Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy 9780199652396

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OXFORD STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND GENDER THEORY General Editors david konstan alison sharrock

Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory publishes substantial works of feminist literary research, which offer a gendersensitive perspective across the whole range of Classical literature. The field is delimited chronologically by Homer and Augustine, and culturally by the Greek and Latin languages. Within these parameters, the series welcomes studies of any genre.

Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy HUNTER H. GARDNER

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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 # Hunter H. Gardner 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published 2013 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 British Library Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–965239–6 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

For Seth, puero aeterno

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Preface In his invaluable and recently reprinted commentary on Propertius, Lawrence Richardson clarifies the amator’s reference to Cynthia’s mortality in poem 2.18, especially imminent when held in the light of Aurora’s immortality. He notes that, ‘compared with the eternal youth of a goddess, his mistress’ life span must seem a trifle, but there may be a veiled threat here’ (1977, repr. 2006, 265). The comment, issued almost in passing, prompted for me a good deal of thought about the puella’s beauty, her quasi-immortal status, and how much of her the amator leaves hidden, until a farewell—or a protracted series of farewells—bids him to do otherwise. The genre of Latin love elegy is the first in the classical tradition to offer a sustained focus on a single beloved who is allowed to evolve and mature over the course of several poems, or poetry books: its unique status as such requires us to examine with an exacting lens—all veils removed—the impact of time on elegy’s male and female subjects alike. This examination has persisted for nearly a decade now, undertaken with a lens made a bit more exacting by the help of many people. I must first express my deepest gratitude to Sharon James, who oversaw the early stages of the project as a dissertation, and kindly suffered my prolonged adolescence as I returned to her repeatedly for intellectual and moral support, long after the completion of my doctoral degree. Thanks to the Classics department at the University of North Carolina, especially my mentors Sara Mack, James O’Hara, and Cecil Wooten, whose readings of Latin poetry, from the elegantly austere to the delightfully manneristic, have productively enriched my own. Special thanks also go to Paul Allen Miller, whose patient readings of my work and congenial fielding of my eleventh-hour questions about Lacanian doctrine have made this a much more astute book than it might have been. A generous fellowship from the University of North Carolina’s graduate school allowed me to complete the dissertation. The University of South Carolina has also been exceptionally gracious in providing me with a sabbatical in the spring of 2011 and with the travel funds that allowed me to complete Chapter Two as a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

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Later stages of the book have benefited greatly from the Classics department at the University of Georgia, where I first started getting serious about philology as an MA student and where I returned in 2009 to present a paper on Cynthia’s transformation in Propertius’ second book. I am also very grateful to Hilary O’Shea, and the series editors, Alison Sharrock and David Konstan, whose patience and insights sustained the manuscript as it underwent its own series of transformations. The anonymous readers offered useful and often challenging feedback that has greatly improved the clarity of my argument. Taryn Campbell has ushered the project through to completion with plenty of professionalism and good cheer. If it is not already implicit from the conventions of the preface-writing genre, let me stress that any errors in the manuscript are my own. I am very grateful to my parents, Jackie Harrington and Ben Gardner, for taking me to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art at an impressionable age, and for bearing with equanimity and encouragement the vicissitudes of fortune that tend to befall an early career academic. My friend Andrea Hebert is responsible for introducing me to Nana and other disreputable women (perhaps Léa will make it into the sequel?). And last, but certainly not least, I must express my gratitude to my husband Sean and to my daughter Syda, whose own life course originated with that of this project. Both Sean and Syda endured my anxieties, piles of books, and monopolizing of the dining room table for far longer than they should have. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own fairly literal renderings. A revised version of the final section in Chapter Six was originally published by the Ohio State University Press, as an article in the collection of essays, Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story (Liveley and Salzman-Mitchell, eds., 2008). An earlier draft of Chapter Three was also published in 2011 as ‘Taming the Velox Puella: Temporal Propriety in Propertius 1.1’, Phoenix 65: 100–24.

Contents 1. Introduction

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Part I Arrested Development 2. Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome

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3. Taming the Velox Puella

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4. Two Senes: Delia and Messalla

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5. Ovid: Elegy at the Crossroads

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Part II Unveiling Aurora: From Puella Relicta to Puella Anus 6. The Waiting Game

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7. Nature, Culture, and the Puella Anus

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8. Departure Strategies: The Elegist in Men’s Time

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Epilogue

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Bibliography Index Locorum General Index

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1 Introduction A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away. (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 40)

We often speak of the narratives of ancient poetry as ‘evolving’, implicitly drawing a metaphor from the physical act of rolling out a neatly bound scroll, or volumen (from volvo, OLD s.v. 9 ‘unroll, roll out’), into a readably linear form. When speaking of Latin erotic elegy, however, it might be more precise to speak of poems that uncoil: with some resistance, the genre reveals a structure ever ready to spring back upon itself and cyclically charged with that repetition experienced by the amator, a ‘poet-lover’ who constantly renews and recounts his engagements with a fickle beloved. Despite constant references to time that measure the elegiac lover’s endurance or mark his rare enjoyment of a red-letter day, the chronology of those renewed engagements has proven notoriously difficult to reconstruct in linear fashion.1 The genre’s obsession with time is laid bare at the opening of Propertius’ Monobiblos, our first extant work of Augustan love elegy.2 The initial word of the collection’s first poem 1 The classic starting point for the study of Propertius’ confused chronology is Allen 1950, 149–52; see further below, p. 61. Paul Veyne has upheld repetition and timelessness as two of the genre’s defining characteristics 1988, 50–1. 2 A few scholars assign priority to Tibullus, notably Peter Knox 2005, who objects to dating Messalla’s triumph (27 BCE) as a terminus ante quem for Tibullus’ first

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and the first epithet applied to Cynthia, prima (‘first’), marks the speaker’s involvement with her as both chronologically and qualitatively prior to his involvement with other women. From there, the thirty-eight lines of poem 1.1 proceed to describe the bittersweet desperation of the speaker, employing no fewer than nine temporal adverbs, two temporal adjectives, and two temporal adverbial phrases.3 Yet despite this profusion of chronological markers, Propertius 1.1, like so many poems in the genre, offers little narrative progress; instead it revolves continuously around the speaker’s ego, as the unfolding (or uncoiling?) of a consciousness animated first and foremost by the awareness of his pre- and post-Cynthia existence. These revolutions eventually cease, however, and the end of Propertius’ third book posits a more linear path for both lover and beloved, though that path leads them in very different directions. Poem 3.24/25,4 studded with its own array of temporal adverbs, asks readers to look back to the Monobiblos’ introduction and neatly inscribes a history of the affair,5 charted over five years (quinque annos, 23). Like poem 1.1, this renuntiatio amoris (‘renunciation of love’) defines the speaker’s infatuation with his subject as a repetitive pathology (saepe, 5; totiens, 7). Such behaviour, however, has now been neatly compartmentalized in the past, as perfect, pluperfect, and imperfect verbs dominate the first twenty-four lines.6 The former amator’s reflective mode is balanced by the poem’s final lines (31– 38), which speak of Cynthia’s future as an ‘old woman’ (anus) in threatening hortatory subjunctives and a single imperative. The final couplet resumes the poet’s reflective mode, but in such a way that grants him closure, sealing his poetic project simultaneously with

book. The general consensus points to the publication of the Monobiblos around 28 BCE and Tibullus’ first collection after 27 BCE (cf. Lyne 1998, 519–22). 3 Ante, 1; tum, 3; donec, 5; iam, 7; toto . . . anno, 7; modo . . . rursus, 11–12; tardus, 17; prius, 18; tunc, 23; sero, 25; semper, 32; nullo . . . tempore, 34; tardas, 37. 4 For the last poem of book three, I have followed Fedeli 1994 and the oldest manuscripts (N, probably A) in accepting 3.24.1–38 as a single poem, though other modern editors begin a new poem at 3.24.21 (= 3.25.1). The text of Propertius used throughout this discussion is Fedeli 1994, unless otherwise noted. For Ovid’s Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia I have used Kenney 1995; I have followed the text printed in Maltby 2002 for my discussion of Tibullus. 5 The correspondences between poems 1.1 and poem 3.24/25 have been long recognized; see, e.g. Camps 1961, 165; Goold 1990, 347; Richardson 1977, 410. 6 Of over twenty finite verbs in lines 1–24, only five are in primary sequence (here present or future tense).

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Cynthia’s fate: has tibi fatalis cecinit mea pagina diras, 37 (‘my poetry has sung these grim prophecies for you’). How has the Propertian amator managed to interrupt the centripetal force that once drove his recurring engagements with his beloved? What precisely kept him spinning on the wheel of love (rota in amore, 2.8.8) in the first place? Why are such disparate fates assigned to the lover and his puella, a ‘girl’ who, for much of the corpus, has proven impervious to the demands of linear time? Time is something of a riddle in elegy: the neat distinction that the male amator draws between his own future and that of a female beloved at the (almost)7 end of his poetic project suggests that one answer to this riddle can be found by examining how time is gendered in the western imagination. As French theorist Julia Kristeva has demonstrated, this imaginative framework commonly attributes properties of cyclicality, repetition, and transcendence of historical time to the feminine subject.8 Masculine subjectivity, in contrast, is defined by the forward momentum of history and teleology (similar to Nietzsche’s ‘cursive time’);9 in other words, by the same linear trajectory to which the amator acquiesces, after renouncing his cyclical dalliances with his beloved at the end of book three. A Kristevan model explains the appeal of both the puella and those temporal properties that define her, properties that may be assumed by the amator when he wishes to forestall time’s forward progress. In turn, when historical momentum—propelling both his own maturity and that of the Roman state—can no longer accommodate the puella’s temporal transcendence, the amator re-assigns to himself and his puella those properties of masculine subjectivity. Such properties transform his beloved into an anus and allow him to conclude a cursive project, now sealed in the present perfect (mea pagina cecinit). If we look within the frame of 1.1 and 3.24/5, however, we will find

7 Propertius’ fourth book, published perhaps around 16 BCE, in many ways responds to, and in a sense unravels, the closure neatly woven into the end of book three; my discussion of book four is confined largely to Chapter Eight, pp. 238–47. 8 Kristeva’s essay on women’s time was originally published as ‘Le temps des femmes’ in 33/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, 5 (Winter 1979). In the present discussion I make frequent use of the English translation of A. Jardine and H. Blake (‘Women’s Time’ = WT), included in Moi’s 1986 anthology, The Kristeva Reader. 9 For differences between Kristeva’s ‘cursive’ (and ‘monumental’) temporalities and Nietzsche’s use of the terms, see Wolfenstein 2000, esp. 113–14, and below, p. 23–4.

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that the reversal of temporal modes—from, ‘women’s time’ (le temps des femmes) to time that is ‘readily labelled masculine’ (qu’ on qualifie facilement de masculine, [Kristeva 1979, 8])—is not nearly as abrupt as it seems: the poet’s interrogation of his puella’s temporally transcendent status begins the very moment that he proposes it.

I. AURORA AND TITHONUS . . . When the first grey hairs began to ripple from Tithonus’ handsome head and noble chin, queenly Eos kept away from his bed, though she cherished him in her house and nourished him with food and ambrosia and gave him rich clothing. But when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her the best council: she laid him in a room and closed the shining doors. There his voice flows endlessly, and he has no more strength at all, such as he once had in his supple limbs (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 227–238).10

Students of classical literature will recognize Aurora, also Eos or ‘Dawn’, as the goddess of Homeric epic, whose eternal burden is to usher in the day with her famously rosy fingers. The erotic life of Aurora, perhaps less well-known, is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where her relationship with the once mortal Tithonus serves as a cautionary tale. When Aurora, showing little foresight, asks Zeus to make her lover immortal, she forgets to request Tithonus’ eternal youth as well. As a result, the goddess begins to lose interest in him at the first sprout of grey hairs, though she dutifully provides for Tithonus after ‘loathsome old age’ (ıªæe . . . ªBæÆ) transforms him into a babbling wraith, stripped of his former strength. In this part of the Hymn, Aphrodite, addressing Anchises, cites Aurora’s love for Tithonus as an example of what can go wrong when mortals challenge the limits of their meagre span of life: ‘I would not have you be immortal in such a way among the immortal gods and live continually so’ (239–40). The Propertian amator, in the poet’s second collection of elegies (2.18a.5–22), uses the same tale to admonish Cynthia, though his version underlines Aurora’s devotion rather than her folly: the poem

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Translation modified from Evelyn-White 1977.

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initially asserts an identity between Aurora and Cynthia, who ought to emulate the goddess in attending to her amator, whose endless flow of verse, in turn, makes him a likely Tithonus. The conclusion of the poem, however, strips Cynthia of her divine status by pointing to the inevitable future that awaits her, one that is more accurately reflected in the decrepit Tithonus than in the Auroran puella (2.18a.17) who attends to him: cum sene non puduit talem dormire puellam et canae totiens oscula ferre comae. at tu etiam iuvenem odisti me, perfida, cum sis ipsa anus haud longa curva futura die (2.18a.17–20). [It caused no shame for a puella like her (Aurora) to sleep with an old man and again and again to bring kisses to his grey hair. But you hate me even in my youth, wretch, although you yourself may be a bent old woman in a day not far off.]

This book follows Propertius’ lead in reading Tithonus and Aurora as foils for the amator and puella within the larger corpus of Latin love elegy. I hope to demonstrate why the puella, while often assuming the unchanging immortality of an Aurora figure, must succumb to old age. Only after having reached her own telos is she able to propel her lover’s erotic, civic, and poetic maturation. The amator, while expressing anxieties about his future aging, challenges mortality through the permanence of his art: his alignment with Tithonus—who was by some accounts released from his suffering through transformation into a tuneful cicada11—ultimately confirms the power of song to outlive the physical form. The elegiac genre, as articulated by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid during the late first century BCE,12 posits an emphatically ‘young’ 11 For the cicada’s association with song, particularly the power of song to combat ‘old age’ (ªBæÆ) see Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1, 29–38; cf. Plato Phaedrus 258e–259d. Links between the cicada, old age, and song extend back to Homer (Iliad 3.150–152), where the voices of the Trojan elders are likened to the cicada’s song. The precise link between Tithonus and the cicada is more difficult to locate, though a later Homeric scholiast (at Il.11.1) mentions versions of the Tithonus myth in which he was transformed into a cicada; see Simpson 1976, 193–4 on Frazer’s edition of the (socalled) Library of Apollodorus. 12 Conspicuously absent from this list is the poet-statesman Gallus, who may or may not have been composing elegiac poetry during the 30s and 20s BCE. He was, of course, dead by 27 BCE; see further below, p. 15–17. I have also omitted from this study discussion the elegies of Sulpicia (fl. 10 BCE?), most likely the daughter of Servius

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(iuvenis) lover in a constant state of rejection from his nearly divine, but hopelessly fickle beloved. As various treatments of elegy have demonstrated, erotic consummation of the elegiac relationship, a relationship maintained primarily through strategies of delay, deferral, and concealment,13 remains ever receding from the amator’s view. The genre is the first in the classical tradition to offer a sustained focus on a single beloved whose maturity, while regularly denied over the course of several poems, or poetry books, is also clearly predicted as a point of thematic departure for the amator. Its unique status as such requires us to examine the relationship between a love story that largely resists teleological closure, and the temporal qualities that it assigns to its key players. Elegy’s loosely implied narrative scheme is described by David Konstan as one that cannot end happily, though the conventions that prevent such an outcome have remained somewhat elusive: . . . the poet-lover imagines a liaison with a woman who, like the hetaira in New Comedy, stands outside the marriageable community, and who shares with the courtesan certain specific characteristics such as sophistication, fickleness and greed . . . Erotic poetry depends upon a distance from the possibility of marriage, but the distance is not absolutely encoded in the status conventions of elegy. Thus, in the last analysis, it falls to the lovers themselves to take a stand against marriage, as Propertius does in the seventh poem of Book II. And the master plot of elegy has as its denouement not the conversion of the status of the beloved to that of a marriageable citizen, but her final rejection of the grounds of inconstancy (1994, 159).

The story of poet-lover and puella is not destined for the bourgeois complacency hinted at in the plots of New Comedy, an otherwise important forerunner to elegy’s configuring of lover and beloved.14 Sulpicius Rufus and niece of the literary patron Messalla Corvinus. Though beyond the scope of the present project, insofar as Sulpicia represents herself as an elite woman under her own temporal pressures (Corp. Tib. 3.14–15, 3.18), she offers useful comparanda for the pressures of time upon masculine subjectivity in the early Principate. 13 In particular, see the treatments of Pucci 1978 and Connolly 2000, 75–9; Kennedy 1993, 69–76 explores the genre’s mode of deferral as ‘ . . . a necessary space in which [the lover’s] discourse operates’ (74); see also Sharrock 1995 for elegy’s strategies of repetition and its failed attempts at closure, deftly illustrated by Tantalus’ ‘cycle of desire and frustration . . . and desire for that cycle’ (156) in Ovid’s impotence poem (Amores 3.7). 14 This is not to say that New Comedy always included a marriageable puella— plots often conclude by temporarily uniting an amator and his courtesan beloved; the

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In light of elegy’s failure to encode explicitly those conventions that prevent the genre’s denouement in matrimony, we might profitably examine how closure is bound to those temporal trajectories assigned to poet and puella. As a starting point for understanding the complex temporal matrix that generates a good deal of elegy’s narrative tension, we must identify the markers of birth, age, and social status that define the poet-lover and puella in relation to the other Roman personae that populate this erotic universe. No single model of masculine subjectivity rigidly defines the amatores of Propertian, Tibullan, and Ovidian elegy, but scholars have rightly noted a degree of homogeneity in their characterization: all three describe themselves as young men, perhaps of the equestrian class, born outside of Rome into families of—at least formerly—significant wealth (White 1993, 6–14; James 2003, 258; cf. Ov. Am. 3.15.5–6).15 As such these poets foreground their capacity for a kind of upward mobility that they will prominently fail to use. The elegists’ propensity for describing their erotic life as a kind of militia (militia amoris) directs us to interpret the amatores’ position on their course of life as an alternative to the stage of ‘soldiering’ that a more civically minded young man would undertake at the start of his career (Lyne 1980, 72). We regularly encounter the poet-lover comparing himself and his reluctance to progress on the cursus honorum (‘course of offices’) to more ambitious peers and patrons (Prop. 1.6; cf. 1.7.1–8; Tib. 1.1.53–56, 1.3.1–4; Ov. Am. 1.15.1–6). The status of the beloved has been notoriously difficult to determine, and we are misguided in looking for her precise extra-textual analogue in contemporary Roman society.16 For the purposes of point is that New Comedy, unlike elegy, does not assume marriage and love to be mutually exclusive. 15 Propertius claims to have only a ‘small fortune’ (parva fortuna) at his disposal (2.34.55), but also indicates that his family estate was once sizeable (4.1.129–30). For textual references indicating that Tibullus and Propertius came from families who suffered financially during the land confiscations carried out by the triumvirs in the 40s BCE, see Murgatroyd 1994, 7 and Putnam 1973, 3; cf. Miller 2004, 114. 16 The evidence concerning the social, legal, and professional identity of the puella is often contradictory, a fact that denies these characters any traceable connection with the real world, as forcefully argued by Wyke 2002 (revision of 1989), 11–45. The impossibility of identifying the elegiac puellae with real Roman women, however, does not preclude the puella’s engagement with Roman political and moral discourse. As Wyke concedes, ‘to deny Cynthia an existence outside of poetry is not to deny her a

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determining the textual life course of the puella, however, we cannot ignore references that mark her as unmarriageable, at least by the poet (Tib. 1.6.67–68, Prop. 2.7) or by members of the wealthiest, senatorial class (Ovid Ars 1.31–34, 3.57–58, 3.611–61). Moreover, the puella’s regular depiction as lacking any male kin or guardian, her frequent association with a lena (‘procuress, madam’), and her material demands encourage readers to identify the elegiac beloved as a courtesan-meretrix, whose course of life is not shaped by the wedlock that defines the future of the more socially orthodox matrona.17 A good deal of scholarship has rightly demonstrated the ambiguity of the puella’s erotic relationships. At the same time, she is clearly represented as unmarried and unmarriageable when the poet needs her to be, in particular, when he needs to situate her in a space segregated from social and familial entanglements or to threaten her with a lonely, impoverished old age. These generic building blocks construct a very different experience of time for lover and beloved in elegy, a difference that I hope to measure with some precision. Accordingly, this study is situated in a body of scholarship, emerging since the 1970s, that seeks to understand the dynamics of gender and power in love elegy.18 Miller and Platter (1999, 405) have perhaps most succinctly designated two competing ideologies regarding the puella’s centrality to this body of literature: ‘the negative view sees elegiac women as completely mastered by masculine cultural discourse, while the positive view

relation to society’ (18). Gibson 1998 has drawn attention to difficulties in determining the status of the puella as she is depicted in Ovid’s erotodidaxis; on the intended addressee of Ars Three, see further below, pp. 215–18. 17 For the identification of the elegiac puella as a courtesan, drawn largely from the meretrices of New Comedy, see Lyne 1980, 8–13, Griffin 1985, 114–21, and Konstan 1994 (cited above), 157–9. More recently James 2003, 36–41 has demonstrated the puella’s courtesan status on the basis of her financial demands, which shape the lover’s persistent attempts to procure her sexual favours through poetry alone (i.e. rather than through material compensation). Miller 2004, 66 notes that Cynthia’s occluded legal status is critical to her function as a kind of ‘vanishing point’ in Propertian verse, one that ‘allows the other more defined shapes around it to have their form and intercourse with one another’. 18 Hallett 1973 should be credited with initiating the debate in her discussion of the behavioural norms that the elegists violate in their enslavement to, and aggrandizement of, the puella; cf. also, in the same volume of Arethusa, Betensky’s criticism of Hallett’s arguments, and in particular of Hallett’s use of the term ‘feminism’ to describe the attitude of the Latin love elegists toward their respective beloveds.

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detects in them elements of subversion that unsettle received modes of thought’. To understand fully how constructions of masculinity and femininity function in the genre, we must consider the role of temporality and its applications to the human life course: the life course and the milestones that guide it are critical tools that men and women use, often in very gender-specific ways, to make meaning out of their experience.19 As I will demonstrate, those same markers and milestones of human development play important roles in defining— often through temporal impropriety—the political ‘heterodoxy’ frequently identified in treatments of the elegiac poet-lover (Wyke 2002, 31–45): when Propertius’ amator claims to have fallen ‘late’ (sero, 1.1.25) for Cynthia, he implies that there is an appropriate window of opportunity for this kind of relationship, but that he has regrettably missed it.20 Such moments on the cursus of human life, however, also place inevitable limits on the lives of poet and puella as erotic subjects.21 We are left with little doubt about the beloved’s future, painted in shades of varying decrepitude, but her maturity raises the question of what happens to the amator along the way. While scholars have acknowledged how historicity and futurity, narrative delays, and nocturnal and diurnal settings play important roles in elegiac discourse,22 they have largely overlooked time in elegy as a specifically embodied concept; that is, time as measured 19 I use the term ‘life course’ in accordance with the definition given by Harlow and Laurence 2002, 3: ‘[Life course] encapsulates the temporal dimension of life that begins at birth and ends in death with numerous stages and rites of passage along the way. However, the life course is not simply a description of biological ageing. It is culturally constructed and need not exactly follow biological or mental development in humans’. Implying the role played by the life course in constructing a narrative of the self, they remark further that, ‘a person’s age within the life course sets out a position with reference to their past, and presents them with an expectation of future events’ (4). 20 Following the interpretation of Hodge and Buttimore 1977, 70, though some scholars prefer to take the adverb with revocatis; for further discussion of the line, see Chapter Three, p. 78. For a similarly ‘late’ experience of love, cf. the serus amor experienced by Ponticus in Prop. 1.7.20. 21 That is, inevitable from the amator’s perspective; as Ancona’s work has demonstrated in the poetic subjects of Horace (see further below), the erotic life of lover and beloved is in no way essentially limited. 22 For more general treatments of time in elegy, see especially the essays of Schwindt and Fabre-Serris in Schwindt (ed.) 2005, La representation du temps dans la poésie augustéenne; for an emphasis on time in Ovid’s poetry (the Amores, as well as his Metamorphoses and Heroides), especially nocturnal and diurnal settings, see also

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by a single, erotically motivated human subject, and used to organize that subject’s experience in terms of a past, present, and future.23 Using the concept of ‘embodied time’ I will examine two basic types of temporal representation in elegy: the dramatic situations in which elegy’s lovers find themselves—e.g. a puella awaiting her lover as a steadfast Penelope, or delaying his civic and military pretensions— and those properties the poet-lover uses to describe himself or his puella—e.g. he is a young man on the brink of adulthood, she is often lenta, ‘sluggish, indifferent’, rather than impassioned. Delay and haste, immortality and mortality, are but two of the temporal antitheses we find operating in elegy as a means of articulating the puella’s position on her course of life in relation to that of her amator. In tracking the embodied temporal rhythms of the genre’s key players, I detect an overall pattern according to which the elegiac puella offers her amator a means of arresting his development and delaying him in a condition of erotic stasis. That stasis, often signalled by the poetlover’s idealization of mora (‘delay’)24 and inertia (‘idleness, sloth, indolence’),25 is not unqualified, however, and the elegiac speaker capitulates to the linear demands of his life course by exposing the processes of aging in both himself and his beloved. That a genre so frequently disguised as autobiography should remain preoccupied with life’s passing phases is perhaps an easy observation. In the light of other contemporary first-person poetic discourses, however, elegy’s inscription of erotic and post-erotic life courses appears unique. The Horatian poet-lover, for instance, shares with the elegiac amatores certain rhetorical strategies that demonstrate time’s ill effects on erotic identity. As Ronnie Ancona’s treatment of the Odes has shown, this rhetoric in Horace’s poetry Montuschi 2005. Musurillo 1967 offers an insightful account of Tibullus’ use of temporal motifs (e.g. the golden age) as poetic devices. 23 Embodied time may, of course, be viewed as analogous to cosmic, or historical time, as ancient thinkers themselves suggest in assimilating the human life course to the life of the cosmos or civic body. In particular, cf. the tendency of Romans to measure the saeculum (‘generation’, ‘the present time’, ‘division of Roman history’, OLD s.v.1, 3, 7) in accordance with the longest possible life span of the Roman citizen (OLD s.v.5). 24 Mora has been identified as a valuable resource in elegy’s erotic economy; see esp. Pucci 1978 and Gardner 2008; cf. Keith 2001 for erotic connotations of mora in the Metamorphoses. 25 Inertia, of course, also implies a lack of ars (or ‘skill’; OLD s.v. 1), an ironic implication of the term that I discuss further in Chapter Four, pp. 88–98.

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frequently works to preserve the autonomy of the speaker, whose perspective simultaneously naturalizes processes of decay as they apply to the beloved, while distancing the poet-lover from such universal rhythms. By resisting critical approaches that sympathetically engage with Horace’s male erotic persona, Ancona’s work highlights the role that gender—that of both reader/critic and poetic personae—plays in structuring the lover’s and beloved’s asymmetrical relation to temporality (1994, 15). A similar asymmetry governs how puella and amator experience time and maturity at certain points in the elegiac corpus. As with the configuring of time in the Odes, gendered discrepancies frequently work to the advantage of the poet-lover. Yet, as I hope to demonstrate, the love story that elegy unfolds relies on properties of repetition and transcendence over linear time, frequently associated with the puella, that on occasion make her and the amator appear invulnerable to the threat of time: quanta ego praeterita collegi gaudia nocte:/immortalis ero, si altera talis erit, 2.14.9–10 (‘[nothing is] as great as the joys I experienced last night: I will be immortal, if there will be another one like it!’). Elegy largely deploys those properties to buttress a (non-) narrative that is, I argue, fundamentally concerned with amator’s resistance to civic and poetic maturation.26 In fashioning their delinquent poetic personae, the elegists construct a perspective that challenges the sort of generic evolution practised by other Augustan poets: witness Vergil’s carefully marked graduation from the Eclogues to the Georgics (4.563–66) to the Aeneid (cf. Geor.3.16–18; Mynors [1994] ad loc.; cf. Prop. 2.34.59–84). Horace too, if less self-consciously, offers an implicit poetic life course that evolves from satire and invective to lyric and erotic experimentation and finally to the practised and morally prescriptive hexameter Epistulae.27

26 For elegy’s narrative properties as well as the genre’s tendency to define itself in opposition to more traditionally narrative projects (epic, tragedy, history), see the collection of essays in Liveley and Salzman-Mitchell 2008. 27 I do not mean to over-simplify Horace’s poetic trajectory, which both begins and ends in hexameters (Satires, 35 BCE to Epistles, book two, c. 13 BCE). Odes Four, moreover, is a later work that explicitly acknowledges and transgresses the temporal proprieties assigning eroticism to youth (c.4.1.esp.1–12). My point is that Horace’s generic evolution sketches a plausible human life course and, in so doing, his voice becomes increasingly didactic and overtly concerned with the function of the poet among the civic body; cf. Conte 1994b, 312–17.

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Gendering Time

A look at the temporal posturing in a previous generation of poets confirms a similar degree of innovation in the way that the Augustan elegists handle the relationship between time and the evolution of the amator. The polymetric and elegiac poems of Catullus clearly acknowledge the pressures of time on erotic subjectivity. Most famously, poem five initially distances lover and beloved from critical old age (rumores . . . senum severiorum, 2), then capitulates to a linear trajectory towards death that connects all human experience: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,/nox est perpetua una dormienda (‘as soon as our brief light has set, we must sleep a single, perpetual night’, 6–7). Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid position their youthful amatores at a similar distance from old age and the proprieties that accompany it (Prop. 2.30.13–18; Tib. 1.1.69–72, 1.4.79–80; Ov. Am. 1.9.1–4, 1.15.1–6). Augustan elegy’s explicit demands on the aetas (‘age’ or ‘youth’) of the lover (cf. Prop. 1.7.7–8), however, provoke reflections on future projects and (resistance to) models of responsible maturation that have no place in the poetry of Catullus or the fragments of his amator’s affair with Lesbia. Aside from implicitly rejecting senex (‘old man’) status, the Catullan poet-lover does not use age as a principle for organizing his erotic experience: the speaker never explicitly identifies himself as a iuvenis, and the only references to young men—as iuvenes or adulescentes— emerge in the less ostensibly ‘subjective’28 epithalamia (61.56; 62.1, 5), Attis poem (63.63), epyllion (64.58, 78), and the epigram on Quintus and Caelius, who are described as the flos Veronensum iuvenum (‘the flower of Verona’s youth’, 100.2). In poem 68, a link binding past youth to former poetic/erotic pursuits proves a point of departure for describing the present maturity that the speaker confronts in the wake of his brother’s death: iucundum cum aetas florida ver ageret/ multa satis lusi, 68.16–17 (‘while my vibrant youth was enjoying a pleasant spring, I had my share of fun’). This poem is considered a crucial matrix for the generation of subsequent erotic elegy,29 but 28 On difficulties of maintaining a distinction in Catullus between the subjective (erotic) poems and the more objective pieces (i.e. those in which the speaker is not identified as the amator), see esp. Putnam 1961. 29 Luck 1960, 48–50 is among the first to comment on the poem as a precedent to Augustan love elegy; cf. Grimal 1987, 253; Hubbard 1984, 41; most recently Miller 2004, 31–59 confirms the links between Catullus 68 and subsequent elegy by examining the split, or ‘schizoid’, subject position characteristic of both; see further below, p. 18.

Introduction

13

the implications of chronological and emotional aging that define the narrator’s perspective point to critical differences in the constitution of the Catullan elegist and his youthfully recalcitrant successors; that is, the Catullan speaker can have his cake (remain a lover) and eat it too (admit to maturity) without unsettling any stringently plotted cursus of expectations. Similarly, the designation of temporal proprieties plays a relatively minor role in the characterization of Lesbia.30 The terminology of female adulthood used to describe Lesbia, though clearly offering an elegiac precedent in her designation as a puella—itself borrowed from New Comedy—diverges from elegiac practice in its failure to limit the beloved’s identity to a presently youthful ‘girl’ or soon-to-be-old woman. While Catullus’ speaker evokes a number of beloveds in his poetry and uses a host of terms, indicating a range of social strata, to describe them—e.g. puer, puella, moecha31—he clearly indicates Lesbia’s status as mulier, a term often designating a mature woman as opposed to a younger puella and thus distinguishing Lesbia from the artificially young ‘girl’ of Augustan elegy.32 What emerges from the corpus as it has been transmitted is a curious concentration of references to a beloved puella in roughly the first half of the collection (c. 1–67) and the absence of the word in reference to the beloved in the second half, where mulier (rather than puella) is used in the elegiac poems.33 We are asked to identify Lesbia with the mulier in 30 The following remarks are adapted from Gardner 2007, where I offer a fuller account of the temporal properties that define Lesbia and distinguish her from the elegiac puella. 31 On Catullus’ terms for his beloved and the varied persons they indicate, rather than a single beloved, see J.K. Newman 1990, 326–9. Though we may assume that many of the references to a puella in the first half of the Catullan corpus concern Lesbia (e.g. 2, 3, 8, 11), that term is also used in a disparaging manner of women who are clearly not Lesbia (e.g. 17, 41, 43, 55). 32 On the use of mulier v puella, see Adams 1972, 248. For the use of mulier in contemporary prose (esp. Cicero and Livy), see Santoro L’Hoir 1992, 29–46, 77–99, who notes a disparaging connotation in uses of mulier (as opposed to femina). This is, of course, not to deny the Catullan poet’s tendency to idealize his beloved; on the Hellenistic tradition of deifying the mistress (as puella divina) in Catullus, especially in poems 51 and 68, cf. Leiberg 1962. 33 The linearity of the libellus, and the process of reading that it implies, has been debated. Though Wiseman 1985, 136–75 makes a persuasive argument for reading the carmina in linear sequence as they have been transmitted, Miller 1994, 52–77 outlines the difficulties of maintaining such a sequence and argues instead for the inherently circular and reflexively allusive nature of the lyric collection (cf. Janan 1994, 143). Skinner 2003, xxv–xxvi counters Miller’s aporia by arguing for Catullus’

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poem 87.1–2, where ‘no woman’ (nulla mulier) is able to say that she is loved as much as Lesbia. Catullus uses the term mulier twice in poem 70, which decries the false promises and infidelity of mea mulier and whose echoes of poem 72 strongly imply that that mulier is Lesbia.34 By contrast, Augustan elegy generally avoids the term. Tibullus uses puella in referring to Delia and Nemesis, or femina (e.g. 1.2.35, 1.5.40) in reference to women other than his beloved; Ovid never refers to his beloved as mulier, and uses the term only once in the Amores, in rather clinical fashion, to describe the mercenary nature of female members of the human species (Am. 1.10.29). Propertius’ occasional, disparaging use of mulier registers woman as a scorned and desirous, rather than desirable figure (2.29.9, 3.8.11, 3.11.49, 4.6.65). In his only direct address to Cynthia as mulier, the poetlover signals disillusionment and the end of his erotic project: falsa est ista tuae, mulier, fiducia formae, 3.24/25.1 (‘that’s a false confidence you place in your beauty, woman’). As observed above, the same poem closes by accelerating the beloved’s life course through a vision of her future as a destitute anus (3.24/25.36). For Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, the beloved must remain, at least for the duration of their affair, a young woman, untouched, when her desirability is asserted, by the ravages of time. Though Catullus’ invective aligns Lesbia with the common prostitute (58), he allows her to accommodate simultaneously maturity and erotic appeal. His amator makes no explicit correlation between increased age and diminished allure; nor does he resort to age-based threats—so often hurled at the elegiac

arrangement of the libellus as we have it. She asserts that ‘the sequentiality of the reading experience imposed by the mechanical act of unrolling the scroll would have created and sustained a linear dimension against which temporal reversals and fluctuations played in counterpoint’. As the opening remarks of this chapter indicate, I agree with Skinner’s account of the sequentiality of the ancient libellus, though such reading does not preclude other non-linear approaches to the text. 34 cf. c. 70: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle/quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat (1–2) and c. 72: Dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum,/Lesbia, nec prae me velle tenere Iovem (1–2). Miller 1994 remarks that poems 70 and 72 articulate a ‘double image of the same situation’ (61). Perhaps the most famous use of the term in Catullus is Attis’ ego mulier (‘I, a woman’) of 63.63. Though the poem is not one of the subjective pieces addressing the speaker’s relationship with his beloved, various critics have remarked that Attis’ emasculation (self-castration inspired by devotion to the goddess Cybele) echoes the Catullan lover’s own experience at the hands of Lesbia; see esp. Skinner 1997, 129–50.

Introduction

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puella—in his critique of her promiscuity.35 Thus, while successor puellae draw important elements from Catullus’ Lesbia, their restricted mobility on a temporal trajectory, within a poetic context obsessed with futurity, makes them uniquely vulnerable to the evolution (or devolution) of the erotic narrative. No doubt the poet Gallus, whose elegiac Amores were composed in the early 40s BCE, also contributed something to the Augustan elegists’ formulations of time and erotic subjectivity,36 though accurate assessment remains elusive because of the damnatio memoriae (‘erasure of memory’) that he suffered after being recalled from his command in Egypt (27 BCE), probably for overtly advertising his personal successes in the province (Crowther 1983, 1623). While the Qasr Ibrîm fragments of Gallus’ poetry are difficult to evaluate in terms of Gallan poetics,37 we may glean something of his use of imagery and elegiac topoi from Vergil’s tenth Eclogue, which, according to the commentator Servius (ad Ecl. 10.46–49; Crowther 1983, 1634), contains direct quotations from Gallus’ work. In the poem, Vergil defines spatial and temporal isolation—articulated here through the pastoral locus amoenus, but equally capable of manifestation in the puella’s urban boudoir—as a fundamental mise en scène of erotic desire, presaging most obviously Tibullus, but lending something to the other elegists as well.38 Vergil’s poem narrates the love of Gallus for Lycoris, who has left him to pursue a perhaps more lucrative relationship with a soldier on a military expedition in the Alps (10.22–23). Situated under a lonely crag (sola sub rupe, 14), Gallus evokes the sympathies of the natural world, characterized as an ahistorical and relatively unchanging 35 Poem 8.14–18 may hint at age-based insult, when Catullus’ speaker reminds his beloved of the lonely future lying ahead, but the poem lacks the emphasis on physical decay characteristic of later elegy. 36 Ross’ analysis of Vergil’s tenth Eclogue 1975, 85–106, as a kind of catalogue of Gallus’ poetry, provides an astute reading of its literary resonance and impact on Augustan poetry; see also Crowther 1983. 37 On the papyrus discovered in 1978, see Anderson-Parsons-Nisbet 1979, 125–55. 38 Papanghelis 1999, 51–3 argues, based on Gallus’ constant recourse to bucolic conventions and mention of multiple mistresses aside from Lycoris, that his love in the tenth Eclogue is somewhat unelegiac. Conte’s argument in 1986, 100–29, that Vergil offers two genres, elegiac and pastoral, along with the way of life each represents, for our comparative evaluation, adeptly explains the particular fusion of pastoral and elegiac modes in the text, though some of the corresponding oppositions—e.g. city v mountainside, Venus v Diana—that he proposes may oversimplify the matter.

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Gendering Time

environment.39 The rapid response from Arcadia’s mythological denizens and the landscape they inhabit, one explicitly lacking ‘delay’ (vobis . . . neque Pindi/ulla moram fecere, 12), balances and underscores the stasis envisioned by Gallus as he seeks comfort in the soothing power of his erotic verse (meos amores, 53): hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,/hic nemus; hic ipso tecum consumerer aevo, 42–3 (‘here are the cool fountains, here the gentle meadows, Lycoris, here is the grove; here my life would be spent with you through time alone’). Gallus emphatically (hic . . . hic . . . hic) associates bucolic space with a conception of time divorced from history. As Page notes (1963: 175) ipsum aevum refers to ‘time alone’ as separate from the other disturbances of the civilized world that will cause them to grow old. While aevum may refer to the natural course of a human life, it is also used of an indefinite, or eternal, span of time, especially in contrast with tempus, which more often refers to specific moments in the path of temporal progress (OLD, s.v. tempus 1a-b). The speaker’s revision of time in the bucolic realm is subtle, for Gallus and Lycoris are still subject to death and the natural processes of decay that accompany old age. And yet this severing of time from history anticipates the distinction between time in its linear aspects and a more repetitive, static notion of time so well articulated by the Augustan elegists, a distinction made clearer in the lines that follow: nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis/tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes (44–45, ‘Now a mad desire for hard warfare detains me in arms, amidst javelins and hostile enemies’). Nunc quite abruptly brings a new awareness of historical reality, of those specific moments in time that lacked relevance in the bucolic realm. Gallus presents the binding entanglements of military and erotic obligations as the antithesis of his locus amoenus and the freedoms it offers.

See James 2003 for the unchanging character of the pastoral realm: ‘a place where history and politics do not exist, where the passage of time is suspended in the eternal, seasonal activities of farming and herding life, wherein life changes little from one decade to the next’ (216). Conte 1986 also addresses the ‘negation’ of history that characterizes pastoral poetry (128–9), though in my opinion, he overstates its antithesis to elegy, a genre he sees as representative of both the city and historical time. In fact, as I argue throughout this study, historical time is antithetical to the desires of the elegiac poet-lover, though he may voice that opposition, and thus recognize the impact of historical time, more often than the singers of bucolic poetry. See also Veyne 1988, 101–15 who remarks on the fundamental similarity between pastoral and elegiac poetry, both of which are staged in self-consciously fictive worlds. 39

Introduction

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Gallus’ attempts to master the natural world around him through hunting (56)40 and transferring the conventions of war into a pastoral setting (59–60) suggest his ultimate inability to find satisfaction in a space segregated from the pressures and privileges of historical time. When we compare Gallan thematics, as indicated here, with those that define elegy over a decade later, what seems missing from Gallus’ scheme of time, if I may speculate briefly, is an addressee or patron whose civic participation is written into elegy as a foil for the truant poet-lover.41 This omission is all the more pronounced if we are tempted by critical approaches that encourage us to read the life of the statesman-soldier Gallus into representations of his amator. For Gallus, so the story goes, managed his life on the Roman cursus with an unlikely and ultimately dangerous success altogether alien to the ethos of Augustan elegy.

II. THE AMATOR IN CONTEXT By making the case that elegy relies on a sense of inherited temporal norms that the genre will alternately contest—by representing the lover as resistant to the exigencies of time—or confirm—by demonstrating capitulation to the demands of maturity—I am re-grounding the study of elegy in the socio-historical context of the Augustan Principate. In doing so, I offer a response to a good deal of postmillennial work on elegy that has examined the sorts of extra-textual realities influencing the flourishing and abrupt demise of the genre.

