–6 4.3.45 134–6 4.3.46 134–6 4.3.47 136 4.3.48 136 4.3.51 137–8 4.3.52 137–8 4.3.54 132–3 4.3.57 132–3, 143 4.3.58 132–3, 143 4.3.63 134, 136–8 4.3.63–6 137–8 4.3.64 134, 136 4.3.66 134 4.3.70–1 132–4 4.3.72 134–6 4.4.5 143–5 4.4.5–6 143–5 4.4.7–8 143–5 4.4.8 143–7 4.4.9 150–1 4.4.9–10 145–6 4.4.12 143–5, 150–1 4.4.13 145–7 4.4.14 143–5

4.4.15 143–5 4.4.16 148–9 4.4.17 151–2 4.4.19 143–5 4.4.19–20 148–9 4.4.20 150–1 4.4.21 148–51 4.4.22 148–9 4.4.23 148–9 4.4.23–6 148–9 4.4.25 148–9 4.4.29 149–50 4.4.30 149–50 4.4.32 150–1 4.4.34 149–50 4.4.35 146–7 4.4.35–6 149–50 4.4.39–42 148–9 4.4.41 149n.62 4.4.53–4 150–1 4.4.57–8 148–9 4.4.59–60 148–9 4.4.61 148–9 4.4.63–5 149–50 4.4.70 149–50 4.4.71–2 149–50 4.4.74 145–6 4.4.79 146–7 4.4.79–80 145–6 4.4.80 146–7 4.4.82 149–50 4.4.84 146–7 4.4.87 146–7 4.4.87–8 149–50 4.4.89 151–2 4.6.77–8 127n.8 4.11.65–6 127n.8 Quintilian - Institutio Oratoria 10.1.93 1–2 Seneca - De Beneficiis 7.9 156n.2 Strabo - Geography 1.2.1 16n.55 2.5.12 92–3 4.6.11 94–5

  6.4 16n.55 17.1.13 92–3 17.1.53–4 93n.29 Suetonius - Divus Augustus 7.2 13n.35 101.4 15n.50 Tacitus - Annales 1.11 15n.52 1.11.3–4 15n.50 1.11.4 16n.53 12.23 7n.13, 13n.35 Tibullus 1.1.1 98–9, 108–9 1.1.1–4 98–9 1.1.2 108–9 1.1.3–4 108–9 1.1.5 98 1.1.7–8 98 1.1.9 98 1.1.10 98 1.1.25 98 1.1.26 98–9 1.1.27–8 98 1.1.29 98 1.1.30 98 1.1.43–5 98 1.1.45–6 88–9 1.1.46 98 1.1.47–52 108–9 1.1.49 98–9 1.1.50 98–9, 121–2 1.1.51 98–9, 111–12 1.1.51–2 119n.122 1.1.52 98–9, 108–9, 111–12, 121–2 1.1.53 99 1.1.53–4 98–9, 108–9, 111–12 1.1.54 98–9, 121–2 1.1.55 111–12 1.1.55–6 108n.83 1.1.56 111–12, 115–16 1.1.57 111–12 1.1.57–8 88–9 1.1.58 88–9, 98 1.1.75 111–12 1.1.75–6 111–12 1.2.16–18 115–16 1.2.41 113

1.2.42 113 1.2.67 99, 108–9 1.2.68 99, 108–9 1.2.69–70 99, 108–9 1.2.70ff. 108–9 1.2.74 99 1.2.99 118n.116 1.2.100–1 113 1.3.1 71–2, 99, 109 1.3.1–5 71–2, 109 1.3.3 71–2, 109–10 1.3.9–34 71–2, 90–1, 110 1.3.14 99, 109 1.3.18 72n.54, 88–9 1.3.35 72, 85–6, 89–90 1.3.35–6 72, 89–90, 109 1.3.35–48 71–2 1.3.36 73, 90–1 1.3.37–40 72, 89–90 1.3.39ff. 72, 89–90 1.3.43 71–2, 89–90, 115–16 1.3.43–4 72, 89–90 1.3.44 69n.46, 72, 89–90 1.3.45 85–6 1.3.46 85–6 1.3.49 90–1, 109, 119–20 1.3.50 109 1.3.55–6 108–9 1.3.57–82 71–2, 110 1.3.64 113 1.3.72 113n.101 1.3.73–80 113 1.3.81 113n.101 1.3.83–92 71–2, 110 1.3.92 110, 121–2 1.4.41 116–17 1.4.68–9 101–2 1.5.17–18 108–9 1.5.20–34 88–9 1.5.30 108n.83 1.5.35 85n.1, 101–2 1.5.36 101–2 1.5.47 108–9 1.5.58 113 1.5.60–6 108n.83 1.5.64 116–17 1.5.67–8 116–17 1.5.70–4 108–9 1.6.12 115–16 1.6.13–14 113