40

For the elegiac convention of hunting as either a means to or a remedy against elegiac love, see Conte 1986, 117–22, who traces the ego venabor motif to Gallus, while acknowledging that the initial impulse is derived from Phaedra’s speech at Eur. Hip. 215–21. 41 The Qasr Ibrîm fragment, however, does contain a reference in the vocative to Caesar, who is described as maxima Romanae pars . . . historiae (‘the greatest part of Roman history’). It is tempting to see in the fragment, which dates to the 20s BCE, the same dynamic between highly motivated patron/addressee and teleologically crippled poet, who mentions Lycoris’ nequitia ‘bad behaviour’ in the same lines. As Anderson, Parsons, and Nisbet remark 1979, 141, a contrast between the speaker-poet and a more socially elevated friend is common to a good deal of Roman verse, not elegy alone, but the tension between a poet hindered by erotic maladies and a patron who has successfully advanced through the course of historical time is particularly elegiac (cf. Prop. 1.6.34, 2.1.16; cf. Tib. 1.3.1–4).

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Sharon James (2003, 213), in concluding her excursus on the docta puella (‘learned girl’) in elegy, expands on the significant impact that Augustan moral and marital legislation had on the lives of Rome’s freeborn citizens. She argues that the puella, as an unmarriageable courtesan, provided a relatively unregulated arena for poetic discourse, since she falls ‘below the radar of inquisitive and intrusive public notice’. James’ interpretation of the puella as an alternative, however temporary, to marital life marked by increased surveillance is critical to the way that this project identifies the a-teleological allure of the courtesan to her truant amator. Lacanian readings of the genre, notably those of Paul Allen Miller (2004) and Micaela Janan (2001), have also looked to the Roman cultural context as generating the peculiar contradictions that define the amator’s relationship to a civically engaged way of life. Such readings proceed from a premise that every discursive arena is regulated by the Symbolic; that is, by the realm of rules, codes, and shared semiotic systems available for articulating experience (Miller 2004, 5).42 Miller defines the elegiac subject position as inherently split or ‘schizoid’, reflecting the subject’s inability to reconcile those categories available for defining experience within the Roman Symbolic (e.g. gloria, virtus, servitium, libertas) with the view he has of himself (‘how we picture ourselves to ourselves’, i.e. Lacan’s Imaginary [Miller 2004, 5]). This failure of identity, a failure of meaning to cohere, originates from a crisis in the Roman ‘Real’, or, put differently, a crisis in the historical circumstances in which the elegists found themselves; namely, a difficult transition from Republic to Principate. Similarly, Janan, refocusing the lens of Lacan’s divided subject on Propertius’ fourth book, considers Augustus’ attempts to reconcile the contradictions that had increasingly defined what it meant to be a Roman citizen—for instance, the status of Romans as both foreigners (descendants of the Trojan Aeneas) and native Italians (Romulus’ progeny): ‘Assuredly some, if not all, of these contradictions existed before the principate and endured afterward, but the tensions they exert on Romanitas are greatly dramatized and hence the more forcibly impressed upon Rome’s consciousness precisely

42

I have followed convention in capitalizing the Lacanian Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary in part to distinguish Lacan’s usage from that of Julia Kristeva, whose concept of the ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ is discussed further below, pp. 21–6.

Introduction

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through the principate’s brave but futile attempts . . . to reconcile them out of existence’ (2001, 6).43 My own approach to the issue of elegy’s unique flowering during the Augustan Principate also confronts the representational strategies of the amator as strategies born from contradiction, but I am concerned primarily with the speaker’s equivocations toward coming-ofage and assuming the identity of a Roman adult vir (‘man’). As such, my approach recognizes the importance of a life course in organizing a narrative of the self. Extra-textual ideals concerning the Roman life course—proprieties that govern the assumption of the toga virilis (‘toga of manhood’), entrance into the cursus honorum, and retirement from public life—offer a template, a series of expectations for the future, that the elegiac amatores will more or less reluctantly subvert. Part One of this book (‘Arrested Development’, Chapters Two to Five) chronicles the process of that subversion by first identifying temporal prescriptions in the Augustan Symbolic and then demonstrating how the elegiac amatores confound or confirm those prescriptions. More precisely, Chapter Two examines how the temporal proprieties governing the lives of the Romans who inspire elegy’s dramatis personae—young elite male, marriageable elite woman, unmarriageable courtesan—were transformed during the early Principate. Augustus’ manipulations of both the individual life course, and the life course of the Roman state—e.g. through revision and inscription of various fasti, or ‘calendars’—have remained an object of interest to scholars over the last thirty years (esp. Wallace-Hadrill 1987, 2008; Feeney 2007).44 This chapter considers the impact of those

43

For an earlier attempt to read elegy as a response to social and legal impositions of the Augustan regime, see della Corte 1982, who focuses in particular on Ovid and the marriage legislation. Other noteworthy attempts to ground elegy in its sociohistorical context I will address as their pertinent arguments arise. In particular, I am indebted to Trevor Fear’s essay 2005 and address it in Chapters Two and Three; this piece is part of a larger collection edited by Ancona and Greene 2005, which uses a range of theoretical approaches to address further the question of elegy’s social, material, and cultural contexts, though the articles address Latin erotic poetry, more broadly defined, rather than confining discussion to the elegiac couplet. 44 Wallace-Hadrill discusses three temporally focused enterprises of Augustan image-making: the Princeps’ commissioning of the triumphal fasti on the Parthian arch, his positioning of the Horologium in the Campus Martius, and his salient presence on the fasti of civic and religious days at Praeneste. The argument of Harlow and Laurence 2002, 111–16, regarding the link between Octavian’s entrance into

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Gendering Time

manipulations on the elite male in particular: not only are the liaisons of erotic elegy most often focalized through his perspective, but it is his life’s trajectory, as represented in the wider arena of Roman discourse, that appears most vulnerable to changes in civic expectations, both those expectations written into legal discourse and the less tangible pressures effected by transforming models of masculinity. After establishing the discursive context from which elegy’s emphasis on youthful defiance and prolonged involvement with a courtesanpuella emerged, I turn in Chapters Three to Five to demonstrate how each elegist adopts and modifies a pose of resistance to teleological progress. Each chapter addresses a set of literary conventions that define the temporal proprieties governing erotic life, and then demonstrates the amator’s alternative failure and success at observing those proprieties: Chapter Three, ‘Taming the Velox Puella’, focuses on the implications of tardus amor (‘slow love’) as it applies to the Propertian poet-lover and Cynthia, both of whom are implicitly measured against the addressee Tullus as an embodiment of ideal maturation. Chapter Four, ‘Two Senes: Delia and Messalla’, examines the sequence of Delia poems in Tibullus’ first libellus and argues that predictions of the beloved as a poor ‘old woman’ (senex, 1.6.77–82) and of Messalla as a venerable senex-progenitor (1.7.56) undermine the speaker’s initial posture of erotic inertia and indicate his commitment to timely maturation. Finally, I examine the Ovidian recusatio, a poetic refusal to sing patriotic verse, as a delaying strategy par excellence. Chapter Five, ‘Ovid: Elegy at the Crossroads’, argues that by conjuring a literary tradition that positioned young Hercules in the process of coming-ofage, during which he must choose a life of vice or virtue, Ovid makes explicit the relationship between elegy’s youthfully recalcitrant amator and the temporal imperatives of the Principate.

III. UNVEILING AURORA: FROM PUELLA RELICTA TO PUELLA ANUS The second part of this book shifts its temporal focus from the amator to his beloved who, in her finest moments, enables the poet-lover to

public life at the age of nineteen and the lowered age of responsibility for the Roman male, is discussed further in Chapter Two, pp. 52–3.

Introduction

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actualize both an ideal of inertia and the repeated engagements in the space of her boudoir upon which such inertia depends. While locating the capacity for such an ideal in the puella, and gendering it accordingly, is unique to the genre, our elegists do not construct a fantasy of inert, static existence ex nihilo. In his thorough account of Roman temporal schemes, Dennis Feeney demonstrates the peculiar nature of Rome’s preoccupation with the Golden Age as a kind of atemporal existence before the rupture that marks the advent of the Iron Age and its concomitant historical progress (2007, 109).45 Late Republican and early Imperial poetic discourses address this aetas (again ‘age’, but also ‘era’ or ‘epoch’) with varying degrees of ambivalence, since the Golden Age lacks both the technological advances and moral impediments of human ars. All these discourses, however, reflect a shared Roman interest in the ‘time’ before time, along with the possibility of its renewal and its fulfilment—or failure to fulfil— the conditions of human happiness. I would suggest that elegy, while also deploying the rhetoric of an aurea aetas (Tib.1.3.35–50; Ov. Ars 2.277–78, 3.113–114; cf. Am. 2.11.1–6), more often looks for a space of pre-temporal plenitude in the figure of the beloved puella, who, at least in her more Aurora-like visage,46 can hold out the promise of unbroken eternity. While the first part of this book cannot overlook the frequent positioning of the puella vis-à-vis her resistant lover, Part Two (Chapters Six to Eight) focuses more intensely on the life course of the puella and asks how we may best describe and account for the temporal properties that the poet-lover applies to her. Such temporal attributes may be explained in part, I argue, by the concept of women’s time articulated by Julia Kristeva, a student of Lacanian psychoanalysis and leading figure of French feminist theory. Her theory severs the traditional coincidence of space and time, aligning the female subject with the spatial and generative properties of the chora: Kristeva uses the chora, appropriated from Plato’s Timaeus, to ground the subject’s experience of language in the material body and locate the origins (or ‘place’, åæÆ) of an individual’s pre-linguistic 45 That is, Rome is peculiar in articulating the concept of a pre-lapsarian existence temporally, through ages, rather than spatially or racially, as in, e.g. Hesiod; Feeney 2007, 110–18 and 262 n. 38. 46 Propertius has the greatest tendency to mythologize and apotheosize his beloved’s beauty, e.g. 1.2.15–22, 2.2.3, 3.10.17, but cf. also Ov. Am. 1.3, 1.5.8–12.

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drives; Kristeva describes these drives as those ‘semiotic’ properties of language that must experience differentiation and regulation in order to produce signification (RPL, 93–98; Moi 1985, 161–162).47 The semiotic chora is emblematic of female subjectivity primarily in terms of positionality; that is, its capacity to indicate that which is marginal to the symbolic order (analogous to Lacan’s Symbolic), but necessary for the very production of that order (Moi 1985, 166). In contrast, she characterizes masculine subjectivity by the linear properties associated not only with the movement of historical time, but with the symbolic components of language, including the syntactical properties that govern the process of signification. Kristeva describes women’s time as, on the one hand, elided with spatiality and transcendent of historical time; on the other hand, drawing on the biological and generative aspects of female subjectivity, she names cyclicality, repetition, and indeed the lack of ‘teleonomic’ potential (sans faille et sans fuite, 1979, 7) as characteristic of women’s time.48 I have already suggested how such temporal modalities, and their association with the elegiac puella, can explain the thwarted progress of the Propertian amator in books one to three of his poetic project. The Kristevan model also articulates the advantages of those modalities to a poet-lover confronted with new pressures driving his civic maturation: As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilization. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality, whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and

47 For Kristeva, language’s semiotic qualities escape signification, but are felt through the material properties of discourse—primarily, discourse as speech: vocal or kinetic rhythm, repetition, sound combinations, etc.; see Roudiez 1984, 5–6 and further below, pp. 147–8. The chora is a concept that Kristeva articulates in her doctoral dissertation, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), which was translated into English (notably by M. Waller in 1984) as Revolution in Poetic Language. Excerpts of Waller’s translation have since then appeared in various anthologies of Kristeva’s work, including Moi 1986, the text I frequently make use of in this discussion (= RPL). When referring to portions of Revolution in Poetic Language not included in Moi’s excerpt, I have followed Kristeva 1984 (Waller’s translation). 48 The term teleonomy was coined by Colin Pittendrigh to describe the ‘property, common to all living systems, of being organized toward the attainment of ends’ (Fraser 1999, 16).

Introduction

23

unison with what is experienced as extra-subjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance. On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is a massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word ‘temporality’ hardly fits . . . (WT, 191).

While this particular scheme ties women’s time to biological rhythms as a way of accounting for the position of women vis-à-vis the symbolic order, Kristeva recognizes that this concept of time is not essentially feminine, and not ‘incompatible with “masculine” values’ (WT, 192). Indeed, Roman idealization of a returned Golden Age, perhaps most pronounced in Vergil’s fourth Eclogue, relies on a cyclical structure of time that could be readily harnessed and granted a new telos in the service of an emerging Principate.49 What is critical for the antimony that Kristeva sketches and for elegy’s articulation of temporal modes, is the way that this defining cyclicality and lack of teleology are constructed as offering a site for jouissance—loosely translated as ‘enjoyment’50—and an alternative to the cursive processes and outcomes, those moments of cleavage and escape, that define the time of history. Kristeva is by no means the first or only thinker to articulate the different experiences of men and women in terms of time and space. The positing of a spatially immobile wife in contradistinction to her teleologically driven husband is as old as Homer’s Odyssey. As noted above, Kristeva draws from Nietzsche the notion of historical or ‘cursive’ time, as well as his concept of a ‘monumental’ time that is elided with spatiality and exists above and beyond historical time

49

On Augustus’ use of golden age imagery in solidifying his power, see esp. Zanker 1990, 167–210 and Galinsky 1996, 93–100. The cyclical and repetitive nature of the calendar would also prove a useful tool for the first Princeps; cf. Feeney 2007, 184–93. 50 In Lacanian terms, jouissance denotes a subject’s (unconscious) experience of a state of plenitude posited as existing before the subject’s break with the maternal body; this re-union with the Real would, of course, ultimately annihilate subjectivity, since, in order to be a subject, one must experience division from the Real; cf. Janan 2009, 39. Lacan explores the concept in depth in Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore (available in English as Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, B. Fink, trans.). Kristeva 1979, 13 sees the late twentieth century pursuit of jouissance manifested in various forms of social and political marginalization.

24

Gendering Time

(WT, 189); she cites Joyce in commenting on traditional associations of women with generative space, and men with linear time.51 What Kristeva adds to our understanding of this model of time as it applies to masculine and feminine subjectivity is a careful account of the model’s psychological implications. Such implications are important for recognizing the peculiar pleasure that ‘women’s time’ offers to our elegiac amatores, whose cyclic liaisons with the puella are selfconsciously staged outside the cursory projects of history. Kristeva’s theorizing of gender and time also points to the political repercussions of any attempt to remain outside of linear time. Her rendering of ‘Le Temps des Femmes’ is constructed in part as a meditation on the relationship between first-wave feminism, with political equality as a fundamental goal, and in some degree successful at integrating women within linear temporality, and post-1968 feminism, which questioned the values and power relations upon which linear time depends. Her scheme is thus motivated by a particular cultural and historical imperative: proposing a ‘third attitude’ for European women to adopt with regard to sexual difference (WT, 209). The elegists’ assignation of gendered temporal properties— and their shifting applications to lover and beloved—may also be understood as politically motivated, in so far as such properties are offered as an alternative way of constructing subjectivity at the birth of the Principate.52 As I will demonstrate in Chapter Six, ‘The Waiting Game’, Kristeva’s association of female subjectivity with confined space helps account for the circularity and repetition that defines the puella’s experience in elegy, as well as the allure and political impact of such 51 WT, 189–90. Cf. William Blake’s famous dictum, from A Vision of the Last Judgment, included in Gilchrist et al. Life of William Blake: ‘But Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female; Time is a man, Space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death’ (1880, 186). For a more recent approach to the metaphorical associations between women and space, as well as those between men and time, see also Shlain 1999. Salzman-Mitchell 2005, esp. 67–116, provides a brief summary of such approaches and links woman’s spatial qualities with her role as a (passive) visual object, and one whose presence retards narrative progress in Ovidian epic. 52 For a defence of using universalizing psychoanalytic approaches to bolster investigations into the peculiarities of a given historical epoch, see Janan 2009, 17: ‘The transhistorical perspective of psychoanalysis is essential to assess [the conditions of the early principate] precisely because they are less than quotidian in human history. We cannot compare different historical eras without the background assumption of continuity. Were every phenomenon absolutely particular, it would be impossible to talk about, much less understand it’.

Introduction

25

temporal qualities. This chapter uses the chora as a conceptual model to describe the dynamics of assault and abandonment that frequently define the puella’s experience in the genre. My aim in so doing is to demonstrate how the beloved’s strikingly consistent spatiality plays an integral role in preventing her lover’s teleological progress, at least for given stretches of the elegiac (non-) narrative. The frequently abandoned puellae of the Ovidian Ars and Remedia appear as the most likely representatives of the a-teleological puella—Phyllis alone suffers abandonment by Demophoon on five different occasions (Ars 2.353; Ars 3.37–38, 346–450; Rem. 55–56, 591–608).53 Yet this poet’s systemization of and cure for the elegiac lament clearly relies on the ‘code’ and master-plot of prior elegy,54 in order to articulate convincing, if humorous, prescriptions to an audience of would-be elegists. In examining the elegiac puella’s various prior manifestations in the poetry of Propertius and Tibullus we will find that she exists in a similarly enclosed and regulated space: the boundaries of this space, metonymically figured through the puella’s limen (‘threshold’), are confirmed by pressure from an exclusus amator, the ‘locked-out lover’ who plays such a prominent role in the genre’s discourse of deferred pleasure (Pucci 1978; cf. Connolly 2000, 77). Alternatively, we confront a relicta puella (Prop.1.3, Tib.1.3), the figure I hope to explore in some depth, who anxiously awaits her poet-lover and ultimately casts off the timeless isolation with which the poet-lover attempts to envelop her. Indeed, belying the lack of teleological progress that Kristeva—and much of the western tradition before her—links to female subjectivity, we confront the spectre of the puella as future-anus, like Cynthia of Propertius 3.24/25, who is hounded by the relentless movement of

53

I treat the topic of the chora in Ovidian eroto-didaxis at greater length and in relationship to the narrative properties of elegy in Gardner 2008; see also Spentzou 2003, for a suggestive reading of Ovid’s Heriodes through the lens of the Kristevan chora, discussed further below, p. 152. 54 On the Remedia as exposing the ‘elegiac code’ and opening up the closed circuit of elegiac love, see Conte 1994, who examines elegy’s ‘code’—for instance, the genre’s requirement that the poet-lover suffer, but at the same time be reluctant to end his suffering—as well as Ovid’s exploitation of it (esp. 39–42). For Conte, elegiac tensions are generated primarily from the genre’s tendency to reinterpret cultural signifiers (e.g. militia, pietas) in a way that points to the discrepancy between the original context of a signifier and its new context in elegy (40).

26

Gendering Time

linear time.55 A more troubling side of woman’s symbolic capacity is hinted at, if not fully explicated, by Kristeva in her essay ‘About Chinese Women’,56 where she accounts for the curious distortions that mark the feminine body of Truth in Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s painting Time Unveiling Truth (c. 1745). The painting’s axis centres around the grizzled, masculine form of Time, whose scythe is laid on the ground as he attempts to hold Truth, who is perched serenely on his lap, but with her right leg where the left should be, thrust forward, ‘between herself and the genitals of Time’: . . . [In] this fantasy, where a woman, intended to represent Truth, takes the place of the phallus (notably in Tiepolo’s painting), she ceases to act as an atemporal [hors-temp], unconscious force, splitting, defying and breaking the symbolic and temporal order, and instead substitutes herself for it as solar mistress, a priestess of the absolute. Once it is disrobed in order to be presented in itself, ‘truth’ is lost ‘in itself’; for in fact it has no self, it emerges only in the gaps of an identity. Once it is represented, even by the form of a woman, the ‘truth’ of the unconscious passes into the symbolic order, and even overshadows it, as fundamental fetish, phallus-substitute, support for all transcendental divinity. A crude but enormously effective trap for ‘feminism’: to acknowledge us, to turn us into the Truth of the temporal order, so as to keep us from functioning as its unconscious ‘truth’, an unrepresentable form beyond true and false, and beyond present-past-future (1986, 154–55).

Like the haggard figure of Time grasping at a malformed Truth, the elegiac amator’s attempt to use the puella as a sign of temporal transcendence effectively reduces her to a prop of the symbolic order, who accordingly takes her place in the marshalling of present-past-future (du présent-passé-avenir). As she is represented, the puella would do well to avoid the allure of her lover’s divinizing rhetoric, a trap binding her to the consequences of linear time. Feminist theory, as articulated on both sides of the Atlantic, has long recognized the problems faced by woman when she confronts the symbolic order (cf. Moi 1985, 167). If woman can stand outside a

55 e.g. Tib. 1.6.76–86, 1.8.39–50; Ov. Am. 1.8.49–54, Ars 3.59–82; Prop. 2.18a.19– 20, 2.28.57, 4.5.59–62. 56 Des Chinoises was originally published as a monograph by des femmes (1974); in this discussion I use the excerpt included in Moi’s anthology 1986, 138-59, translated by Sean Hand, with occasional reference to the original French publication.

Introduction

27

realm of signs, symbols, and transcendent artefacts, she is also highly vulnerable to manipulation, as a symbol, within that realm. Although the elegists’ use of woman as a sign of temporal resistance frequently situates her in a flattering light, any symbiosis in the relationship between Time and Truth, poet and muse, is destined to fail. In Chapter Seven, ‘Aurora Unveiled’, I chronicle the deterioration of the elegiac puella in light of categories that link female subjectivity with the natural world and thus grant woman a perishable status denied to the masculine subject. Sherry B. Ortner, drawing on LéviStraussian notions of binary opposition, has famously documented the association of woman with nature. This association finds its counterpart in a similarly acknowledged link between man and ‘culture’, described by Ortner as ‘ . . . the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.), by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest’ (1996, 25; reprint of 1974). Ortner’s account of culture suggests the degree to which men and women differ in their experience of the teleological movement of time. Within the conceptual categories that she discusses, men are associated with transcendence and lasting artifacts, i.e. those elements that resist nature’s obstinate cycles of life and death. Women, by implication, are associated with those things that do not outlast a generation. Their generative powers result only in that which is impermanent: In other words, woman’s body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male, in contrast, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, ‘artificially’, through the medium of technology and symbols. In so doing, he creates relatively lasting, eternal, and transcendent objects, while the woman creates only perishables—human beings (1996, 29).57

57 On this point, Ortner acknowledges a debt to Simone De Beauvoir 1953, 58–9, who argues in The Second Sex that woman’s biological role in reproducing the species is devalued with respect to man’s priorities of ‘transcending Life through Existence,’ and effectively ‘shap[ing] the future’. In reprinting her 1974 essay, Ortner also includes a response to criticism of her thesis, especially her assertion of the universality of male domination; I discuss this response briefly (= 1996b) in Chapter Seven, pp. 182–4.

28

Gendering Time

The circularity associated with women in Kristeva’s model of time, viewed in a different light, becomes a sign of mortality and decay rather than eternity. By highlighting those identifications in elegy between woman and the elements of nature, we can better observe how the poet-lover has primed his puella for physical deterioration— a process that culminates in verbal and situational parallels that elide representation of the youthful beloved with that of the grasping and often sub-human lena. As such the puella’s life course emerges as uniquely vulnerable to her lover’s naturalizing rhetoric and is distinguished even from that of the otherwise feminized and also time-sensitive puer delicatus (‘favourite, beloved boy’). In contrast, the poet-lover’s journey toward senescence is smoothed by the resilience of his verse: he achieves the status of a cultivator-artifex and aspires to the sort of immortality that is perpetuated not through cyclical timelessness, but through creation of those artefacts that will outlast a single generation. In this respect, the poet-lover asserts his authority to determine Rome’s aitia (‘origins, causes’) and history, and lay the poetic ‘walls’ (moenia, cf. Prop. 4.1.57) that will secure the future grandeur of the state. Expectation, of course, often stands at quite a distance from fulfilment: the poet-lover’s limited success in the arena of greater literary projects, not to mention the tantalizing deferrals that programmatically shape the course of each libellus, suggest to my mind that the elegiac enterprise ultimately subverts and unsettles the dominant masculine discourse.58 By accelerating the puella’s life course and accepting his own quotient of maturity, the amator systematically demonstrates a failure to keep promises for generic evolution. It is elegy’s failed promises that are the subject of the book’s final chapter, ‘Departure Strategies’, where I argue that references to future projects, of both life and literature, are a means by which the amator raises the possibility of a reentry into Roman civic life. This chapter identifies a pattern of recantation and reversal that functions as a mechanism of closure in the poetic projects of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, and finds the poet’s expectations of generic and civic evolution thwarted by a morbid curiosity in the highly perishable body of the puella. The puella’s emphatic deterioration demonstrates her inability to provide a site for jouissance, an excuse for the poet’s lingering: as such

58

cf. Miller and Platter 1999, 405; see above, pp. 8–9.

Introduction

29

the thwarted telos of the poet—no longer an amator—must be interpreted not as a symptom of erotic proclivities but as a marker of civic resistance. Throughout this introduction I have used the terms ‘failure’, ‘inability’, and ‘reluctance’ interchangeably to describe how the amatores view their options for upward mobility. I have thus been guilty of the same evasions that our elegists practise in confronting the possibilities for evolution—generic, civic, or otherwise. This final chapter aims at sorting through the finer differences of capability and choice, and argues that volition, rather than talent, or even circumspect modesty, has everything to do with defining the elegiac ethos. As with Barthes’ mandarin, who leaves his beloved just before possessing her, the waiting game does not preclude elegiac success—it is precisely the point of the genre.

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Part I Arrested Development

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2 Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome ‘It is striking to see how the privileges of the old diminished and then collapsed all together with the decay of the oligarchic system . . . ’ (de Beauvoir 1973: 176, describing the advent of the Augustan Principate in The Coming of Age [La Vieillesse])

I. TEMPORAL NORMS AND ELEGIAC DEVIANCE It is a major premise of this study that the elegiac poet-lover shapes his discourse in a way that allows him to confront, explore, and challenge his own temporality as an elite male subject in the early Roman Principate. Before examining those operations within the elegiac corpus, we must look beyond it in order to determine why this particular group of writers may have been prompted to challenge the temporal exigencies that shaped their lives. In other words, to what temporal prescriptions in other discursive practices might elegy be responding? This chapter focuses on concerns about the proper maturation of the individual expressed in contemporary— i.e. late Republican and early Principate—legal, rhetorical, and poetic texts, as well as in histories documenting the Augustan period—in particular, Suetonius and Cassius Dio. I argue that the Princeps’ interventions in the life cycles of his subjects prompted the concerns of time, aging, and immortality so evident in elegiac poetry. Moreover, Augustus’ representations of his own temporal trajectory as both accelerated—in becoming a champion of Roman libertas at age ninteen—and beyond time—as a youthfully liminal Apollo figure—played an equally influential role in the amator’s depiction as developmentally resistant.

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Arrested Development

To demonstrate a temporally defined intersection between the particular ideologies of elegiac poets and other contemporary ideologies, I will outline variations in the prescribed life course of the elite Roman male from the period of the late Republic to the early Empire. I will focus primarily on the equestrian class, since it is this population with whom the amatores self-identify. The tendency of the elegists to evaluate themselves in the light of members of the senatorial class (e.g. Messalla, Tullus), however, also makes the expectations governing Rome’s most prestigious order relevant to the amatores’ representational strategies. The elite—senatorial or equestrian—woman’s life course is of interest to this study since the Roman matrona probably played some role in the characterization of the elegiac woman;1 more importantly, because it is women of this status that elegy often self-consciously avoids, a look at the future that awaits them helps us improve our understanding of the basis for such a disavowal. For the historical courtesan who more directly inspired the depiction of the puella we must contend with silence as our most eloquent testimony. We have little evidence for the life course of this figure, though discussion of the Augustan marriage laws, probably first proposed in 28/7 BCE,2 will point to legal classifications that 1 Griffin 1985, 1–28 and Hemelrijk 1999, 79–81. The work of the poet Sulpicia is perhaps the most convincing evidence for the impact of Latin love elegy on an upperclass Roman woman; see esp. Hemelrijk 1999, 146–64. Conspicuously absent from this cast of characters is the puer delicatus, who plays a significant role in the poetry of Catullus and Tibullus. The full stretch of his life, like that of the puella, is largely accounted for by silence, though it is worth stressing that a young man ceased to be an appropriate love object by the time his first beard was shaved (cf. Richlin 1992, 56; Harlow and Laurence 2002, 73–4). As Ancona notes in discussing the feminization of the male beloved in Horace’s Odes (esp. 3, 17–18), the puer’s fate is distinguished from that of the puella in so far as he might eventually assume the role of lover/amator (145–6, n. 2). On only one occasion in Augustan elegy (Tib. 1.4.27–38) do we glimpse any prospects for the adult male beloved, discussed further in Chapter Seven, pp. 186–9. 2 This is the date of a mysterious piece of attempted legislation (alluded to in Suet. DA 34, perhaps Livy’s preface to his history, and, most famously, in Prop. 2.7) that has been the source of much debate. For a concise discussion of the poets’ attitudes towards the legislation that moves beyond simplistic definitions of support or rejection, see Wallace-Hadrill 1985. For the moral and philosophical implications of Augustus’ marriage legislation, as well as its aim to buttress the floundering aristocracy and further the goals of Roman imperium, see Galinsky 1981. While Badian 1985 has argued that the lex sublata (Prop. 2.7.1) referred to an obsolete tax measure, the content of Propertius 2.7, which directly addresses compulsion to matrimony and fatherhood, suggests that the law bore heavy implications for the sexual and marital lives of upper-class Roman cives. For a point-by-point rebuttal of Badian’s argument

Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome

35

precluded the securities she might gain by marriage to Rome’s wealthier citizens. Evidence concerning the lives of these individuals points to widespread cultural concern about new temporal pressures exerted on a person’s life course and will, in turn, explain a certain frisson crucial to the elegiac code. To argue that elegy’s narrative tension is generated to some extent from its temporal deviance assumes on the part of its Roman audience a keen sense of temporal propriety, and an understanding that age was a crucial factor in strategies of self-representation.3 Cicero, through the wizened voice of Cato the Elder, naturalizes the change in political, intellectual, and emotional interests that accompanies the progress of age, which he describes as an unswerving cursus from boyhood to early adulthood to middle age to senescence: cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae eaque simplex, De Sen. 10.33 (‘the course [or “race course”] of life is fixed and there is a single straightforward path of nature’). This progress, suggestively described in language that evokes the course of a political career,4 reminds us of how easily civic and biological maturity could be assimilated in Roman thought. The ‘fixed’ (certus) and ‘straightforward’ (simplex) progress of aging, moreover, suggest that the attitudes and dispositions characteristic of each phase of life were thought to be rigidly sequential. By constantly representing themselves as young men, whose work is designed to appeal to the youth,5 the elegiac amatores indicate their liminal position, between the feebleness of boyhood and the sensibility of middle age, always almost ready to assume the full responsibilities of manhood.

see James 2003, 229–31, who reminds us that the marriage laws, as they eventually took shape, were not aimed primarily at replenishing the treasury or enacting moral reform, but at restoring a depleted population. 3 The properties that Romans—drawing partly on Greek rhetorical and philosophical traditions—attribute to the different phases of life have been thoroughly treated in recent decades; see esp. the monographs of Eyben 1993, Harlow and Laurence 2002, and Parkin 2003. 4 See esp. OLD s.v. 9, which, in defining cursus as the ‘passage’ of an individual, treats references to both life and career; cf. Cato’s subsequent comment on the middle life and cursus honorum of Valerius Corvinus: ita quantum spatium aetatis maiores ad senectutis initium esse voluerunt, tantus illi cursus honorum fuit (Cic. Sen. 60). 5 For representations of the elegist as a young man, cf. Prop. 1.7.8, 2.1.73, 2.18a.19; Ov. Am. 1.9.1–4, Tris. 4.10.58; for the elegist’s youthful audience, see Prop. 1.14.21; Tib. 1.1.65–66, 71–2, 1.4.79–80 1.6.17; Ov. Am. 1.2.2.

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Recent scholarship has stressed the youthful perspective of the elegiac narrator by either pointing to elegy’s tendency to deny the pressures of time and old age (Lyne 1980, 65–67), evaluating the discourse and its prerogatives as the expressions of a less mature mind (Eyben 1993, 184–91), or interpreting the genre, especially as manipulated by Propertius, as a kind of coming-of-age story, in which the excesses of youth are more or less contained within the closure of the elegiac narrative (Fear 2005). In describing the elegiac narrative as one of ‘liminal adult masculinity’, Trevor Fear suggestively positions such a narrative in the context of those cultural shifts characteristic of Augustan Rome: . . . elegiac discourse is both part of the soundtrack to the process and also an integral element of such a cultural shift. In this manner, issues of liminality and maturation seem to be fundamental Augustan concepts. The coming-of-age throes of the elegiac poet can be set aside the ‘maturation’ of Rome from republic to principate (2005, 26).

Fear’s proposal that the amator’s coming-of-age functions as both a soundtrack to the consolidation of Augustan cultural hegemony, and a metaphor for a state on the verge of adulthood is intriguing, if a bit imprecise. I will devote much of this chapter to illustrating how the dominant cultural paradigms regulating ‘liminality and maturation’ were significantly destabilized and redefined during the transition from Republic to Empire. Moreover, while all three approaches cited above provide some explanation of how the topos of the youthful amator functions in elegy, they do not fully account for the extra-textual social pressures—e.g. marriage, entrance into public life—that may have shaped the youthful bent of the lover’s rhetoric; nor do these approaches attempt to integrate a youthfully positioned narrator within a larger framework of temporal motifs—e.g. mora, tardus amor, inertia, immortality, the puella’s aging—that govern the progress of the elegiac affair. In what follows, I outline what might be described as a normative maturation for an elite male born in the years of the late Republic and focus on any changes in the process of coming-of-age that accompanied the rise of Octavian/Augustus. By doing so, I hope to convey more precisely the deviance of the amator’s temporal development.

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II. THE ELITE MALE Ideas concerning age classification in the Roman world varied greatly and have been well documented.6 The most long-standing age classification was the military classification, dating back to Servius Tullius, which defined iuventas as the period of life between seventeen and forty-six, since this was the appropriate age for military service.7 Because I am largely concerned with moments in the life course when the state imposed certain responsibilities, I begin my examination of the elite male at the start of this period.8 A removal of boyhood’s toga praetexta (‘bordered toga’) and donning of the toga virilis (‘the toga of manhood’) marked a young man’s entrance into military and public life, and ceremonially initiated the phase of iuventas.9 This term frequently denotes a transitional phase between childhood, designated by the term puer, and that stage of adulthood ceremonially marked by the first shaving of the beard.10 While, as noted above, iuventas could define the entire phase of life correlating with eligibility for military service, practically speaking, this period

6

e.g. see Parkin 2003, 15–35, Suder 1978, 5–8, and Eyben 1973, 213–38. Aulus Gellius (NA 10.28.1), citing Tubero, tells us that Servius Tullius first made the division of citizens into iuniores and seniores; cf. Livy 1.43. See Parkin 2003, 95–6. 8 While infancy and early childhood play important roles in shaping an individual’s character, these phases of life are of less interest to this study because they occur prior to recognition of an individual by the state as an active and responsible member of its community. Moreover, our ancient sources show greater interest in the period of early adulthood, particularly in the late Republic, when the loss of an infant was considered much less grievous than that of a young man. Significantly, this attitude changed somewhat in the Empire, when the political life of a citizen became less important and may have been replaced to some extent by a focus on family matters. See Neraudau 1987, 195–208 as well as Eyben 1991, 142. 9 Also referred to as iuventus; for iuventas, cf. Harlow and Laurence 2002, 65. Ancient sources of this period use both terms, though iuventus primarily refers to a collective body of young men rather than the period of life under discussion, see OLD s.v. iuventas 1, iuventus 1 and 2. According to Varro’s classification, adulescentia could also refer to the period of life a young man entered just after donning the toga virilis. In the larger context of the quote from De Senectute (cited above), Cato first uses adulescentia to refer to the period of life just after boyhood, and then speaks of iuvenis (ferocitas iuvenum) to indicate the same period, demonstrating the degree to which these terms were interchangeable. For the sake of clarity and consistency, I use iuventas in this discussion to refer to the early adulthood of the Roman male, but iuventus to refer to a collective body of young men, while recognizing that adulescentia and its cognates quite frequently refer to the same period of life. 10 On the shaving of the beard, see Harlow and Laurence 2002, 72–5. 7

38

Arrested Development

concluded with marriage or the entrance into public office, the former of which was especially viewed as a restraint to the licence associated with young manhood (Eyben 1993, 19–21). Deleterious as such freedom could be, it is consistently deemed in textual sources as a necessary phase of maturation.11 In giving up the bordered toga, a young man was no longer marked as someone in need of adult supervision, and was thus free to visit parts of the city formerly off limits, including the Subura, Rome’s red-light district (Harlow and Laurence 2002, 69; cf. Prop. 4.7.15–18; Pers. Sat. 5.30–38). That the term toga virilis (‘toga of manhood’) is often used interchangeably with toga libera (‘toga of freedom’) highlights not only the individual’s assumption of ‘free’ status—i.e. liberation from another’s dominion or potestas and integration within the citizen body—but also the initiation of unrestricted licence.12 Both the setting of the toga virilis ceremony and its implications for the young man’s experience as he prepared for the responsibilities of adulthood underwent significant changes during the period between the last half-century of the Republic and the foundation of the Principate. The ceremony proper occurred partly in the young initiate’s home, where he exchanged his bordered toga praetexta for the plain white toga virilis after dedicating his childhood bulla (an amulet or locket) to the household gods. From there, during the Republican era, the young man was led into the Forum (deductio in forum) by his father and, according to Vergil’s commentator Servius, concluded his procession at the temple of Capitoline Jupiter.13 The goal of this procession was changed around 2 BCE, after the Forum of Augustus was dedicated (Dio 55.10). While such a change in the ceremonial deductio, of course, could not have affected elegiac poets writing in the 20s BCE, it may be considered a more forceful demarcation of a change in attitude that had begun much earlier in the Augustan Principate. Harlow and Laurence stress that the revised physical course of the deductio brought about significant 11 See esp. Fear 2005, 14–17, who examines the licence allowed to young men as evident from Cicero’s Pro Caelio and Seneca’s Controversiae. 12 For political libertas as slavery’s opposite and primarily indicative of civic rights, see Wirszubski 1950 (repr. 1960), who emphasizes a fine but persistent line between libertas and licentia (7). A Roman male recently initiated into iuventas would no doubt have blurred the distinctions with some enthusiasm. 13 See Servius on Ecl. 4.48–9. For a description of the familial and civic aspects of the ceremony see Neraudau 1979, 147–9, as well as Harlow and Laurence 2002, 67–9.

Coming-of-Age in Augustan Rome

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modifications in iconography viewed by the initiate during this important moment of transition.14 The design and sculptural groups of the Forum Augusti articulated the lineage of the Princeps and his role as the inevitable climax of Rome’s history. Statues of Aeneas and Anchises, in particular, would have served as models of filial respect, or pietas, and thus shaped the young man’s attitude towards his own father, but also toward Augustus as the father of his country (2 BCE), as the inscription on the statue base, pater patriae, confirmed.15 Moreover, the Forum’s placement before the Temple of Mars Ultor—another symbol of filial respect insofar as it celebrated the vengeance won by Octavian for Julius Caesar’s murder—would stress the new citizen’s role as a warrior for the state.16 The temple conveyed an important ideological directive to the young initiate since, as Yavetz (et al.) have argued, among freeborn (ingenui) citizens, enrolment in the army had steadily declined since the late Republic.17 This revision in the ceremony that ushered in maturity for elite young men appropriately crowns a series of youth-directed initiatives that were undertaken as early as 29 BCE. Cassius Dio (fl. early third century CE) attributes the institution of various ceremonial roles and duties for young men in the same year to Maecenas, whom he has counsel Augustus that children of senators and knights entering youth ‘ . . . should turn their mind to horses and to arms, . . . [i]n this way from their very boyhood (KŒ Æ ø) they will have had both instruction and practice in all that they will themselves be required to do on reaching manhood (¼ æÆ . . . . ª ı), and will thus prove more serviceable to you for every undertaking . . . (52.26)’.18 Though various studies have demonstrated that Dio’s account reveals

14

Harlow and Laurence 2002, 67–8. On Aeneas’ role in the Forum of Augustus as a symbol of pietas, and his complementary pairing with Romulus, see also Zanker 1990, 201–10. 15 See Kockel 1995, 290; cf. Aug. Res Gestae 35. 16 Feeney 2007, 176 also notes a change in the recording of time associated with the temple: Augustus initiated the practice of driving a nail in the temple of Mars Ultor in order to mark every five-year period (or lustrum); this ceremony would be in direct competition with the Republican practice of ‘the driving of the nail’ into the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. 17 See Yavetz 1984, 8–10, who stresses, however, that the decline was largely among the ‘ordinary citizens, i.e. those involved in the real fighting’, rather than among the aristocracy. On reluctance to serve in the army in the Late Republican period, see also Toynbee 1965, 95–6. 18 Cary’s translation 1917, 141.

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more about the political turmoil characteristic of his own time than that of Augustus,19 evidence from other sources corroborates the notion that the Princeps and his advisers were particularly concerned with encouraging the participation of young elites in civic life.20 As early as 28 BCE, he forced young men of the nobility to participate in the Circensian games, and, most famously, instituted a spectacle involving Roman youth of the senatorial order known as the lusus Troiae, whose mythical origins were celebrated by Vergil in Book Five of the Aeneid (545–602; cf. Suet. DA 43).21 It would appear that the assumption of libertas and the toga libera, which once served to initiate the autonomy of the Roman male, were gradually redirected to serve the emergent regime.22 While the introduction of new customs to govern the maturity of the senatorial class would not directly impact our equestrian amatores, such customs inform the models of responsible youth—like Tullus of Propertius 1.1 and 1.6, or Messallinus of Tibullus 2.5—to which the elegists implicitly or explicitly compare themselves. Moreover, as likely members of the equestrian order, the amatores were in some respects more vulnerable to the air of reform that swept Rome in this period.23 Following Mommsen, various studies have 19 For Dio’s literary programme and its impact on his presentation of the Augustan principate, see esp. Reinhold and Swan 1990, who also note a general consensus that Maecenas’ speech ‘addresses the concerns of Dio’s age and class’ (170). 20 On the significance of Augustan measures concerning the iuventus and its relationship to his self-representation, see Yavetz 1984, 14–20, whose arguments further the conclusions drawn by M. Rostovtzeff, Romische Bleitesserae 1905 (cited in Yavetz 17): ‘Die iuvenes waren eine mächtige Stutze des Caesarismus’. 21 For the Circensian games, see Tac. Ann. 2.83; for the lusus Troiae, see also Dio 51.22.4; 54.26.1. Augustus also encouraged senators’ sons to familiarize themselves with administration at an earlier age (liberis senatorum, quo celerius rei publicae assuescerent) and wear the purple stripe immediately after assuming the toga virilis (Suet. DA 38). 22 Encouragement to civic participation was matched by increased surveillance of young Romans: Augustus prohibited beardless (inberbes) teenagers from participating in the revived Lupercalia, an early fertility rite (Suet. DA 31); he also required young men and women (iuvenes) to be accompanied by adults during evening entertainment at the Ludi Saeculares (‘Secular Games’, DA 31). Underage boys (praetextati) viewing performances (spectacula) were segregated and required to sit with their tutors (DA 44). 23 The recusatio (‘poem of refusal’) that opens Propertius’ second book may echo the discourse of reform in naming Maecenas as the ‘enviable hope of our youth’ (2.1.73–4, nostrae spes invidiosa iuventae), where youth, as many commentators note, can indicate the equestrian class; see Miller 2002, 186–7 for a review of the debate surrounding the phrase’s translation.

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emphasized Augustus’ efforts to incorporate the equestrian class in civic life.24 Augustus allowed young equites to bestow the title of princeps iuventutis, a title first awarded to his adopted heirs Gaius and Lucius Caesar (RG 14). He permitted knights over thirty-five to give up their public horses (Suet. DA 38.3), a concession that allowed younger knights to take their places as representatives of the order in public appearances (Taylor 1924, 160). In Dio’s account of the early Principate, Maecenas counsels Augustus to let age be no hindrance to a young knight wishing to embark on a senatorial career, providing that he has distinguished himself in military or civil service (52.25).25 Election to office—often temporally coordinated with marriage— was considered the final stage in a young man’s transition to adulthood (Eyben 1993, 8–9). At different points in Rome’s Republican history, the licence of youth was checked under legislation that fixed the minimum age for assuming the office of quaestor, the first post in the cursus honorum. During the last fifty years of the Republic, the minimum age for holding the quaestorship was thirty years.26 This position could be followed by a praetorship at thirty-nine and the consulship at forty-two, an order of succession confirmed by Cicero in his statements that he held each office (beginning at age thirty) ‘in my year’, i.e. the minimum age for holding that office (Cic. Off. 2.59, Brut. 323). Early in his Principate, probably as part of the great settlement of 27 BCE, Augustus established twenty-five as the age at

24 Mommsen 1952 (= Staatsrecht vol. III.1) 476–569, esp. 525; Syme 1960 also stressed the critical role played by the equestrian class in the foundation of the Principate. Yavetz 1984 cites both Suetonius and Dion. Hal. 7.72 in arguing that ‘Augustus relied heavily on the equites, and especially the young equites, and took great interest in the organization of the iuvenes, not only in Rome but also in other Italian municipalities’ (16). On Augustus’ attempts to involve the youth, particularly the equites, in state ceremony, see also Taylor 1924, 158–71. 25 In the same speech (52.20) Maecenas also cautions Augustus against allowing anyone to enter the senate under the age of twenty-five; such implicitly contradictory encouragements to the young perhaps reflect the author’s ambivalence toward the Augustan programme, though they also indicate the degree to which the age of responsibility was a contested matter in this period. 26 The lex Villia Annalis of 180 BCE ordained that a citizen could hold the quaestorship only after having completed ten years of military service, a process that, as noted above, usually began around the age of seventeen. Twenty-seven was thus the minimum age for holding public office until Sulla’s reforms during the 80s BCE; cf. Harlow and Laurence 2002, 104–7 and Wiedemann 1989, 119, on the effects of Sulla’s reforms.

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which one could hold the praetorship.27 After his marriage legislation was passed in 18 BCE, a young man could embark on his senatorial career at an age younger than twenty-five, if he had children and was thus eligible for the rewards offered by the law.28 This legislation, the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea, the first part of which was passed around 18 BCE, has been described as ‘one of the most prominent legislative measures of the age of the Principate’.29 More important for this study is the evidence that similar laws were attempted early in the 20s BCE (Csillag 1976, 29–30). Propertius’ poem 2.7 indicates that a negative response to them was felt in the 20s BCE.30 Less direct evidence of incipient moral legislation may be gleaned from Horace’s Odes, published in the late 20s, in which the speaker incorporates his indictments of adultery in such a way that they seem to be essential to Augustus’ realignment of the Roman state.31 As they eventually took shape, the Julian laws specified certain ages at which men and women ought to be married. While the originally required ages for marriage are unknown, we can surmise that they were somewhat similar to those outlined in Augustus’ later effort at legislation, the Lex Papia of 9 BCE: between 20–50 for women and 25–60 for men.32 The fact that elite men were exempted from 27 Harlow and Laurence 2002, 114, remark that the change occurred in 27 BCE, but there is some uncertainty regarding how the change was implemented. 28 Discussed further below, pp. 43–4. These privileges may have been allowed at an even earlier point (c. 27 BCE), as suggested by Dio 53.13, when Augustus may have first attempted to pass legislation to promote marriage and childbearing among the upper classes. 29 See Csillag 1976, 79; cf. Raditsa 1980 and McGinn 1998. Treggiari 1991, 61 n. 94 provides a good starting point for further research into the vast body of scholarship on the legislation. The designation Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea is more convenient than precise, since it refers to what were originally different acts of legislation: the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis and the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea. 30 For the debate surrounding the lex sublata of Propertius 2.7.1, see above n. 2. 31 e.g. Odes 3.6; cf. Garrison’s 1991 comment: ‘ . . . This ode, believed to be the earliest of the Roman Odes, recalls the period after Augustus assumed the office of Censor in 28 BCE, began the restoration of some eighty-two temples, and attempted by legislation to raise the standard of morality . . . ’ (304). Wallace-Hadrill 1985, 181 points out (contra) that Augustus’ pose of unwillingness (cf. Res Gestae 6.1) with regard to legislation in 18 BCE suggests he must not have been campaigning for moral reforms in the 20s. Galinsky 1981, 127 reminds us that the Princeps did not give up certain extraordinary ‘enabling’ powers (e.g. cura legum et morum) until 27 BCE, at which point his public image underwent significant transformations. 32 Treggiari 1991, 65–6; cf. Tertullian Apol. 4.8 on the rather illogical discrepancy between the two laws: he claims that the Papian law required children at an age earlier

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marriage requirements at roughly the same age they were exempted from participation in the senate suggests the degree to which family life and political life converged during Augustus’ Principate.33 Men of the upper classes, particularly among knights, voiced their opposition to such an incorporation of private life into the public domain on more than one occasion (Suet. DA 34, Dio 56.1). While these protests were based partly on the strictness of the laws, it seems that senators and equestrians also felt uncomfortably forced into wedlock with much younger wives who were engaging in ‘disorderly conduct’ with younger men (Dio 54.16). Other sources are less direct about the reaction of younger men to coerced marriages, though funerary monuments have suggested that a high percentage of the elite male population did take advantage of the political rewards for marriage and children.34 Those rewards included running for office earlier than the minimum age and receiving preference in positions shared with the unmarried (caelibes) or childless (orbi). Penalties against caelibes and orbi, aside from political disadvantages, came in the form of financial liabilities, insofar as the rights of these groups to inherit were restricted.35 To circumvent such penalties, elite men often attempted to forestall the time of their first betrothal—while still enjoying the rewards of married status—by becoming engaged to infant girls, a practice eventually outlawed by the Princeps (Suet. DA 34, Dio 54.16, 56.7). Judging from the space Dio accords to Augustus’ harangue of resistant bachelors (56), we can surmise that the measures were unpopular among a large sector of the population. This is perhaps a likely response to the frustration of having what was traditionally an extended and licentious youth, at least in terms of sexual conduct or ‘after hours’ entertainment, cut short by rather rigidly defined rewards and penalties. There remains a measure of doubt as to what extent changes in the prescribed cursus would affect Roman males who opted out of a senatorial career. And than the Julian law required marriage. The age limits discussed above were obligatory in so far as those who did not contract marriage accordingly forfeited certain property rights; see Csillag 1976, 83–6. 33 For an insightful treatment of this convergence, with a particular focus on the domestic sphere as a site of politics, see Milnor 2005. 34 Saller 1987, 29 supports Syme’s 1958, 64 conclusions that the incentives offered by the legislation were effective. 35 See Csillag 1976, 85, 159, on the status of orbi and caelibes persons; cf. Galinsky 1981, 128.

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yet cultural ideals as embodied in exceptional individuals indisputably shape the social and personal identities of those who fail to embody, or even reject, those ideals.36 Record of these measures has led various scholars to comment on a change in the perceived age of responsibility coinciding with the foundation of the Principate.37 Such conclusions are well supported by Aulus Gellius’ recognition of a gradual reduction in the respect accorded to Rome’s seniores beginning with Augustus’ marriage legislation (NA 2.15.1–4).38 The opportunities available to younger citizens as older men stepped out of the limelight hide a more sinister element of coercion, the very sort of pressure protested by the elegists. We can measure better the sea change in definitions of maturity by recalling the figures of the late Republic whose long, profligate youth also accommodated political ambition: Cicero’s description of Marcus Caelius—who was about thirty at the time of his trial in 56 BCE—is perhaps the most obvious example, though Valerius Maximus (fl. 30 CE) also describes a number of famous republicans whose lives are virtually divided into two parts owing to a dramatic change from loose living as a young man (cf. solutioris vitae, of Scipio Africanus, 6.9.6) to responsible patriotism.39 The men Valerius cites, often older than thirty before attempting to moderate their private lives, would become increasingly a thing of the past after Augustus attempted to control the population through channels of sexual, marital, and familial life. 36 As Mary Harlow 2007, 197 notes, even if a Roman male did not choose a political cursus, he could rate his progress through life based on the offices held by his contemporaries. 37 Other measures that point to a lowered age of responsibility are found in Dio (54.26), who informs us that in 13 BCE, Augustus began compelling members of the senatorial class under the age of thirty-five to become active members of the senate body and, at the same time, allowed ex-quaestors not yet forty to become tribunes. From Suetonius we learn that Augustus shelved the custom of calling on members of the senate in order of seniority (DA 32, 35). For modern scholarship on the change in the age of responsibility beginning in the Augustan period, see Harlow and Laurence 2002, 111, Wiedemann 1989, 119, and Parkin 2003, 66. 38 Sed postquam suboles civitate necessaria visa est et ad prolem populi frequentandam praemiis atque invitamentis usus fuit, tum antelati quibusdam in rebus qui uxorem quique liberos haberent senioribus neque liberos neque uxores habentibus. The sentiment is echoed in de Beauvoir’s treatment of old age, cited above. On the importance of the Gellius passage, cf. Parkin 2003, 114–15. 39 Val. Max. 6.9.2–6. Valerius describes men like C. Valerius Flaccus and Q. Catulus living a life of luxury during adulescentia, a stage which, in the Imperial period of our writer, could last up to age thirty or thirty-five. See Suder 1978, 6.

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III. MARRI AGE FOR ELITE WOMEN: FROM PUELLA TO MATRONA However abbreviated the period between iuventas and matrimony may have been for a young man in the early Empire, it was undoubtedly longer than that experienced by a young woman.40 For elite women of both the late Republic and Empire, there was no officially sanctioned period of iuventas.41 The prolonged designation of a freeborn female child as puella from early youth into adulthood suggests that a woman essentially retained her childhood identity until after she married and assumed the role of ‘wife’ (uxor).42 This single fundamental change in age classification for Roman women offers a telling contrast to the much more gradual and gradated experiences of young men. Though the experience of giving birth would transform the wife into a ‘mother’ (matrona) and often increased her authority within the family structure,43 there remains a perhaps not unsurprising lack of support mechanisms and rites of passage to help ease the transformation of the puella into an adult.44

40 Harlow’s comment on the male life cursus (2007, cited above, n. 36) is in fact established as a foil for the life course of the upper class woman: ‘An upper class male could rate his progress through life by the offices he held or those his contemporaries held . . . , whereas a woman was judged by two different criteria: the age and status of the man with whom she was most closely associated, and her stage in the reproductive cycle’. 41 We are aware of a few rites of passage for young girls, such as the Greek Brauronia festival, but none so public and well documented as, e.g., the toga virilis ceremony. See Harlow and Laurence 2002, 56–7 on the scarcity of evidence regarding female adolescence. 42 On use of the term puella and the more marked term virgo to designate young women, see Neraudau 1984, 51–2, who notes that puella could in some instances designate a married woman. For the use of mulier and femina to describe adult females, see Adams 1972 and Santoro L’Hoir 1992, esp. 29–46. Significantly, Adams 1983 notes a development from the late Republic on where the term puella refers to women past puberty, ‘who in the context may be treated as of easy virtue’ (346–7). 43 For the increased authority of the matrona, see Harlow and Laurence 2002, 84–5. 44 Hallett’s 1992, 343 comments on the absence of women in Cato’s discussion of the joys and challenges of old age in Cicero’s De Senectute remind us of the very limited conceptual categories available to Romans for articulating the life course of the ancient woman.

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Widespread epigraphic evidence from the western Roman Empire confirms a pattern by which Roman women married in their late teens or early twenties, a pattern that may have influenced the drafters of the Augustan law, which specified twenty as the legal age by which a woman should have borne her first child (Shaw 1987, 43). As such, Roman women experienced minimal change in this phase of the life course when compared with that of their male counterparts, though the Augustan legislation seems to have reduced the age gap at first marriage between a woman and man (Treggiari 1991, 402). This reduction no doubt would have affected a woman’s experience of marriage as it transformed what had been a rather asymmetrical structure, in which the husband’s greater age had traditionally increased his authority over his wife.45 At the same time, middleaged men entering their second marriages were more likely to choose a wife at the beginning of her child-bearing years and thus considered to be at the height of her attractiveness (Treggiari 1991, 401). Such a trend created a new set of problems under Augustan marriage legislation, implicit in the passage from Dio mentioned above (54.16), where male citizens complained about the presumably adulterous behaviour of much younger wives. While Dio states that the Princeps’ first reaction was for such indiscretions to remain private affairs, they eventually became criminal offences under the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis. This legal interference would significantly shape the marital experience of a young Roman wife, whose infidelity, prior to the legislation, ‘does not appear to have been viewed as a particularly grave offence’.46 Similarly, while a Republican woman widowed early in life could remain unmarried and thus enjoy a relatively unfettered existence,47 by the Augustan period elite women were expected to continue contracting marriages until the 45 On asymmetrical marriages, see Harlow and Laurence 2002, 81–4. Such relationships were, of course, still common in the Imperial period (cf. Pliny’s marriage at forty to the fifteen-year-old Calpurnia); these were most often second or third marriages. 46 See Hallett 1984, 237, who cites the relatively small portion of a woman’s dowry that her husband was customarily entitled to after she had been divorced for adultery. For sexual misconduct handled within the private sphere prior to the Augustan legislation, see also McGinn 1998, 141. 47 In fact, the univira—a woman who did not remarry, but remained a widow after her husband’s death—was an idealized figure during the Republic, and remained so to a certain extent during the Imperial period, despite laws encouraging remarriage; cf. Hemelrijk 1999, 14, 64 (on Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, as a univira), et passim.

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age of fifty. In such a way did the state define a woman’s reproductive potential and set a timer, so to speak, on her status as a sexual creature.48 It is in response to the deliberate pace of this timer, plotting its own series of insecurities and expectations, that we should interpret the elegiac amator’s avoidance of both coerced marriage and the elite women with whom such unions were contracted.

IV. A PLAUSIBLE LIFE COURSE FOR THE MERETRIX-PUELLA It is worth emphasizing here that, at least insofar as our limited sources attest, the life courses of women, especially in mid-life and beyond, are given significance primarily by their ties to men. As Mary Harlow’s recent examination of the later years of an elite woman’s life course has demonstrated (2007, 207), the two factors most often used to identify post-menopausal women are a woman’s social position within her family (both marital and natal), and her position within the inheritance network, in other words, her continuing viability as an economic agent. Whatever conclusions we draw about the social status of the puella as she is depicted in elegy, she is rarely contextualized in a patriarchal family network, and is never granted recourse in her later years to the mechanisms of self-identification described by Harlow.49 Moreover, the biting rejoinders of a lonely and impoverished old age spoken by elegy’s amator ring all the more clearly if we align the puella’s identity with that of the courtesan-meretrix, who has neither the comforts of familial network nor inheritance to shield her in later life. 48 Later Imperial marriage legislation defined an impar marriage as one in which the woman was over fifty and the man under sixty; see Cokayne 2003, 123. 49 For the puella’s ambiguous legal status, see Introduction/Chapter One, pp. 7–8. The puella is frequently linked with a vir, though this character is best understood as a paying customer rather than a husband (see esp. James 2003, 41–52). The puella’s male relatives are never mentioned, except to deny their existence (Prop. 2.18b.33–4). We do learn of female family relatives, see Tib. 1.6.58–9, 2.6.29–40; Prop. 2.15.20, though evidence points to the involvement of these women in the profession of the meretrix (Ov. Am. 1.8.91–2). Propertius 3.20.8 refers to the puella’s doctus avus (‘learned ancestor/grandfather’), though, as Camps has remarked 1966, 148, the epithet suggests nothing more than that the man was a freedman school teacher (cf. Richardson 1977, 398).

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As Thomas McGinn’s work on the legal status of prostitutes has demonstrated, the moral and sexual turpitudo that marked active practitioners of the profession would, with few exceptions, accompany them throughout their lives.50 Moreover, the Julian laws, which lumped together prostitutes, actresses, and procuresses (lenae) as infames, prohibited these groups from marrying freeborn individuals and thus made it relatively difficult for such women to rely on the lasting security of matrimony.51 Childbirth and the security provided by offspring were also risky since children could be an obvious indicator of age and such a stress on the body was generally thought to hasten signs of aging.52 It seems likely that the upper age limit for practising the profession corresponded roughly with the onset of menopause, when, as noted in the case of elite women, a woman’s sexual capacity was thought to be reduced and when the Julian laws no longer pressured a woman to bear children.53 As we shall observe, 50

McGinn 1998, 131 speculates that the wording of the lex Julia may have originally created a loophole by which prostitutes who gave up their profession by the time of the law’s passage could be exempt from such lasting turpitude. 51 Tituli Ulpiani 13.2. The statute is worth quoting in full: ingenui prohibentur ducere [corpore quaestum facientem] lenam et a lenone lenave manumissam et in adulterio deprehensam et iudicio publico damnatam et quae artem ludicram fecerit. On the provision and its supplementation by editors, see Treggiari 1991, 61–2. McGinn 1998, 94–9 handles the sticky legal problems regarding a prostitute’s right to inherit from a freedman husband, which existed in a very limited capacity. Interestingly, the law allowed unmarried prostitutes to inherit more than married ones, thus effectively discouraging such women from wedlock: ‘This disposition bears witness more to the testamentary freedom enjoyed by Romans . . . than to favoritism toward prostitutes. The idea was to discourage marriage: a prostitute stood to gain far more from a lover by not marrying him (if he were not a libertinus and the pair did not have children)’ (97). Dio (54.16.2) mentions a provision that allowed sub-senatorial freeborn men to marry freedwomen; cf. McGinn 2004. If a freedwoman had worked as a meretrix, however, any marriage she contracted with a citizen would mark him with infamia (Treggiari 1971, 197). 52 cf. Seneca Cons. ad Helv., 16.3, for childbirth bringing on old age. On this point, Ovid’s Amores 2.13–14, regarding Corinna’s abortion, are particularly relevant. See also Favonius’s speech in Aulus Gellius NA 12.1, on the hiring of wet nurses in an effort to preserve the decorative function of nipples. Juvenal compares lower-class women who have decided to undergo the difficulties of childbirth (hae tamen et partus subeunt discrimen et omnis/nutricis tolerant fortuna urguente labores, 6.592–593) with their wealthy counterparts who have avoided the experience through costly abortifacients (594–601). Evidence from New Comedy does suggest that, if a meretrix had attractive female offspring, she might profit from the child’s eventual entrance into the profession. See Rosivach 1998, 51–63. 53 We also find evidence that freedwomen, by the age of fifty, were no longer required to perform operae for their patrons. Such favours, of course, were by no means exclusively sexual. See Parkin 2003, 198.

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elegy regularly implies that the courtesan will end her life as a lena, or procuress, a figure for whom we find external contemporary evidence in a passing reference of Cicero as well as in the portion of the lex Julia et Papia cited above.54 While Ulpian’s comment (D. 23.2.43.6) on the law suggests that pimping and prostitution were equal in the eyes of the law, McGinn notes that moral opprobrium tended to weigh more heavily on lenones and lenae (1998, 136).55 Being legally defined as infames, lenae functioned as suitably despicable and mercenary obstacles to the wishes of elegy’s poet-lover. While the greed of lenae in elegy is surely a requirement of the genre, their diminished legal capacity for marriage and rights to inherit made the impoverished old age wished upon them an unfortunate reality.56 Though most of Augustus’ efforts at social and moral legislation were aimed at the elite, these laws had the effect of further marginalizing the class of infames, of which both the meretrix and the lena were representatives. More specifically, this marginalization was largely the result of laws preventing or discouraging a marriage that might have afforded some future security for the meretrix, whose otherwise bleak prospects make her literary counterpart a rather vulnerable object of affection in Latin love elegy. That same marginalization, moreover, left her reproductive role and life course, unlike those of the upper class Roman matrona, of little concern to Augustan dictates. Thus, as I shall demonstrate in following chapters, the meretrix-puella provides an ideal defence for the poet-lover who himself wishes to avoid embarking on a stringently plotted cursus 54

For the legal status of the lena, see n. 51. The word is not common outside of New Comedy and elegy; Cicero uses the term figuratively to describe natura in his Nat. Deo 1.77. For the puella’s future as a lena, see esp. Myers 1996, 4–6, and James 2003, 172, discussed further in Chapter Seven, pp. 207–15. 55 cf. Myers’ 1996 remark that ‘ . . . the lena is emphatically lower class, socially marginalized by both her profession and her gender’ (4). I would also add age to the list of marginalizing characteristics used to describe the lena. McGinn 2004, 78–111 argues against the notion of any distinct physical marginalization (‘moral zoning’) of brothels, but does describe, in addition to a deeply negative attitude toward centres of prostitution, a number of social pathologies—heavy alcohol consumption, brawls, etc.—that surrounded them. 56 Jurists appear, in many cases, to have elided their profession with that of prostitutes; see n. 51. On the disgrace attached to former prostitutes and the provision that ‘a woman is not to be excused who leads a shameful life under the pretext of poverty’, see Ulpian Dig. 23.2, Lex Julia et Papia, in Lefkowitz and Fant 1992, 118. McGinn 1998 notes that a procuress was not far behind the prostitute as a ‘least desirable marriage prospect’ (135).

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vitae—not entirely unlike Dio’s stubborn bachelors who avoided marriage through betrothal to prepubescent girls.

V. AN EXEMPLARY LIFE COURSE In a defence of new historicist approaches to texts, Stephen Greenblatt reminds us that one aim of this theoretical framework is to reveal the ways in which ‘the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with a collective, social energy (1992, 75)’. We should not view the elegist as shaping his verses into an aesthetic unity de nihilo (despite Propertius 2.1.16), but rather as an actor positioned where cultural practices intersect, and influenced by the various ideological and material bases available to him. Implicit in this reading of the artist’s relationship to his cultural milieu is also a critique of the politician’s relationship to the social order he is thought to govern. In other words, by interpreting the poetry of the elegists as, in some degree, shaped by the implementations of the Augustan order, we must be careful not to overestimate the autonomous agency of Augustus as ‘individual genius’. His own self-representation—or ‘self-fashioning’, to use the new historicist jargon—is indebted not to any Nietzschean ‘will to power’,57 but to the social mores and governing ideologies available to him, a pastiche of Hellenistic and late Republican cultural paradigms. This is not to deny Rome’s leading citizen the status of agent, but rather to stress that I do not view him as a master puppeteer, pulling the strings of the elegists one way or the other. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the life course that he celebrated—not entirely of his own making, though perhaps most famously expressed as the narrative crafted in the Res Gestae—was one which most Romans would have noticed and on some level measured their own lives against. In cherry-picking from the cornucopia of incidents that comprised his personal history, Augustus chose to begin with his prodigious rise to power at the age of nineteen:

cf. also Terry Eagleton’s 1991, 198 nuanced appreciation of how ‘ideology’ is disseminated among the populace as an endless process of ‘conflict and contradiction’ rather than by uncontested imposition of a monologic discourse. 57

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Annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi, per quem rem publicam a dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi (RG 1). [At the age of nineteen, I raised an army at my own responsibility and my own expense, with which I defended the liberty of the Republic, which had been oppressed by the dominion of a few men.]

In remarking on the introduction, Brunt and Moore raise a question: ‘considering the illegality of his action in 44 and his volte face in 43, when he combined with Antony . . . we may ask why he chose to record at all that he had raised an army in 44. In the Res Gestae omissions are common, and he was not obliged to start this way’ (1967, 38). For the commentators, the answer lies in the Princeps’ desire to present himself as a champion of libertas by assuming early in his account a role that he would be able to claim with more confidence at a later stage in his career. As Wirszubski has noted (1950, 101), Augustus would in the future have a number of successes which might have earned him the title vindex libertatis. For Wirszubski (103) the answer to the introduction of the Res Gestae lies in the Princeps’ interest in re-presenting what had been a patently illegal entrance into public life, in masking unorthodox conduct behind its ultimately salutary effects. Indeed, the lack of precedent for Octavian’s rise to power was something that the senate found rather difficult to circumvent. In his attempt to excuse and capitalize upon the gumption of this nineteenyear-old adulescens, Cicero transforms him into a kind of Wunderkind (divinus adulescens, Phil. 5.15.42), despite significant reservations about Octavian’s precocious introduction as Caesar’s heir (cf. ad Att. 16.8–9). Most famously, he was quoted as describing Octavian as ‘a young man to be praised, honoured, and removed’ (Cic. Epist. 11.20; cf. Vell. Paterc. 2.62.6), a remark that surely eased the conscience of the young man when he transferred his loyalty to the triumvirate.58 We may surmise that Cicero, in confidence at least, felt about Caesar’s nephew much the same as did his arch-rival Antony, who is said to have repeatedly referred to Octavian as a ‘rash youth’ ( Øæ æ, Appian 3.7.43) and a ‘boy (puer) who owed everything to his name’ (Cic. Phil. 13.11.24–5; cf. Plut. Ant. 16).

58

Suetonius (DA 12) repeats remarks from Cicero and others about Octavian as a youth (puer) to be raised up and removed (quasi alii se puerum, alii ornandum tollendumque iactassent).

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The public image that Cicero draws of Octavian, however, is one shaped by political expediency: in the Phillipics (44–43 BCE) the orator aims to legitimize the authority of this young man by naming him pro-praetor with the fullest power (imperium) of a regular appointment (Phil. 5.42–6). Though Octavian possessed the backing of Caesar’s legions, he would assume the title of pro-praetor at an age younger than the leges Annales allowed (Phil.5.47),59 younger even than Pompey the Great, who had been allowed to bypass the usual cursus and become consul six years before he was legally permitted. Cicero attempts to demonstrate capacity and reliability by sketching a youth of exceptional talent, and a foil to the depraved Antony,60 and even implies divine will behind Octavian’s prodigious arrival: quis tum nobis, quis populo Romano obtulit hunc divinum adulescentem deus? (5.43, ‘which god then brought forth this divine young man for us and for the Roman people?’). While the divinus adulescens would clearly prove his capacity, his reliability and deference to the senate would prove as slippery as his young age: Octavian demanded to hold the consulship in 43 BCE, after Hirtius and Pansa had fallen in battle, despite the senate’s reluctance and misgivings about his youth (Appian 3.12.87–88). As Harlow and Laurence put it: ‘One might say that on first January 43 BC, the Roman Revolution was decided in the senate and a youth won the day through the proposal and oratory of an old man’ (2002, 111–12; cf. Cic. Ad M. Brut. 1.16). In arguing that Octavian’s ascent challenged ‘the entire age structure of the Republic’, they point to a more lasting consequence of such a challenge: by openly celebrating his unauthorized consolidation of powers at age nineteen in the Res Gestae, the Princeps implicitly undermined the ideal that would restrict the boldness of young men from the exercise of power. Nor did Augustus need to wait until the end of his career to flaunt his youth and the threat he posed to a carefully graded cursus: the first honorific statues voted to Octavian early in 43 BCE, drawing heavily on Cicero’s flattering portrait in the Phillipics, emphasized his age of nineteen in a dedicatory inscription on the base (Zanker 1990, 39). At the same time, it was with an acute sensitivity to implications of chronological maturity that Octavian 59

= lex Villia Annalis of 180 BCE; cf. Harlow and Laurence 2002, 105. Reliability and restraint were difficult to argue in the case of the nineteen-yearold, but Cicero makes the attempt; cf. Phil. 5. 47, 50. 60

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resisted slanderous designation as a puer: in explaining the mysterious iuvenis of Vergil’s first Eclogue (1.42), Servius reminds us of a senatorial decree forbidding Octavian’s address as a puer, ‘lest the honour of such great imperium be diminished’.61 Even as the youth advanced into middle age and donned the title of Augustus (27 BCE), he continued to invoke the image of a divine young man adumbrated in Ciceronian rhetoric. Paul Zanker has rightly demonstrated a transformation from the portraiture and iconography used by Octavian, in his struggle for supremacy, into the more seasoned and pax-promoting images fostered by Augustus after his auctoritas was left unchallenged (31 BCE). It is also evident, however, that portraits of Augustus never age (Harlow and Laurence 2002, 113); rather, ambitious youth yields to timeless divinity. The transformation that occurs in the portraiture is one that patently avoids the rugged verism chosen, e.g. by his adoptive father Julius Caesar in his own acts of self-representation. The most iconic image of Augustus, the so-called Prima Porta type, created after the standards taken from Crassus by the Parthians in 53 BCE were returned in 20 BCE, was reproduced until the end of the Princeps’ career. This portrait drew heavily on high classical sculpture, Polykleitos’ Doryphorus (‘spear-bearer’) in particular (Zanker 1990, 98–99). The initial reliance on such a model, known for its idealized and adamantly youthful form, for representations of Augustus, who was around forty when the Prima Porta was made, offered a clear departure from the realistic tendencies of much late Republican sculpture.62 The relief sculpture on the cuirass of the same Prima Porta portrait also advertised Augustus’ carefully cultivated association with the god Apollo, who is represented along with his sister Diana, presiding over the return of the standards. Much has been said of the Princeps’ prolonged cultivation of the god Apollo, visibly demonstrated through construction of a temple to the god in the Palatine complex in 28 BCE.63 As a god of morality and restored order, Apollo provided 61 Servius, ad Ecl. 1.42: iuvenem Caesarem dicit Octavianum Augustum: decreverat enim senatus, nequis eum puerum diceret, ne maiestas tanti imperii minueretur. 62 cf. Galinsky 1996, 24–8. Zanker 1990 argues that the Doryphorus-inspired images were first used in 27 BCE, and then later incorporated into the Prima Porta, cf. 98–99; he emphasizes the new image as ‘unlike anything found in late Republican portraiture’ (98). 63 See esp. Zanker 1990, 44–77, and more recently, with a particular emphasis on the Palatine complex, see Milnor 2005, 47–93.

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an expedient counter to the Dionysiac images of Antony circulating in the propaganda wars preceding the battle of Actium. More important for our purposes are Apollo’s nuanced temporal implications: as a god closely linked with the sun,64 Apollo bears distinctly teleological connotations as he charts an easily observed path that determines the foundation of linear time. Of course, the sun’s tendency to repeat that path points to another aspect of Apollo’s temporality—that is, his eternal renewal as a divinity, beyond time, beyond ‘past-present-future’. Apollo’s particular configuring as intonsus (‘unshorn’, cf. Hor. Epodes 15.9, Odes 1.21.2; Tib. 1.4.37–8, 2.5.121), moreover, was especially appropriate for conveying an image of Augustus’ temporal transcendence. As an ‘unshorn’ divinity, he connoted a phase of marginal masculinity defined by the ludic space between boyhood and early adulthood, the same phase when Octavian had come of age politically. The Princeps would again capitalize on his identity with the god when crowning an era of ‘epochal thinking’ with the celebration of Rome’s Secular Games in 17 BCE (Miller 2009, 253; cf. RG 22). As with his depiction in the Prima Porta imagery, Apollo of the Ludi Saeculares is credited with temporal governance, and his identity again converges with that of Sol to usher in the new age.65 Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, composed for the occasion and sung by segregated choruses of twenty-seven boys and the same number of girls, points to the premier position held by Apollo in the festival rites (CS 1, 9), and it is under the guidance of a distinctly Apolline Augustus that we should interpret Horace’s prescriptions for a new generation. In celebrating the renewal of the human life course,66 Horace’s Princeps, scion of Anchises and Venus (CS 49–52), didactically proffers a new model of maturation—one that implicitly contends with the more Bacchic associations frequently characterizing youth on the brink of adulthood. While laying emphasis on the sexual purity expected of Roman citizens in accord with the recent marriage legislation 64 Or ‘Sol’, an identification advertised on the same Prima Porta breastplate; see Miller 2009, 286. 65 See Miller 2009, 258 on the links between Sol and the return of the Golden Age. Zanker 1990,188 comments on the ‘intimate association between the imagery of the (Prima Porta) breastplate and certain motifs of Horace’s Carmen Saeculare’. 66 For the text of the Sibylline oracle prescribing the renewal of the games (in Zosimus 2.5: ‘when the longest span of life for men has passed, journeying through a hundred-and–ten-year cycle’), see Chisholm and Ferguson 1981, 150.

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(esp. CS 5–8, 16–20), the hymn correlates that purity with the orderly progress of the heavens (9–11) and with the proper maturation of Rome’s next generation (rite maturos aperire partus/lenis, Ilithyia tuere matres, CS 13–14). The poet’s request for good mores among a ‘teachable’ youth (docili iuventae, 45) is matched by the peace of mind suitable to old age. Just so does the moral programme articulated in Horace’s choral song wed Apollo’s restrained liminality to the successful coming-of-age of the next generation. As demonstrated through Augustus’ implicit leadership in the Carmen Saeculare’s process of carefully directed maturation, the life course drawn by the Princeps is one that wastes no time in reckless sowing of wild oats. We may turn again to the Res Gestae to find a more direct evocation of that course: the autobiography transforms the nineteen-year-old avenging son into a pater patriae by the end of its narrative; and it would appear by careful design that the Princeps chooses to conclude his life story with the title of ‘father of the country’ awarded to him by all three orders in 2 BCE (RG 35), rather than mark a more recent moment in his seventy-six-year history. Such a transformation would clearly have a didactic effect, impressing its teleology upon the youthful population, and prompting modern readers, with a great deal of hindsight, to suggest the implied addressee and dedicatee of the work was undoubtedly the Roman iuventus (Yavetz 1984, 19).67 If we look at the amator’s arrested development through the lens of Octavian’s accelerated youth, love elegy emerges as a vital participant in a dialogue over youth and the age of responsibility, as the meanings of both were transformed during the early Principate. While we might question the relevance of Octavian’s youth during the 20s BCE, when the Princeps (now Augustus) was well into his thirties, the fact that his preternatural maturity continued to resonate beyond its temporal limits is attested by, for example, an anecdote in Plutarch (Moralia 207 E [= Apophthegmata Romana]) describing an audience of young men addressed by the Princeps in his later years: ‘Young men, listen to an old man, to whom old men listened when he was young’.68 Perhaps more pertinent to elegy’s sensitivity to the

67 It is also worth noting that in the Res Gestae Augustus boasts of restoring a temple to Iuventas (RG 19), to whom a dedication was customarily made on the day when he assumed the toga virilis, after that day had been inscribed in the Roman fasti. The date of the restoration is unknown; see Brunt and Moore 1967, 61. 68 cf. also Moralia 784 D; see Yavetz 1984, 19.

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Princep’s remarkable youth is Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. In what has been described as one of the poem’s least tactful moments,69 the praeceptor lavishes praise on the young Gaius’ imminent, and ultimately tragic, Parthian campaign: ultor adest primisque ducem profitetur in annis bellaque non puero tractat agenda puer. parcite natales timidi numerare deorum: Caesaribus virtus contigit ante diem. ingenium caeleste suis velocius annis surgit et ignavae fert male damna morae: parvus erat manibusque duos Tirynthius angues pressit et in cunis iam Iove dignus erat; nunc quoque qui puer es, quantus tum, Bacchus, fuisti, cum timuit thyrsos India victa tuos? auspiciis annisque patris, puer, arma movebis et vinces annis auspiciisque patris (Ars 1.181–192). [An avenger is present and declares himself leader, though in his early years, and he is conducting wars that ought not to be conducted by a boy. Fearful men, don’t reckon the birthdays of gods: courage comes to Caesars early. Heavenly ingenium rises more swiftly than its years and it brings great ruin to slothful delay: Hercules was small when he pressed the two snakes with his bare hands and was already worthy of Jove while in the cradle. Now also you, who are a boy, how old were you then, Bacchus, when conquered India feared your thyrsus? Under the auspices and years of your father, boy, you will go to war, and you will conquer under the auspices and years of your father.]

In praising the young Gaius, Ovid focuses so intently on the precedent set by Octavian—defined emphatically as a puer, despite the senate’s decree—that the first half of the digression (cited here) speaks much more of the adoptive father’s former glory than of Gaius’ present promise. As Casali notes (2006, 222), it is this passage that Ovid has in mind when he argues for the panegyric elements of his eroto-didactic project. The model of Octavian’s accelerated

69 Critics have often pointed to the irony of the passage, emerging largely from the fact that the Parthian standards had already been returned by 20 BCE and thus a new campaign would be unnecessary (see Casali 2006, 223–30 for a recent review of the scholarship). As Hollis implies (ad loc.), a degree of irony emerges (retroactively) from the expedition’s result, i.e. from ‘the disparity between the language heralding the event and the outcome’. Gaius, of course, died in 4 CE from a wound that he had received during the expedition.

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youth drawn upon here is one that implicitly polarizes remarkably swift ingenium with the ruin caused by the slothful delay (mora) that immobilizes elegiac lovers. Where Tibullus and Propertius stop short of spelling out a binary opposition between the immature dalliances of their amatores and the new models of youthful responsibility being promoted in the Principate, Ovid’s savvy praeceptor articulates the opposition in unambiguous detail. As is well known, Augustus would come to rely increasingly on the next generation within his own lineage, as he celebrated the youth of the Imperial family in a processional relief on the Ara Pacis (c. 13 BCE).70 In grooming his young grandsons Lucius and Gaius for the Principate, he celebrated the decision of the equestrian order to name them principes iuventutis with an inscription made upon a basilica built in their honour (12 BCE), and encouraged their acceleration along the cursus honorum.71 Suetonius tells us (DA 26) that Augustus wanted to be holding the consulship when Gaius and Lucius came of age so that he could conduct the tirocinium in forum (2 BCE) of each, ceremoniously introducing them into public life (cf. RG 14). However such youthful initiatives were interpreted—and to whatever extent the Augustan model of maturation influenced the life course of individual Romans—they pointed increasingly to the difference that a single generation made as Rome was transformed from a relatively competitive aristocracy into a monarchy. And it is as a part of this dialogue of transformation, of working out the proper course of maturation, that I will now turn to evaluate the youthful discourse of the elegists and their signature championing of tardus amor, inertia, and sluggish mora. 70 Brunt and Moore 1967, 53 note that children depicted on the processional relief may not be only those from the Imperial family and that, ‘they may symbolize the hopes of a rising birth-rate among the higher classes’. 71 This was not the first time that Augustus had accelerated the cursus of his male relatives: in 24 BCE Augustus accepted the Senate’s proposal that his nephew Marcellus be given the right to be a senator and stand for the consulship ten years earlier than was usual (Dio 53.28). Tiberius, in similar fashion, was granted entry into the cursus five years before the minimum legal age. These are exceptional individuals, of course, and not representative of the population at large, but they do seem to reflect a general change in attitudes about the age at which full responsibility was assumed. The Princeps’ attitude towards temporal propriety, however, is marked by inconsistencies. He is said to have expressed disapproval when the crowd applauded Gaius and Lucius publicly, since they were still under age (Suet. DA 56, eisdem praetextatis); but cf. also DA 64, where he ‘initiated Gaius and Lucius into administrative life while they were still young (teneros)’.

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3 Taming the Velox Puella Cynthia, facundi carmen iuvenale Properti, accepit famam; non minus ipsa dedit (Martial 14.189) ‘The experience of delay leads to an existential grasp of time’s passage, to the notion of cause and effect, and later, to the idea of time itself . . . ’ (Fraser 1999, 11)

I. TEMPORAL PROPRIETY IN THE PROPERTIAN MONOBIBLOS To demonstrate how time’s linear movement affects the elegiac speaker, I begin with Propertius 1.1 and its verbal and thematic links with the remainder of the Monobiblos, which together establish a template for those temporal pressures felt throughout Propertian elegy. Poem 1.1 considers various strategies (artes), and the failure of those strategies, for dealing with the pains of elegiac love. The different options presented, ranging from traditional—support from paternal friends, trips abroad—to the utterly unorthodox—witches— define the speaker’s dilemma as one rooted in his experience of time, and imply in turn that the solution to that dilemma is also a temporal one. I argue that the temporal dimensions of the speaker’s erotic crisis are best observed by evaluating competing models of masculine subjectivity. The poem introduces, as a foil to the malingering lover, Tullus, a young addressee whose link with consular authority and failure to experience the erotic crises of youth make him an example of civically responsible maturation. The same linear impulse that drives Tullus along the path to responsibility also straightens out the cyclical wanderings of the poem’s mythological figurehead, Milanion. The version of Milanion’s erotic pursuit of Atalanta patched

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together in the poem suggests a means of correcting the peculiar temporal floundering of the poet-lover. As such we observe linear time operating in very different enterprises of the poem’s masculine subjects, though both Milanion and Tullus are upheld as solutions to the pains of elegiac love. By recognizing the linear impulses that propel Milanion and Tullus, we are able, moreover, to view those impulses as part of a larger antimony, a gendering of time that allows the poet—provided that he can retard the movement of his Atalanta-like beloved—to envisage his female subjects as sites of resistance to various telē and to assign them a pre-eminent role in effecting delay, the forestalling of time’s linear progress. Embodied in the sorceresses (vos, 19) to whom the poem is also addressed is a mode of time operating in cyclical measures, and in defiance of the normal procedures of linear time (19–24). It is this temporal mode—a kind of ‘women’s time’—that the amator would project upon his beloved, and enjoy in her company. And here again we observe the intricate connections between temporal options and the positioning of the subject in relation to the socio-symbolic order. The amator’s idealized lingering in love (sua quemque moretur cura, 35–36) marginalizes him beyond the parameters of the traditional Roman cursus. While the full extent of that marginalization is not felt within the frame of poem 1.1, the portrait of Tullus that emerges in the Monobiblos, especially the ambitious young man drawn in poem 1.6, provides a clearer reflection of the amator’s deviance, facilitated partly through his alliance with women’s time. This deviance is inscribed as a literal departure from customarily linear paths (notas vias, 18) that shape literary, civic, and erotic progress.

II. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: THE AMATOR’S TEMPORALITY 1 Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis, contactum nullis ante cupidinibus.

1

The following analysis of Propertius 1.1 is a revised version of Gardner 2011.

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tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus, donec me docuit castas odisse puellas improbus, et nullo vivere consilio. et mihi iam toto furor hic non deficit anno, cum tamen adversos cogor habere deos (1.1.1–8). [Cynthia first seized with her eyes wretched me, touched before by no desires. Then Love cast down my gaze of steadfast arrogance and bowed my head with its feet pressed upon me, until it, relentless, taught me to disregard chaste girls, and to live without direction. And already for a whole year this madness has not failed, while still I am compelled to suffer adverse gods.]

In an earlier era of more biographically oriented criticism, scholars tried to follow Propertius’ chronological clues, and fixed on the whole year (toto . . . anno) that opens the Monobiblos as a milepost guiding their efforts to reconstruct the relationship between the historical persons Propertius and Cynthia.2 Subsequent critics like A.W. Allen, responding to the pressures of New Criticism, would later demonstrate the futility of historical reconstruction amidst what on closer inspection appears a hopelessly confused chronology. The measures of time sprinkled throughout the Propertian corpus bear no analogue to life outside the text, but are part of a larger network of strategies by which a poet creates a persona defined by ‘sincerity’ in his works: [T]here is no progression of time in the elegies . . . Explicit statements of time, place, person, and circumstance have meaning not as references to the private sphere of the poet’s experience, into which the reader is only occasionally and, as it were, by chance, allowed entrance; they have meaning rather as details which serve to enforce the perception of the essential and typical aspects of experience in love (1950, 151).

Allen’s article, which defines poetic sincerity, or fides, as a consistency between style and the emotional condition being depicted, has rightly

2 Sellar 1899, 262–94 offers a useful example of an attempt to reconstruct Propertius’ biography through his poetic corpus. Interest in biographical reconstruction was, of course, not confined to Propertius, but was practised with equal fervour in scholarship on, e.g. Catullus and Horace.

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had a lasting influence on contemporary analyses of elegy.3 And yet Allen’s reading of elegy’s confused chronology implicitly poses a question in need of further investigation: while it is tempting to write off earlier interest in Propertian time as simply a symptom of the biographical fallacy, we must ask ourselves whether there is something unique about this poet’s treatment of time that prompted such scholarly enthusiasm for play-by-play historical reconstruction.4 In other words, if these temporal markers will not allow us to reconstruct a logical series of events, can they instead offer insight into how the genre defines erotic experience? The first eight lines of the poem offer the beginning of a love story, one in which the amator’s past, governed by the linear progression of time, becomes frozen in a present moment. Perfect tenses (cepit, deiecit, pressit, docuit) in the first three couplets yield to a resolute present in the fourth (deficit, cogor), the tense that will, with the exception of the Milanion exemplum, dominate the remainder of poem 1.1. Each of the first four couplets of the poem contains temporal adverbs that mark a transformation from the amator’s experience of completed actions in the past to present stasis, and further inflect stages in the narrative of the poet-lover’s servitium to Cynthia. Ante looks backwards almost wistfully to a time prior to his involvement with her; tum recognizes the moment of contagion, a moment extended through the lasting force of donec, ‘until’. It is precisely when the poet begins to live without a forward, teleological momentum, nullo . . . consilio, that this narrative of time past is interrupted, and we arrive at somewhat of a quagmire in Propertian scholarship: who are these castae puellae loathed by the amator, and why should we equate hating them with living ‘without a plan’? Casta in Propertius, discussed at length by Joseph Fontenrose (1949, 371–8), most often applies to women who are explicitly virgins or admirably faithful within the confines of marriage (2.29.27, 3.20.7, 4.8.13, 3.12.15). And yet here the epithet is somewhat uncomfortably

3 cf. Boucher 1965, 401 on the lack of beginning and ending in books one and two of Propertius. Earlier scholarship had already recognized a degree of convention rather than chronological precision in phrases such as toto . . . anno; see Butler and Barber 1969 (reprint of 1933) 154, who compare Tib. 2.5.109, and Rothstein 1979 (reprint of second edition, 1920–1924) 57. 4 See also Liveley 2010, whose use of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative demonstrates the elegiac audience’s equally strong desire for narrative closure, according to which readers often assimilate what they know from experience to their experience of the text.

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wed to puellae, a noun that almost always refers to the elegiac (i.e. meretrix) mistress:5 it is then possible to assume that the phrase points ironically to women, like Cynthia, who should grant sexual favours, but do not, for the poet at least (Richardson 1977, 147). Still, within the context of poem 1.1 Cynthia is not referred to as a puella: she is, of course, implicitly compared to Atalanta, the velox puella, but is only referred to directly as domina, and is presumably the most significant femina (nulla femina) denied access to the amator in line thirty. Moreover, despite its potential irony, as Fontenrose points out, casta—though occasionally referring to a loyal meretrix, as well as, more often, to a virgin or faithful wife—is not an appropriate description of the pathologically fickle Cynthia.6 On one level, the amator is setting up an equation between having no use for non-elegiac women—i.e. the sort with whom one ‘settles down’—and living life without a deliberate trajectory. Earlier collocations of consilium with forms of vita/vivere confirm that living in the manner described here by the poet, nullo consilio, amounts to abandoning the life of a civic minded elite Roman male (Fontenrose 1949, 380).7 As Lyne recommends, we must read both the consilium and the epithet casta within the larger context of political discourse from which they are drawn (1998b, 163).8 The speaker has presented

5 Galla (3.12.17) and Arethusa (4.3.45) are both referred to as puellae, which may (despite the general consensus) point to their status as faithful concubines, rather than wives; on Arethusa, see James 2012. On puella as term for prostitute, see Adams 1983, 344–6, who notes that the word commonly refers to a prostitute in late Republican literature, but rarely means anything but ‘young girl’ in Plautus and Terence, whose comedies have exerted a well-documented influence on elegiac scenarios. The elegiac penchant for the term may be motivated by an interest in the ironic potential of a word connoting both an idealized young maiden and a disreputable harlot. 6 I am generally in agreement with Fontenrose’s conclusion that the poet ‘means that his passion for Cynthia has so far overpowered him as to lead him to give up all thought of marriage with a woman of the eligible class’ (378), though the tone of his article is somewhat moralizing, and his evaluation of Propertius’ progress toward orthodoxy, in my opinion, overly optimistic. Castae puellae in poem 1.11 refers to a class of women among whom the poet would like to number Cynthia (those women to whom the shores of Baiae are ‘hostile’, inimica, 29), but cannot (since she is presently in Baiae). 7 For consilium with vitae, indicating an ‘intended course of action’ (OLD s.v. 5), cf. consilium omnis vitae consentiens, Cic. Tusc. 5.72; cf. also Lucr. 3.95: animum . . . in quo consilium vitae regimenque locatum est. 8 For consilium as a virtue of the elite male, Lyne cites Hellegouarc’h 1963, 254–6 and, e.g. Livy 6.27.1, Cic. Fam. 5.7.3. For casta in reference to a chaste and marriageable woman, cf. also Cat. 62.63, Livy 1.59.1; cf. Hor. c.3.6.23; see Lyne 1998b, 162–3.

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in the couplet a programmatic correlation between the type of life he will live—one that positions him outside the state’s governance and resists the normative telos of marriage—and the sort of women with whom he will live it.9 It is within the aftermath of love’s aberrant lessons that the remainder of the elegy is fixed: iam brings the love story and the poet’s audience up to the present tense experience of contagion, which he has measured roughly within the space of a single year, toto anno, and whose unflagging persistence is indicated with a cum clause (cum tamen, ‘though still . . . ’) describing the conditions under which the madness continues. It might be objected that the confessional nature of Propertian, and indeed all elegiac, discourse lends itself to an interest in the temporal unfolding of past events, and a persistent fixation on present hardship. A look at a similarly confessional erotic epigram, AP 12.101, one cited by various scholars as a model for Propertius 1.1,10 suggests that, while the author is interested in conveying the dynamics of his abrupt servitude, he does so without the chronological precision that defines Propertius’ poem:   ŁØ ¼æø Pe  æØØ ıŒ Z ÆØ Æ F’ Å , “e ŁæÆf ¥ º Kª, e ’ K’ OçæØ ŒE çæƪ Æ ŒÅæçæı ç Æ M  d ÆH.” fiH ’ ‹ I Æ  ’ çÅ. “ç º Œıæ,  ŁÆ E; ŒÆPe I’ ˇPº ı ZBÆ ŒÆŁEº  0Eæø.” [Muiskos, when he struck me unwounded by desire under my breast with his eyes, shouted these words: ‘I have seized (you) proud one. I am trampling with my feet that arrogance of haughty wisdom on his brow.’ Taking a breath, I replied to this: ‘Beloved boy, why are you amazed? Love dragged even Zeus himself down from Olympus.’]

9 More recently, S.J. Heyworth 2007b, 5 has revived the conjecture that the phrase castae puellae obliquely refers to the Muses: the poet’s assertion that he has ‘loathed the Muses’ (i.e. avoided writing verse) thus clarifies the circumstances under which he has lived until now ‘without a plan’, i.e. without a poetic programme. At the same time, as Heyworth himself observes, many readers would be hard pressed to identify castae puellae with the goddesses elsewhere referred to in Propertius as novem puellae or sorores (3.3.33, 2.30.27, 3.1.17). 10 See Camps 1961, 42, and Fedeli 1983, 1865–66 on Propertius’ close imitation of Meleager here as a programmatic suggestion of adherence to Alexandrian poetics; more recently, see Miller 2004, 84–6 and Pincus 2004, 165–7.

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Here we observe a similarly potent glance of the beloved, who wounds the unwounded and tramples the lover’s arrogance underfoot. And yet, other than an aorist participle and verb indicating completed actions, the ‘shooting’ and then the act of ‘shouting out’, there is little to indicate the temporally graded transformation of the lover from past time to present.11 For Propertius, the past perfect force of contactum (cf. ¼æø) is redoubled through ante, which also resonates with Cynthia’s status as prima, his ‘first’ and most significant erotic experience, discussed further below. Where Meleager’s speaker remains in an aorist aspect, recording the callous words of Muiskos, also completed in the past, the Propertian poet continues to plod forward, so that his shift to present time in the fourth couplet is all the more arresting. The epigram’s abrupt treatment of temporal transformation is owed partly to its generic conventions, which dictate concise wit. That same treatment allows us to recognize what is characteristic of Augustan elegy, poems written in the same metre, from the same love-struck persona, but which linger over and prolong a discourse of erotic transformation and stasis.12 The relatively rapid progression through time that characterizes the first six lines of Propertius 1.1 is slowed not only by the lover’s present tense aporia. The following lines introduce both an addressee, Tullus—long overdue in the context of a collection’s introductory poem—and a mythological exemplum, the story of Milanion. In terms of the poem’s narrative economy, the imposition of a mythological illustration clearly retards the progress of the speaker’s own erotic tale. Not only does the myth interrupt the emergent dominance of the present tense and look backwards in time to a clearly marked pre-historical era (ut prius), its very status as an exemplum signals a 11 It might be argued, of course, that the comparison is not entirely appropriate, since systems of verbs in the two languages do not identically mark the passage of time. In particular, the aorist indicative connotes the aspect of simple occurrence in past time rather than completed or continuous action (cf. Goodwin and Gulick 1992, 267). Still, there were plenty of temporal adverbs available to poets of the Anthology, and Meleager chooses not to use them. 12 The final word on the relationship between Latin elegy and earlier erotic epigrams in Greek has not been spoken. Cairns explores the topic in a 1979 article, arguing that we should recognize a greater influence of archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry on Latin elegy, reprinted and expanded in Gunther 2006. He reminds us that no literary theory prescribed that subjective erotic elegies in Greek be limited to ten or twelve lines, while ceding that ‘length was an important concept in Hellenistic poetry’ (72).

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delay in narrative progress, a characteristic of exempla that Ovid will harp on in his erotodidactic project (quid moror exemplis? Rem. 461).13 We may read the speaker’s increasingly sluggish account of Amor’s dominion as a symptom of his experience as a male elegiac subject, a position challenged and clarified through Milanion and Tullus. Each figure is offered as a competing example of masculine subjectivity and represents a mode of temporality distinct from that of the amator: Milanion nullos fugiendo, Tulle, labores saevitiam durae contudit Iasidos. nam modo Partheniis amens errabat in antris, ibat et hirsutas [saepe] videre feras; ille etiam Hylaei percussus vulnere rami saucius Arcadiis rupibus ingemuit. ergo velocem potuit domuisse puellam: tantum in amore preces et bene facta valent. in me tardus Amor non [n]ullas cogitat artis, nec meminit notas, ut prius, ire vias (1.1.9–18). [By avoiding no hardships, Tullus, did Milanion overcome the cruelty of hardhearted Atalanta. For he used to wander mad, sometimes in Parthenian grottoes, and often he went to look upon the frightful beasts. Struck by a wound from Hylaeus’ branch, he even groaned aloud, wounded, to the Arcadian cliffs. Thus was he able to subdue the swift girl: so much do prayers and good deeds prevail in love. As for me sluggish/slowing love devises no tricks, nor does it remember how to go along known paths, as before.]

As commentators note, Propertius follows a less well-known variant of the Atalanta myth, attested with minor adjustments in Apollodorus (3.9.2) and Ovid (Ars 2.185–92), in which the Arcadian-born heroine is pursued in marriage by Milanion, and, on a separate occasion, is attacked by two centaurs, Hylaeus and Rhoetus.14 Though scholars, beginning with Ross (1975, 63), have postulated the influence of a Gallan version of the myth, it is possible that the poet innovates both in making Milanion suffer at the hands of the Centaurs, and in emphasizing the hero’s vocalization of that 13

cf. Davisson 1996, 252–3 on the delaying function of exempla (esp. those of Circe and Phyllis) in the Ars Amatoria. 14 Rothstein 1979, 58; Camps 1961, 43; Richardson 1977, 147.

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suffering (ingemuit),15 taken together as potent forces (facta et preces) that tame the velox puella, ‘swift girl’. Matthew Pincus’ more recent reading of the exemplum (2004, 190) demonstrates that this elliptical version of the story allows Propertius to construct important parallels (‘triangulation’) between, for instance, Milanion-Hylaeus as rivals for Atalanta and the amatorGallus (the addressee of poems 1.5, 10, 13, 20) as rivals for Cynthia. The evocation of such parallels does not, however, satisfactorily explain Milanion’s endless wandering or the description of Atalanta as velox, an epithet that foregrounds the version of the myth in which suitors competed against the heroine in a foot race, to win her hand in marriage.16 I would argue that Propertius has patched together variants of the myth as a way to shed light on his furor and lack of direction (nullo consilio) in the present time: the crazed (amens) hero of the exemplum wanders endlessly in the imperfect, in a realm of spatio-temporal isolation that recalls the poet Gallus’ own erotic plight (Ross 1975, 64), divorced from space and time in the Arcadian landscape of Eclogue Ten.17 For Propertius, Milanion’s expression of suffering (ingemuit . . . preces in amore) becomes a key element of the Atalanta story,18 the element that brings repetitive longing and wandering to a successful conclusion (contudit . . . potuit domuisse). At

15 Ovid picks up on the detail in his own version of the story at Ars 2.188, flesse sub arboribus Milaniona ferunt. 16 In particular, a Catullan fragment (2.11–13) alludes to Atalanta as a puella pernix, ‘swift girl’, whose love for a golden apple slowed her progress in the footrace. While the lines are difficult to contextualize, the dramatic situation suggests a parallel between the amator and Atalanta, both of whom experience great pleasure upon some kind of gain. The speaker of Propertius 1.1, by contrast, initially aligns himself with Milanion and opposes himself to Atalanta, making her speed something in need of taming. 17 Indeed the temporal irregularities within the exemplum itself, in particular the highly unusual use of modo without a corresponding temporal adverb, have forced commentators to assume a brief lacuna (following Housman 1888, 20–2) or emend ille of line 12 to saepe (cf. Shackleton Bailey 1967, 3). Booth 2001, 69 would read non (for nam) at line 11 and interprets the passage, under the guidance of non modo . . . etiam, as contrasting Milanion’s former ineffectual attempts to subdue Atalanta (in the imperfect) with his successful measures (marked by the perfect tense). For the collocation of amens with erro/errans and its later use in Ovid’s Ars (1.527), see Tränkle 1960, 13, whose analysis of the passage stresses its highly archaic and artificial style. 18 The introduction of preces has bothered some critics (esp. Housman 1888, 23–4), since it refers to an element of persuasive speech at best only indirectly summoned through ingemuit.

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the same time, Atalanta’s description as ‘swift’ places the heroine in implicit juxtaposition with Milanion: she who was once moving forward in space and time is now subdued by a quasi-elegiac lament; he who wandered repetitively without issue can now move forward to master, or ‘tame’, Atalanta’s saevitiam. Of course, within the poetic present of the Monobiblos, the speaker has no such luck. In the couplet immediately following the exemplum, tardus confronts the rapidity of Atalanta and reflects on the success with which Milanion subdued her (cf. Booth 2001, 66).19 Amor—Cynthia transformed into abstract love (Buttimore and Hodge 1977, 64)—who once mastered the poet’s arrogance (1.4) is now described as ‘slow’,20 unable to contrive a means of correcting the situation for which love is also responsible. Critics have offered various explanations for the poet’s choice of epithet. Since at least the interpretation of Vulpius and Passerat (1775), it has been suggested that the amator describes love as tardus since it afflicts him late in life (cf. Tib. 1.4.27–34). For C.F. Saylor this reading is inconsistent with the speaker’s frequent self-identification as a iuvenis (1977, 783). Rather than allowing for a degree of ironic self-awareness in the amator, who harps upon his youth even as it slips away from him, Saylor defends the adjective as nearly synonymous with serus (‘late’) and argues that tardus amor must refer to a love that is both unexpected—that is, ‘late’ in light of one’s formerly contented present—and unpropitious. While the critic does not miss the mark in identifying Amor’s dominion in Propertius as frequently unforeseen and all the more painful for it, his reading overlooks the very pressures of a telos that Vulpius and Passerat have correctly intuited and that are critical to any account of this amator’s strategies of self-representation. E.N. Genovese has also addressed Amor’s striking description as tardus, a collocation unique to Propertius, who himself recognizes the rapidity with which the god is most often associated (2.12.5–6). While acknowledging the polysemantic range of this particular modifier, especially the sense of ‘slow-witted’ appropriately entailed in a force 19 cf. Hodge and Buttimore 1977, 67–8, who read tardus as a reference to the unstated myth of the golden apples, a suppressed element that moreover suggests that Milanion used guile (i.e. artes) to slow the heroine with gifts and finery. For velox as the opposite of tardus (at, e.g. Cic. Inv. 1.24.35) see Ernout and Meillet 1985, 677. 20 Richardson 1977, 148 also suggests an element of temporal impropriety: ‘late in coming’ and ‘slow to assist.’

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that cannot devise ‘any tricks’ (ullas artes), Genovese (1973, 140) explores the active sense of the adjective, under the influence of the verb tardo (‘make slow, impede, delay’).21 This active and causal sense of tardus becomes clearer in poem 1.13, where Gallus, who wishes never to linger in love (in nullo quaeris amore moram, 6), is impeded by tardis curis (‘slowing cares’, 6–8), because of which he now begins to grow pale (incipis pallescere, 7–8). The couplet at 1.1.17–18 is important for our purposes because it directly addresses the temporality of elegiac love, a force that is experienced inappropriately late in the life course and, if we follow Genovese’s interpretation, actively delays the amator. The lines also imply an antithetical relationship between tardus amor, still trailed by Cynthia’s shadow, and the teleological progress associated with other generic enterprises: nec meminit notas, ut prius, ire vias. The speaker’s failure to ‘remember known paths’, recalling the famous dictum in Callimachus’ Aetia that the poet should avoid well-worn literary ‘tracks’ (fr. 1.27–8; Booth 2001, 73–4), defines his own poetic project against the progress associated with inflated and prolonged narratives.22 Resonances of epic in poem 1.1 further buttress a slowly emerging polemic between what might be described as elegy’s discourse of delay and epic’s rhetoric of progress. We have already noted the contrast between Milanion’s ability to reassert dominance and reclaim his status as hero, in spite of the un-heroic pitfalls that have tripped him up along the way. Buttimore and Hodge (1977, 66) detail the mock-epic tone of the passage, which uses decidedly elevated language (contudit, the patronymic Iasidos) in an account of what amount to rather paltry (quasi-Herculean) labores. I wish here simply to emphasize how generic signposts iterate a polarity between the kinds of literary enterprises that enact linear progress through space and time, and the painfully slow enterprise Propertius has undertaken. Milanion shares his role as foil for the Propertian amator with another, less ambiguously equipped, representative from the realm of non-elegiac enterprises, Tullus, who serves as the addressee of four poems in the Monobiblos: 1.1, 1.6, 1.14, and 1.22 (cf. also 3.22). As Paul Allen Miller (2004, 88) queries in his examination of Cynthia as 21

See also Ernout and Meillet 1985, 677 for the active verbs derived from tardus, and their synonymity with moror/mora. 22 For the reminiscence, see Heyworth 2007, 8.

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a means by which the poet reconstructs homo-social bonds among a fractured Roman aristocracy: ‘[W]hy at this point introduce the one addressee who throughout the Monobiblos most clearly stands for traditional Roman virtus as instantiated in public accomplishment and its material remuneration?’23 I would suggest one answer to this question lies in the peculiar mode of temporality that Tullus brings to the text as both a character in the Monobiblos and a historical personage. Even upon a ‘first reading’ of poem 1.1, Tullus’ name, generally assumed to refer to the nephew of L. Volcacius Tullus, would bring with it a resonance of Tullus’ uncle, who was consul with Octavian in 33 BCE.24 Thus, by suspending the name of his dedicatee, the Propertian poet nestles in close juxtaposition a remnant from the pre-historic time of myth, and one of a very historic and recent moment, indicating a consulship—an office that marked the pinnacle of the cursus honorum and whose successions marked the divisions of the Roman year. When we look beyond the context of poem 1.1 for Tullus elsewhere in the Monobiblos, we find activities in the civic and military spheres augmented in a way that cements his status as a representative of a distinctly linear temporality. In poem 1.6, a variation of the propemptikon (or ‘send-off’ poem), the amator bids farewell to Tullus, who is about to embark on a military expedition (19–22). The speaker of poem 1.6 begins with a firm denial that hints at common ground between Tullus’ proposition and Milanion’s quasi-heroic efforts (non ego nunc Hadriae vereor mare noscere tecum, 1.6.1).25 Tullus’ progress through space and time is then contrasted with the entanglements of the amator, who is being delayed by the embrace and repeated imprecations of Cynthia: sed me complexae remorantur verba puellae,/mutatoque graves saepe colore preces (5–6, ‘but the 23 Miller 2004, 88–9, following Sharrock 2000, 268–9, sees Milanion and Tullus as a pair of opposites (one among many)—a polarity strengthened if Gallus in fact lurks behind the Milanion exemplum. However, viewing these two figures as representatives of a contrast between elegiac torpor and active Roman virtue does not preclude also viewing them both in opposition to the amator: both have managed to escape or avoid altogether tardus amor. For the historical elements that may have influenced Propertius’ choice of patron/addressee, cf. Gold 1982, xvii. 24 Horace also highlights Tullus’ consulship (or that of an ancestor, 66 BCE) at C. 3.8.12 by opening a bottle of wine produced in that year (Tulle consule). 25 Milanion’s exploits are described with a similar verb plus complementary infinitive that implies looking upon a more or less frightful object: ibat et hirsutas ille videre feras (1.1.12)

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words of the girl embracing me hold me back, and her prayers made grievous by her changed colour’). There operates here, and throughout the poem, an obvious dialectic between the life of love and the life of action. But a closer look at the language of 1.6 suggests that temporality plays a role in the construction of both these models of masculinity, and one that retroactively informs the representation of Tullus in poem 1.1. For Tullus has not simply followed an active course of life, but one in which he tries to ‘surpass’ his ancestors (anteire, 1.6.19, lit. ‘go beyond’), reminding us of his chronological role in the succession of generations as well as the qualitative value of his exploits. He has never (non . . . umquam . . . non umquam, 21–24) yielded to the temptations of love. Not even in youth (aetas, 21), the rightful province of the winged puer, has he relaxed his patriotic vigilance. And yet a look at the present and future tenses applied to Tullus and the amator respectively reveals an uncomfortable lack of certainty for the Monobiblos addressee. Where the lover need consider only the vicissitudes of a single hour (his ego non horam possum durare querelis, 11), or at the opposite extreme, the span of an entire life (longinquo in amore, 27), Tullus takes a risk with every step along the cursus to glory. The rhetorical heap of seu clauses that consider options for Tullus’ travels (31–34), ranging from the admittedly heroic to the utterly effete, is crowned with a single moment (non immemor hora, 35) during which the certainty and repetition of the lover’s plight, however difficult, trumps the unforeseeable future of linear temporality (vivere me duro sidere certus eris, 1.6.36). The contrast between the wavering but predictable cycles that govern elegiac love and Tullus’ far flung ambitions will be restated in poem 1.14. This poem measures Tullus’ luxurious way of life, rather than his military ambitions, with the amator’s devotion to love, but it uses a similar time differential to compare the experiences of these two masculine subjects. The addressee’s frequently alternating attempts to seek pleasure in material remuneration are devalued by comparison with the round-the-clock persistence with which an amator tends to his puella, and she to him (seu facili totum ducit amore diem, 1.14.9–10). All of this is to say that Tullus of poem 1.1 imports from his representation elsewhere in the Monobiblos a timeline of past, present, and future, with all its vicissitudes, against which we may measure the relative stasis of the poet-lover. As Lyne has noted

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(1980, 72; cf. Veyne 1988, 104), Tullus’ brand of soldiering was de rigueur for a young man on the brink of an illustrious career. And it is through this contrast between Tullus’ accelerated maturity and the poet-lover’s delayed progress that we can understand better why the love that afflicts the poet happens to be tardus. If the model of time demonstrated through Tullus is momentarily rejected, it is largely because that model cannot accommodate the constant and repetitive nature of elegiac love: for Propertius’ poet—at least in so far as his desires are articulated in the first half of poem 1.1—does not wish to escape Cynthia’s erotic embrace, but only hopes to manage better its concomitant pain.

III. CYNTHIA, SAGAE, AND WOMEN’S TIME IN POEM 1.1 If Tullus’ model of maturation will not accommodate the desires of the amator, we must look within poem 1.1 for an alternate mode of time more suited to the speaker’s idealized stasis. In surveying the feminine subjects of the poem we famously confront Cynthia prima, who is marked first and foremost by a distinctly linear aspect of time—not unlike the velox puella eventually slowed by Milanion’s lament. As has been recognized, Propertius’ substitution of a hetero-erotic relationship for what had been, in Meleager’s poem, a homo-erotic one foregrounds Cynthia’s gender.26 To claim that his Cynthia, as liber, is a ‘first’ constitutes a nod to literary heritage and departure from prior convention (Pincus 2004, 166); and yet the ordinal sense that lies behind the adjective’s metapoetic veneer also encourages us to construct a timeline for elegy’s duration. As Rothstein observes (1979, 53–4), prima—belying the speaker’s promises of eternal fidelity—establishes a temporal framework that looks backwards, but also forwards: Cynthia is the speaker’s first experience of love, though we are left with some doubts as to whether

26 See esp. Miller on Cynthia’s gender and the poem’s hom(m)osexuel concerns— in other words, its interest in discursively rebuilding those bonds among men that had become strained under the collapse of the Republic (Miller 2004, 86, using Irigaray’s [1977, 168] term).

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she will be his last. Thus Cynthia and the poetic project she represents enter the text with an implicit expiration date. Because prima so decisively emplots Cynthia in the unfolding of the amator’s love story, it is only by resisting a linear evolution of that story that our speaker can defer those foregone conclusions, the poet’s maturity and the end of the affair, written into the Monobiblos. By defining and dwelling in those resistant temporal modes—that is, correcting Cynthia’s swiftness—the genre will put off the denouement of the love story and, in the process, garner the bulk of its narrative tension. We have already observed the amator’s temporality slowed by tardus amor and we expect the puella to play an active role in retarding him, as she clearly does in, for example, poem 1.6 (5–6). The initial elision of Cynthia and Amor in subduing the poet (1.1.1–4), moreover, suggests that she is responsible for love’s ‘slowed’ and ‘slowing’ aspects. As a velox puella who motivates tardus amor, Cynthia is defined by a twofold temporal status: much of the Propertian project will involve enhancing her role in thwarting the amator’s maturity, while occasionally harkening to the tick of the timer that governs both their lives. Only by distinguishing the temporality that initially marks Cynthia for retirement (prima) from another model of temporal transcendence that confounds expectations of closure can we explain the poet’s assertion that the pinnacle of erotic success lies in ‘taming the swift puella’ (ergo velocem potuit domuisse puellam). Moreover, if we mark the domus (‘house, home’) embedded in domuisse, the process of ‘taming’ is not just about soothing the savage, but also about situating the girl in a relatively privatized space. Early in the poetic corpus, Propertius has established a productive—for elegiac composition, at least—tension between the puella as a site, or chora (‘space’), for unchanging erotic plenitude and the shadow of a puella that constantly threatens to outpace him. Elegy’s erotic narrative is not governed entirely by deferral—the putting off of erotic consummation—but also by the discursive inscription of a space in which the lovers are imagined to exist. This space cannot be defined with precision, but is conceptually located through a game of fort! da! that distinguishes ‘gone/away’ from ‘present/here’ (e.g. 1.8.27; cf. Connolly 2000, 76–77). Still, elegy offers a number of farflung exotic places from which to view the idealized space of contentment that seems to hover in and around the Roman urbs. That space bears a distinctly static and atemporal connotation in so far as its various antitheses—trips to Baiae or Athens—point to a link between

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movement away from the elegiac chora and a change in erotic subjectivity: non sum ego qui fueram: mutat via longa puellas (1.12.11, ‘I am not who I was before: a long journey changes a girl’). The opposition between a spatially defined experience of erotic contentment and erotic suffering marked by the forward movement through time and space continues to govern Cynthia’s relationship to her amator in the poems immediately following poem 1.1. In poem 1.2, a famously ornate paean to unadorned beauty (cf. Curran 1975), the amator complains about Cynthia’s constant desire to parade her charms (quid iuvat ornato procedere, vita, capillo, 1.2.1). The fickle beloved on the prowl, trailing the shadow of the velox puella, is juxtaposed with the faithful and unadorned beauty whose intellectual assets (his) inspire eternal devotion (his tu semper eris nostrae gratissima vitae, 1.2.31). Poem 1.3 situates the Penelope-like puella at home, an Atalanta now tamed, experiencing long delays (longas moras, 1.3.43) and lamenting her lover’s carousing at the house of another (1.3.35–6).27 Cynthia’s propensity to shift her erotic attentions or remain dutifully immobile in space and time, while presenting necessary obstacles to erotic satisfaction, also reflect on the two modes of temporality that vie to authorize Cynthia’s experience as an erotic subject. The issue of such a contest will of course elude readers of the Monobiblos: a post-Cynthia existence is just what the poet-lover ostensibly denies us within the frame of the collection, whose erotic boundaries are marked through Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit (1.12.20). In refusing to limit the duration of Cynthia’s elegiac presence, the poet-lover awards her an all encompassing status, the appeal of which is aptly conceptualized through Kristeva’s ‘monumental’ time. And yet this same act of unbounding the puella’s erotic sovereignty imposes another boundary: for she is not Cynthia aeterna, but Cynthia finis—she will last only as long as this particular poetic project. Indeed we cannot forget her velox status, her troubling alliance with linear time that requires extraordinarily supra-temporal powers to correct it: At vos, deductae quibus est fallacia lunae et labor in magicis sacra piare focis, en agedum dominae mentem convertite nostrae, 27

On the representation of Cynthia in this poem, see Chapter Six, pp. 153–61.

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et facite illa meo palleat ore magis: tunc ego crediderim vobis et sidera et amnes posse Cytaeines28 ducere carminibus (1.1.19–24). [But you, whose work it is to draw down the moon, and to perform sacred rites on magic hearths, please come and turn about the mind of my mistress, and make it that her own face grows paler than mine: then I would believe that you are able to control the stars and rivers with Cytaenian songs.]

The vos here addressed are women whose age and social status marks them as the direct antithesis of the castae puellae for whom the speaker has no use. For drawing down the moon, singing incantations, and reversing the natural order of things are in elegy traditionally associated with the saga, ‘witch, sorceress’.29 Indeed scholarship on erotic magic acknowledges a widespread convention that associates amatory spells—just the sort that the amator requires here—with old women (Myers 1996, 9). Though the poet-lover does not overtly describe his addressees, vos, as sagae, the following account of their powers is reflected in those descriptions of old women who threaten the lover’s access to his beloved at Tibullus 1.2.43–54, 1.5.59 (sagae praecepta rapacis), 1.8.17–26, as well as in Ovid’s Amores (1.8.5–18), and Propertius’ own 4.5 (11–18; cf. audax cantatae leges imponere lunae, 13). The sorceress is thus reckoned among the stock characters of elegy and, as Sarah Myers has argued (1996, 6–10), her persona is often elided with the mercenary visage of the lena.30 Perhaps more importantly, the reprise of the pleas for help made in poem 1.1 at 3.24/25, the poetlover’s famous farewell to Cynthia that identifies the failed efforts of a Thessalian saga, encourages us to identify these new addressees as sorceresses.31 Literally, ‘with the songs of the woman of Cytae’, i.e. Medea; see Richardson 1977, 149. Fedeli keeps the reading of the MSS, cythalinis, daggered. 29 Ross 1975, 65–6 does not explicitly identify the poem’s magicians (vos, 19) as male or female, though his insistence that their presence in poem 1.1 alludes to the magical power of neoteric song and of ‘scientific poetry’, as embodied in Gallus and Orpheus of Vergil’s sixth Eclogue, places the addressees of 1.1.19 among the ranks of male poets, rather than identifying them with the more deviant enchantresses suggested by other commentators. 30 cf. Tib. 1.5.59, where the saga is explicitly identified as a lena. 31 For poem 3.24/25 as a precise repudiation of poem 1.1, see above, Chapter One, p. 2, n. 5; cf. Fear 2005, 27. 28

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The identity of these enchantresses is clear enough, but we might question further why, among very legitimate (paternal, 3.24/25.9) friends, who presumably have very legitimate resources at their disposal, the saga’s perspective is thrust so early into the fore?32 I would argue that, just as the lena has been understood as the embodiment of the puella’s decrepit future (Gutzwiller 1985, 111, Myers 1996, 5; cf. James 2003, 54), we might also understand these sorceresses as somehow shedding light on Cynthia’s character, and, more specifically, on those properties that make her so bewitching to the poet. The poet-lover identifies these women by the talents that he finds most remarkable: in general, their powers to reverse the natural order of things. This power underscores the status of such women as deviants, whose active control over nature runs counter to the ‘natural’ passivity expected of women (Myers 1996, 9). Whether we wish to recognize more scepticism, desperation, or abhorrence in the imprecation,33 it is no mean feat to control such potent symbols as the heavenly bodies, especially those that govern the course of the night. While most commentators point to the canonical nature of such manipulations attributed to the sorceress in Latin literature,34 the power to ‘draw down’ the moon (fallacia deductae lunae) links the passage with other explicitly elegiac contexts.35 A reprise of the collocation in book two reminds us that the deducta luna also figures importantly within the poet-lover’s distorted chronology of his relationship with Cynthia: septima iam plenae deducitur orbita lunae,/ cum de me et de te compita nulla tacent (2.20.21–2, ‘already the seventh path of the full moon is drawn out, since all the crossroads began talking about me and you’; cf. 2.28.37). In manipulating the moon’s cycles, these sorceresses rival the poet’s own temporal manipulation of his love story, a challenge made clearer by the moon’s frequent association in the Propertian corpus with the 32

The chronological inconsistency of the affair (remarked earlier) is countered by a distinctly linear arrangement of the poetry book. Thus, though we are by no means required to read linearly, the poet has encouraged us to take this view of Cynthia (and her lover) prima, which no doubt adds weight to the importance of the saga’s perspective in poem 1.1; cf. Sharrock 2000, 274. 33 For a defence of the poet’s choice to imprecate women in whom he has very little faith, see Rothstein 1979, 60 and Enk 1978 (reprint of 1911) 6, who reviews previous scholarship on the issue. 34 See Mckeown 1989, 204–5 and Maltby 2002, 168–9, 253–5. 35 Tibullus will use the same phrase (lunam deducere) in detailing the various functions of the old woman’s (anus) cantus at 1.8.21; cf. also Ovid Am. 2.1.23–4.

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coveted experience of delay (longius in primo, Luna, morare toro, 3.20.14; cf. 1.3.32–3, 1.10.2–9). Such references to the moon in the wider Propertian corpus suggest that ‘drawing down/out the moon’ in poem 1.1 identifies those modes of time sacred to lovers, the control of which has been relinquished to women of ill-repute, and reminds us of the amator’s own interest in temporal manipulations. Manipulating ‘the moon’, moreover, might just effectively manipulate ‘her’; that is, Cynthia, whose name, a feminized form of Apollo-Cynthius, invokes that deity most intimately connected with the moon, Diana (O’Neil 1958; cf. Commager 1974, 34–5; Habinek 1982, 592). From a temporal perspective, the moon’s cyclical nature—the waxing and waning that define the nocturnal sky—also reflects on the jouissance that Cynthia can offer her lover, at least in so far as she is bound by the ‘cycles, gestation, and eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm’ (WT, 191) that define women’s time.36 The cyclical implications of Cynthia, in her idealized celestial form, are drawn out further with convertite. While most commentators and translators render convertite as ‘change’, the verb has the primary meaning of ‘cause to rotate or revolve’, a nuance brought out especially in the context of descriptions of celestial objects, as here among the moon and stars (sidera, 23).37 It appears that the amator is not only asking that his puella’s attitude change, but that these sorceresses set the formerly velox beloved on a revolving course.

IV. ALL IN GOOD TIME: LIBERTAS AND TEMPORAL PROPRIETY The poet puts an abrupt end to this imprecation and redirects his pleas to amici, a larger group of whom surely Tullus is a part and who will balance the less socially sanctioned influence of the saga: 36

By Habinek’s 1982 estimate, however, the poet will have hammered his mistress into a lunar year’s worth of elegiac couplets by the end of the Monobiblos; for connections between Cynthia and the moon, as well as the implications of both for women’s time, see further below, Chapter Six, pp. 155–7. 37 cf. Cic. Arat. 44, Lucr. 2.1097, Plin. Nat. 2.34. Converto also has in similar contexts a specific temporal sense; cf. Cic. Rep. 6.12, which describes the completion of a span of time within the course of a revolution; see OLD s.v. 1b. This is not, of course, to deny that mentem draws out (perhaps more readily) the force of ‘directing (someone’s) attention in a particular direction’; see OLD s.v. 6a. The verb is relatively rare in Propertius, used on only two other occasions, both in the Monobiblos (1.15.23, 1.17.9), and both in reference to Cynthia’s (desired) change of attitude.

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Arrested Development Et vos, qui sero lapsum revocatis, amici, quaerite non sani pectoris auxilia. fortiter et ferrum saevos patiemur et ignis, sit modo libertas quae velit ira loqui. ferte per extremas gentis et ferte per undas, qua non ulla meum femina norit iter (1.1.25–30).

[But you friends, who call back one who has fallen too late, seek aid for an unsound heart. Bravely will I undergo iron and fire, if only I have the freedom to speak as anger wishes. Carry me through far away peoples and waters, where no woman will know my path.]

In requesting help from more conventional sources, the speaker now shifts his emphasis from transforming his beloved to selftransformation. He describes himself as one who has fallen late (sero lapsum), not only recalling his former steadfast resistance to love,38 but also, I would argue, implying that he has somehow missed the appropriate window of opportunity for erotic servitium. The related adjective serus will appear at 1.7.26, prompting a parallel between the amator’s experience of love ‘too late’ and the ‘late love’ (serus amor) that threatens Ponticus, a reference especially pointed in a poem that articulates limits of erotic suffering within youth’s temporal boundaries (cogor et aetatis tempora dura queri, 1.7.8). Sero thus introduces an element of temporal urgency that should be recognized as a driving force behind the poet-lover’s willingness to undergo the pains of cautery, if only it would allow him the freedom to vocalize his suffering, as Milanion once did in an effort to escape his repetitive experience of unrequited love. Libertas, in connoting the unrestricted speech enjoyed by an aristocratic male (OLD s.v. 5c, 7), ironically challenges the poet’s power to discursively reconstruct his erotic plight. As commentators note, the couplet (lines 27–28) also alludes to the poet’s servile status (Rothstein 1979, 62; cf. Heyworth

38 Following Hodge and Buttimore 1977, 70. It is also possible to take sero with revocatis (‘call back too late’), as many commentators do, though there seems to be a slip of logic in so doing: why imprecate a group of amici if they have become available too late? Moreover, parallel usages of sero suggest that it is occasionally associated with various life stages (e.g., the first shaving of the beard at Mart. 1.31.8); cf. Tib. 1.8. 41, where sero modifies revocatur, but also makes an impacted connection between iuventas and amor: heu sero revocatur amor seroque iuventas/cum vetus infecit cana senecta caput.