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 

Tibullus (cont.) 1.6.23–4 108n.83 1.6.37–8 108n.83 1.6.47–9 113–15 1.6.48 113–15 1.6.51 113–15 1.6.54 113–15 1.6.55 113–15 1.6.56 113–15 1.6.58 113–15 1.6.66 113–15 1.6.73–4 113–15 1.6.75 113–15 1.7.3–8 91–2 1.7.4 99–101, 108–9 1.7.5–8 99–101, 108–9 1.7.9–12 99–101 1.7.13–22 73, 90–1, 99–101 1.7.57 99–101 1.7.59 99–101, 108–9 1.8.5–6 108n.83 1.8.37 113 1.8.38 113 1.8.60 116n.110 1.9.7–8 102 1.9.8 102 1.9.9–10 102 1.9.13 102 1.9.13–15 102 1.9.16 102 1.9.58 112n.99 1.10.2 102–3 1.10.3 119–20 1.10.4 102–3 1.10.7 102–3 1.10.8 85–6 1.10.10 85–6 1.10.29 102–3 1.10.31–2 102–3 1.10.39–44 88–9 1.10.45 102–3, 113–15 1.10.51–4 115–16 1.10.53 113–16 1.10.55 113–16 1.10.57 113–15 1.10.59 113–15 1.10.61–3 113–15 1.10.66 113–15 1.10.67 113–15 2.1.11–12 116–17

2.1.33–4 109 2.1.34 115–16 2.1.37ff. 98n.54 2.1.37–40 116–17 2.1.38 86n.4 2.1.67–8 116–17 2.1.67–72 113 2.1.69 116–17 2.1.69–70 113n.101 2.1.72 117n.113 2.1.75 116–17 2.1.78 116–17 2.1.90 121 2.2.11 101–2 2.2.15–16 119n.123 2.2.16 101–2 2.3.1–3 108–9 2.3.2 117–18 2.3.3 117–18 2.3.5–10 108n.83 2.3.16 120n.125 2.3.33–4 117–18 2.3.34 117–18 2.3.35 117–18 2.3.38 119–20 2.3.41 113–15, 117–18 2.3.43 117–18 2.3.43–4 117–18 2.3.49 118–19 2.3.50 118–19 2.3.51–2 118–19 2.3.53 118–19 2.3.53–4 118–19 2.3.54 106–7, 120–2 2.3.55–6 120–1 2.3.57–8 118–19 2.3.59–60 113–15 2.3.68–9 110–11 2.3.69 110–11 2.3.70 110–11 2.3.73–4 115–16 2.3.79–80 108n.83 2.4.1–6 108n.83 2.4.21 119–20 2.4.22 119–20 2.4.25 119–20 2.4.27 119–20 2.4.28 119–20 2.4.29–30 119–20 2.4.31–4 119–20

  2.4.52 119–20 2.5.9 103–4 2.5.23 87, 103–4 2.5.25 87 2.5.25–38 103–4 2.5.26 87 2.5.27–30 87 2.5.28 87 2.5.37 87 2.5.38 87 2.5.39 110–11 2.5.41 103–4 2.5.51 110–11 2.5.54 112n.99 2.5.55–6 103–4 2.5.58–60 103–4 2.5.62 103–4 2.5.105–8 113 2.5.106 113 2.5.111–12 198–9 2.5.115–16 103–4 2.6.1 102–3 2.6.2 102–3 2.6.3–4 102–3 2.6.12 115–16 2.6.15 113 Varro - De Lingua Latina 5.41 151n.75 5.143 7n.12 - De Re Rustica 1.2.1 129–30

Virgil - Aeneid 1.278–9 15–17, 103–4 1.279 54, 69 1.286–96 75n.65 4.2 149n.65 4.172 149n.65 4.261–4 137n.34 6.792–5 93n.34 - Eclogues 4.6 87–8 4.18 87–8 4.31–9 88 4.39 87–8 4.42 86n.3 4.42–5 87–8 - Georgics 2.490 79–80 3.25 93n.35 Vitruvius - De Architectura 7.7.2 176n.51 8.2.6 130–1 Xenophon - Oeconomicus 10.2–9 155 10.3 155 10.5 155 10.7–8 155 10.9 155