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2007, 11). In poem 2.23, which sings the praises of the easily accessed meretrix,39 the usage appears nearly identical to that in poem 1.1: the servitium required of the lover precludes libertas. And yet libertas, used on only one other occasion in Propertius, may have more force than merely that of the abstract ‘freedom’, as slavery’s opposite. The final mention of libertas in Propertius shines a new light on freedom and masculinity, correlating both with a specific period of life. At poem 3.15 the amator, attempting to reassure a jealous Cynthia, links the donning of his toga virilis with the opportunity (libertas) to spend a night with Lycinna, something that has not occurred in at least three years:40 ut mihi praetexti pudor est revelatus amictus/et data libertas noscere amoris iter (3.15.3–4, ‘when the restraint of my [toga] praetexta was removed, and I was allowed freedom to learn the way of love . . . ’).41 The allusive impact of libertas here in 3.15 is redoubled by its metrical placement in the pentameter, identical to the word’s placement in 1.1, and its similar use in governing an infinitive (noscere): in the poet-lover’s reconstructed chronology of his early youth in poem 3.15, the initial freedom to enjoy youth’s sensual prerogatives with Lycinna will be replaced with the freedom to speak against Cynthia’s cruelties. Libertas in poem 1.1 thus represents the poet-lover as a Roman male of a certain age, who, having assumed the toga virilis and entered a period of licence that could last through the first shaving of the beard, paradoxically experiences slavery while being explicitly entitled to certain sexual freedoms.42 While the implications of the 39

As opposed to the domineering and demanding puella; the poet reminds his reader that no amator of an elegiac puella has any real liberty (libertas quoniam nulli iam restat amanti,/nullus liber erit si quis amare volet, 23–4). 40 Tertius haud multo minus est cum ducitur annus, 3.15.7. On the significance of the toga praetexta here, cf. Richardson 1977, 381: ‘this supports what we know from other sources, that as long as a boy wore the toga praetexta, the toga bordered with a crimson stripe that was the badge of well-born Roman youths, he was forbidden to consort with women, and this prohibition was lifted with the assumption of the toga virilis’ (381). 41 The connection made explicit here between sexual freedom and the removal of the toga praetexta may also account for the poet’s reference to the toga libera (rather than the more common virilis) at 4.1.132. As Ovid’s Fasti demonstrates, there was a strong ideological connection between the festival of Liber (Bacchus) and the toga virilis ceremony (Fast. 3.771–88); for the significance of the ceremony’s frequent concurrence with the festival of Liber, see Fraschetti 1997, 66–7. 42 For the first shaving of the beard as marking the end of this period of licence, see Harlow and Laurence 2002, 72–5 and above, p. 37–8. It is with a similar irony that

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human life course in libertas may not frame our first encounter of the word in poem 1.1, those implications—in retrospect and drawing from the chronology pieced together by the speaker of poem 3.15— inform the first appearance of libertas in the Monobiblos. The amator has outgrown certain prohibitions, but cannot manage to outgrow his servitium to Cynthia. Still, there is some hope in the salutary effects of movement through time and space (per extremas gentis et undas, 1.1.29), the result of embarking on another age-appropriate project, the service abroad signalled early in the poem through mention of Tullus, and spelled out later in the Monobiblos in the poet’s disparaging accounts of his friend’s exploits (1.6.1–4, 31–4). While the couplet in poem 1.1 confirms, in the case of unrequited love, the salutary effects of a linear path (or iter), it also functions as a point of contrast with the contented lovers of the poem’s conclusion and helps define an erotic ideal that remains fixed in time and space. Poem 1.1’s final address, to a broadly defined vos, inscribes within its programme the possibility of satisfactory elegiac love, the conditions of which are immediately denied to the speaker. Perhaps nowhere else in the Monobiblos are the anxieties about change over time expressed so acutely: vos remanete, quibus facili deus annuit aure, sitis et in tuto semper amore pares. in me nostra Venus noctes exercet amaras et nullo vacuus tempore defit Amor. hoc, moneo, vitate malum: sua quemque moretur cura, neque assueto mutet amore locum. quod si quis monitis tardas adverterit auris, heu referet quanto verba dolore mea (1.1.31–8). [You stay put, to whom the god has nodded with an easy ear, and may you always be equal in constant love. Against me our Venus plies bitter nights and Love [never] fails, fancy-free at no time.43 Avoid this evil, I warn: let his own beloved delay each man, and let him not change

Tibullus opens the fourth poem of his second book, longing for the paternal liberty that Nemesis has recently stolen from him: iam mihi libertas illa paterna vale (2.4.2). 43 The negative adverbial phrase, nullo . . . tempore, can be taken exclusively with vacuus, though a more natural sense following the hexameter that describes the relentless activity of Venus, is that love ‘never’ fails; cf. Camps 1961, 45; Richardson 1977, 149; Goold 1990, 45.

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places when love has grown familiar. But if anyone will turn sluggish ears to my advice, alas, with what great grief will he recall my words!]

As noted above, desire’s inconstancy and love’s antithetical relationship with the passage of time are well woven into the traditions of Roman erotic poetry.44 The model of ideal elegiac love proposed here, however, is not simply one that transcends the ravages of time: everlasting amor (semper in tuto amore) is constituted by equally committed partners (pares), one of whom (the puella, sua cura) delays her lover, while the other resolves not to change his place (locus) in the face of time’s passing (assueto amore). Here again we are reminded of how erotic stasis is interdependent with its spatial configuring. And yet, against this ideal of erotic stasis, we confront a poet whose own contentious relationship with Amor/Venus keeps him on an exhaustingly linear trajectory. Excereo in an erotic context has bothered commentators, who more or less reluctantly accept amaras noctes as the object of the verb and concede to it a meaning of ‘ply against, exercise upon’.45 Heyworth’s reading of nam me for in me in line 33 would alternatively underscore the erotic conventions highlighting the lover’s temporal endurance by allowing amaras noctes to function as an accusative of extent rather than the object of exerceo.46 Such a reading, moreover, implicitly articulates a notion that erotic satisfaction is met in the absence of time’s linear progression. Indeed the qualification of unrequited love as a form of temporal endurance has just been put to the point in the description of Amor as ‘fancy-free at no time’, nullo vacuus tempore, in this case the antithesis of mora in amore proposed in the following couplet. Significantly, Horace’s speaker describes himself as ‘fancy-free’ (vacui, 1.6.19) in his erotic pursuits, a concept of love quite the opposite of the Propertian ideal expressed in the Monobiblos.47 44 See Introduction, pp. 10–11, with a particular focus on Horace’s treatment of the relationship between time and eroticism (examined in Ancona 1994); for other Latin examples of relevant topoi, see, e.g. Plaut. Epid. 137, Ter. Eu. 972.; cf. Lucr. DRN 4.1278–87. 45 cf. Shackleton Bailey 1967, 7, who suggests that nostra Venus plies bitter nights against the amator just as one might exercise potentia or imperium over someone, often in a military context. 46 For the conjecture, see Heyworth 2007, 11; cf. Heyworth 1984 and Lyne 1998b, 172 n. 37. 47 Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 on Hor. c. 1.6.19, note the parallel use of vacuus in Propertius. For further discussion of vacuus as it applies to the free status of the young adult citizen and the servitude demanded of elegiac lovers, see p. 83 below.

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The speaker’s discontent with the temporal norms that govern the lives of paternal amici like Tullus thus lies not so much in his wish to opt out altogether of the movement of linear time, but rather in his desire to reconfigure its telos. The goal of the amator is achieved through stasis, but the quality of that stasis must be evaluated by its longevity: is poterit felix una remanere puella,/qui numquam vacuo pectore liber erit (1.10.29–30, ‘he will be able to remain happy with a single girl, who will never be free with a fancy-free heart’; cf. 2.23.23–4). Though the poet-lover’s erotic servitude is highly ironic in light of the sexual freedoms allowed to a young Roman male having just donned the toga libera, such servitude remains a telos no less, and one that depends on temporal endurance. If, in the second half of poem 1.1, there emerges a distinct interest in redefining temporal propriety in erotic terms, the final couplet punctuates that concern by reminding the reader, or prospective lover, of the ruthlessness with which such propriety can operate: slow ears (sluggish, dull, inept—here the passive sense of the adjective prevails) hearken back to the ‘slowing love’ and foreshadow certain failure at taming the swift puella.

V. (IN)CONCLUSIONS It appears that the Propertian amator’s response to exigencies of linear time is highly conflicted: on the one hand, wishing to remain in that spatial, monumental dimension of time described by Kristeva, he denies the imposition of limits on his experience of erotic delay. And yet his experience of erotic delay has, by the end of poem 1.1, only confirmed the acute sensitivity with which he must measure time as a masculine, Roman subject. Put differently, the performance of the elegiac lament, with all its cyclical wandering, completed through groans and prayers (ingemuit, preces), allows the amator to confront his temporality. In the preceding chapter, I have revealed a sense of temporal urgency which, no less than Amor himself, presses upon the poet-lover. After establishing an implicit telos—and implied expiration date—for the love affair, Propertius 1.1 constantly reflects on the exigencies of linear time upon masculine subjectivity, a subjectivity expressed not only in the shape of the poet-lover, but in that of the statesman, mythical hero, friend, and neophyte amator as well.

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In assimilating the Propertian corpus to a coming-of-age story, Trevor Fear (2005) notes Cicero’s gracious concession of vacatio adulescentiae (‘the freedom/exemptions of youth’) to Marcus Caelius in the Pro Caelio (12.30). Such a concession reflects the popularly held belief that, within its proper limits, the frivolities of youth— erotic or otherwise—should be tolerated and even encouraged. It is thus tempting to interpret the Propertian speaker’s denial of any vacatio to his Amor in poem 1.1 (nullo vacuus tempore Amor defit) as a response to that vacatio once allowed to young men in the late Republic. By denying himself freedom from erotic suffering ‘at any time’ the amator resists defining the limits of marginal manhood within the context of parameters traditionally acknowledged, but increasingly under surveillance. What I hope to have shown here is how time’s effect on various subjects in Propertius 1.1 points to the speaker’s own temporal aberrations. It is through examining the accelerated maturity of Tullus and the lunar revolutions of ‘swift’ Cynthia that we can best understand how the poet-lover—in his state of contentiously arrested development—has deviated from those ‘known paths’ (notae viae) that mark the human life course. Those deviations experienced by the speaker attempting to define himself as a Roman subject and an amator, in turn, lay important groundwork for the circuitous paths that define the larger movements of the genre.

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4 Two Senes: Delia and Messalla sic ego sim, liceatque caput candescere canis temporis et prisci facta referre senem (Tibullus 1.10.43–44)

As Julia Haig Gaisser notes in the introduction to her study of rura, militia, and amor in Tibullus, the contrast between the life of love and other modes of existence is a central preoccupation of Latin elegy (1983, 58), and a significant body of scholarship has emerged to address that contrast. Attracting less comment, though evident in more recent studies of the genre, has been the amator’s ambivalent self-positioning with regard to competing modes of existence, increasingly evident as each amator’s over-arching erotic narrative progresses:1 while a Tullus—or a Messalla—may be initially served up as a foil to the heterodox amator, such figures gradually fit more comfortably in the elegiac landscape. When the Propertian speaker directs his talents towards luring Tullus homeward, and preaches the rewards of Italy and the honours of civic life to the converted (3.22), we are left to wonder just how the ideological distance between these two men was bridged. So too we observe the congenial antithesis between Tibullus and Messalla become transformed into a kind of joint venture aimed at celebrating complementary visions of Roman pax. This bridging effect relies heavily on the marginalization of the puella, a circumstance that is absolute in the case of neither poet: we will in Chapter Eight examine processes of equivocation and recantation that allow the elegiac poets 1 For such an implied narrative, see esp. Konstan 1994 and above, Introduction, p. 6. A good deal of scholarship in the past twenty years has effectively complicated the assumed polarities of elegy; see esp. Greene 1998, Janan 2001, Miller 2004, Greene and Ancona 2005.

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to stage their long-deferred homage to Augustan Rome while undermining it with further deferrals. Yet when the poet-lover aims at fashioning a self in transformation, who has taken steps towards civic maturity, he does so largely by deploying a series of temporal motifs that directly address the relationship between time and the human subject. In the present chapter, I will explore how the ideal of inertia and the static existence it implies shapes the life course and love story of the Tibullan amator. The positive or negative implications of inertia, like those of mora, change within the context of the evolving libellus, but we can never entirely silence the resonance of inertia in its initial collocations. Tibullus highlights his own equivocations when the erotic securities of inertia are undermined through the threat of iners old age within the same introductory poem: where the poet’s sedentary inertia initially functions to repair, or at least address, the ruptures, anguish, and expectations demanded of linear time, that function will prove inadequate to resist the old age and mortality that drive the human course of life. The conflicted overlay of ideals that inertia conveys on a semantic level mirrors on a thematic level the tension generated between a concept of resistance to forward momentum and notion of proper maturation. Such a tension reaches its apogee in the penultimate poem of book two, where Messallinus, a young initiate into the priesthood of the Quindecimviri, plays the foil to Tibullus’ poet, out of commission for a little over a year (iaceo cum saucius annum, 2.5.109) due to the wiles of Nemesis, but already planning his return to the realm of history and linear time, writ large. While poem 2.5 most clearly juxtaposes the progress of a future statesman on the brink of maturity with that of an amator, who hopes to correct his erotic floundering and follow suit, the poem is only the culmination of a continued interest in generational succession and the potential embodied in a youthful—rustic and Roman—community: book one also figures importantly in developing the relationship between youth’s maturation, its progress beyond erotic potential, and the restoration of a fractured citizen body. Various stages of masculine maturation mark a linear movement of the book, which opens with the rustica pubes (‘young men of the countryside’, 1.23) who secure the goodwill of the gods and concludes in the vision of a contented elderly rusticus flanked by a new generation (1.10.39–40). It is against these stages that the amator measures his own temporal development. This development, I argue, prompts us with some

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difficulty to reconcile the amator’s contradictory views of love in old age as both unseemly and desirable: the love that he will not admit to old age in poem 1.1 (neque amare decebit, 1.1.71) is embraced as an ideal in poem 1.6 (85–6). Such a contradiction is partially resolved, however, within the movement of book one, which raises doubts about how gracefully Delia can accommodate her lover’s linear path and, moreover, replaces her with more viable and temporally resilient models of human subjectivity. I have paid particular attention to poems one to seven, what might be described as ‘the Delia cycle, plus one’, because this series of poems encapsulates a lover’s journey, or rake’s progress in reverse. The series allows us to view time’s effect on erotic subjects (both puella and amator) in tandem with time as it governs the more civically minded, and teleologically driven, life and triumph of Messalla that constitute poem 1.7. I have, moreover, placed a special emphasis on the amator’s self-positioning in poems 1.1 and 1.7, which function as bookends to the amator’s erotic servitium to Delia. We may view the two poems as outlining a double programmatic, a first start and a fresh one: poem 1.7, with its obvious departure in content and narrative voice, has often been read in isolation, so that its tensions with the rest of the heavily erotic corpus are ignored (Lee Stecum 1998, 210). Given the poetic architecture that clearly structures book one (Skutsch 1969; cf. Leach 1980) and the verbal repetitions that tend to transgress the boundaries of individual poems,2 we should remain sensitive to the interrelationship of poems and the life course of the amator that their arrangement evokes. Where the poet begins his erotic narrative with the puella advocating a kind of a-teleological complacency in contrast to Messalla’s ventures ‘on land and sea’ (terra . . . marique, 1.1.53), he concludes it by ostensibly committing himself to the operations of linear time (non sine me est tibi partus honos, 1.7.9). The amator, however, does not rely solely on masculine subjects to cast in relief his temporal progress, but also uses Delia’s unstable alliance with women’s time to offset a commitment to the rewards of linear time. The seeds of Delia’s temporal vulnerability are carefully sown in the agricultural 2

See Fineberg 1991 and 1999 (discussed further in Chapter Six, p. 162 n. 33) for a review of the scholarship on repetition in Tibullus (419 n. 1). She uses the Kristevan concept of the semiotic to explain how repetition (anaphora) undermines the meaning of traditional syntax in poem 1.4, though her observations are suggestive for other poems as well, and might be applied to repetition between (as well as within) individual poems.

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imagery of poem 1.1, as she is linked verbally with the crop cycles suggestive of both constant renewal and inevitable deterioration. Delia’s portrayal in subsequent poems—as devotee of the goddess Isis (1.3.23–32) and inspiration for the amator’s cyclical furor (1.5.3–4)—reaffirms her link with the spatiality and repetition of women’s time, but the poet-lover ultimately assigns her a role as the potential inops senex of poem 1.6 (82). Despite this poem’s hopeful glance at grey-haired erotic fidelity,3 its placement immediately prior to the celebration of Messalla’s venerable existence as senex (1.7.56) and Delia’s conspicuous absence from the remainder of the corpus force us to mark an unsettling discrepancy between the futures paved for puella and patron. The amator, meanwhile, resists time’s passage and occasionally enacts the sort of temporal improprieties that we have observed in Propertius. By the end of book one, however, and as predicted all along through the strategic use of proviso clauses (1.1.57–8; cf. 73–4),4 he capitalizes on the conclusion of his entanglement with Delia to lay the groundwork of a path toward temporal acquiescence. The Tibullan speaker thus concedes to the forward momentum embodied first in Messalla’s fatales anni and finally in the contentedly aging rusticus of poem 1.10. On the one hand, the book’s final elegy returns to the same realm of fantasy that opened the collection (Leach 1978, 97), and in so doing sketches a cyclical motion—a recoiling, as it were—that quietly troubles the poet’s attempt to absolve himself of love by riding the coat tails of imperial progress. On the other hand, this poem’s rustic tableau reflects a broader vision, where personal desires have been contextualized (Ross 1975, 162), a vision equally vulnerable to external pressures, but one whose breadth encompasses the entire span of a human life, rather than the youthful immediacy demanded of a poet-lover.

I. TIBULLUS 1.1: VIGILANT INERTIA The lack of conventional teleology—living nullo consilio—that drives Propertian discourse finds a counterpart in the Tibullan amator’s 3

Amoris/exemplum cana simus uterque coma, 1.6.85–86. 1.1.73–4 is not, strictly speaking, a proviso clause, since it constructs dum with the indicative; it does however have similar effect of limiting the terms of the erotic relationship, and adding to it a new layer of contingency. See further below, p. 95. 4

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programmatic desire to live an iners vita, despite the forces that pull him towards civic maturity.5 As Boucher observed some time ago (1965, 15–19), elegy’s interest in inertia as one form of escape from public life is predicated in Catullus’ own reluctant devotion to a life of otium.6 By describing otium as simultaneously ‘un état de fait dans les moeurs’ and ‘une aspiration générale’, Boucher (1965, 15) implicitly points to the paradox of the inactive life as a teleological impulse, a paradox Tibullus exploits in his own amator’s representational strategies. The otium that plagues Catullus becomes, for Tibullus, the initially salutary iners vita (1.1.5), a life etymologically defined ‘without art’.7 me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus assiduo luceat igne focus. ipse seram teneras maturo tempore vites rusticus et facili grandia poma manu, nec Spes destituat, sed frugum semper acervos praebeat et pleno pinguia musta lacu (1.1.5–10). [May my frugality lead me to/through an inactive life, so long as my hearth shines with a constant fire. I myself will (may), as a field worker, sow tender vines at the right time, nor would Hope desert me, but would always furnish heaps of crops and rich vintages in a full vat.]

Cairns (1979, 28) has noted the irony of the Hellenistic poet’s espousal of life without artistic labor, and the implication of ‘artlessness’ here surely would not have been lost on the ancient reader. More commonly, however, iners refers to a lack of activity or resistance to movement,8 the sort of movement undertaken by the acquisitive

5

When the young lover Pamphilus in Terence’s Andria confesses that he is both ‘lazy’ (iners) and ‘of/with no plan’ (nullo consilio) he marks the properties of inertia and aimlessness as two sides of the same coin (An. 608). 6 See esp. Cat. 76.21 (torpor) and Cat. 50.1 (otiosi), 51.13 (otium); cf. Lyne 1980, 67–71. 7 See OLD etym., in + ars, 1 ‘lacking skill’, 891. Tibullus’ inconsistent or contradictory uses of inertia and related concepts have been well documented. For the most recent synthesis of previous interpretations, as well as a Lacanian reading of the apparently contradictory applications of the iners vita, see Miller 2004, esp. 117–28. My reasons for revisiting the topic here are based on the potential for reading the phrase as denying the teleology that shapes the human (specifically, Roman male) life course. 8 See OLD s.v. 2a-d, 4; cf. Verg. G. 1.94 and Hor. c. 3.4.45, where iners is used of the unmoving and resistant earth.

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soldier, whose lifestyle is rejected in the poem’s introductory lines. The poet-lover’s relationship to the life that he rejects is difficult to ascertain: as Kennedy interprets the curious string of subjunctives that open the poem, the amator here is best understood as a soldier, who expresses a longing for the creature comforts that he lacks.9 At the same time, by the end of poem 1.1, present indicatives station him as an amator at Delia’s door, in contrast to Messalla’s foreign military service. Again, he will wish to be called iners (58), but it remains unclear as to whether or not that particular epithet is available to him. In evaluating the precise relationship between the speaker and an iners vita, we first confront a textual problem: does a modest lifestyle (paupertas) lead the speaker to an ‘inactive life’, under the assumption that inerti vitae is dative with a compound verb, and following the MSS tradition?10 Or, does paupertas lead the speaker ‘through an inactive life’ (ablative of the way or route; cf. Maltby 2002, 121)? The shift in meaning is subtle but important, since it transforms a statement of methodology—‘how I would like to live my life?’—to one of teleology—‘to what end do I live my life?’ If we follow the reading of the manuscripts (cf. Lee 1974, 94), inertia is represented as a goal, and is not inconsistent with the speaker’s representation as an individual who, under the pressure of what was becoming a conventional telos for a Roman life, offers a glaringly ironic alternative. As Lee-Stecum notes (1998, 30), ‘in these opening six lines the process underlying a conventional Roman career path is first revealed then comprehensively transformed’. Moreover, while iners, connoting ‘cowardliness’ and ‘unmanliness’,11 is consistent with the elegists’ tendencies to portray themselves and their way of life as effeminate, this particular poetic context activates a meaning of the adjective as resistant to forward momentum, especially movement along a defined temporal path. Traduco frequently indicates an individual’s passing a given period of time—whether a night (noctem, Hor. Ep. 1.18.97), or youth (adulescentiam, Cic. Plan. 31), or life itself (vitam per novem mox 9 And, in any case, the speaker of poems 1.3 and 1.10 offers the perspective of a soldier; see Kennedy 1993, 14. 10 Thus the syntax presents a variant of the more common construction, traduco + in/ad with accusative. 11 OLD s.v. 3 and TLL iners IA, 1309; cf. Cic. Cat. 2.10 and Verg. A. 9.55 (for iners in a more obvious military context). As Lee points out 1974, 107, traduco also has decidedly military connotations, which may ironically allude to the erotic ‘soldiering’ preferred by the speaker.

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annos, Tac. Hist. 4.67).12 Thus as the indirect object of a verb with applications to the human life course, the speaker’s iners vita marks him as developmentally resistant,13 at least insofar as it comes to the activities of soldiering and acquiring wealth rejected in the poem’s opening lines. The sense of developmental delay that presses upon the speaker’s course of life at the poem’s introduction becomes more salient in his self-representation as ideally segnis and iners, before his mistress’s door: te bellare decet terra, Messalla, marique ut domus hostiles praeferat exuvias: me retinent vinctum formosae vincla puellae, et sedeo duras ianitor ante fores. non ego laudari curo, mea Delia; tecum dum modo sim, quaeso segnis inersque vocer (1.1.53–58). [It is right for you to wage war on land and sea, Messalla, so that your house might display enemy spoils: the chains of a beautiful girl hold me bound, and I sit a doorkeeper before hard doors. I do not care to be praised, my Delia; so long as I am with you, I seek to be called sluggish and inactive.]

The Tibullan speaker positions himself primarily with respect to the widely roaming Messalla, whose accomplishments will speak to posterity and augment his family lineage (ut domus hostiles praebeat exuvias). The amator, by contrast, denying his interest in future recognition—though vocer may betray some interest in posterity’s judgment—opts for present contentment with his mistress: he, like Propertius (sua quemque moretur cura, 1.1.35–6), defines his own erotic ideal through spatial and temporal restriction. ‘Sluggishness’ (segnis) enforces the impact of inertia by duplicating the moral connotations of idleness and lack of initiative (OLD segnis s.v. 3; Maltby 2002, 143); and yet its frequent use in describing physical movement as ‘slow’ also clarifies the temporal dimension in which the amator wishes to dwell (OLD s.v. 1,4).14 12

cf. Cic. Sen. 82: otiosam aetatem et quietatem traducere. And in fact roughly contemporary uses of iners apply the adjective explicitly to temporal periods, in evaluating whether a particular period of time has been used to good effect (cf. Sen. Nat. 7.24.3, Ov. Ep. 17.110, Fast. 1.168, Sil. 12.104). 14 Use of segnis later in the corpus (1.4.28) retroactively fortifies and complicates the temporal dimension of the adjective’s use in poem one. Priapus advises his pupil 13

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Despite his complacent appearance in the second half of poem 1.1, the Tibullan speaker proleptically achieves an outlet from his erotic enclosure by initially creating a kind of disjunction between the narrator—perhaps a duty-bound soldier, eventually an unmoving amator—and the rusticus he longs to be: as various critics have observed, the rusticus used to explain the speaker’s vision of inertia is not marked by inactivity or sluggishness, but rather by proper timing, maturo tempore.15 While the phrase constructs an idyllic image of the farmer’s relationship with the natural world, as he sows and harvests at just the right time, it also introduces a notion of proper sexual maturation, not entirely unexpected in an elegiac couplet. Maltby (2002, 123), recognizing reminiscence of a Catullan epithalamium in the teneras vites and maturo tempore (1.1.7), suggests that the poet foreshadows here the elements of eroticism that will dominate the end of the poem. For Catullus, the ‘unwed’ and improperly pruned vine (vidua vitis, 62.49) offers an apt image of the virgo whose time for marriage and sexual maturation are soon to pass: ut vidua in nudo vitis quae nascitur arvo, . . . hanc nulli agricolae, nulli coluere iuvenci: at si forte eadem est ulmo coniuncta marito, multi illam agricolae, multi coluere iuvenci: sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum inculta senescit; cum par coniubium maturo tempore adepta est, cara viro magis et minus est invisa parenti (62.55–9). [Just as an unwed vine that grows in a bare field, . . . no farmers, no oxen cultivate it: but if by chance the same vine is wed to an elm, many farmers tend it, many oxen too: just so does a maiden while uncultivated grow old, while she remains unwed; when she has attained an equal marriage at the right time, she is dearer to her husband and less hated by her parents.]

Tibullus’ use of maturo tempore in relation to his farmer’s pruning suppresses the human terms of the Catullan analogy, as well as the consequences of improper timing (dum intacta manet, dum inculta senescit.) For his poet-lover (as rusticus) views the exigencies of amator with an explicit reference to the passage of time and its effects on erotic identity: at si tardus eris errabis, transiet aetas/quam cito: non segnis stat remeatque dies. This passage is discussed further below, Chapter Seven, p. 187. 15 Wimmel 1976, 28; cf. Miller 2004, 109.

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timing initially only as they insure the future life cycle of his crops (Spes . . . semper). Still, the pressures of time on the virgo and the contingencies that shape her life—articulated in Catullus through the ever-present menace of dum with indicative verbs—are felt in Tibullus’ opening description of the rusticus’ duties. As the farmer’s proper timing unfolds in yearly harvests (novus annus, 13) and equally regular devotion to rustic gods (quotannis, 35), the relevance of timely maturation extends to human elements of the landscape, the rustica pubes (23)16—that is, the young rural population whose own ripe participation ensures a stable and reciprocal relationship between the human world and the divine. The speaker gradually enlarges his rustic community enough to include a mistress (domina, 46), and the dichotomies of poem 1.1 shift from an antithesis between militia and rus to that between amor and militia.17 Still, the notion of proper timing remains central, though its terms are expressed through erotic rather than agricultural productivity. Immediately following reminders of his erotically delayed station (sedeo ad fores duras; quaeso segnis inersque vocer, 58), the poet-lover discloses the impact of timing—proper and improper—upon the erotic subject: te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora: te teneam moriens deficiente manu. flebis et arsuro positum me, Delia, lecto, tristibus et lacrimis oscula mixta dabis. flebis: non tua sunt duro praecordia ferro vincta nec in tenero stat tibi corde silex. illo non iuvenis poterit de funere quisquam lumina non virgo sicca referre domum. tu manes ne laede meos sed parce solutis crinibus et teneris, Delia, parce genis. interea, dum Fata sinunt, iungamus amores: iam veniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput; iam subrepet iners aetas neque amare decebit dicere nec cano blanditias capite. 16 For pubes, is, f. indicating physical maturity, see OLD s.v.2; the adjective form (pubes, puberis) can also apply to fruits and plants (as full of juice, i.e. ripe), OLD s.v. 2. 17 For the poem’s division into two halves, each based on antithesis, see Maltby 2002, 115–16, who also includes relevant bibliography. Lee acknowledges the two halves 1974, 104–6, but stresses the poet’s skill at linking them in such a way that virtually conceals the division.

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[May I look upon you when my final hour has come; may I hold you with a failing hand, as I die. Delia, you will weep for me, placed on a pyre about to burn, and give kisses mixed with mournful tears. You will weep: your heart is not bound by hard iron, nor does flint stand in your tender breast. From that funeral, no youth or maiden will be able to return home with dry eyes. Don’t you hurt my shade, but spare your loosened hair, spare your tender cheeks. Meanwhile, while the Fates allow, let’s make love: soon Death, his head covered in shadows, will come; soon sluggish old age will creep up; nor will it be appropriate to make love and speak blandishments with a grey head. Now we must handle fickle love, while it is not shameful to break down doors, and it is pleasing to incite brawls.]

The poet speaks of his final hour, suprema hora, the culmination of his mortal life, while embedding the moment in an erotic context.18 Those temporal pressures shaping the portrait of lovers, drawn under the shadow of death, evoke the seasonal regularity that characterizes the farmer’s planting, as well as hints of the rusticus’ agency, attending to his puella as he once attended to vines. In the amator’s fearful embrace with a deficiente manu (rather than a facili manu, 8),19 Delia must avoid marring her ‘tender cheeks’ (teneris genis, 68). Effectively, her status is rewritten, along with the amator’s, as far from temporally or spatially resilient, but instead becomes vulnerably reliant upon proper timing, like the tender vines (teneras vites, 7) planted by the rusticus. The gendering of the Catullan metaphor—vines as virgines in need of cultivation—makes its way back into poem 1.1’s conclusion, as timing now applies to love rather than agriculture. From Delia’s depiction as essentially immobile and resistant, behind hard doors, and the force behind the speaker’s immobility, she has been transformed in the final passage to a malleable and pliant object of the speaker’s emotive capacity. In denying that Delia’s gentle, yielding (tenero) heart consists of flint, or that her 18 On the frequent coupling of love and death in Tibullus, see Eisenberger 1960; cf. Putnam 1973, 49, 58–9. Mursurillo 1967 sees the coupling—often, though not in 1.1, found with references to the Golden Age—as part of a pattern in Tibullus’ poetry that frequently shifts from present time, to future, and then reverts to the past. 19 Though both adjectives, drawn from facio, reflect on the speaker’s creative potential.

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praecordia is bound (vincta) with hard iron, the poet-lover rejects the kind of permanence that once characterized both her hard (duras, 1.1.56) doors,20 and her hold over her lover (vinctum, 1.1.55). Thus the inversion of applying durus to the puella, characteristic of elegy, is restored to orthodoxy by the end of the poem, and with the softening of the puella comes her malleability, her vulnerability to change over time.21 The fact that tener connotes a quality of age (‘immature’, OLD s.v. 2) as forcefully as it describes physical condition (‘soft, delicate’, OLD s.v. 1), or erotic verse (OLD s.v 6b), underscores Delia’s vulnerability to the very old age whose propriety in erotic games is denied by the speaker. Her tenera status is represented as ephemeral, as the apostrophe to her (teneris, Delia, parce genis, 68) is answered in the following pentameter by the metrically parallel arrival of Mors, hooded in shadows (tenebris Mors adoperta, 70). Thus while it is the amator’s mortality that dominates the closing passage, that mortality is modified by its comparison with the implicit life cycle of the beloved, whose erotic potential, it turns out, has a maturum tempus all its own. The temporal dum-clauses that close the poem (interea dum Fata sinunt . . . dum frangere postes/non pudet), neatly described by Putnam as ‘hedging’ clauses,22 point back to the original proviso that defined the poet-lover as iners (tecum dum modo sim, 58) and lay the limits of his erotic plenitude. The contrast between the uncertainties of a subjunctive provision in the amator’s isolated inertia with Delia and the resolute indicatives that address those conditions of human mortality at the close of poem 1.1 widens the gap between the poet-lover’s ideals and the realities of which he becomes increasingly aware. For Mursurillo (1967, 262), interea (‘meanwhile’) at line 69, ‘so precariously balanced between the past and the grim vision of the future’, offers a crucial indicator of the poet’s sense of human transience, in all its poignancy. Yet, as Putnam’s description of the accompanying clauses indicates, there is also an element of practical foresight in the line, a contingency that secures an outlet for future endeavours just as it points to the 20 Maltby 2002, 145 suggests the ‘permanence and immobility’ conveyed by the monosyllable, stat, in combination with silex. 21 cf. Kennedy 1993, 31–2 esp. on the binary—and generic—opposition between ‘hard’ (durus) and ‘soft’ (mollis, tener) in elegy. 22 1973, 58: ‘Love of home and love of Delia obviate ambition, but there is a hedging clause attached to each sentiment’.

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ephemeral nature of erotic entanglements. Though death will haunt both lover and beloved, the conclusion of poem 1.1 positions the poet-lover on the verge of a well-won Nachleben, and leaves Delia as one lauditor among many, under the threat of the physical and temporal violence that will mar her cheeks. In the poem’s conclusion, Delia’s temporal vulnerability provides a springboard for her lover’s progress along the paths of linear time: the final couplet turns away from the inclusive rejoinder to seize youth’s prerogatives (iungamus amores, 69) and returns to the singular (ego, 1.1.77), not particularly erotic voice that marked the poem’s opening. Throughout poem 1.1, the amator’s experience of time has been defined with reference to the masculine and feminine subjects who populate the Tibullan landscape—rustic youth, patron Messalla, Delia as domina. Up to this point, it is primarily Delia’s course of life—cyclical at best, at worst, untended and withering—against which the lover gauges his movement in space and time. As the corpus unfolds, however, other models of human subjectivity adumbrated in poem 1.1 emerge with greater clarity: their proprieties and improprieties suggest that the poet-lover, despite his professed desire for erotic stasis, ultimately (in suprema hora) recognizes that the handling of Venus, like the planting of vines, must occur in due season. Inertia’s threat to erotic identity at the conclusion of poem one, where it is patently inappropriate for lovers’ brawls and nightly vigils, anticipates its usage in poem two. There Tibullus’ speaker claims that Venus will not help lovers slowed by inertia: nec docet hoc omnes sed quos nec inertia tardat/nec vetat obscura surgere nocte timor (1.2.23– 24, ‘nor does [Venus] teach this to everyone, but only those whom inertia does not slow, nor fear forbids to rise in the dark night’). The suggestively Propertian collocation (inertia tardat)23 works overtime to interrogate just what it means to linger in love, to be called iners, and casts doubt on the desirability of achieving such a state. The same poem, staged as a paraclausithyron outside Delia’s door, closes with the amator’s threat to his detractors: vidi ego qui iuvenum miseros lusisset amores post Veneris vinclis subdere colla senem, et sibi blanditias tremula componere voce 23

cf. Prop. 1.1.17: in me tardus Amor non ullas cogitat artes.

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et manibus canas fingere velle comas; stare nec ante fores puduit caraeve puellae ancillam medio detinuisse foro. hunc puer, hunc iuvenis turba circumterit arta, despuit in molles et sibi quisque sinus. at mihi parce, Venus. semper tibi dedita servit mens mea. quid messes uris acerba tuas? (1.2.91–100) [I have seen one fellow, who had made fun of pitiable lovers among the young, later in his old age submit his neck to the chains of Venus, and rehearse charming speeches in a quavering voice, and wish to style his gray hairs with his hands; nor is he ashamed to stand before the door of his beloved puella or to have detained her maid in the middle of the forum. Boys and young men crowd around him in a tight throng, (and) each spits into the soft folds of their tunics to avoid bad luck. But spare me, Venus. Always my mind, devoted, serves you. Why in harshness burn your own crops?]

As Maltby notes (2002, 179), the poet innovates in applying the warning of indecorous love in old age, usually directed to a hardhearted mistress (cf. Hor. Carm. 1.25; Prop. 3.24–5; Tib. 1.6), to a male bystander who mocks his efforts at Delia’s door. The impropriety of aged eroticism is heightened by the crowd whom the speaker imagines jeering at the senex amator, consisting as it does of pueri and iuvenes and signaling the ages at which love remains a comely sport. Reference to the medium forum, moreover, illustrates in spatial terms the failure of this senex to follow temporal norms; that is, to follow the cursus that prescribes, at this point in the life course, the role of fulfilling citizen duties, rather than tracking down an ancilla, in a decidedly public space.24 This senex amator, emphatically positioned at the end of the pentameter (92), looks forward to the aging puella, statesman, and rusticus (1.6.82, 1.7.56, 1.10.44), all senes who populate the remainder of book one,25 equally upheld as models of identity for the poet-lover. In the present review of the male life course and its experience of amor that closes poem two, the speaker denies his own capitulation to the exigencies of age: acknowledging 24 Putnam 1973, 72–3: ‘The ultimate shame of the old man—who should have others’ respect instead of performing disreputable acts himself—is to accost the girl’s maid where all can see, medio foro’. 25 On the emphatic position of senem (here and later in the corpus, see further below, pp. 107–9); cf. Maltby 2002, 180–1.

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a division between the physical transformation that accompanies old age, so insultingly described in the passage, and the mind’s resistance to change over time, the poet-lover boasts that he will always (semper) serve Venus. There remains in poems one and two a persistent question over the role of eroticism in the human life course: the amator’s confident refusals of love’s temporal boundaries cannot tolerate his vivid inscriptions of the improprieties of aged lovers, incongruous portraits that leave us wondering what ought to define masculine subjectivity, after the season of youth has passed.

II. DELIA SENEX, MESSALLA MEUS, AND THE ROMANA PUBES In poem 1.3, Delia is configured initially as a means of resisting teleological pressure: it is failure of the omens to assuage Delia’s fear—implicitly hinting at her cynical estimation of linear time— that prompt the amator’s eager search for lingering delays (tardas moras, 16).26 Overcome by illness, Tibullus’ poet-lover has verged off Messalla’s linear trajectory (ibitis Aegaeas sine me, Messalla, per undas, 1.3.1) and looks fondly upon Saturn’s reign (quam bene Saturno vivebant rege, 1.3.35), a time before sea-travel, when journeys abroad, or house doors, for that matter, did not separate lovers (priusquam/tellus in longas est patefacta vias, 1.3.35–6). The poet’s equation of golden age pleasance with a space in which he might experience relief from his current plight underlines the amator’s crisis as a fundamentally temporal one; that is, one generated from time’s linear constraints—constraints that exist neither in the Saturnian age, nor, at least in the poet’s imaginings, in the space that he shares with Delia, who is allied with the Saturnian dies that prevents his departure (1.3.18; Bright 1978, 28). Poem 1.3 also explores another outlet for escaping his current plight, the end point of linear time, death itself, in which there are no drives, no crises, indeed, no subjects. While scholars have reacted ambivalently to the psychoanalyst’s death drive as motivating elegy’s 26

For Delia’s role in poem 1.3 as a representation of time as it applies to feminine subjectivity, in accordance with a Kristevan model, see below, Chapter Six, pp. 161–7.

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preoccupation with mortality,27 Freud’s Thanatos—the final resting point and ‘stumbling block’ of time associated with masculine subjectivity in Kristeva’s scheme (WT 192)—is indispensible in poem 1.3 for understanding the properties that define both the golden age and its future tense alternative, Elysium.28 Again we observe how the antimony between the cyclical enclosure of women’s time and the teleological movement defining a post-lapsarian existence functions to retard or hasten the amator’s development as a subject in the world. The routes toward death are identifiably linear (nunc leti mille repente viae, 1.3.50), and in their wake leave the subject traced in the symbolic order: quod si fatales iam nunc explevimus annos, fac lapis inscriptis stet super ossa notis: hic iacet immiti consumptus morte Tibullus, Messallam terra dum sequiturque mari (1.3.53–6). [But if already I have completed my fated years, bring it about that a tombstone stands above my bones with an inscription: here lies Tibullus wasted away by cruel death, while he followed Messalla on land and sea.]

The final dum-clause of the epithet—not provisional, but reflecting on concurrent circumstances—indicates that it is the poet-lover’s pursuit of Messalla’s linear trajectory that has brought about his

27 cf. also Tibullus’ vision of death as a welcome release from distress brought by Nemesis in book two (2.16.19), discussed in Chapter Eight. Papanghelis 1987 explores Propertius’ tendency to conflate love and death, but resists a psychoanalytic reading (2–5). Others, however, have been less reluctant; cf. esp. Drews’ 1952 exploration of Todesangst. More recently, Miller 2004, 127–8 treats death in Tibullus 1.3 as a solution to the poet’s paradoxical desire to possess Delia exclusively but also exist in a world without boundaries. Ovid playfully conflates the poles of Thanatos and Eros by expressing the desire to expire mid-coitus, Am. 2.10.35–38. 28 Freud famously argues for an organism’s drive to return to an earlier—i.e. inanimate—state of existence in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he asserts that the ‘aim of all life is death’ (in Gay 1989, 613). cf. Eagleton 1996, 139: ‘The final goal of life is death, a return to that blissful inanimate state where the ego cannot be injured’. Kristeva RPL 95, 119 identifies the death drive as one of many pulsions, but acknowledges that (for Freud) it is the most instinctual. On the death drive (or ‘death work’) as one of fundamental operations of the unconscious in Kristeva’s understanding of human subjectivity, see esp. Reineke 1997, 25–6, who stresses that such a drive—while destructive in some capacity—does not preclude the subject’s agency and active engagement in the world. I revisit the topic’s relevance to elegy’s ‘departure strategies’ in Chapter Eight.