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General Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Aeneid and Tibullus 2.5 103–4 imperium sine fine 15–17, 54, 69, 103–4 Agrippa 7–8, 10–11, 76, 82–3, 92–5, 127, 161–2 Map of 2–5, 7–12, 14–15, 26, 54–5, 82–3, 82n.100, 105–6, 127, 129–31, 199–203 anti-cosmetic tradition 155–60, 164–72, 178 and prostitution 157–9 Arethusa and foreign luxury 137–8 and Hippolyta 134–6, 201–2 and spatial fixity 126–8, 131–4, 201–2 as elegiac amator 134–6 as faithful wife 132–3, 136–8, 143, 201–2 as letter writer 124–6, 131–3, 143, 152–3 as reader of ethno-geographic writings 126–33, 152–3 name of 134–6 see also map, Arethusa’s map Augustus and cadastration 13, 54–5, 81–2 and central record-keeping 13, 54–5, 94, 105–6 and civic space / public monuments 18, 54–5, 76–8, 92–3, 105–6, 161–3 and division of Rome and Italy 13, 54–5 and expansion of imperial boundaries 14–16, 21–2, 54–5, 59–60, 74–6, 83, 92–3, 123–4, 161–2, 200–1 and geographic writing 12–16, 54–5, 81–2 and the Res Gestae 12, 81–2, 93–5 and social legislation 18, 161–2 as curator viarum 94–5, 201 as Lacanian subject 21–2, 83–4 as second founder of Rome 13 Roman roads under 94–7, 99–101, 105–6, 201

Caesar territorial expansion of imperium under 18–19, 28–30, 46–7, 54, 200–1 Catullus as Verres 43–4 Attis in 39–41, 55 Bithynia in 31–2, 39, 41–5, 55, 59–60, 197–8 death of the brother in 36–7, 45–55 disintegrating subject in 25, 31, 36–55, 59–60, 104–5, 160–1, 197–8, 200, 203–4 domus in 45–50, 55, 200; see also Catullus, Verona in; Catullus, Rome in; Catullus, Troy in good and bad poets in 33–4 gremium in 52–4 Hercules and Hebe in 50–2, 55 Laodamia and Protesilaus in 50–2, 55 Lesbia in 27–8, 36–9, 49–52, 55, 59–60, 197–8, 200 Mamurra and military conquest in 34–5, 44–5 Memmius in 43–5 Rome in 28–33, 36–8, 45–9, 54–5, 200 Sirmio 41 space of imperium Romanum Chapter 1 passim 56–7, 96, 104–5, 197–8, 200, 204 Syria in 32–3, 197–8 traveling comites in 31–2, 35–6, 43–5, 55, 59–60, 200 Troy in 46–7, 55, 59–60, 200 Verona in 30–2, 45–9, 55, 59–60, 200 Cicero 16–17, 23, 29n.8, 41n.46, 42–4, 53–4, 133n.23, 140n.38 city walls of Rome 6–7, 25–6, 138–48, 152–3 of Tomis 185–8, 203 Coan silk 118–22, 141, 156, 158–9, 175n.44, 198–9, 201

  cosmetics 155–8, 162–5, 176–81, 195, 199, 202–3 Cynthia and spatial fixedness 66–9, 83–4, 121, 123–4, 159–61, 198; see also Cynthia as finis and spatial mobility 25, 57–61, 63–70, 73–4, 78–9, 121, 160–1, 198, 200–1 as finis 25, 56–8, 61, 67–9, 71, 81, 96, 121, 123–4, 160–1, 198, 200–1 Cynthia prima 56–8, 61, 200–1 Delia and pastoral fantasy 88–9, 101–2, 111–12, 198–9 and the trappings of empire 110, 121–2 as Penelope 71–2, 110 dyes clothing 54, 118–20, 164–5, 173–6, 195 hair 157–8, 163–75, 195, 199, 202–3 elegy dramatic shift in space in 1–3, 22–6, 54–5, 79–84, 121–2, 152–3, 194–5, 199–200, 203–4 Roman worldview in 9–10, 79–84, 121–2, 152–3, 194–5, 199–200, 203–4 emeralds 98–9, 111–12, 119–20, 198–9 fines in Ovid 154, 164–5, 171–4, 180–3, 194–5, 199–200, 203–4 in Propertius, see Propertius, finis; Cynthia, as finis in Tibullus 69, 71–4, 78–9, 89–90, 106–7, 121, 198–9, 201, 203–4 see also Tomis, as fines imperii gems 119–20, 151–2, 156–7, 162–5, 173–4, 175n.43, 180–1, 195, 199, 202–3 gender and the elegiac subject 3–4, 197–200, 204 anti-cosmetic discourse and 155–60 Arethusa and 132–6 in Catullus 37–41, 43–5, 50–2, 55, 197–8; see also Catullus, Lesbia in Lycotas and 136–8 Tarpeia and 148–50 Vertumnus and 140–1 see also Delia; Nemesis; Cynthia; Ovid, disintegrating feminine subjectivity in;

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Ovid, disintegrating masculine subjectivity in; Ovid, imperial adornments of the puella in; Propertius, disintegrating subjectivity in; Tibullus, disintegrating subjectivity in Golden Age in Horace 87–8 in Lucretius 87–8 in Ovid 88n.9 in Virgil 87–8 see also Tibullus, Golden Age in hairstyles 163–6, 168–75, 177; see also wigs; dyes, hair Lacan, J. alienation in 19, 26, 58–9, 195, 204 and desire 19–22, 28, 31, 58, 73–4, 76, 80–4, 105–6, 115n.107, 121–2, 203–4 and language 3, 19–22, 25, 28, 31, 58–9, 80–1, 83–4, 107, 109, 111–12, 121–2, 141, 189–90, 199–200, 203 and subjectivity 3, 19–22, 28, 31, 58–61, 68–9, 80–3, 107, 121–2, 189–90, 203 division / lack in 19–21, 28, 31, 58–9, 74n.61, 80–3, 107, 115n.107, 189–90, 203–4 fantasy of wholeness in 19–22, 28, 31, 58, 73–4, 80–4, 105–7, 115n.107, 121–2, 189–90, 203–4 Imaginary in 19n.66, 51n.77, 58n.7, 73, 83–4, 121, 203 objet a in 80–1 Real in 20n.70, 122n.126 Symbolic in 3, 19n.66, 20–1, 51n.77, 58–60, 58n.7, 80–1, 109–11, 117–18, 121–2, 189–90, 203 luxuries, foreign 68, 98–9, 101–2, 105–7, 111–12, 116–21, 137–8, 154, 158–9, 162–4, 167–8, 170–8, 195, 197–9, 202–3 Lycotas and Hippolyta 136 and spatial mobility 126–9, 134, 201–2 antithetical to the enemy 134, 201–2 as lover 132–3 as Roman 134, 201–2 as soldier 126–9, 131–4 Greek name of 134–6 like the enemy 136–8

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 

maps 2–3, 5–10, 82–3, 104–6, 121, 124–5, 131, 187–8, 203–4 and ethno-geographic writing 126, 129–31 Arethusa’s map 25–6, 124–6, 138–9, 152–3, 201–2 cartographic theory 11–15, 17–18, 59–60, 82–3, 96, 127, 202–4 cartographic world view 2–3, 5–8, 10–15, 59–60, 81–4, 104–6, 115–16, 124–7, 131, 153, 195, 199–200, 202–4 hodological worldview 9–10, 14–15, 96, 126 see also, Agrippa, Map of Messalla as road builder 94–5 see also Tibullus, Messalla in Nemesis and luxury items 118–22, 163–4, 198–9 see also Coan silk; emeralds; via, in Tibullus Octavian, see Augustus Odysseus/Ulysses and Arethusa 133n.25 in Catullus 46–7 in Ovid 184 in Tibullus 72, 110 Ovid and the space of empire Chapter 5 passim 202–4 as barbarian 192–5, 203 as Getic 192–5, 203 as letter-writer 183–4 as Roman 189–95, 203 as Sarmatian 192–5 disintegrating feminine subjectivity in 26, 171–2, 178–82, 195, 197–9, 202–4 disintegrating masculine subjectivity in 26, 181–2, 187–95, 197–200, 203–4 imperial adornments of the puella in 26, 154, 159–60, 163–82, 199, 202–3 see also anti-cosmetic tradition; Coan silk; cosmetics; dyes, clothing and hair; emeralds; hairstyles; luxuries, foreign; pearls; perfume; wigs Parilia the 145–6 pearls 68, 101–2, 119–20, 175n.43, 195, 198–9 perfume 101–2, 134, 136, 156n.2, 158–9, 162–3, 173–5, 195