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death. He takes some comfort in thoughts of an afterlife, which, like Saturn’s reign, is another realm not subject to the degenerative and progressive passage of historical time.29 Tibullus’ Elysium echoes its golden age counterpart most clearly in the uncultivated bounty (non culta, 1.3.61) that its fields produce. While erotic desire motivates Elysium’s happy inhabitants—drives that, as Miller notes (2004, 124), are fundamentally incompatible with the golden age—these lovers’ battles are staged repeatedly among participants who are forever in youth’s prime.30 The afterlife for the speaker is a space defined by recurring episodes of elegiac love: ac iuvenum series teneris immixta puellis/ludit, et assidue proelia miscet Amor (63–64, ‘and a [battle] line of young men, mingled with young girls, makes sport and Love constantly stirs up skirmishes’). Here we envision the military and teleological implications of series (‘lines, ranks’, cf. Maltby 2002, 204) neatly countered by the repetition (assidue) that has come to characterize the amator’s erotic entanglements with Delia, a fantasized resolution to the contradictory impulses of vigilant movement and inertia that have, up to this point, governed his experience of the genre. Still, in the speaker’s consideration of his post-mortem existence there is an awkward discrepancy between Delia’s generic role, as presumably one of the tenerae puellae—reminiscent of both youth and vulnerability in poem 1.1—indiscriminately frolicking in the underworld, and the specificity with which he alludes to Messalla. As Lee notes in evaluating the poet-lover’s epitaph: The inscription is revealing and we notice how the two names it contains are placed together—Tibullus/Messallam. If we could have asked Tibullus which meant more to him, his friendship with Messalla or his love for Delia, it looks as though he would have replied, in the words of 1.5.31, Messalla meus (1974, 111).

While we might question the hermeneutic value of determining whether Delia or Messalla ‘meant more’ to Tibullus,31 the observation 29 For parallels between Tibullus’ Elysium and Golden Age, see Whitaker 1983, 72; cf. Miller 2004, 128. 30 The constant plenitude that characterizes this vision of Elysium is cast into starker relief by the subsequent image of Tartarus, whose inhabitants are defined by unceasing and unfulfilled desires (1.3.67–82). 31 In fact, Ball 1983, 21, 51, 57 suggests the recall of Messalla’s excursions on land and sea in poem 1.1 undermines the value of his achievements; cf. Moore 1989, 423.

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underscores the subtle but persistent distinction that the speaker makes in assigning puella and patron respective roles in imagining the future that awaits him. When it comes to the permanent record our poet wishes to leave behind, his life (fatales anni), as inscribed in stone, reflects the amator’s services to a patron rather than his servitium amoris. By contrast, the speaker’s concluding imprecation to Delia that she remain ‘chaste’ (at tu casta, precor, 1.3.83) under the dutiful eye of a sedula anus (‘careful old woman’, 1.3.84) looks forward to the infidelity, perhaps even the destitute old age, that define Delia in her final appearance in the Tibullan corpus (nec saevo sis casta metu sed mente fideli, 1.6.75). Poem 1.5 reinvents the very triangulation that situated Delia, Messalla, and the amator in poem 1.1 and that gradually dominates Tibullus 1.3. As various scholars have noted, poem 1.5 constitutes an important step in the poet-lover’s processes of incorporating Messalla into his elegiac landscape: the ideological distance between the two men established at the beginning of the corpus begins to close through the speaker’s inclusion of his patron in the rustic fantasy that is the poem’s centre-piece (1.5.21–34). As W.R. Johnson argues, the stability of empire provided by Tibullus’ patron is necessary for the poet’s Arcadian, and in poem 1.5, decidedly erotic, vision.32 At the same time, the obligations required for such stability—e.g. the military service abroad lamented in poem 1.3—threaten to tear that vision asunder. And yet, outside of the amator’s idyllic imaginings there will emerge a paradoxical stabilitas loci33 in the Messallan realm that is conspicuously absent from the amator’s erotic vicissitudes. The amator of poem five continues to lack teleological initiative, but in this case his inertia is re-presented as a cycle of anxious despair: namque agor ut per plana citus sola verbere turben,/quem celer assueta versat ab arte puer (1.5.3–4, ‘for I am driven like a quickly spinningtop by a lash through a deserted plane, [a top] which a swift boy spins

32 For Johnson 1990, Messalla’s presence in the poem marks an uncomfortable collocation in that it both ‘verifies the presence of Delia and the reality of Arcadia’ and prompts the speaker to consider his own ‘inadequacies and irrelevance’ (103–4). Miller’s 2004 Lacanian reading of the poem also attempts to account for the various contradictions that define 1.5 as a dream text, i.e. one that represents the contradictory nature of our desires without transcending or resolving them. Thus, Messalla, as emblem of the (Lacanian) Symbolic, both ‘makes desire possible and keeps it ever unfulfilled’ (129). 33 The term, loosely translated ‘firmness/steadiness of place’, is used by Jürgen Paul Schwindt 2005, 4.

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with practised skill’). The image of a boy skillfully spinning a top with a lash has Greek precedents in Homer (Il. 14.413), Aristophanes (Av., 1461 ff.), and Callimachus (AP 7.89.9–10), though it is here first that a Latin author uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of love affected by Cupid, whom we readily associate with the celer puer.34 Ovid will use the simile to describe love’s affects in Amores 2.9 (nescioquo miserae turbine mentis agor, 28),35 and, in both cases, it points to love’s cyclical nature as a peculiarly elegiac phenomenon. The swiftness (citus, celer) assigned to both the boy and the passively driven poet-lover as top depart from the ideal of sluggish inertia that framed the lover’s contentment in poem 1.1. And yet the flaws inherent in that ideal—its improbability as a model for the human experience of time—have already been exposed.36 Inertia has thus been replaced by an experience equally a-teleological, but whose cyclical furore points to the dark side of those erotic scenarios repeating themselves in the underworld (1.3.61–64). As Putnam notes (1973, 100), the skill of the boy is customary (assueta), but so too is the amator’s tortuous experience of love. The pattern is conventional; it is in the potential for escape, for converting revolutions into a teleological movement, that there lies room for innovation. The amator’s likeness to a spinning top—swift, unable to gain forward momentum—is restated at the end of the poem in the more common image of the wheel of love:37 tu qui potior nunc es mea furta [fata] timeto: versatur celere fors levis orbe rotae (1.5.69–70, ‘you, who are better off now, fear my thefts [or ‘fate’]: fickle fortune turns on the swift sphere of a wheel’). Repetition of the temporal and spatial terms that shaped the image of the lover as a spinning top (celer, versatur) not only creates a ring structure within the poem, but also raises the mirror of content to one of form, so that the repetitive experience of love mocks a poetic structure built on repetition. The

34 The image is also used by Vergil to describe Amata, driven by a fury (7.378–83; see Maltby 2002, 242), though her plight is not explicitly erotic. Vergil’s wording reveals some affinities with the Tibullan passage, although ascribing priority to either author is impossible. 35 As Mckeown 1998, 185 notes, Ovid has changed the force of turben, so that it conveys something like ‘bewilderment’ rather than indicating a literal spinning top that functions as a metaphor (as in Tibullus). 36 Not least in the preceding poem (1.4), where denial of the time’s sluggishness is emphasized through Priapus’ threefold anaphor of quam cito (1.4.28–30). 37 See Maltby 2002, 259 on the ring composition; cf. Prop. 2.8.8; Hor. c. 3.10.9–10.

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same continuous rhythm that determines the amator’s experience in love is resumed at the start of the final elegy concerning Delia (semper . . . post tamen, 1.6.1–2). And yet this poem attempts to straighten out love’s cyclical course by glancing decisively forward and insinuating the puella’s place on the fast track to ‘old age’, senecta: at quae fida fuit nulli, post victa senecta ducit inops tremula stamina torta manu, firmaque conductis adnectit licia telis, tractaque de niveo vellere ducta putat. hanc animo gaudente vident iuvenumque catervae commemorant merito tot mala ferre senem. hanc Venus ex alto flentem sublimis Olympo spectat et infidis quam sit acerba monet haec aliis maledicta cadant. nos, Delia, amoris exemplum cana simus uterque coma (1.6.77–86). [But (the puella) who has been faithful to no-one, after she is impoverished and conquered by old age, leads twisted threads with a quavering hand, and she binds strong leashes to a rented loom, and cleans the flocks of wool pulled from snowy fleece. And throngs of young men watch this woman with their spirits high, and declare that the old woman deservedly bears so many hardships. Lofty Venus watches this one weeping from Olympus on high and warns of how harsh she is to unfaithful lovers. Let these ill-wishes fall upon others. Let each of us, Delia, be an example of love when our hair is grey.]

Despite the poet-lover’s wish that both amator and puella be an exemplum in their old age, it is Delia who is more readily represented as a cautionary tale. When presented two alternatives for the future, moreover, we are perhaps made more sceptical of the poet’s happilyever-after ending: when a similar prediction of love in old age emerges in book two, the Tibullan speaker applies it to Cornutus (dum tarda senectus/inducat rugas inficiatque comas, 2.2.19–20), who is bound to his beloved by wedlock (coniugio vincula, 2.2.18), a bond that clearly does not exist between the poet and Delia (1.6.67–8). In twisting the threads of the loom with trembling hands, Delia, now envisioned as a formerly unfaithful old woman rather than the devout and dutiful Penelope of poem 1.3 (85–94), conjures the wheel of fortune (cf. torta) that governs elegiac love; though here, at the end of her life, there is little chance of a return to the good graces of those young lovers (iuvenes) who mock her as an ‘old woman’ (senem,

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1.6.85). Should we ask ourselves why throngs of specifically young men should rejoice in the demise of an old mistress, critics point to convention (cf. Horace, Carm. 4.13.26–8; Maltby 2002, 279), or note how the youths function as a ‘symbol of all who rejoice in her demise’ (Putnam 1973, 117). Still, the logic of the situation, which dictates that such young men would have been mere infants at the time of the puella’s desirable prime, here concedes to a polarizing artistry that emphasizes the beloved’s old age in light of the vigorous youth left to place it on poetic record.38 Disregard for chronological verisimilitude here is not accidental, but points to generic conventions that would manipulate the temporality of elegy’s subjects consistently to the advantage of the amator. Delia’s age has been artificially accelerated and, in the game of mortality that alternately threatens lover and beloved, has been left with the losing hand. The future impermanence made manifest through Delia’s grey and withered end is, in turn, underlined by its juxtaposition with the sturdy, ‘fated’ threads woven into Messalla’s future in the opening of poem 1.7, fatalia stamina ‘to be undone’ (dissoluenda) by no god. As Timothy Moore has indicated in tracking the ideological and physical separation between Messalla and the poet-lover throughout book one, poem 1.7 makes a concerted effort to complete the bridge between the two men attempted in poem 1.5 (Moore 1989; cf. Leach 1978, 93 and 1980, 83). Tibullus expands the limits of the genre and looks outside the relative isolation of elegiac love most notably here, where he celebrates the beginning of his patron’s life and dexterously conflates it with that moment when a military triumph, celebrated in September of 27 BCE, was ordained by the Fates: hunc cecinere diem Parcae fatalia nentes stamina, non ulli dissolenda deo; hunc fore, Aquitanas posset qui fundere gentes, quem tremeret forti milite victus Atur. evenere: novos pubes Romana triumphos vidit et evinctos bracchia capta duces; at te victrices lauros, Messalla, gerentem portabat nitidis currus eburnus equis (1.7.1–8).

38 As connoted through commemoro, which bears connotations of ‘placing on public record’, as in, for example, a funerary inscription; see OLD s.v. 3.

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[The Fates have sung this day, spinning out the fated threads not to be undone by any god: (predicting that) this would be the day which was able to route the peoples of Aquitaine, the day when Atur trembled, conquered by the brave soldiery. These things have come to pass: the Roman youth sees new triumphs and captured leaders with their captive hands bound; but an ivory chariot with shining horses was carrying you, Messalla, wearing the laurel of a victor.]

Luck, commenting on the conventions of the genethliacon (‘birthday poem’) and the poet’s choice to foreground the role of the Parcae, rather than invoke the more traditional Diana or Ilythia, argues that Tibullus does so in order to iterate the links between Messalla’s fate and the destiny of Rome (1960, 84).39 By foregrounding the teleological path that Messalla’s fata stamina have taken, as well as the implications of that path for Roman imperium, the poet-lover encourages us to evaluate his patron’s ‘fated threads’ with respect to his own fatales anni (1.3.53). There is perhaps no more linear trajectory than that which carries a man from the day of his birth through a triumphal procession culminating on the Capitoline hill, and no more cyclical one than that which keeps an amator spinning madly on a smooth surface. Only now, just after suggestively depicting the twisted threats (stamina torta) that Delia may spin in lonely old age, the poet-lover claims his own share of Messalla’s glory (non sine me est tibi partus honos, 1.7.9). Critics have variously explained what amounts to a clear departure from the amator’s earlier reluctance to partake in his patron’s military imperatives (ibitis Aegaeas sine me, 1.3.1; cf. Lee-Stecum 199, 209) as a reference to his ‘actual’ participation in Messalla’s campaign (Elder 1965; cf. Moore 1989, 423), an indication of the glory won for Messalla through Tibullus’ poetry (Hammer 1927), the poet’s participation in the campaign as a private citizen (Mossbrucker 1983), or the poet’s role as a spectator of the triumph (Konstan 1978). The last of these is especially attractive for three reasons: as Konstan notes (1978, 175), the geographic landmarks described in lines 9–24 seem particularly suitable for iconographic representation. I would add that the narrative stance of the speaker as spectator would follow an 39 The poet may also have in mind the Parcae of Catullus 64, who spin the threads of Achilles’ life. On the implicit comparison between Messalla and Achilles, see Elder 1965 and Gaisser 1971b, 223. Bright 1978, 50–1 suggests an even stronger reminiscence of Vergil’s fourth Eclogue.

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elegiac convention that stations the amator watching an Augustan triumph—usually with his puella;40 finally, that same narrative stance reinforces the notion of a triumph as a visually demonstrative performance (testis . . . testis),41 whose transmission of values anticipates the role played by the god (Osiris-Bacchus) instructing human beings in the culture history that forms the centre of the poem. Critics of the poem have focused on the geographic excursus (1.7.9–24), and subsequent praise of Osiris as Egypt’s greatest benefactor (1.7.27–48), defending their thematic relevance to the ostensible occasion of the poem. The result of such emphasis has been a collectively thorough commentary on the parallels and discrepancies between Messalla and Osiris, whose identity is merged with pater Nile and the god Bacchus.42 At the same time, the role assigned to each figure as an instructor of the next generation—Romana pubes43 or barbara pubes—has been largely overlooked: te canit atque suum pubes miratur Osirim/barbara, Memphiten plangere docta bovem (1.7.27–8, ‘The foreign youth, taught to bewail the Memphian bull, sing of you and marvel at you as their Osiris’). The youth instructed (docta) by Osiris, who marvel (miratur) and sing the god’s praises in turn, reflects back on and fortifies the visual impact of the triumphator’s procession (pubes Romana . . . vidit). I view it as symptomatic of

40 The role assigned to the puella at Prop. 3.4.15 and Ars 1.213–222 make her absence in the Tibullan scenario somewhat conspicuous. Chronologically speaking we may assign priority to the Tibullan poem, with Propertius and Ovid responding to it, and eroticizing it, in the process. Still the topos is a peculiar one in light of the fact that (after Lucius Cornelius Balbus, 19 BCE) no triumphs were granted during the Principate except to members of the imperial family. Even in the 20s triumphs were strictly regulated by Augustus, who allowed only three other men to do so; during the remainder of Augustus’ reign Tiberius alone triumphed—on two occasions, 7 BCE and 12 CE. As Beard notes 2007, 300–2, during the early Principate to refuse a triumph after it had been offered became an insignia of honour, following the precedent of Agrippa. 41 cf. Konstan 1978, who notes the propaganda value of the series of triumphs occurring in the years 29–26 BCE: ‘Again and again these triumphs asserted the success of Roman arms in pacifying the Mediterranean world, bringing the entire empire under the secure but ever watchful rule of the imperator’ (176). 42 For a nuanced treatment of the language used in the excursus, see Bright 1978, 52–61, who also includes an overview of relevant scholarship (esp. 49 n. 25); Gaisser 1971b is especially useful on the parallels between Osiris and Messalla, though Bright 1978, 52 perhaps rightly finds her basis for the parallels, Messalla’s love of a good vintage, anticlimactic. 43 Maltby’s translation, ‘the Roman people’ (2002, 284) overlooks the specific implication of age implied in pubes, here, as in poem 1.1.

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the speaker’s interest in generational politics—those imperatives to civic service aimed at a younger population—that, in describing the various spectatores who attend the triumph, he singles out pubes, whose rustic incarnation is the first human element mentioned in the Tibullan countryside (1.1.23). The collocation of novus with pubes draws out the youthful connotations of the noun, and implies the role of this pubes as a fresh start for Rome.44 By naming an audience of young men, specifically those whose age makes them eligible for military service (OLD s.v. 1; cf. Lee-Stecum 1998, 208), the speaker primes a generation just come of age to follow the paradigm established by his patron. In offering foreign youth as a foil to these young Romans, the poem encourages us to evaluate the instructive potential of Messalla’s deeds with the lessons learned from a foreign deity, who is cast as a culture hero and heuretes figure (primus . . . primus, 29–31; docta 20, 28, docuit 33, 38). Where the poet’s account of young Roman men and their role in absorbing and transmitting a new set of values is slight compared to the cultural transformation experienced by the foreign pubes under the guidance of Osiris-Bacchus,45 we can look to the end of the poem to tease out the implications of Messalla’s role in the enculturation of a new generation. The relatively remote didactic influence of the adult triumphator upon an anonymous body of young Romans is personalized in the final lines of the poem, where the speaker hopes for the success of Messalla’s lineage (proles) and its role in furthering the goals of Roman imperium (cf. Konstan 1978, 184): at tibi succrescat proles quae facta parentis augeat et circum stet veneranda senem. 44 The triumph’s epithet novus, ‘fresh’ (Maltby 2002, 284), may also refer to its status in succeeding Augustus’ own triple-triumph of 29 BCE, a succession that would have been inscribed in the Princeps’ recently commissioned Fasti Triumphales, the list of recorded triumphs that extended back to Romulus as original triumphator. There is considerable disagreement over where and when these were inscribed (possibly the Parthian arch c. 19 BCE, perhaps the Actian one c. 30 BCE). The term fasti here is more convenient than accurate; see Feeney 2007, 168. For the role Augustus’ list of triumphs may have played in his larger programme of historical and calendrical manipulations, see esp. Wallace-Hadrill 1987, 224. 45 While the barbara pubes are mentioned only in lines 27–8, they are, until the introduction of the agricola of line 39, the only human pupils available for the god’s instruction; thus we can easily infer their role as the recipient of knowledge on ploughing, planting, grafting, viticulture, and singing in lines 29–38.

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[May your offspring grow up to increase the deeds of their parent and, about to be honoured, stand around you in your old age. And let him not remain silent about the monument of your road, (him) whom the Tusculan land and shining Alba, with its ancient Lar, detains (i.e. from Rome). For here the hard gravel is spread, built up with your resources, here stone is joined with an appropriate art; may the farmer sing your praises when he comes from the great city late in the day, and returns without stumbling. But you, Birthday spirit, which will be celebrated through many years, come always brighter and brighter.]

In recalling the fourth Eclogue here the speaker effectively compliments Messalla’s sons, who would implicitly be aligned with the promising puer of Vergil’s poem (4.26, facta parentis; Putnam 1973, 125). The allusion may also evoke the original context of the phrase, which stressed the didactic function of heroic deeds as well as the role of education in proper maturation: at simul heroum laudes et facta parentis/iam legere et quae sit poteris cognoscere virtus (Ecl. 4. 26–7, ‘as soon as you will now be able to read about the praises of heroes and the deeds of your father, and to recognize what courage is . . . ’). For Vergil, the timely development of the puer (at simul . . . iam . . . paulatim, 26–8) enacts a return to the Golden Age, despite the vestigia of old vices that must test the mettle of the young hero. For Tibullus, proper development of Messalla’s sons suggests a more widespread process by which succeeding generations might strive to surpass their ancestors, as pointed reference to proles implies: the word clearly connotes ‘offspring’ (1.3.79, 1.4.7, 1.10.39), but is also used of those generations that comprise the myth of the ages (Cic. Arat. 134; Rep. 6.23; Ov. Met. 1.125). In isolating two sources of future praise for the statesman, his proles and via, the speaker assimilates the intangible potential that lies in the succession of generations with the concrete teleology of a

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Roman road.46 The silex that once, by its denial, defined Delia’s stony heart (1.1.64) is now suitably (apta) incorporated into the machinery of an empire. The wealth that the courtesan-puella will surely lack in old age (inops), Messalla, in his capacity as civil administrator, rather than warring triumphator, has used to finance one of the many blessings of the pax Romana.47 Messalla’s potential to combat the very deterioration associated with the Tibullan beloved becomes more apparent through comparison of the portraits of old age that close poems 1.6 and 1.7. Messalla as senex recalls the old woman who concluded one biting pentameter in the previous poem (Delia, as potential senex, 1.6.82)48 and revises the passage of time and its incarnation in old age as desirable rather than indecent: here the pointed antithesis between proles and senex promises a future that will outlive him, rather than serving as a reminder of time’s ill-effects on erotic identity. It is in fact a predominantly Messallan vision of masculine identity that the amator will long for in the homage to Pax that closes the first poetry book: quin potius laudandus hic est quem prole parata occupat in parva senecta casa. ipse suas sectatur oves at filius agnos et calidam fesso comparat uxor aquam. sic ego sim, liceatque caput candescere canis temporis et prisci facta referre senem (1.10.39–44). [But rather this man should be praised, whom slow old age takes hold of while his offspring are at hand. He himself shepherds his own sheep, and his son tends to the lambs; and his wife prepares hot water for him, wearied. May my life be so, and may my head be allowed to glisten with grey hair and, as an old man, tell the deeds of a former time.]

46 The conflation of road and generational succession as two forms of monumenta is perhaps emphasized by the (often recognized) echo in line 61(te canat agricola) of those praises sung of Bacchus-Osiris in line 27–8 (te canit . . . pubes barbara). In any case, by looking back to the god’s role as instructor and civilizer, the echo teases out the possibility of Messalla’s similar impact on the Roman population. 47 Though, as Gaisser notes 1971b, 228, the war booty used to finance the road lingers behind the reference to ‘your resources’ (opibus tuis). 48 As commentators note (Maltby 2002, 279; Putnam 1973, 117), the adjective in poem six is striking on its own, since senex is only rarely used to indicate a woman.

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The image of two lovers bound by fidelity alone and denied the socially legitimizing equipment of marriage has been replaced by an orthodox vision of domestic life, replete with wife and offspring. Though the poem forcefully rejects the perspective of the warrior, it articulates an ideal that relies heavily on Messalla, as father and civil benefactor, for its template. Two items in particular resonate: the privilege and duty of the old to instruct the young (referre facta temporis prisci) and the reciprocity of a youthful audience of descendents (parata prole, filius). Under such circumstances, the old age that formerly threatened eroticism, while still sluggish (pigra senecta), is now championed as a worthy goal, rather than a blight to be staved off in the meantime.49 W.R. Johnson attributes the friction of Tibullus’ poetry in part to the uncomfortable dynamic between Messalla and the amator, who experiences a ‘special (yet almost universal) adolescence’ (1990, 96), effectively coming of age under the fatherfigure who is also his patron; Johnson asks of book one’s concluding poem: ‘when young men crave to be old—what can that mean if not that they find their youth intolerable?’ (101). While the query surely captures much of the anxiety and disillusionment that alternately assert themselves in Tibullan verse, it overlooks the role of the senex as an evolving telos, one who appropriately, at the end of the book, finds a fragile kind of contentment, without his beloved puella. Such tentative comfort in the Messallan model, articulated through 1.10’s senex rusticus, raises the issue of just how committed the erstwhile amator is to his patron’s linear proclivities: non sine me est tibi partus honos (1.7.9). The statement poses as an obvious departure from the iners vita that he championed in the presence of Delia (dum tecum, 1.1.57–8) at the opening of the libellus. Shall we infer that her demise, innocently predicted in poem 1.6, has facilitated his transition into active and mature participation in civic life? In other words, should we count the poet among those Romana pubes eagerly anticipating Messalla’s triumph? For Timothy Moore (1989), poem 1.7 demonstrates a kind of balancing act which, while reminding readers of the different values shared by poet and patron, attempts to incorporate Messalla into the poet’s world by ultimately honouring Messalla’s peace-time 49

On the positive connotations of old age in the passage, particularly in light of its attributes of fatherhood and connections with Messalla as senex of 1.7, see Évrard 1978, 126–7.

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beneficence rather than his military facta (cf. Konstan 1978, 184). Jaqueline Fabre-Serris (2005, 146–49), moreover, has suggested that the poet’s history of culture (1.7.27–48) presents the role of amor in shaping human civilization in decidedly more positive terms than do the comparable histories of Vergil and Lucretius. This transcription of cultural history will recur in poem 2.1, where again Messalla is invoked as a triumphator (this time looking backward rather than forward along the generational lineage, intonsis avis, 2.1.34). In enumerating the gifts of Italy’s rustic gods to human civilization, Tibullus’ speaker will again allow Amor-Cupid pride of place, its transgressions—couched explicitly in terms of age-appropriate behaviours—both acknowledged and contained: hic iunveni detraxit opes, hic dicere iussit/limen ad iratae verba pudenda senem (2.1.73–4, ‘this [god, Cupid] has stolen money from the young man, he has also ordered the old man to speak shameful words at the threshold of an angry mistress’). Such tactics we may interpret as signalling the poet’s independence from Messalla, despite his admiration. Still, there seems to be a remarkable concession in the poet’s presentation of amor: placing love among the litany of divine services to human kind—whether those of Osiris-Bacchus, or of the Dei Ruris (2.1.37)—he diminishes its significance, and reduces it to the suitably ephemeral experience it appears to be at the end of poem 1.1. Viewed as one step in the greater movement of linear time, love’s immediacy is diluted into a sociological phenomenon. This is not to say that the critics cited above are wrong in stressing the role of love in marking the poet’s autonomy, but simply that the relationship between his persona and love’s inertia has been transformed: what was initially presented as an exclusive and all-encompassing, if tentative, force in the amator’s life (1.1.55–9) has been reduced to an external phenomenon, altogether more tractable for its distance and visibility, a transformation that, as I hope to have shown, we might have predicted all along. If we grant that the speaker of poem 1.7 enacts a qualified disavowal of his iners way of life, however, we must be a bit more precise in defining what he recommends in its place. I do not mean to limit the poem’s potential as a statement of values or political ideology, but it is clear enough that on one level the poet is recommending Messalla’s role in instructing the next generation of young men. Is this the same thing as advocating Augustus’ interest in grooming a generation of loyalists? The Messallan road was an Augustan project

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(cf. Suet. DA 30); the triumph itself was one of a series authorized by the Princeps, initiated in part to remind the Roman populace of the breadth of the empire and the rewards of Roman imperium (Konstan 1978, 176). By affirming the glory of Messalla and his positive impact on the next generation, and by outlining a human life course that looks well beyond the immediacy demanded of an amator, the speaker of poem 1.7 seems to advocate the very programme of youthful politics that had emerged in the early Principate. Moreover, the same voice championing Messalla’s cursus indicates his own progress along the path to civic maturity, as he has moved from a sedentary position as Delia’s ianitor to accompany, and verbally re-enact, Messalla’s ventures on land and sea. The amator’s identity vis-à-vis the larger community of youth will, of course, become destabilized once again by the conclusion of the Tibullan corpus. Poem 2.5, the celebration of Messallinus’ priesthood mentioned earlier in this chapter, leaves us uncertain as to whether the poet-lover will recover from the year-long hiatus that has engulfed him. In poem 2.5, Tibullus measures the strength of Messalla’s lineage against a timeline of Roman history, embodied in the journey of impiger (not ‘sluggish’, ‘slow-moving’, or ‘idle’) Aeneas (2.5.39). I deal with that poem in Chapter Eight because, as the penultimate poem of the Tibullan project, it specifically positions the amator on the verge of his departure from the puella, but still in the grip of her cyclicality. By contrast, the speaker of 1.7 appears to have shaken the grip of Delia’s furor altogether. What I hope to have demonstrated here are the strategies by which the Tibullan speaker vacillates between inertia and forward momentum, and how he gradually makes concessions to the latter through evaluations of gender, the proprieties of old age, and the civic potential of youth. While the telos of human life, death itself, haunts book one in various guises, Messalla’s embodiment of linear time, despite its improprieties for the peace-loving amator, offers itself as the most resilient model of human subjectivity, a model echoed in the portrait of old age that Tibullus longs to embody (sic ego sim, 1.10.43).

5 Ovid: Elegy at the Crossroads O argumenti lente poeta tui! (Ovid Amores 3.1.15–16)

I. INTRODUCTION: OVID’S AMORES The pleasures of an iners existence, experienced while the elegist lingers in love, play a relatively small role in the economy of erotic affection that operates in Ovid’s Amores. Attuned to the contradictions of his elegiac predecessors—who, as we have observed, profess teleological commitments alongside amorous contentment—Ovid disturbs the tenuous correlation between a life of love and one of idleness by having saevus amor interrupt his somnos inertes (‘sluggish slumber’, Am. 2.10.19). Lack of progress hinders rather than helps the designs of the poet-lover of the Amores at 3.7.13–16, where he describes his limp member as truncus iners (‘a sluggish trunk’). Ovid’s flagrant coupling of the traditionally, if inconsistently, polarized militia and amor in Amores 1.9 points to teleological strides (1.9.9–10)1 that link the soldier with the no longer segnis Ovidian amator (ipse ego segnis eram discinctaque in otia natus, 1.9.41). Here, as elsewhere, the overtly aggressive pose of the Ovidian speaker reconciles the conflicted attitudes of his elegiac predecessors by dispensing with the iners vita and approaching love as a conquest.2

1 cf. the amator’s rejection of desidia (1.9.31), the same state of ‘idleness, inactivity’ that threatens the Propertian amator at 1.12.1. 2 On Ovid’s particular fondness for depicting love as militia, see Cahoon 1988. Ovid further challenges the ideal of erotic inertia in the Ars, where the praeceptor

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Old age, moreover, does not pose the threat to male and female erotic subjectivity in the Amores that it does in Propertian and Tibullan verse, or even as it will in the Ovidian Ars. Ovid questions the endurance of Propertius’ aeternus (or ‘life-long’) amor (Prop. 1.12.20, 1.19.25–6, 2.25.9–10), and assaults Tibullus’ sentimental portrait of white-haired poet and puella by marking the youth appropriate to lover and soldier, while relegating the senex beyond generic boundaries:3 quae bello est habilis, Veneri quoque convenit aetas:/turpe senex miles, turpe senilis amor (Am.1.9.3–4, ‘the youthful age that is suitable for war is also fitting for Venus: the old soldier is a disgrace, so too is the old lover’). The Ovidian amator’s cavalier dismissal of old age from elegy’s militia amoris in poem 1.9 reserves senectus for the lena alone, whose decrepit status in poem 1.8 (110–114) provides some comfort to the jealous amator: Dipsas remains a haunting incarnation of what lies in store for the puella (Gross 1996; Gutzwiller 1985, 111; James 2003, 54), but in the realm of Ovid’s practically oriented erotic universe, the beloved’s future aging matters little, since amor himself, forever a puer, is never granted much of a future.4 At the same time, the elegiac amator’s position on his life course— that is, his status as a young male subject, who must determine a future by choosing among various age-appropriate pursuits—remains a fundamental organizing principal for Ovid’s ‘Loves’. As Alison Keith observes in her analysis of Amores 1.1 and its treatment of Propertian poetics (1992, 336), by establishing within the first few lines the mise en scène of a poet on the verge of writing poetry, Ovid lays out a plot of artistic development for the entire poem: I would add further that such a narrative of poetic attempts and failures prompts his male students to swift servitium by reminding them that ‘love hates the sluggish’, Amor odit inertes (2.229). He states more pointedly in the Remedia that Agamemnon would have been shamefully inactive (or impotent), turpiter esset iners (Rem. 780), had he not taken full advantage of time spent with Briseis. For a more general discussion of Ovid’s adaptation of elegiac motifs in the Amores, see McKeown 1987, 11–31, who addresses the question of literary parody in the three books. 3 For Tibullus’ aging lovers, see 1.6.85–86 and the discussion above, pp. 102–4. 4 In the Amores, the rare mention of love’s endurance into the long years quickly proves untenable: at the end of book two, despite a new puella’s potential to win the poet-lover’s lasting devotion (amor longos . . . adolescit in annos, 2.19.23), her overaccessibility—here Ovid toys with an erotic topos requiring the puella’s inaccessibility—leaves him cold; cf. also 1.3.15–16, where the amator’s claim that his puella will be a perennis cura is implicitly undermined by the lover’s comparison with the notorious desultor amoris, Jupiter; see Curran 1966.

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shapes the plot of all three books of Amores, and that the amator’s development—or failure to do so—is signalled primarily through Ovid’s innovative use of the recusatio, an ‘objection’ to or refusal of writing elevated verse, often based on claims of insufficient talent.5 In this chapter I argue that Ovid uses the Callimachean recusatio as a delaying strategy par excellence: the poet-lover of the Amores conflates elegy’s frequently recognized erotic deferrals with the generic deferrals that hinder his evolution towards writing patriotically inspired verse.6 Ovid makes the recusatio work overtime, much as the puella’s inaccessibility does, to prolong his identity as an elegist, an identity that, as a brief review of his ‘autobiography’ in the Tristia suggests (4.10), he never fully disavows. The defence of an elegiac (as opposed to, for example, epic) aesthetic on the grounds of its expediency in erotic persuasion has been a long recognized component of the genre’s recusationes (cf. Stroh 1971; Booth 1991, 25). Yet the function of a refusal within the implied narrative of a love affair, and within the corresponding narrative of the poet’s evolution, has been largely overlooked. Critics have detected in the course of Ovid’s erotic poetry a movement away from elegy towards a ‘greater challenge’ (Du Quesnay 1973, 6), and even found a maturation in narrative voice—as it is transformed from neophyte lover of the Amores to the veteran magister of the Ars—to match generic development (Armstrong 2005, 21–42).7 I would argue that we should pay closer attention to the strategic deferrals that interrupt such maturation, and how they not only heighten the instability associated with the youthful poetics of elegy, but rewrite the master plot of the genre as one of a stubborn resistance to evolve. My discussion of the Ovidian recusatio will focus particularly on his extensive treatment of the topos in Amores 3.1, which is cast explicitly as a deferral rather than a rejection on the basis of insufficient talent. The amator of poem 3.1 is stationed at a conceptual crossroads and forced to choose a generic path that would 5 This identification of the Amores’ plot accords well with the general view of Ovid’s literary self-consciousness, illustrated through recent treatments of the Ovidian amator’s development. cf. Hinds 2006, 37; for the development of Ovid’s amator as poet, see esp. Boyd 1997 and Boyd 2002, 18. 6 Important studies on elegy’s strategies for deferral of erotic consummation are Pucci 1978 and Connolly 2000; see above, pp. 5–6. 7 For Ovid’s evolving experiments with elegy, see also Harrison 2002, who plots a ‘generic movement upwards from the Amores’ (83).

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lead him either to responsible maturity—following Tragoedia—or further ignominy—at the heels of Elegia. As such we are encouraged to read the poet’s confrontation between elegy and tragedy as a commentary on the genre’s posture of arrested development, one that points to the potential embedded in human and poetic maturation, as well as the value of such potential to the Augustan programme. The explicitly Augustan value of proper maturation, moreover, is defined through Ovid’s choice to cast this lover at the crossroads as a Hercules figure, and thus reclaim as poster child for elegy’s arrested development a hero whose literary and visual representations had been formerly usurped by Octavian in his propaganda wars with Marc Antony (cf. Galinsky 1996, 222–4). If we consider the function of the recusatio within this larger portrait of the artist as a young—or not-so-young—man, we discover that the Amores redeploy the topos of refusal in ways that distil the elegiac narrative, and provide answers to the questions shaping elegy’s controversial politics of dissent:8 how does the ideological impact of a deferral, even one sweetened with promises for the future, differ from that of acquiescence or blunt refusal? What are the limits of youth in the context of elegy? How should we interpret the amator’s adherence to a youthful poetics in a cultural—Augustan—milieu focused precisely on the innovations of a new generation of Romans? After briefly contextualizing the recusatio in Augustan poetry, and especially in Ovid’s elegiac forerunner, Propertius,9 I will examine the ‘refusals’ that shape the Amores, arguing that their evolution within three books enacts a truncated coming-of-age, which leaves the amator poised at the helm of manhood and all but certain of his next foray into the elevated (sublimia, 3.1.39) verse that he has so consistently deferred.10 8 On elegy’s status as a genre of dissent, as well as its provocative use in shaping the nationalist themes of the Fasti, see Newlands 1995, 130; cf. Boyd 1997, 7. 9 Tibullus does not employ the recusatio to the same degree as Ovid and Propertius, though many critics read an element of refusal in poem 1.1 and, especially, 2.6, which I discuss in Chapter Eight. 10 Amores 2.18, of course, does refer to the attempted composition of a tragedy, perhaps the Medea, in a passage indicating that the poem was composed for the second edition of the Amores, and after the first and last poems of book three (McKeown 1987, 88–9). If Ovid is referring in lines 2.18.13–16 to the already published and well-received Medea, it is suggestive for our purposes that he revises his success in the genre as a project interrupted by Amor (cf. McKeown 1998, 384, 393–5); see further below, and Chapter Eight, 248, n. 55.

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II. TE DUCE: GENERIC DELAY AND DEPARTURE IN PROPERTIUS In the preceding chapters, we have observed how Tibullus and Propertius rely on the civic engagements of patrons and peers to define more clearly their conditions of erotic stasis. Frequently this kind of productive, if implicit, contrast is articulated more explicitly through a refusal, such as that issued to Tullus by Propertius’ amator, who refuses to undertake military campaigns that would part him from Cynthia. When a reluctance to partake in martial exploits is rewritten as an objection to writing about them, as happens frequently in Propertius and Ovid, the elegist proffers a formal recusatio: the poet assumes the suggestion that he should write an epic poem and then refuses to do so.11 Such a stance in turn allows the elegists to develop more fully the alternative to social and political pressures, an alternative often embodied in the elegiac puella. On the one hand, the recusatio is a contrived way for the poet to humble himself before attempting to sing of more elevated subjects: his talents are not sufficient for epic, but, if they were, he would sing Caesar’s praises, rather than hackneyed mythological themes. On the other hand, the recusatio may also be understood as a formal, and perhaps ideological, protest. As Williams (1968, 47) notes in his discussion of Propertian recusationes, ‘[t]here is considerable ambivalence of attitude, and no desperate attempt to please authority’.12 Though the speaker’s consistent charge that a puella is responsible for his generic affiliation is characteristically elegiac, the recusatio is not unique to the elegists. The form is derived most obviously from Callimachus’ Aitia, where the poet makes an aesthetic decision to avoid the trite themes of long-winded rival poets and instead turns out a short (ıŁ, 1.5 frag. Pfeiffer) tale and keeps his muse ‘slender’ (ºƺ Å, 24). In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, water

11 See esp. Wimmel 1960 for the recusatio/apologetischen form as a Callimachean strategy developed by the Augustan poets as a response to the unique artistic and political circumstances of the early Principate; cf. also Williams 1968, 46–7. 12 But see also Kennedy’s 1993 critique of Williams, which identifies the latter’s emphasis on poetic convention as a means of ‘obliterating notions of dissent’: ‘the ideologies which underpin the approach of Williams produce a reading of Propertius in which there are no discrepancies or contradictions, or at least none that are deemed to matter’ (35).

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and sea-faring metaphors illustrate the sort of epic verse the poet rejects at the behest of Apollo in favour of a more refined song—a ‘small drop that trickles up pure and undefiled from a holy spring’, 111–112.13 For Callimachus, as far as we can tell from the fragmented text, these refusals are essentially a matter of aesthetics and have nothing to do with an erotic interest.14 Vergil, like his Hellenistic predecessor, proffers recusationes that have little to do with love: Eclogue Six, Vergil’s most influential treatment of the topos, lacks an erotically motivated speaker, and may even be understood, in its exhortation to the poet Gallus, as a recommendation for versifying aetiological matters rather than erotic ones.15 Horace uses the recusatio with more frequency and variation;16 his motives for rejecting epic poetry range from feigned humility and insufficient talent (S. 1.10; Carm. 1.6, 4.2; Ep. 2.1) to a momentary preoccupation with a beloved (Carm. 1.19, perhaps 2.12; Epod. 14). And yet Horace’s approach to the opposition between nationalist and erotic themes differs markedly from that of the contemporary elegists. Perhaps most significantly, Horace does not assign this opposition a programmatic position in any of his lyric collections. In Epode 14, the poet’s love for Phryne is offered as an unfortunate stumbling block in the greater path of his already begun iambics. Within the Odes, love for Glycera (1.19) and Licymnia (2.12) will have a similar effect of thwarting the speaker’s good intentions. Yet utterly lacking in Horace’s rejection of epic themes is the Propertian 13 But cf. the arguments of Cameron 1995, 454 ff., who does not see any specific genre (e.g. epic) as the object of Callimachean polemic. Cameron instead sees Callimachus’ remarks as aimed at contemporary elegists producing work of inferior quality. 14 Another possible Hellenistic precursor to the Augustan recusatio may be Anacreontea 26, which does make an explicit link between the rejection of epic themes and a preference for erotic ones. Still, I hesitate to discuss the poem as a relevant elegiac precursor since scholars have dated poems in the collection from first century BCE to the fifth/sixth century CE. 15 Leach 1974 remarks on the implied request for Gallus—following in the steps of Hesiod—to transform the erotic ‘wandering’ themes of his poetry into more civilized, ordering verse, 241–4. The introduction of the third Georgic is also marked by elements of the recusatio form, insofar as the poet must momentarily put off his monument to Caesar (cf. 3.13, 46–48) in order to fulfill Maecenas’ request that he sing of crops, fields, and pastures (3.40–43). Again, no preference for erotic themes is mentioned directly—though of course in Georgics 4 Vergil’s poet will handle from a distance the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. 16 For Horace’s treatment of the recusatio—as distinguished especially from that of Vergil and Propertius—as well as his possible debt to Gallus, see Lyne 1995, 31–9.