pomerium and the boundaries of empire 6–7, 13 Pompey territorial expansion of imperium under 18–19, 28–9, 46–7, 54, 200–1 Porticus Vipsania 7–8, 10–11, 127, 130–1, 201–2 Propertius artificial adornment in 156–9, 163–4 as fixed in space 57–62, 64–5, 67–8, 71–2, 78–9, 132, 159, 198, 200–1 as gravis 79–80, 200–1 Baiae in 64–7, 121 disintegrating subjectivity in 25–6, 57–60, 68–71, 74, 79–81, 83–4, 104–5, 123–4, 160–1, 198, 200–1, 204 fas in 79–81 finis in 25, 57–8, 61, 68–71, 80–1, 83–4, 96, 121, 123–5, 128–9, 131, 138–9, 152–3, 160–1, 198, 201–2, 204 Ponticus in 61–2 Roman walls as fines imperii in 25–6, 123–5, 138–9, 141–2, 152–3, 160–1, 201–2 Rome in 61–2, 123–8, 131–3, 138–42, 160–1, 201–2 space of empire in Chapter 2 passim 96, 104–5, Chapter 4 passim 198, 200–2, 204 see also Cynthia Romulus 6–7, 13, 87, 103–4, 110–11, 125, 139–42, 145–8, 150–3, 151n.75, 201–2 Saturn, age of 71–2, 85–6; see also Golden Age; Tibullus, Golden Age in sea voyages in Catullus 39–41, 46–7 in Propertius 67–8 in Tibullus 71–2, 98–9, 102, 109, 111–12, 117–18 in Ovid 184 “spatial turn” 8–9 and Classics 9–10 Tarpeia and erotic desire 148–50 and Tatius’ spring 143–5 as Amazon 149–50 as Ariadne 148–9 as bride 148–50

  as Dido 149–50 as elegiac lover 149–50 as Sabine 148–9 as Scylla 148–9 as Vestal Virgin 143–50, 201–2 see also city walls, of Rome; gender, Tarpeia and Tatius 139–53, 201–2 as other 150–1 as Roman 150–2 Tibullus accumulation of wealth in 88–9, 98–9, 101–3, 106–9, 111–12, 117–18, 201 Aeneas in 87, 103–4 age of Jupiter in 90–1 amator in 89–91, 98–104, 106–7, 109–22, 201 Amor (Cupid) in 110–20, 122 and spatial mobility 71–2, 90–1, 96–7, 104–22, 201 as fixed in space 71–2, 88–9, 109 Augustus in 96–7 Bellona in 113–15 disintegrating subjectivity in 25–6, 96–7, 104–22, 160–1, 201, 204 doors in 88–90, 106–12, 115–17 Elysian Fields in 71–2, 109–10 Golden Age in 78–9, 85–91, 96–8, 103–6, 118–19, 122 lack of fixity in 85–6, 201 Messalla in 87, 91–2, 98–104, 108–12, 115–16, see also Tibullus, rival in Messallinus in 87, 91–2, 103–4 military service in 88–9, 98–9, 102–3, 106–9, 111–12, 116–18, 201 militia amoris in 110–11 pax in 102–3, 113–15 Phaeacia in 71–2, 109–10 rival in 98–104, 106–11, 113–22, 201 rustic simplicity in 61–2, 88–9, 98, 101–3, 107, 111–12, 116–17

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space of empire in Chapter 3 passim 201, 204 spoils of war in 98–9, 103–4, 108–9, 111–12, 118–22 travel in 89–91, 98–102, 107, 109, 201 Venus in 113–20 see also Coan silk, Delia; emeralds; Nemesis; sea voyages, in Tibullus; via, in Tibullus Tomis 154, 181–90, 194–5, 197–200, 203 and barbarian attack 185–6, 189–90 and Scythia 184–5 as barbarian 188–91, 193–4, 203; see also Tomis, inhabitants of as fines imperii 26, 154, 181–2, 184, 187–90, 194–5, 197–8, 203 as Greek 187–92, 203 inhabitants of 187–92, 203 lack of vegetation in 185 neighboring peoples of 185–92 year-round winters in 185, 187–8 triumph 2–4, 76–8, 91–3, 99–101, 103–4, 108–9, 119–20, 129–30, 161–2, 167–8, 172–3 Vertumnus and clothing 141, 201–2; see also gender, Vertumnus and as Etruscan 140–2, 152–3, 201–2 as Roman 141–2, 152–3, 201–2 via in Ovid 73n.57, 90n.17, 184 in Propertius 63–4, 68, 73, 79 in Tibullus 25–6, 72–3, 88–91, 96–107, 109–12, 115–18, 120–4, 201 see also Augustus, Roman roads under wigs 163–4, 166–9, 171–5, 195