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lover’s fear, discussed further below, that an obsession with his mistress will follow him to the grave and keep him from ever treating weightier matters in verse.17 For Propertius, the recusatio serves two primary functions: to establish a position of poetic marginality, and to align that position closely with his puella. The amator uses a host of spatial metaphors that dramatize the relationship between his own verse and the behemoths who would cast doubt on its legitimacy. Book three, in particular, situates the speaker on the fringes of poetry’s maiora opera, while at the same time linking that position with a puella.18 The first five poems each touch on the recusatio theme and further outline the speaker’s marginality, as he grazes the shore in a skiff, avoiding the maxima turba (‘great throng’) of epic (3.3.19–24), or is positioned along the edge of the Sacra Via, sitting out an anticipated triumphal procession celebrating Augustus’ eastern expansion (3.4.7–15).19 And yet temporal liminality—positing the speaker on the edge of adulthood as often as on the edge of the maxima turba—creates a particular frisson in the Propertian programme. This is partly because time’s inexhaustibly linear development so diligently demonstrated in the Monobiblos engenders the expectation of generic progress: with the first sprout of a beard will come the first hairs of consistent hexameter. The Propertian recusatio thus relies heavily on a model of human maturation that the biography of his poetlover will ultimately disturb. 17 cf. Commager 1995 on Horace’s rather distanced approach to love in 1.19: ‘The terms in which Horace describes his predicament are formal to the point of parody . . . As in the Ode on Lalage (c. 1.22), the absurdity of the attitude he strikes may conceal a certain envy of those so single-minded that they can maintain it unabashedly—an indulgence that Horace morally rejected’ (152). 18 For Ross 1975, 116–29, Propertius uses his erotic interests, particularly in books one and two, to distinguish himself within the elegiac genre, and, unlike Callimachus or Gallus, identifies the puella as a unique source of inspiration. Ross argues, however, that by his third book the poet allots a much stronger role to Gallan and Callimachean influence, while simultaneously minimizing the importance of the puella. While such linear readings of the Propertian poet’s development have much to recommend them (cf. Putnam 1980, Fear 2005), they also highlight the difficulty of integrating the fourth book of poems into the amator’s narrative: Propertius’ fourth book opens with a recusatio and a puella, who, triumphing in the face of the poet’s regression, poses as the most significant stumbling block to generic evolution. See further Chapter Eight, esp. pp. 238–47. 19 Williams 1968, 50 groups 3.4 and 3.11 (see below) with a number of poems characterized by the recusatio theme, insofar as they attempt to handle weightier subject matter, while at the same time rejecting the values—poetic or ideological— associated with it.

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The first poem of Propertius’ second book implicitly defines poetic marginality, and the quality of verses best suited to it, through claims of youth (nostra iuventa, 73) and a correlative moment in the poetic career. The poem fulfils the formal requirements of a recusatio, but goes beyond simply refusing a request to make a half-hearted and perhaps ironic attempt at it.20 The poet-lover has clearly identified the source of his talent in a puella (ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit, 2.1.4). Practising the same conflation of erotic and martial values that Ovid will find so amusing in Amores 1.9, the poet first boasts of a love poetry that might rival in scope (longas Ilaidas, 14) and telos (maxima historia nascitur, 16) works of the epic and historical genres. Yet his erotic narrative is born from nothing (de nihilo, 16) and, despite ambiguous engagement with those struggles that shape recent Roman history, the conclusion of 2.1 suggests a distinct failure to evolve from erotic torpor. The poem’s grandiose opening gestures in the end only make more pronounced the rather ignominious—if aesthetically appropriate—death suffered by the Propertian amator after a life devoted to a dura puella (et breve in exiguo marmore nomen ero, 72).21 Though the poet-lover, here and elsewhere, takes pains to associate erotic poetry with the marginal and ephemeral phase of early adulthood,22 he fears that such a phase might extend throughout his life: Maecenas nostrae spes invidiosa iuventae, et vitae et morti gloria iusta meae, si te forte meo ducet via proxima busto, esseda caelatis siste Britanna iugis, taliaque illacrimans mutae iace verba favillae: ‘Huic misero fatum dura puella fuit’ (2.1.73–78).

20 Commager 1974, 62 detects sustained irony in Propertius’ deferential attitude toward the epic genre. 21 For exiguus as a literary critical term, see Commager 1974, 8 and Wyke 2002, 123; for more general comments on elegy’s use of literary critical terms, see Schrijvers 1976, 416–22. 22 cf. 2.10, another recusatio: aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus:/bella canam, quando scripta puella mea est (7–8 discussed further below, Chapter Eight, p. 233.) Of course, this passage implies that both youth and old age—along with generic associations of each—are marginal, an implication confused by the fact that the Romans had little notion of middle age. The particularly marginal time of youth, however, is well attested by the many rites of passage connected with it. See Néraudau 1979, Eyben 1993, and Stanley 2003.

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[Maecenas, enviable hope of our youth, and rightful glory of my life and death, if by chance a nearby road will lead you to my grave mound, halt your British carriage with engraved yokes, and in your tears cast such words upon mute ash: ‘a difficult puella was the death of this wretched man’.]

By naming Maecenas an ‘enviable hope’ of his own ‘youth’,23 the speaker points to the potential embedded in a young man who might become another sort of Maecenas, but posits, in the end, the more likely outcome of an ignoble demise. Should he suffer the fate outlined at the poem’s conclusion, the poet-lover would be reduced to little more than a silent tomb aside an unspecified path happened upon by his patron. To articulate his generic affiliations, the poet initially casts elegy in epic grandeur—with the correlative suggestion that elegy might reach its own kind of maturity—but finally cowers in self-deprecation: the most natural expression of the amator’s poetic practice is embodied in the Roman iuvenis whose potential remains unfulfilled at the time of his perhaps premature and mostly unremarkable (mutae favillae) death. The recusatio that governs poem 3.9 is reminiscent of poem 2.1 in its address to Maecenas as well as in its reliance on iuventa as a defence of poetic priorities. The amator initially rejects Maecenas’ request that he make his way into the wide sea (vastum in aequor, 3) of poetic projects and later expands on the metaphor, explaining the sort of writing for which he is suited: non ego velifera tumidum mare findo carina:/tota sub exiguo flumine nostra mora est (3.9.35–6, ‘I do not cleave the swelling sea with a sailboat: all our delay is in the shelter of a shallow stream’).24 Significantly, the poet-lover contrasts the forward and divisive progress of an implied epic undertaking (tumidum mare findo) with his own efforts to delay (mora) in the composition of erotic verse—a contrast redoubled in the shift from a first

23 Spes implies both political ambition—as an equestrian, Maecenas’ power in the new regime was enviable—and poetic patronage, since other young men, like Propertius, might hope for his support. Similarly, iuventa here may refer to either the speaker’s own youth (as Richardson favours 1977, 217) or to the collective promise of the equestrian order. See Miller 2002, 186–7; cf. Butler and Barber 1969, 193. Given the amator’s practice in the Monobiblos of comparing his own development with that of his addressee, I am inclined with Richardson to take nostra as a poetic plural. 24 For the translation, see Richardson 1977, 353, for whom sub may suggest the protection offered by the banks.

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person active verb in the hexameter to the static, copulative est in the following line. Moreover, that ‘delay’, which we have seen become such a gendered concept in the elegiac corpus, is localized in a relatively marginal space (sub exiguo flumine), much like the tomb that the poet-lover of 2.1 fears will mark his post-mortem existence (in exiguo marmore, 72). Here, more than in any other Propertian refusal, we observe the potential for mora to operate as a structural principal shaping the poetic libellus, as the language of a recusatio—a delaying of the epic project—is deliberately elided with the vocabulary of erotic stasis. The tone of Propertius 3.9 is much more hopeful than 2.1: the speaker implies that the youth with which he associates his love elegies (3.9.45, 57) may well develop into a maturity occupied with more serious pursuits (3.9.47–56). In fact, a change of heart is proffered in the second half of the elegy, with promises to sing of Augustus’ triple triumph, if Maecenas takes the lead (te duce, 3.9.47). While critics are divided over the exact force of the ablative absolute,25 I would suggest that our poet-lover is deliberately vague here about his future intentions. Sarcasm and sincerity are easily interchanged, especially when the speaker’s position—for he is still a young man suited for explicitly elegiac enterprises (mollia tu coeptae fautor cape lora iuventae, 57)—exempts him from doing more than merely discussing his future prospects. By positioning himself on the verge of young manhood (coeptae . . . iuventae) and linking this phase with the ‘gentle reins’ (mollia lora) of elegy, the speaker marks the potential for a generic evolution that might culminate in celebration of the Augustan programme; at the same time, he has already denied the fruition of those projects for which he is naturally unsuited (3.9.20).

25 Butler and Barber 1969, 285 and Camps 1966, 99 argue for a conditional reading of the ablative absolute. Rothstein 1979, 78 notes a measure of politeness in the concession, and remarks on how such expectations are markedly inconsistent with Propertius’ poetic programme. The language of epic aspirations in the ablative absolute here strikes a discordant note with the poet’s earlier rejoinder that one must continue to practice the arts for which one is naturally suited: naturae sequitur semina quisque suae (20). We might resolve the inconsistency by reading his proposal to Maecenas as dubiously conditional—i.e. ‘If you take the lead, though I’m sure you will not . . . ’. And yet, as Richardson 1977, 354 contends, this strains the traditional sense of the ablative absolute (‘with you as my guide’) and overlooks the contents of book four, which does handle—among other subjects—matters of Roman history.

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III. OVID AND THE POETICS OF DEFERRAL On a grander scale, Ovid enacts a similar elision of structural and erotic mora in the metapoetics of Amores 3.1. The poet-lover of the Amores echoes his forerunner in predicting the conclusion of his poetic malingering, and attempts more forcefully to contain elegiac affectations within the narrow margins of young adulthood. Propertius’ sophisticated evasion infuses the recusatio form with sparks of elegy’s temporal frisson, sparks that Ovid fuels into a full-blown conflagration in the Stilkampf that pits Tragedy’s commands against the seductions of Lady Elegy. Poem 3.1, however, is only one in a series of deferrals sown into strategic points throughout the larger corpus of the Amores. Each volume begins with a recusatio, though the speaker is notoriously lacking an object of affection in Amores 1.1, and does not link his refusal with a particular puella until Amores 2.1 (17–18).26 Even without the proper materia for erotic poetry, however, the initial poem of the Amores stages its reluctant refusal as developmental regression sparked by a devious, and emphatically youthful, puer—as Cupido is named on three occasions in the poem (5, 13, 25)—whose kingdoms, so it is implied, are more than enough for his handling.27 The poem’s conclusion positions the speaker at the same ‘fancy-free, idle’ vantage point (in vacuo pectore, 26) that in Propertius’ Monobiblos (1.1.34, 1.10.30) hints at the liberties allowed to a young Roman male.28 Just as Propertius’ vacuus condition was transformed through servitium to his mistress, Ovid too suggests that Amor’s governance will soon fill the vacuum left through a temporary alleviation of responsibilities. The same book concludes with a poem less frequently identified as a recusatio but clearly consistent with a tradition of literary apologias

26 As Cahoon remarks 1985, 30, Ovid’s approach to the topos differs from all his predecessors—elegiac and non-elegiac—insofar as he fails to offer any excuse for his deferral other than a ‘transparently invented cupid’. 27 For emphasis on Cupid’s youth, cf. McKeown 1989,15; see also Rem. 23–4, where the praeceptor accuses Amor of acting in a manner inappropriate to his years, et puer es, nec te quicquam nisi ludere oportet: / lude; decent annos mollia regna tuos. It is tempting to read Ovid’s reference to this puer’s magna . . . nimiumque potentia regna (Am. 1.1.13) as an evocation of Octavian’s preternatural youth, especially in light of the familial connection between Cupid and the Julian line, played up in Am. 1.2.51–2. 28 On the vacatio adulescentiae, see Fear 2005, 14–18, and above, p. 83.

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sparked by Callimachus, who in the Hymn to Apollo criticizes ‘envy’ (çŁ, 105) as representative of his poetic detractors (McKeown 1989, 389).29 While the Ovidian amator here evaluates lifestyles rather than generic affiliations, he too condemns ‘gnawing/devouring envy’ (livor edax) as a misguided critic: Quid mihi, Livor edax, ignavos obicis annos ingeniique vocas carmen inertis opus, non me more patrum, dum strenua sustinet aetas, praemia militiae pulverulenta sequi nec me verbosas leges ediscere nec me ingrato vocem prostituisse foro? (1.15.1–6). [Why do you accuse me of (or ‘throw in my face’) idle years, gnawing jealousy, and call mine the work of a lazy talent; (criticizing the fact that) I have not, in the manner of my forefathers, followed the dusty rewards of military life, while the vigour of youth endures; and that I neither learn wordy laws, nor have I prostituted my voice to the thankless forum?]

In reconfiguring the polemics of his Callimachean predecessors, Ovid’s amator does not merely champion a life of carmina over military or forensic artes; rather, he situates such an occupation within a temporal frame during the human life course. The years (annos) he must defend against charges of laziness (ignavos) are neatly restated in a present tense dum clause—‘while vigorous age sustains me’. Here the speaker isolates the youth and strength that would also be appropriate to the occupations of the soldier or advocate. In rejecting the ‘custom of my forefathers’ (more patrum), the Amores poet implies a proper developmental sequence from which he has chosen to deviate. The elegiac buzz of inertia,30 a complement of ignavi anni, characterizes his peculiar ingenium (ingenii . . . inertis). And yet, unlike Propertius and Tibullus, who use a similar vocabulary of stasis to defend their amatores’ way of life,31 Ovid assigns such

29 Wimmel 1960, 302–3 treats the poem—esp. the significance of Livor edax—in his discussion of Ovidian recusationes. See also Williams 1978, 89–90 on the difficulties of interpreting the role of çŁ and its aesthetic implications in the Hymn to Apollo. 30 In such a poetically self-conscious context, there is of course probably also a play on in-ers, ‘without art’; cf. Mckeown 1989, 390. 31 cf. Tib. 1.1, discussed above, Chapter Four, pp. 88–98; for Propertian inertia, see also 3.7.71–2, and for a defence against charges of idleness, cf. Prop. 1.12.1–2, 3.11.1–4 (ignavi capitis).

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classifications to the voices of his detractors, and rejects the titles of complacency frequently—if disingenuously—assumed in elegiac discourse. In the opening of poem 1.15 Ovid has refashioned a polemic, initially adopting but ultimately rejecting elegy’s vocabulary of stasis. Through a defence against charges of ‘lazy years’ spent during the vigour of his youth, the Ovidian speaker relegates elegiac practice to a moment in the human life course. In this final poem of book one of the Amores, however, he leaves few clues as to the nature of his generic progress, and instead focuses on the prospect of poetry, whatever the genre, as a lifelong and ultimately immortalizing commitment (vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit, 1.15.42). The evolution of artistic ingenium, relatively muted in Amores 1.15, rings a little louder in the introductory poems of books two and three. Amores 2.1, provocatively positioned after the poet’s musing on his post-mortem survival, begins with a reference to his birth (natus, 2.1.1) in ‘watery Paelignia’. The poet-lover attempts to limit his audience (theatra; Mckeown 1998, 6) in a way that ostensibly reverses the expansive and immortalizing gestures that closed book one: hoc quoque iussit Amor: procul hinc, procul este, severi: non estis teneris apta theatra modis. me legat in sponsi facie non frigida virgo et rudis ignoto tactus amore puer. atque aliquis iuvenum, quo nunc ego, saucius arcu agnoscat flammae conscia signa suae miratusque diu ‘quo’ dicat, ‘ab indice doctus composuit casus iste poeta meos?’ (2.1.3–10). [Love also bid this: be far, far away from here, stern (old) men: you are not a suitable theatre for tender/youthful measures. Let a maiden, moved by the sight of her promised one, read me, and an inexperienced boy touched by unknown love. And may one of the young men, wounded by love’s bow, just as I am now, recognize the (secretly) shared signs of his own flame and, marvelling for some time, may he say, ‘taught by what informer has the poet written of my own misfortunes?’]

In specifying his own readership (virgo, puer, iuvenis), Ovid makes an overture to the maidens and young men to whom Horace addresses the first poem of Odes Three (virginibus puerisque canto, 3.1.4; Booth 1991, 24). Horace uses a similar formula, as noted above, in the Carmen Saeculare (virgines lectas puerosque castos, CS 6), as he targets

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a group of elite boys and girls, recognized for their malleability and potential to embody the ideals of the new age (docilis iuventa, CS 45). Given the programme of civic, Augustan values that are generally recognized to have shaped the first six poems of Horace’s Odes Three, and that undoubtedly shape the Carmen Saeculare, commissioned for the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE, we might read Ovid’s appeals to pueri and virgines as an attempt to instruct Roman youth to rather divergent, and erotic, ends. By contrasting those who should make elegiac sport a priority with severi reminiscent of Catullus’ severiores senes (poem 5.2)—‘rather strict old men’, too hardened to be stirred by anything but disapproval—Ovid goes beyond simply inscribing his appropriate audience within the margins between child and adult. He constructs an ideal readership in a way that reinforces the malleability (tener, rudis, non frigida) of various phases of youth, whose attentions (so the speaker himself illustrates, 2.1.11–20) may be directed with equal aplomb towards celestial wars or erotic ones. In targeting such an audience, the Ovidian amator complements the self-fashioning of the generically young poet-lover with equally young and inexperienced readers, thus underscoring the susceptibility of Roman iuvenes to erotic values. It is with the amator’s pardon to Jupiter for his failure to sing caelestia bella that the poem’s recusatio proper begins. The amator defends the power of songs to manage erotic, rather than heroic, matters in a witty expansion of the magical incantations attributed to the sorceresses of Propertius 1.1 (19–24; cf. Tib. 1.2.45–6, 1.8.19–22).32 In Amores 2.1, the puella prompts her lover’s volte face only in the most generic sense (clausit amica fores), and yet it is from poetry inspired by her—rather than epics sung at Jupiter’s behest— that songs take on their function of resistance to, and reversal of, time’s passage, to which Ovid gives pride of place among elegiac priorities: carmina sanguineae deducunt cornua lunae/et revocant niveos solis euntis equos (2.1.23–4, ‘songs draw down the horns of the blood-red moon, and call back the snow-white horses of the travelling sun’). The linear trajectories that define epic, whose subjects 32 See also McKeown 1998, 17, who notes that Ovid is drawing especially from Vergil’s eighth Eclogue (8.68–71). McKeown distinguishes between carmina as a form of erotic magic (‘charms’) and the kind of elegiac carmina that Ovid is writing, a division that seems to me overly rigid, since Ovid’s mimesis of erotic spells (e.g. in repetition of carmina at 23, 25, 27, 28) here suggests his poetry is allied with them in nature and purpose.

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are the swift-footed Achilles (velox cantatus Achilles, 29) and longwasted years of Odysseus (quique tot errando quot bello perdidit annos, 31), are of no present use to a poet-lover, now posing as exclusus amator. And yet in asking Jupiter to pardon him from writing epic (Jupiter ignoscas, 2.1.19) in a way that anticipates a similar pardon requested from Tragoedia in poem 3.1 (McKeown 1998, 15), the speaker predicts his own narrative of generic evolution. A statement of poetics in Amores 2.1 that situates the Ovidian speaker within a relatively narrow theatrum, speaking to a marginally adult audience, and presided over by the ‘youthful’ (purpureus, OLD s.v. 3) glow of Amor, suggests that the poet-lover’s coming-of-age is nearly overdue.

IV. FINIS AMANDI? For Leslie Cahoon, the opening of each Amores book marks a stage in the poet’s development, though that development occurs in a decidedly sinister direction: These stages seem to hint at a progression in age, at a kind of moral hardening of the arteries. A moral decline, regardless of age, is undeniably apparent. The frivolous, charming and seemingly harmless selfdeception and literary posing of 1.1 leads to callousness towards the feelings of others of 2.1, which leads in turn to a kind of poetry that teaches a whole culture to break faith. Art affects life and ideas have consequences (1985, 38).

Cahoon’s reading of the Amores, which posits a careful distance between Ovid and his callous amator, rests largely on detecting the operations of a narrator who exposes the problems inherent in the elegiac model of desire. If her reading is accurate—and she is in good company here33—we should inquire further what this process of moral regression in the face of progressed age has to do with prior elegy. In the present analysis of poem 3.1, I argue that Ovid’s ‘aging’ narrator exposes the impropriety of extending youthful eroticism beyond its traditional limits—thus the insistence with which Tragedy 33 cf. Conte 1994, whose reading of Ovid’s critique of the elegiac model of desire applies especially to the Remedia Amoris; see also James 2003, 155–211.

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breathes down the neck of the amator at the poem’s conclusion (3.1.61–70). Like Hesiod’s grey-haired children in the Works and Days (Erga 209–14), signalling Zeus’ vengeful destruction of the current Iron Age, Ovid’s clearly aged, but developmentally resistant poet-lover poses as something of a monster, whose incongruities reveal a fundamental shift in the order of things. By emphasizing Ovid’s literary critical achievement, I do not mean to reduce his treatment of elegy to a mere rehashing of generic topoi.34 The Ovidian recusatio innovates in wedding the rhetoric of refusal to a clearly articulated timeline of maturation mapped on human and textual bodies alike. The Propertian amator’s equivocations in responding to Maecenas, as we have observed, owe something to the position of youth he enjoys in the narrative present. Ovid makes no subtle equivocations, but reinforces his promise for the future with an emphatic timeline for elegy’s duration (exiguum tempus, 3.1.67; quod petit illa, breve est, 68 . . . breve). All the same, elegy’s emphatically brief existence in the life course of a young poet is undermined by this poet-lover’s demonstration that he has already moved beyond the brink of maturity. By widening the discrepancy between what the poet promises and what in his sluggishness (cessatum satis est, 24) he has already failed to do, the poet not only cements elegy’s status as a coming-of-age story par excellence, but interrogates what it means to come of age—or resist such development—in an explicitly Augustan discursive context. In his self-fashioning as a lover who has outgrown the appropriate window for such dalliances, the Ovidian amator engages directly with the lexicon of Tibullan and Propertian elegy, particularly the adjective lentus, which applies equally to a beloved’s indifference and a lover’s tenacity. Ovid’s highly charged appropriation of a sluggish, clinging, or resistant nature reminds us that the genre’s discourse of eroticism often overlays a dialogue over questions concerning what the future holds for a young male citizen in Augustan Rome. This dialogue rings a bit louder through the contrast between a lentus poeta and the swift, expansive projects that Lady Tragoedia would have him compose. To foreground the temporal modes that the elegist relies on to resist the responsibilities of adulthood, the recusatio to Tragoedia also invokes Prodicus’ parable of Hercules at the crossroads, recounted in 34 See esp. Boyd’s 1997, 5–8 warnings against the ‘progressive fallacy’ according to which later poets writing in the same genre are deemed inferior.

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Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and later Cicero’s De Officiis (1.32.117–18). In the parable, the hero is explicitly positioned on the verge of young manhood, and forced to make decisions that will shape the course of his adulthood and old age (cf.  æÆ H › H, 2.1.21). Ovid’s amator makes the very un-Herculean decision to follow the morally unorthodox Elegia, but also mitigates his offence by recalling the genre’s characteristic brevity, both its shortened pentameters and its position in the poet’s course of life. Readers of the Amores have already observed a deferral of tragedy, one prompted by an amorous puella, and resulting suggestively in the speaker’s penning of the Heroides (Am. 2.18). The confrontation with tragedy in book three dispenses with the puella as chief obstacle to poetic evolution, so frequently upheld in the Propertian refusal, and assigns to ‘Elegy’ herself the role of delaying the poet. Maria Wyke’s analysis of the poem has convincingly demonstrated how Amores 3.1 calls attention to the puella’s fictive status and directs us to read the women of elegy as ‘textual bodies bearing both poetic and political meanings’ (2002, revision of 1989, 119).35 Though both Elegia and Tragoedia, in keeping with their identities as Muses, are feminine, each represents a different type of woman within the Roman ideological framework. Palla-clad Tragoedia presents herself as a matrona, while Elegia, with her vestis tenuissima (‘very scanty garment’) suggests the appearance and demeanor of the meretrix. In other words, we are encouraged to read Elegia as a private, temporary flirtation and Tragoedia as a lifelong public commitment, in keeping with the respective status of each figure within the context of Roman society (Wyke 2002, 132–137).36 No doubt the life courses of matrona and meretrix, as manipulated and determined by Augustan moral legislation, also resonate in the speaker’s deliberations and closing concerns for his own temporal endurance. Where Propertius impudently rejects the teleology of marriage implicit in the castae puellae who crowd the opening of the Monobiblos, Ovid—always the diplomat—merely puts it off for a while.

35 Keith 1994–5 (following Wyke) examines a similar link in Ovid’s Amores between the puella’s body and the narrator’s literary aesthetic with a particular focus on the non-programmatic poems. 36 See also Davis 2006, 73, for the poem’s relationship to Augustan moral and marital legislation.

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The poet-lover describes tragedy’s muse as distinctly telos driven: she enters swiftly, ingenti passu (10), and quickly surpasses (prior . . . dixit, 15) the halting gait of Lady Elegy (pes illi longior alter erat, 8). Tragoedia’s imperative restates a contrast between movement and inertia in such a way that suggests the two Muses represent not only a dynamic Stilkampf but a larger cultural friction as well, one concerned with the nature of time and its governance over the proper development of Roman subjects. Tragoedia’s first address to the poet marks him in accordance with a temporal property frequently—and often disparagingly—applied to elegiac lovers: et prior ‘ecquis erit’ dixit ‘tibi finis amandi, o argumenti lente poeta tui? nequitiam vinosa tuam convivia narrant, narrant in multas compita secta vias (3.1.15–18). [And she asked first, ‘will you ever make an end of your loving, o sluggish poet of your own story? Drunken dinner parties chatter about your disgrace, as do the crossroads leading into many streets’.]

The adjective lentus imports a literary, and particularly elegiac, background into the portrait of an artist sketched at the opening of book three. The primary meanings of lentus, ‘flexible, pliant’ (OLD s.v.1; cf. Lewis and Short s.v.1), are often apparent as physical properties applied to material goods (e.g. of aurum at Ars 3.123); extended applications of the adjective to material substances can also connote an adhesive nature, with the basic quality of resistance to breakage, or ‘clinging’, uniting various shades of meaning.37 In his own treatment here Ovid transfers an epithet frequently applied to obstacles that block erotic progress onto his own poetic persona, the most critical stumbling block to his artistic evolution. Lentus elsewhere in elegy functions as a pejorative term used to identify the failure of the beloved to respond in timely fashion to the dictates 37 Cf. OLD s.v.2, ‘not brittle, tough’. The semantic range of lentus leaves little consistency among translators and lexicographers: e.g. where the OLD s.v.1 cites lentum aurum at Ars 3.123 as indicating gold’s ‘malleable’ property, Green 1982 translates the same usage as ‘stubborn’. While there is a certain logic that governs the transformation of a word that can refer to flexible—but also sticky and clinging— physical properties into a term connoting sluggish resistance—of either wit or emotion—the gap between these two points offers a rather frustrating, or tempting, variety of alternate implications; on the range of meanings of lentus, especially in an elegiac context, see Gauly 1995.

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of desire; that is, she is ‘clinging’ in a direction contrary to her lover’s interests. Lamenting the inefficacy of his poetic ars, the Tibullan amator decries Marathus for his lentus amor (1.4.81);38 at the conclusion of book two, the poet-lover also threatens Nemesis with the haunting visage of her deceased sister, should she become lenta (perhaps, ‘unresponsive’) to himself (2.6.36; cf. 1.10.58). By extension, narrative situations that hinder erotic motives are also dubbed lentus, as in, for example, the extended military service that a hypothetical rival wishes upon Tibullus’ poet-lover (optavit lentas et mihi militias, 1.3.82). Propertius in the Monobiblos defines as ‘sluggish’ or ‘unresponsive’ a faithless womanizer (1.6.12) and the negligent latecomer Cynthia (1.15.4; cf. 3.8.20); in book two, in the vocative case likely echoed in Amores 3.1, the adjective is used by Cynthia to reproach the sexually exhausted and thus unresponsive amator (2.15.8). As Gauly notes (1995, 92), however, the term’s divergent applications to the elegiac puella should recommend a degree of caution in any evaluation of the adjective’s use in erotic discourse: within the space of a single poem, Propertius 2.14, lentus reflects equally the beloved’s resistance, as he no longer cries before a lenta puella, 14, and his erotic contentment, as his lenta puella remains happily ‘clinging’ by his side, 22. The Amores poet-lover neutralizes the antithetical erotic connotations of lentus and strips the adjective down to convey a persistent artistic endurance—he is ‘stuck’ in a rut, as it were—at odds with Tragoedia’s agenda, but required for the poet who as yet refuses to make his ‘end of loving’. Again, we may assume that lentus harkens back to its most basic physical connotation of ‘clinging, not easily broken off ’. In poem 3.1, however, the word suggests that the amator is clinging in the direction of amor—or writing about it—rather than away from it, as with the reluctant puellae of earlier elegy. In assuming the title of lentus poeta at the beginning of Amores Three, the speaker recalls his injunction to a careless maritus (‘husband, sexual partner’)39 in the poem that had closed the previous book of Amores: 38 Tibullus’ usage may have influenced Horace’s depiction of his painful love for Glycera in the Odes (1.13.8); for parallels, see Gauly 1995, who also posits an etymological connection between the properties of lentus amor and the name Marathus, and Maltby 2002, 238. 39 On the deliberately ambiguous lexicon of elegiac partnerships, see especially James 2003, 42–9; Ovid uses the same adjective in Amores 1.6 to describe the doorkeeper, another obstacle—or would-be obstacle—to his erotic motives (1.6.41–2).

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lentus es et pateris nulli patienda marito;/at mihi concessi finis amoris erit, 2.19.51–2 (‘you are sluggish/dull and allow what should be allowed by no partner; but it will be the end of my love if it is yielded to me’).40 Here the rival’s excessive tolerance and, in particular, a tendency to tolerate what had been forbidden in Augustan marital legislation (Davis 2006, 82–4), predicts the ‘end’ (finis) of elegiac amor and poetic practice—a playful irony in light of the lenta puella’s usual role in generating and prolonging the elegiac lament. In applying the same term to the amator in poem 3.1, the critic Tragoedia has taken a property of temporal resistance that frequently thwarts the designs of the poet-lover and rewritten it as one of the genre’s defining characteristics—what prevents the speaker from making an ‘end of his loving’, in fact, the most salient property defining the elegist’s failure to break off and away from the viscous trap of elegiac love. Underlining the a-teleological resistance of the amator are Romana Tragoedia’s recommendations for a new discursive project: she does not encourage tales of defiant daughters or lovelorn heroines,41 a fit subject for drama as Euripides or Sophocles would have it, but instead directs the poet to sing the ‘deeds of men’ (facta virorum): fabula, nec sentis, tota iactaris in Urbe, dum tua praeteritio facta pudore refers. tempus erat thyrso pulsum graviore moveri; cessatum satis est: incipe maius opus. materia premis ingenium; cane facta virorum: ‘haec animo’ dices ‘area digna meo est’. quod tenerae cantent lusit tua Musa puellae, primaque per numeros acta iuventa suos. nunc habeam per te Romana Tragoedia nomen: implebit leges spiritus iste meas (3.1.21–30). [Your story is talked about throughout the whole city—not that it bothers you—as long as you let go of shame and tell of your deeds. It’s past time that you were inspired, struck by a weightier wand

40

429).

The text is Kenney’s; others read concessa (cf. Brandt 1911, 138; McKeown 1998,

41 Thus there is some irony in the fact that, when Ovid did produce a tragedy, his subject was Medea. For Holzberg, cane facta virorum is clear evidence that the Tragedy heralded in poem 3.1 is not the Medea, an argument met by others with some scepticism; Holzberg 2006, 68 n. 24.

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(‘thyrsus’). You stifle your talent with such a subject; sing the deeds of men: you will say, ‘this field is worthy of my spirit’. Your Muse, driven by its own measures, has played at the sort of thing sung by young girls and boys in the first part of youth. Now let me, Roman Tragedy, have a name through your efforts. That breath will inspire my sovereignty.]

In outlining the kind of project she imagines for the poet, Tragoedia effectively polarizes the overly reflective spatio-temporal closure of elegy (tua facta)—practised by a poet of ‘his own argumentum’, and generated in the confines of dinner parties and crossroads—with a more cursive operation that looks outside the self to sing the deeds of men (facta virorum). Her rhetoric reinstates those features of the genre that conform to its articulation of women’s time. In particular, Tragoedia emphasizes the genre’s provision of ‘all-encompassing and infinite’ space as both a refuge for the amator, and an alternative to historically engaged projects (Kristeva WT, 191; 1979, 7: ‘inglobante et infinie comme l’espace imaginaire’). That self-reflective alternative—almost ‘Imaginary’ in its musings—however, can also be interpreted as a precondition to entering the symbolic order and the historical projects that order supports. Thus, rather than simply identifying the facta advocated here as a nod to the conventions of drama or epic poetry, we should view it as activating the same interdependent structural polarity that governed Tibullus’ transition in narrative voice from that of helplessly spinning amator (1.5.3–4) to one of directed civic maturity, celebrating Messalla’s facta in poem 1.7 (55): Ovid’s Tragoedia not only advocates the ‘deeds of men’ and the greater expanse in which they might be surveyed, but she naturalizes their role as successors to the self-interested, erotic chatter of youth (prima iuventa).42 Tragoedia also decries her rival genre as a kind of delay (cessatum satis est, 24) and burden to the ingenium, which must be positioned relative to the sweep of her own area digna. In using spatial metaphors to assign the poet a development that moves further away from the self, the speaker relies on a well-developed vocabulary of aesthetic prerogatives.43 And yet what is peculiarly elegiac and Ovidian about Tragoedia’s demands is the temporal trajectory that she maps out for 42 As Brandt notes 1911, 142, the emphasis on early life goes beyond simply denoting youth as the province of love, but also states the opposition between generic modes as one mirrored in the contrast between youth and age. 43 See esp. Wimmel 1960, 139 and Wyke 2002, 129–30.

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the poet’s development: the conclusion of her speech not only dwells on a long overdue present (tempus erat . . . nunc), but insists that the poet has aged out of his material and his audience (tenerae puellae . . . prima iuventa). Where Augustan recusationes frequently depend on proprieties of natural ingenium to make their arguments, Ovid, taking a cue from Propertius’ polite objections, revises the point of contention as a matter of timing, and maturity, rather than talent. In peeling back the layers of Ovid’s overly ripe amator in poem 3.1, we confront another element of characterization, and one that asks us to concentrate more closely on an established reciprocity between age and generic evolution. As noted above, Ovid’s Stilkampf has long been recognized as an evocation of the parable of Hercules at the crossroads, recounted as the tale of Prodicus in Xenophon’s Memorabilia.44 Xenophon’s speaker describes a young Hercules who must choose a life of virtue or vice, Kakia or Arete, and must give audience to the enticements of each, before making his final, virtuous decision. As Maria Wyke has noted, Ovid’s evocation and upending of the Hercules parable, so that the Ovidian Hercules-amator chooses Elegia-Kakia over Tragoedia-Arete, insinuates itself within a larger Roman civic discourse that linked Hercules with Augustus (2002, 136–7). Augustus’ self-promotion as a latter day Hercules, through, for example, the decision to celebrate his triple triumph of 29 BCE on the day of the hero’s festival,45 is well-attested, and Wyke’s interpretation is consistent with Ovid’s penchant for humorous appropriation of prominent symbols of Augustan culture. What scholars have overlooked in their recognition of thematic overlap in the amator’s crisis and the Herculean one recounted in Xenophon is that both are presented as coming-of-age narratives.46 As Xenophon’s Socrates, narrator of the tale in the Memorabilia, attempts to demonstrate the difficulties and rewards of a virtuous

44 For the influence of Prodicus’ tale, see Brandt 1911, 141; cf. also Schrijvers 1976; Wyke 2002, 130–45; Boyd 1997, 197–200, and Gibson 2007, 71–80. Wimmel 1960, 295–7 stresses Ovid’s daring in treating the recusatio form here, but recognizes other influences, especially Propertian (cf. 3.3, 4.1), in the poet’s Stilkampf. 45 Vergil’s treatment of Hercules in Aeneid Eight bolstered this kind of imagemaking; cf. Wyke 2002, 137. See also Galinsky 1996, 222–4 on Augustus’ appropriation of Hercules. 46 For the Hercules parable in Xenophon as a coming-of-age story par excellence, and indicative of the ‘bifurcation’ with which every young man was confronted in ancient conceptions of maturity, see Eyben 1993, 13.

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life, he introduces a parable that explicitly positions the hero on the threshold of manhood: Åd ªaæ  HæÆŒº Æ, Kd KŒ Æ ø N lÅ ‰æ A, K w ƒ  Ø X Å ÆPŒææ ªØª Ø ÅºFØ, Y c Ø’ IæB › e æ łÆØ Kd e   Y c Øa ŒÆŒ Æ, KºŁÆ N ıå Æ ŒÆŁBŁÆØ IæFÆ,  æÆ H › H æÅÆØ (2.1.21). [He says that when Heracles was passing from boyhood to youth’s estate, wherein the young, now becoming their own masters, show whether they will approach life by the path of virtue or the path of vice, he went out into a quiet place, and sat pondering which of the roads to take (translation modified from Marchant 1979, 95).]

Xenophon’s earlier account clearly situates the tale within a transitional phase of the human life course (Kd KŒ Æ ø N lÅ ‰æ A), making it an appropriate paradigm for the temporally liminal elegiac speaker. As with Ovid’s Elegia and Tragoedia, Kakia and Arete, who arrive shortly to plead their cases, are equipped with physical properties to match moral fibre, though Xenophon allows the impetuous Kakia priority in speaking: she ‘runs before’ (æ æÆ E, 2.1.23) her rival to meet Hercules just as Tragoedia moves swiftly past her limping adversary. After both offer opening remarks in Xenophon’s narrative (2.1.23–28), Kakia inserts a sly reminder that her road is a ‘short’ (æÆåEÆ) one, while her opponent’s is decidedly arduous and lengthy ( ÆŒæa). As Arete proceeds to explain, however, the rapid road to pleasures sought by many men is succeeded by a life of hardship: ‘ . . . idle and sleek they thrive in youth ( Øa Å), withered and weary they journey through old age ( Øa ªæø), and their past deeds bring them shame, their present deeds distress. Pleasure they ran through in their youth: hardship they laid up for old age . . . ’ (2.1.31). Arete draws the substance of her argument from a view of the human life course in toto; and it is primarily the linear trajectory (›dB) from youth to old age that makes the life she espouses rewarding. The virtuous path offers compensation that inverts the model of withered and disreputable old age: ‘the young rejoice in winning the approval of the old; the elders are glad to be honoured by the young, and with joy they recall their deeds past . . . ’ (2.1.33).47 Arete emphasizes how the

47 ŒÆd ƒ b  Ø E H æı æø KÆ Ø åÆ æıØ, ƒ b ªæÆ æØ ÆE H  ø Ø ÆE IªººÆØ ŒÆd 

ø b H ƺÆØH æø ÅÆØ.

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path of virtue can earn something the Ovidian poet is always grasping for—eternity in memory, though we have already observed the amator’s conviction that such an achievement requires no generic evolution, a claim he will iterate at the end of poem 3.1 (65). Despite the fact that Xenophon’s Arete has demonstrated a life of virtue and one of vice to be strictly incommensurable, Ovid ingeniously transforms a matter of choice forced upon Hercules into one of sequence—first, elegy, then tragedy. In doing so, he simultaneously exchanges the spatial implications of the ‘short’ road to ruin for the temporal nuance of elegy’s brief duration. Just as the Ovidian amator reverses the victory of Arete over Kakia, he capitalizes on the transience of the life of vice impugned by Arete (2.1.31), and uses its ephemeral nature, when applied to elegy, to a rhetorical advantage. In Amores 3.1, Elegia concedes to tragedy both durability and gravitas (3.1.35–40), and relegates her authority to the nightly liaisons of the puella, taking credit only for powers of persuasion in erotic affairs (43–60). Ovid’s poet-lover will for the moment follow elegy’s enticements, but he forecasts a time when he will abandon his interest in the genre: Desierat; coepi ‘per vos utramque rogamus, in vacuas aures verba timentis eant. altera me sceptro decoras altoque cothurno: iam nunc contracto magnus in ore sonus. altera das nostro victurum nomen amori: ergo ades et longis versibus adde breves. exiguum vati concede, Tragoedia, tempus: tu labor aeternus; quod petit illa, breve est’. mota dedit veniam. teneri properentur amores, dum vacat: at tergo grandius urget opus (3.1.61–70). [She had finished; I began, ‘I beg, by each of you, that the words of a frightened man fall on open/agreeable ears. One of you honours me with a sceptre and lofty buskins: already now there is a great sound about to come from my pursed48 lips. The other of you allows to my love a name that will live on: therefore be present and add brief verses to long ones. Concede a slight measure of time to your vates, Tragoedia: yours is a work for all time; what that one seeks is brief.’ So moved she

48 Reading contracto with Kenney; or, reading contacto (cf. Brandt 1911, 144), ‘touched, anointed’.

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gave her pardon. Let my youthful love stories be hurried along, while there’s the freedom to do so: but a more mature work presses from behind.]

As Gibson notes (2007, 74–5), the trial as recounted in Xenophon locates its own origins in Hesiod’s prescriptions to Perses regarding the two roads, one virtuous and one base, available for one’s course of life (Xen. Mem. 2.1.20; Hes. Op. 287–9). Such a literary provenance activates in Ovid’s version the clear distinction, in fact polarization, of a right and a wrong way, with no room for a middle way between them. For Gibson, it is against this denial of a middle way that we should read Ovid’s compromising solution to the aesthetic crisis his amator faces in poem 3.1. While this interpretation appropriately evaluates the amator’s decision against the elegiac genre’s ‘predilection for extremes’, it does not fully explain the terms of Ovid’s compromise, which are explicitly chronological; that is, his decision admits both extremes, but only in succession. Echoing the projection of immortality that closed the first volume of Amores (1.15.41–2; cf. 1.3.25–6), Ovid’s poet-lover boasts that the fame gained by his elegies will surpass temporal limits (nomen victurum).49 Yet, paradoxically, we are twice reminded that his current subject and generic affiliation is breve, requiring only ‘a little time’ (exiguum tempus). Engaging Propertius’ fondness for expressing elegiac style as exiguus, Ovid adds a layer of brevity (brevis) to this adjective’s signifying capacity, generically linking the ‘meagreness’ of elegiac verse to the brief window of opportunity during which a poet ought to practise it50—quite unlike the labour of tragedy that will constitute a lifelong project, the project of an aetas.51 Here Ovidian aesthetics are conflated with the poet-lover’s autobiography, in such a way that we are bound to reinterpret those elegiac buzzwords littering the corpus in terms of the amator’s life course, his limited leisure to conduct such frivolities, as much as we read them as signs of a polished style. So too does the urgency of the final couplet, 49

b–c.

For vinco as outlasting or exceeding the limits of time and space, see OLD s.v.10

50 Propertius has to some extent anticipated this layered significance by having his breve nomen etched on a ‘slight piece of marble’ (exiguo marmore, 2.1.72). 51 Aetas and aeternus are both derived from aevum. While aeternus often bears a stronger sense, more akin to our ‘eternal, undying’, the context of Ovid’s aeternus labor, in which his current occupation is juxtaposed with a future project, points more to the adjective’s ‘weakened sense’ (OLD s.v.4) of ‘life-long’.

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pressing a grandis poetic project over and above a tener one, hasten to the fore the primary sense of grandis (‘mature, full-grown’, OLD s.v.1a–b), now superimposed over its literary critical implications (OLD s.v. 6a). Tragoedia’s final depiction suggests that she is quite imminently breathing down the neck of the poet (cf. iam nunc),52 who must hurry along (properentur) his tender Amores, while he still has the leisure to do so (dum vacat). The ‘hedging clauses’ (dum licet) sprinkled throughout Tibullus’ erotic narrative with Delia, which secured an outlet for his amator’s future literary endeavours,53 are condensed by Ovid into a single moment of deferral. In the poem’s final line, Ovid turns again to the notion of a young man’s leisure (vacatio), the same condition of freedom which Propertius ironically denies in the opening of the Monobiblos, but which nonetheless we have observed as intimately connected with the production of elegy, and under pressure in the context of an emerging Augustan programme. In staging the final refusal of the Amores, Ovid rehearses a process of poetic and civic maturation, prompting us perhaps to consider other Herculean life courses along the way.54

V. LITERARY LIFE COURSES: OVIDIAN ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHY’ Foregoing Propertius’ careful contingencies that made his poet-lover’s literary evolution dependent on Maecenas’ leadership (te duce, 3.9.47), Ovid makes a bold promise that he will only half-heartedly keep. Within the course of Amores Three we will observe yet another disavowal of amor and another recantation, poem 3.11—fits and starts that by now we should recognize as characteristic of elegiac practice (Holzberg 2006, 67). Despite the urgent insistence of a higher—or simply ‘more mature’—genre, Ovid in the course of his poetic career strays only twice from the elegiac couplet. What is perhaps a more

52 For the sexual innuendo here, as a reminder of the instability of terms used in elegiac discourse, see Kennedy 1993, 62. 53 See Putnam 1973, 58 and Chapter Four, p. 95. 54 Recent history’s most famous ‘bifurcation’, which prompted the morally ambiguous Octavian to take the more salubrious path to Augustan respectability, surely lingers in the background as a dynamic—even irritating—foil to Ovid’s reluctant lover.

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useful gauge of his poetic evolution is the poet’s elegiac ‘autobiography’ offered in Tristia IV as part of a larger apologia. Despite the success of the epic Metamorphoses and the tragic Medea (if we go by Quintilian’s testimony, Inst. 8.5.6, 10.1.98), as well as the significant shift in content that marks his elegiac Fasti, the speaker defines his pre-exile self, above all, as a ‘player of tender loves’ (tenerorum lusor amorum, 4.10.1). The Tristia are consistently concerned with lamenting and reversing the poet’s exile, a punishment suffered in part from the offence of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (cf. Tr. 2.5–8, 207). It is within this polemical context that we find the poet’s defence of both erotic poetry (esp. Tr. 2.237–470) and of his life as an erotic poet (Tr.4.10). The poet may explain his autobiography as a mere nod to posterity (4.10.2), but it is as a defence of his own aesthetic, moral, and civic choices that we are encouraged to read it.55 With exacting precision, ‘Ovid’ charts a course of life that spans from birth, to tender years (teneri 4.10.15), to the assumption of both the toga that marks a ‘freer’ way of life (liberior toga, 27–8), and the broad purple stripe (purpureus, 29) worn by young men destined for public office. Ovid’s public career did not last long, and the core of the biography consists of poetic inspiration and poetic composition, for which, despite much written and much burned, the pseudonym Corinna alone stands as a reflection of his life’s work: utque ego maiores, sic me coluere minores, notaque non tarde facta Thalia mea est. carmina cum primum populo iuvenalia legi, barba resecta mihi bisve semelve fuit. moverat ingenium totam cantata per urbem nomine non vero dicta Corinna mihi. multa quidem scripsi, sed, quae vitiosa putavi, emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi. tunc quoque, cum fugerem, quaedam placitura cremavi, iratus studio carminibusque meis (4.10.55–64).

55 Twentieth-century critics frequently focused on the poem as a sphragis to the Ovidian corpus and attempted to isolate (with some disappointment) biographical details. For a review of such approaches and a more positive evaluation of the literary conventions deployed in the passage, see Fredericks 1976, who explains Ovid’s selection of details as an expression of the important role poetry and poetic inspiration played in shaping the course of his life.

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[Just as I revered older poets, so did younger ones revere me, and quickly my Muse became known. When I first read my youthful poems to the people, my beard was cut either once or twice. Corinna (not called by her real name) had inspired my talent and was sung throughout the whole city. Indeed I wrote many things, but, that which I thought flawed, I myself gave to the flames for revision. Then also, when I was fleeing (into exile), I burnt certain poems that would have pleased, because I was angered at my zeal and my poetry.]

In discursively presenting his life to the reading public, Ovid—always the amator—defines himself as a love elegist, whose early compositions, written about the time his first beard was shaved (4.10.57–8), appear to preoccupy the majority of his career. It is beyond the scope of this project to offer a comprehensive account of the poet’s biography or even of Ovid’s life as a poet. I cite the passage here merely as evidence for Ovid’s adherence to a model of arrested development, in spite of the evolution predicted in Amores 3.1. Harrison’s account of Ovid’s ‘evolutions’, while clearly illustrating the virtuosity with which Ovid adapted the elegiac metre to new materia, also reminds us of how frequently Ovid bids farewell to erotic elegy (2002, 84), leaving us to wonder whether or not he will ever really get on with it: it is over and against his identity as an erotic poet that he constantly defines himself, not least of all in the exile poetry. As Holzberg notes (2006, 58), Tristia Four includes its own narrative of fits and starts—of civic services attempted and aborted, much to the chagrin of his father and successful brother—in such a way that returns us to the origins of Ovid’s erotic self-fashioning at Amores 1.1. In offering a veritable poetic ‘hall of fame’, in which he confidently positions himself, Ovid restates the contradiction between youthful poetic vitality (iuvenalia carmina, 4.10.57)56 and a stifled old age spent in exile (iam mihi canities pulsis melioribus annis venerat, 4.10.93). For Holzberg (2006, 57), Ovid ‘ . . . needed to sculpt the portrayal of himself as a young poet accordingly. There, in complete contrast to the old man in exile, he presents himself as a typical elegiac poet with all the freshness of youth. As such he first distances himself expressly from the world of negotium, represented by his father and brother . . . ’. The impression of Ovid’s life course 56 Incidentally, Martial uses the same phrase (in the plural) to describe Propertius’ poetry (14.189); see above, p. 59.

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with which we are left—a flourishing career in erotic verse broken off abruptly with the advent of exile, development both arrested and sadly accelerated—must be interpreted not only within Ovid’s unique poetic production, but rather as part of a larger system of generic conventions.57 The last word on the Augustan amator resounds with the same clinging reluctance to evolve (lente poeta!) that marked his initial deferrals. With the elegist no longer able to plead youth in defence of his transgressions, his refusals have lost their softened edges of promises for the future.

57 The locus classicus for teasing out Ovidian biography and concurrent Roman history from Ovid’s poetry is Syme 1978, 15, who reminds us that emphasis on the poet’s identity as a iuvenis at the time of poetic/erotic transgressions also rhetorically underlines the injustice of his experiencing punishment in his old age.

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Part II Unveiling Aurora: From Puella Relicta to Puella Anus

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6 The Waiting Game Cynthia, like the moon, partakes of both mortal and immortal nature—‘eternity in her, oft change she bears’, as Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of a later, and quite different, Cynthia. As a human being Cynthia must change, age, and die. But, like her namesake, she may also remain unchanging and eternal through the medium of Propertius’ verse. (Commager 1974, 35)

I. INTRODUCTION TO THE KRISTEVAN CHORA AND LE TEMPS DES FEMMES In observing the amator’s resistance or concessions to linear time, expressed through poetic evolution or biological maturity, we have also glimpsed the puella’s role in shaping her poet-lover’s erratic progress: whether he is crippled under the force of tardus amor or vies for longevity as it is embodied in representatives of conventional Roman masculinity, the puella is credited with retarding or accelerating the poet-lover’s movement. In either case, she is ill-rewarded for her favours. Ovid makes this jarringly apparent in his dismantling of elegiac verisimilitude in Amores 3.1, where the endurance of the mistress Elegia comes up punningly short (brevis) when measured against that of the matron Tragoedia. The relative merits of either courtesan or respectable Roman wife are exposed as ultimately serving the poet’s interests alone, winning for him a nomen victurum (Cahoon 1985, 35–6) or an aeternus labor, an extension of the poetic life course in either case. At the same time, the puella’s configuring as a site of poetic delay and her assignment to spatio-temporal isolation suggest that in

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certain guises she remains mysteriously untouched by historical progress. This chapter offers a closer look at the temporal qualities attributed to the elegiac beloved in her role as a steadfast puella relicta. I argue that the depiction of the ‘abandoned beloved’ allows the poet-lover to develop most fully the puella’s gender- and genrespecific experience of time—that is, an experience defined by repetition, cyclicality, and spatial enclosure. Various portraits of the puella relicta, drawn most clearly in Propertius 1.3, Tibullus 1.3, and Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, in turn, allow the amator to define his own resistance or acquiescence to teleological advancement. While other topoi also contribute to the puella’s composite experience of women’s time,1 it is in her lonely (sola) or abandoned state that she most clearly proposes and interrogates those alternatives to the teleologies that shape the amator’s experience as a male subject. The nature of the puella relicta comes into particularly sharp focus when examined through the conceptual lens of the Kristevan chora: Kristeva’s concept and its role in her formulation of women’s time isolates certain properties—repetition, cyclicality, confinement—that can be shown in elegy to operate in ways that extend the poet-lover’s experience of erotic malingering. These properties are not biologically determined in Kristevan thought, but are used heuristically to describe a potentially subversive subject position that disturbs the functions of the symbolic order. Thus Kristeva’s account of the chora and its relation to the symbolic also demonstrates how the puella’s unique composite of characteristics appeals to her lover as an expression of his political heterodoxy. To understand Kristeva’s concept of the chora, we must turn briefly to the work of her early mentor, Jacques Lacan.2 As his student, Kristeva, like many French intellectuals of the period, was concerned with the relationship between the unconscious and the processes of 1

The puella’s abandonment is in many ways reversed through the paraclausithyron, which posits her on the more desirable side of a threshold (e.g. Prop. 1.16, 2.14.21–22; Tib. 1.2, 1.5.67–76, 1.6.33–4; Ov. Am. 1.6); this topos, whose implications for the operations of symbolic language are treated by Pucci 1978 esp. 62–9, works to confirm the spatial borders that enclose the puella, even suggesting an equation between the girl and the space she occupies. This equation is demonstrated partly through pointed transference of typical elegiac epithets (dura, clausa) from the ‘girl’ to her ‘threshold’, and vice versa (cf. Prop. 1.16.17–18, 1.17.15; Tib. 2.6.28, 47). 2 This discussion is partly indebted to the helpful analyses of Kristeva’s works in Lewis 1974; Roudiez 1984, 1–10; Moi 1985, 150–73, 1986, 1–22; Reineke 1997; and Oliver 2002, xi–xxix.

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language, or, more generally, with the motivating forces behind the speech act.3 Lacan had identified an opposition between Imaginary and Symbolic realms, or between how we see ourselves in the world and the realm of signification, including culture in its broadest sense.4 To account for the space between these realms, for the fact of their non-identity, Lacan introduced a third term into the dyadic opposition between the self and the world of signs: the Real, that ‘inaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of signification, always outside the symbolic order’ (Eagleton 1996, 145). The Real occupies the position of the lost plenitude, of the maternal body as experienced before the child’s entrance into Symbolic language, a state that language always unsuccessfully attempts to achieve. Yet it is also the world of history as a realm of change, surrounding circumstances that continue beyond representation. Kristeva revises this triadic structure consisting of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary elements as an opposition between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ aspects of language. For Kristeva, the symbolic is language in its differentiated form, following the split between signifier and signified. The production of symbolic language involves an initial impulse (the subject’s desire) that is transformed into one or more meaningful signs; this procedure requires a break between subject and object, resulting in the positing of signification (RPL, 98). This process of breaking and positioning is what Kristeva terms the ‘thetic’ phase, the ‘threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic’, and it results in what we might term comprehensible linguistic utterances (RPL, 102). The thetic describes a process of positioning, by which the symbolic elements of language become evident as a subject’s initial impulses are separated from their referents and arranged according to the traditional rules of grammar and syntax. Thus the symbolic is equated with the structures by which symbols operate and convey meaning. Kristeva’s most revolutionary thinking, however, involves that which she posits on the other side of the thetic threshold, namely, the semiotic. Just as Lacan had assigned to the Real all that which escapes signification and thus marks the limits of the Symbolic, As Oliver 2002 succinctly states the question, ‘Why do we speak?’ xiv. For a useful summary of the relationship between Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic, as well as its relevance to the development of Roman elegy, see Miller 2004, esp. 5–16, and above, Introduction, p. 18–19. 3 4

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Kristeva acknowledges, within the scope of a subject’s desire to communicate, certain semiotic elements—for instance, intonation, gesture, vocal rhythm (RPL, 96)5—that escape the restrictions of symbolic language. The semiotic, however, also has affinities with Lacan’s Imaginary: the Imaginary is associated with that state of plenitude prior to the break with the maternal body and thus prior to the need to articulate absence through Symbolic structures (Moi 1985, 99). Kristeva’s semiotic aspects of language emerge from pulsions (or ‘drives’, predominantly oral and anal) originating in the body of the speaking subject. These pulsions are also prior to the absence of maternal plenitude and precede the introduction of symbolic language that constitutes the Oedipal phase. With her study of the semiotic components of language, Kristeva acknowledges the residual effects of the subject’s link with the maternal body and redirects the study of signifying practices back towards the subject’s own material form. It is largely from interest in these residual effects, or traces of the semiotic, that Kristeva’s linguistic theory diverges from Lacan’s. Where Lacan stresses the security—however tentative—that the subject finds in the world upon its introduction into the difference, primarily sexual difference, that determines the operations of the Symbolic, Kristeva stresses how sexual difference can prompt subjects to contest, and thus render unstable, their roles within the symbolic order.6 Part of that instability is due to drives operating in the unconscious, manifested as semiotic properties of language, which always threaten to disturb meaning (RPL, esp. 96–105; cf. Reineke 1997, 20–21). Such instability, moreover, underpins Kristeva’s resistance to formulating the subject as a transcendental ego;7 instead, she describes the subject as an entity in constant flux and fragmentation 5 More precisely, Kristeva describes voice and gesture as two of the ‘various material supports susceptible to semiotization’, i.e. aspects of the speech act in which semiotic pulsions are made manifest. 6 cf. Reineke 1997, 20: ‘Where Lacan stresses that sexual difference functions to secure the subject in the world, Kristeva notes that it plays a role when subjects contest the circumstances of their existence in the Symbolic order’. For Kristeva, Lacan’s account of subjectivity suggests that human development leaves the subject largely reconciled to its status as a creature of language (Kristeva 1984, 130–1, citing Lacan 1977, Ecrits: A Selection, 260–4 [Alan Sheridan, translation, with some modification]). Paul Allen Miller (per litteras) reminds me that, for Lacan, such reconciliation may be less stable than Kristeva (or Reineke) implies. 7 In Husserl’s sense. See Kristeva RPL, 90–1.

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(le sujet en procès).8 Kristeva’s articulation of subjectivity, while not altogether denying individual identity, strikes a delicate balance that weighs the heterogeneous drives characteristic of the human body against the notion of a unified consciousness or ego.9 The pulsions born from bodily drives persist after the Oedipal phase, manifested as semiotic qualities of language, but undergo a kind of stasis when checked by biological restraints and social interaction. Kristeva locates these semiotic pulsions in the chora, a term she borrows from Plato’s Timaeus, where åæÆ (‘space’) is described as: . . . everlasting, not admitting destruction; providing a situation for all things that come into being but itself apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning, and hardly an object of belief. This, indeed, is that which we look upon as in a dream and say that anything that is must be in some place and occupy some room (52a–b, F. Cornford, trans.).

In this section of the Timaeus, Socrates discusses the three kinds of being of which the universe is constituted: source (model), offspring (copy), and the space wherein ‘becoming’ occurs, namely the åæÆ. The åæÆ lacks the constitution of difference integral to the production of forms, while at the same time providing the very receptacle in which objects produced from forms can occur. Its heterogeneity results in an inherent instability that must be constantly and tenuously repressed, a process Plato describes as an uneven oscillation ‘to and fro under the impact of these forces and, in turn, through [the åæÆ’s] motion, she sways them to and fro (Tim. 52d5–e6)’.10 While this space lacks forms or intelligible properties, Plato characterizes it as a markedly feminine entity (Tim. 50c–d), assigning it a function as ‘a receptacle and, so to speak, the wet nurse (ØŁÅ) of all becoming’ (49a). He also refers to the space as a mother figure (50d, 51a), as opposed to the model father and their resulting offspring. Plato’s vaguely situated, generative åæÆ becomes, for Kristeva, a useful concept for designating the dynamic and heterogeneous drives that motivate language:

8

cf. Oliver 2002, xvii–xviii. Moi 1986, 13–14. 10 cf. Spentzou 2003, 99–104, who offers a useful account of the link between Plato’s åæÆ and Kristeva’s appropriation of the concept. 9

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Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in the semiotic process—by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call the chora:11 a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated (RPL, 93).

Like Plato’s åæÆ, Kristeva’s chora designates an inherently unstable entity that, during the language process, suffers repetition and regulation (réglementation), a process that ‘differs from symbolic law’, but one that ‘effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them and then starting over, again and again’ (RPL, 94). Kristeva feminizes both the chora and the semiotic component of language issuing from it by echoing Plato’s original stress on its maternal (maternel) properties in La Révolution12 and later, in her essay on women’s time, where she describes it as a ‘matrix space’ or womb.13 Furthermore, as noted above, these drives originate in a pre-Oedipal stage and during the subject’s experience of the mother’s body, the original site of a jouissance that is later transferred—e.g. to the male phallus.14 Because the chora can never be definitely posited (cf. RPL, 94), it designates a space between the dispositions that constitute the signifiers of the symbolic order and is used to indicate marginality within Kristevan theory.15 In ‘Le Temps des Femmes’, or ‘Women’s 11

Italics in quotations from texts are original unless otherwise noted. RPL, 94. To say that Kristeva follows Plato in feminizing the chora does not mean that she marks the chora and the semiotic as essentially the province of the female sex. Both sexes experience the semiotic; see Reineke 1997, 39–40 and Moi 1985, 163–7. In Kristeva’s discourse, however, the chora designates a subject position often, but not exclusively, held by women. 13 WT, 191. It is important to note that the chora (though described as ‘rhythmic space’, RPL, 94) is anterior to both temporality and spatiality. 14 Kristeva RPL, 95, 101. For jouissance as indicating the subject’s approach towards an experience of the Real, see Chapter One, p. 23; cf. also Reineke’s 1997 understanding of Kristeva’s use of jouissance to refer to ‘an excess and surplus of being—inassimilable alterity—that establishes for humans the possibility of creation, communion, newness, pleasure, and transgression’ (24). 15 Kristeva RPL, 94: ‘[it] is not yet a position that represents something for someone . . . neither model nor copy [signifier or signified], the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’. For Kristeva, the semiotic chora is responsible for disruptions and 12

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Time’ (1979), Kristeva further demonstrates how the semiotic chora’s association with—and functional identity as—space, and, more specifically, feminine and marginal space, provides a foundation for her argument concerning the temporal modalities defining men and women. She describes a ‘problematic of space’: . . . which innumerable religions of matriarchal reappearance attribute to woman, and which Plato, recapitulating in his own system the atomists of antiquity, designated by the aporia of the chora, matrix space, nourishing, unnameable, anterior to the One, to God and, consequently, defying metaphysics (WT, 191).

Dominant conceptual categories have traditionally linked women more closely with space16 and, as a result, women’s time—according to those same conceptual categories—fails to progress beyond spatial boundaries in the way that linear time does. Women’s time is characterized by confinement (sans faille et sans fuite, Kristeva 1979, 7), in so far as its repression and regulation is necessary for sustaining the functions of the symbolic order. Like the pulsions of the chora, women’s time—as it conforms to biological rhythms—operates by repetition, eternity, and cyclicality. As such, this temporal modality is also the antithesis of ‘cursive’ time, understood as ‘ . . . project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history’ (WT, 192). Just as women’s time finds its structural analogue in the chora, and, in fact, operates like the repetitive pulsions of the semiotic, cursive time, ‘readily labeled masculine’ (WT, 193),17 is reflected by the linear movement that determines syntax and the operations of symbolic language. In accordance with this gendering of time, women, as well as the marginalized and repressed groups that ‘woman’ represents in Kristevan theory,18 have difficulties entering and participating in the

discontinuities, what Moi 1985, 162 describes as ‘pulsional pressure’ in conventional grammar and syntax—e.g. ‘slippage’ of meaning, disturbed relations between signifier and signified—particularly evident in the poetic language of modernist writers. 16 Kristeva cites Joyce’s dictum, ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, to illustrate woman’s role as a generative space forming the human species (WT, 190). 17 WT, 193; cf. Kristeva 1979, 8: ‘qu’on qualifie facilement de masculine’. 18 Kristeva has been criticized for her tendency to overlook differences between the various marginalized groups to whom she assigns a feminine subject position; see Moi 1985, 171.

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realm of symbolic language and the larger socio-symbolic contract. Because the socio-symbolic contract requires a sacrifice to articulate the difference necessary for communicable meaning, certain groups—traditionally women, though the assumption of a sacrificial, or ‘scapegoat’ role is by no means limited to them—are forced into marginalized positions. In fact, the very marginality associated with feminine subjectivity makes the female subjects of elegy potent figures of resistance. Partly because of the chora’s association with the confinement, repetition, and subversive potential of women’s time, it has appealed to Efrossini Spentzou (2003) as a means of explaining the isolated space of the abandoned woman in Ovid’s Heroides. Remarking on the unpredictable and heterogeneous nature of the chora, Spentzou sees this space as suggesting the heroines’ potential for resistance, through their own literary efforts, within the confines of ‘policed living and creation in their repressed enclaves’ (101). Spentzou’s observations on the chora-like experience that defines the speaker-authors of the Heroides can inform our reading of a specific articulation of the female beloved in male-focalized elegy. In the present chapter, we will find that the elegiac puella exists in a similarly enclosed and regulated space, and is often depicted in a virtually sealed-off house or boudoir. There, in the confines of the chora, she anxiously awaits her lover, who mythologizes her devotion and explores her potential for transcending the linear operations of the symbolic. The following analysis identifies a pronounced consistency in the language of repetition, delay, and confinement in those elegiac vignettes that cast the puella as a dutifully waiting or abandoned beloved. By isolating such properties and setting them in a theoretical context that establishes their meaning within larger discourses of power and subversion, we can determine better why this particular construction of woman, defined by these properties, was so appealing to poets writing in the early Principate.19

19 Of course, the maternal chora does not apply in a narrowly literal fashion to the Roman meretrix-puella, who can ill-afford actual childbirth; on pregnancy as one of the puella’s greatest occupational hazards, see James 2003, 173–83. The genre’s suppression of the puella’s maternal function is far from complete, however: its problematizing of female biological capacity may, in fact, be viewed as response to the Augustan emphasis on childbirth (cf. Prop. 2.7). Because maternity in the climate of Augustan reform had become overdetermined as a civically performed telos for elite Roman women, elegy finds its desirable refuge, its matrix space—figured, for

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II. CYNTHIA AND THE LINGERING MOON Poem three of Propertius’ Monobiblos alternately strengthens and undermines Cynthia’s role in signifying a space that is segregated from, but altogether necessary for, the operations of linear time. This poem, one of our most detailed encounters with the Propertian beloved, looks at her spatio-temporal marginality in juxtaposition with the cursive wanderings of the elegiac amator. My analysis of the poem demonstrates that the puella’s experience of repetition within the confines of her own threshold (cf. nostro . . . lecto, Prop. 1.3.35) and her pronounced experience of erotic mora can be explained in part by those qualities that Kristeva attributes to feminine subjectivity, qualities reflective of the chora’s symbolic disruptions. I do not attempt an exhaustive analysis of this justly celebrated poem, but instead focus on key passages that configure Cynthia as a point of resistance to time’s linear movement, in particular, her thematic links with the (almost) lingering moon in lines 31–4, and her account of the repetitive ‘women’s work’ that she turns to in order to enact delay, staving off the inevitable progress of the night, 37–46. Yet the poem’s appeal to mora as a means of transcending the demands of linear time—that is, mora in its guise as ‘delay in the performance of an action, putting off’ (OLD s.v.5a)—in the end will affirm the term’s more sinister primary implications, as a loss or waste of time (OLD s.v.1); that is, time, as described by Cynthia in the poem’s conclusion, operates according to a kind of sum-zero logic, as a resource lost and gained, despite concerted efforts to deny its passing. The poem’s mise en scène is relatively straightforward: the lover stumbles drunkenly to the house of his beloved and finds her sleeping. In his fumbling exclamations over Cynthia’s beauty, the amator awakens her and then must endure criticism for his prolonged carousing at the house of another (alterius clausis . . . e foribus, 36). Cynthia is cast at the poem’s beginning as, in turn, Ariadne,

instance, through the Propertian amator’s designation of Cynthia as ‘dearer’ than any blood relatives (1.11.21–24; cf. 2.6.9–14)—through the kind of woman who must explicitly avoid maternity. Kristeva, in dispelling the myths of maternity that define woman’s temporal experience, points to how representations of woman’s atemporality can function, in the end, as a tool for subsuming her within the temporal order (About Chinese Women, 154 [in Moi 1986]).

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Andromeda, and a weary Bacchant (fessa Edonis); a few lines later she is likened to Io (20). By such comparisons, the Propertian puella is integrated into a mythological setting, complete with the promise of deification (Commager 1974, 35), and situated apart from the flow of linear time as it is constructed in the larger narrative of the elegiac affair. Numerous readings of poem 1.3, in fact, stress ‘timelessness’ and ‘permanence’ as the puella’s most salient qualities (Curran 1966b, 194–5; Allen 1962, 134; Breed 2003, 36–7), qualities that in turn cement her representation here as a work of art rather than a ‘real’ woman. As Curran notes, Cynthia’s artificial representation constitutes part of a larger intertextual relationship with the ekphrasis of Ariadne in Catullus 64, where the heroine is described watching the departure of her lover, a reminiscence strengthened by the bacchant images used to describe both women.20 The same crucial literary predecessor will thus also identify this incarnation of the elegiac puella with the archetypal puella relicta, which aligns her—according to multiple mythological paradigms, as Ovid will make exhaustively clear in his erotodidaxis—with the space left behind by a swiftly moving, teleologically driven hero.21 The amator’s belated midnight journey (ebria . . . traherem vestigia, 9), moreover, elicits a marked contrast with his beloved’s sedentary condition (talia visa mihi mollem spirare quietem, 7). The tension between the amator’s immortalizing, artistic gaze and Cynthia’s resistance to it has been frequently cited in a rich tradition of scholarship that explores Cynthia’s depiction in Propertius 1.3 as an embodiment of poetry’s mimetic power. The poet-lover’s likening of his beloved to works of literary and visual art figure importantly in a larger poetic ethos that demands submission of the puella as her lover’s artistic creation and poetic materia (Sharrock 1991, 41–3; cf. Greene 1998, 55–9).22 What such analyses have overlooked,

20 Curran 1966b,196, 207 and passim, thoroughly treats the intertextual relationship between Catullus 64 and poem 1.3; more recently, see Breed 2003, who focuses on the ekphrastic conventions that govern representations of Cynthia and Ariadne. For the influence of Ariadne on depictions of the puella as she is represented throughout the elegiac corpus, see Gardner 2007, 147–9, 176–7. 21 cf. Curran 1966b, 207, who notes that the poem’s relationship with Catullus 64 implicitly links the amator with Theseus, rather than the Bacchus figure he initially poses as. 22 See also Downing 1990 on the ‘artefaction’ experienced by the puella-in-training in Ovid’s Ars Three.

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however, is the way that the amator’s immortalizing impulse at the introduction of poem 1.3 is born from the desire to confound a rigid temporal economy that governs poet and puella alike. We are soon to discover that the poet’s projections of timeless, artificial qualities onto his beloved are generated partly from a temporal transgression that needs correcting through an appeal to those qualities that except—but ultimately fail to exempt—Cynthia from the demands of linear time. By mythologizing and freezing his mistress in a static portrait, the speaker can momentarily overlook a temporal debt, one that he casually admits in positioning the narrative ‘late in the night’ (sera nocte, 10), but that debt that will become the central focus of Cynthia’s indictment. Anticipating Cynthia’s focus on the demands of linear time, the moon initially disturbs the amator’s truant voyeurism. After clumsily bestowing gifts upon the still-sleeping Cynthia and attempting to rearrange her hair, the amator is apprehended by the moonlight ‘about to linger’ before a window: donec diversas praecurrens luna fenestras luna moraturis sedula luminibus, compositos levibus radiis patefecit ocellos. sic ait in molli fixa toro cubitum (1.3.31–4). [Until hurrying across parted window shutters, the moon, a busy-body with eyes that would have lingered, laid open her closed eyes with its faint rays. Thus she cried, leaning her elbow on the soft couch. . . . ]

In light of Cynthia’s conceptual link with the moon in poem 1.1—and its foregrounding there as a mechanism of temporal manipulation23—we should inquire further into the role of the moon here and ask why its almost lingering light, despite a swift journey through the sky, praecurrens,24 should prove the amator’s undoing. While the perspective of the moon can be understood as analogous to 23 And throughout the corpus; see O’Neil 1958, 5; see also above, Chapter Three, pp. 76–7. As Kaufhold 1997, 93 argues in her analysis of poem 1.3, the lines’ reminiscence of poem 1.1 (1–4), recalling the moment when the poet is first seized by Cynthia’s eyes and stricken with love for her, enacts a reversal of roles between puella and poet, insofar as the dramatic scenario now prompts Cynthia to speak as the ill-treated elegiac amator. 24 As Heyworth 2007, 19 notes, the verb praecurro is used of heavenly bodies that run ahead of their usual cycle, a connotation that imports another temporal contradiction into the text—i.e. the moon is moving more swiftly than usual on its path, but

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the Argos-like gaze of the poet (Breed 2003, 49), it introduces what is also a competing perspective, insofar as the moon’s gaze is credited with interrupting the poet-lover’s fantasies. These lines are critical to the poem’s development and to the dichotomy that structures Cynthia’s portrayal insofar as they locate the exact moment (donec, 31) when a work of art becomes an animated, ‘flesh-and-blood’ woman. Yet there has been little consensus on the role of the moon, its implicit alliance with Cynthia or her lover, and its motives for delaying its usual course. More specifically, there is considerable ambiguity regarding the connotations of sedula (‘[rightly] dutiful’ or ‘overly officious, busybody’) and the effect of the future participle, moratura. The moon’s lights (or ‘eyes’) are characterized by an inclination to delay (moraturae) variously translated as ‘laggard, that would have lingered’25 (Camps 1961, 51), ‘disposed to linger’ (Richardson 1977, 155), ‘willing to linger’ (Shackleton Bailey 1967, 13; Booth 2001, 541), or simply as a present ‘lingering’ (Lee 1996; cf. ‘qui s’ attarde’, Viarre 2005, 6). And yet the participle’s embedded future intentions offer a necessary gloss on the dutiful nature (sedula) that ultimately thwarts those intentions.26 The moon’s almost lingering eyes, coupled with its epithet sedula, also ambiguous in designating the benefactor of its ‘dutiful’ nature, have generally yielded two opposing senses: either the moon, and its light, would have lingered, ‘if it had not been so dutiful (in continuing its course)’ (Shackleton Bailey 1967, 13); or, the moon ‘wishes to linger in accordance with a nature dutiful (to Cynthia)’ (Booth 2001, 542–42). As Rothstein (1979, 80; cf. Camps 1961, 48) notes, Propertius here may be drawing on an epigram of Philodemus in the Palatine Anthology, which similarly dramatizes the voyeur’s glance beneath a moon-lit window. Joan Booth (2001) argues that poem 1.3 transforms the moon from an originally benign and sympathetic presence—as

also would have slowed down its gaze, were such a thing possible. Most commentators defend the spatial designation of prae (= praeter) and thus translate ‘running past’. 25 That is, with an implied protasis (si sedula non fuisset); cf. Booth 2001, 541. 26 cf. Rothstein 1979, who rightly notes that the future participle, designating thwarted intent, underscores the poem’s thematic emphasis on the amator’s thwarted desires: ‘Aber schon in dem Participium des Futurums ist neben der Absicht auch ausgesprochen, daß sie diese Absicht nicht ausführen können, weil der Mond, im Eifer seinen pflichtmäßigen Weg zu vollenden, ihnen keinen Aufenthalt gestattet’ (81).

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Selene in Philodemus’ epigram—into a nuisance, who interrupts the possibly malicious designs of the amator. In the epigram, the moon is invoked, indeed commanded, as an ally in the lover’s designs (a ‘friend of all night festivals’, çغıå), while the sedula luna only thwarts the Propertian lover’s fumbling attempts.27 Whether we configure the relationship between the moon and the amator in poem 1.3 as sympathetic or antagonistic, the poet has infused Philodemus’ celestial body, cited for its faithful attendance throughout the night, with a measure of temporal instability. The possibility of the moon’s interrupted course recalls the celestial manipulations advertised by the witches addressed in poem 1.1 (19, deductae . . . lunae), but the thwarted intentions infused in the tense of the participle underscore the very impossibility of those same manipulations. Such contradictory impulses, between transcending and succumbing to time’s inevitable linearity, moreover, replay Cynthia’s own erratic velocity in poem 1.1, as she ought to offer the capacity for much coveted erotic mora, but remains quietly, dutifully suffused with a linear (velox, 1.1.15) impulse.28 It is a similar sensitivity to that linear impulse that shapes the concerns expressed in Cynthia’s speech. Her indictment appropriates and revises the temporal ideals of poem 1.1, while stressing the realities of linear time that govern her experience as an elegiac subject. Cynthia charges the poet-lover with imposing a double standard in his attempts to control her temporality: tandem te nostro iniuria lecto alterius clausis expulit e foribus? namque ubi longa meae consumpsti tempora noctis,

27

On the other hand, as Valladares 2005, 232 suggests, Philodemus’ epigram may import into the text a more benign version of the moon, or at least more ambiguous than Booth’s threatening one: it is possible that Propertius’ moon, like that of Philodemus, shines and would allow her light to linger because she too is in love— this is, at least, the implication when we consider the moon’s potential for delay, in accordance with the amator’s interest, in 3.20: longius in primo, Luna, morare toro (14). 28 Ovid’s poet-lover of the Amores will underscore the moon’s compliance with cosmic order in Propertius 1.3 by voicing his own qualms with night’s inevitable conclusion, where he chastises Aurora for resuming her course with such irritating regularity. The possibility of resisting such regularity is also raised, however, since Aurora’s behavior is described as unlike that of the moon/Selene, who on at least one occasion succumbed to her desire for Endymion and allowed ‘so many slumbers/ dreams’ (quot somnos) to the beloved boy, iuveni amato (Am. 1.13.43–44).

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[At last has injury driven you to our bed from the sealed threshold of another? For where have you wasted the long hours of my night, (you) limp, alas, with stars nearly driven from the sky? Scoundrel, I wish that you would spend such nights, like the ones you always bid poor me to spend.]

As the puella’s castigation moves from the space she now shares with the poet to his former exclusus status, we are reminded of the limited enclaves, the well-defined boundaries and sealed thresholds (clausis foribus, Pucci 1978, 57), that always house the enjoyment of elegiac love. The syncopated consumpsti (for consumpsisti), an abbreviated form found only here in Propertius (Rothstein 1979, 81), is striking in its concision, especially when couched within an excessively long hexameter, whose complaint is precisely the excessive length of time ‘wasted’ by the amator. While ‘wasting time’ (consumo tempus; Cic. Fam. 7.1.1; Tac. Dial. 3.4) or a period of time is a fairly common Latin idiom, its use here rather unconventionally charges a second person ‘you’ with wasting, or even ‘consuming, reducing to nothing’ (OLD s. v.1) a stretch of time once promised to someone else, in this case Cynthia. The puella’s lament over the tales noctes that she is ordered to spend reverses the poet-lover’s own complaint of ‘bitter nights’ (amaras noctes) in the Monobiblos’ introductory poem (Kaufhold 1997, 95); more importantly, her lament directs us to view the amator as the direct agent of temporal manipulations—he is indicted as subject of both second person verbs—and suggests that the prerogative of ordering time is his alone. For the solitary puella awaiting her beloved, there are no teleologies, or end points, that mark time as well spent, or measure it from a productive vantage: thus she engages in explicitly repeated actions and incantations designed to cheat the inevitable. Both lover and beloved have attempted to correct time’s linear advance, but where the amator appeals to the timeless—in fact, lifeless—realm of the artefact, Cynthia resorts to women’s time as an alternative to the night’s swift passage. As postscript to the Platonic chora and precursor to the Kristevan one, Cynthia’s confinement is shaped by rhythm and repetition, a lament over the long delays that mark her enclosure

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and social isolation (mecum querebar, 43) as helplessly dependent on her lover’s fidelity: nam modo purpureo fallebam stamine somnum, rursus et Orpheae carmine fessa lyrae; interdum leviter mecum deserta querebar externo longas saepe in amore moras: dum me iucundis lapsam Sopor impulit alis. illa fuit lacrimis ultima cura meis (1.3.41–6). [For at one time I was cheating sleep with a purple thread, and again wearied with a song of the Orphic lyre; now and then I complained softly with myself of the long delays (that I endure) often during your love for another: until Sleep sent me falling with its gentle wings. That was the final worry for my tears.]

Cynthia’s weaving, often recognized as an allusion to Penelope’s weaving and unraveling of Laertes’ shroud (Miller 2004, 63), further mythologizes her, but also defines the constant repetition of her efforts. That the Homeric Penelope’s weaving was done in order to delay or put off her suitors heightens Cynthia’s portrayal here as one who is using all her resources to forestall temporal momentum.29 The constant regularity of the archetypal women’s work, intermittently varied by lament, is adeptly evoked in the coupling of rursus (‘again’) and modo/interdum (‘at one time’/‘now and then’) with the imperfect tense of fallebam and querebar. At the same time, by rehearsing a soliloquy of ‘long delays’ she plays upon the established conceptual link between herself and the luna, which, despite its potential for delay, was unable to secure its own designs, or those of the elegiac amator. Cynthia’s repetitive women’s work, efforts to put off what the passing night requires, have only wasted time, as she remarks in the opening of her speech. If the elegiac project can be viewed as an effort to thwart the passage of time, by seeking refuge from symbolic demands in the semiotic chora, Cynthia’s failed efforts here do not bode well for the ultimate success of that project. As commentators have noted (Curran 1966b, 207; cf. Valladares 2005, 35), Cynthia’s comparative imprecations to her lover (qualis . . . talis, 39–40) and her self-ascribed 29

cf. Od. 2.93–109, 19.136–58, 24.131–46; cf. also Prop. 2.9a: coniugium falsa poterat differre Minerva,/nocturno solvens texta diurna dolo (5–6). I am grateful to Micah Meyers for the references.

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deserta condition in the final couplet return us to the poem’s opening image that likened the puella to Ariadne on the shores of Naxos. As with her earlier Penelopean pretensions, here the puella engages in her own myth-making, casting the amator as the infidel Theseus. While this authoritative and authorizing speech grants Cynthia a degree of control over the text, in so far as it underlines the status of both puella and poet as materia for erotic verse (Valladares 2005, 234–5), it also secures a dynamic of teleological progress operating in antithesis with the abandoned space of the puella, a dynamic that will continue to determine the operations of the genre. Though her abandonment and solitude are imagined—often as wish-fulfilment—throughout the Propertian corpus (2.21.6, 16; 2.29.13, 24; 3.6.21–3, 3.20.1–7; cf. 3.12), containment under pressure in the chora is not the only condition that shapes the puella’s textual life. Within the Monobiblos, the poet-lover complains more frequently of Cynthia’s desertion of himself, as the space of his abandonment ranges from predictable urban enclaves (1.11, 1.12, 1.15) to highly allusive literary landscapes (1.18; 1.17).30 In poem 1.8, a failed ‘setting out song’ (propemtikon) occasioned by Cynthia’s impending departure, the puella’s teleological progress threatens to leave her lover stranded on the shoreline, à la Ariadne, in the role of poeta relictus, brandishing a fist and calling his mistress crudelis (cf. Cat. 64.136, 175).31 And yet, the neat inversion of subject positions—so that the amator inhabits the chora of women’s time, while the puella appears committed to the linear projects propelled by its pulsions—only confirms the centrality of this model of erotic relationships to the greater elegiac corpus. Whether Cynthia or amator plays the infidel Theseus, the economy of time—its productive or futile passing—and the space of abandonment play key roles in navigating the progress of the implied elegiac narrative. This navigation appears momentarily suspended under conditions of reunion, a kind of pre-symbolic plenitude that stations both lover and beloved in 30 For the abandoned man as ‘miraculously feminized’, see Barthes 1978, 13–14; Greene 1998, 6–7 discusses both Barthes and Lipking 1988 (Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition) in her treatment of the competing voices that assert themselves in Catullus 8. 31 Though some commentators initiate a new elegy at line 27, Fedeli et alii (cf. Richardson 1977, 169) consider the poem a single piece and no manuscript divides it. For Propertius’ variation on the traditional form of the propemptikon (most often figured as a lament over departure and a wish for safe travels), see Stroh 1971, 40–1.

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the chora (hic erit! hic iurata manet, 1.8.27), but is eventually forced to resume.32

III. DELIA AS RELICTA PUELLA The third poem in the Tibullan corpus presents an image of the puella characterized by a cluster of temporal and spatial properties similar to those assigned to the devout Cynthia of poem 1.3 in the Monobiblos. The poem configures the relationship between wayward lover and faithful puella relicta—as Delia appears in her reluctance to let the speaker depart—inconsistently with the remainder of the collection (Lee-Stecum 1998, 101–102). And yet there is a kind of consistency in the way that Delia’s spatial designation—whether she is the object of the poet’s paraclausithyron (1.1.56) or the agent of one at Isis’ temple doors (1.3.30)—regularly thwarts the amator’s linear advancement. Where my earlier discussion of poem 1.3 focused on its significance in a series that charted the poet’s maneuvering vis-à-vis Messalla, the present discussion looks to what the Tibullan amator leaves behind: Delia’s imagined ritual devotions in the cloistered space of women’s time emerge as a reflection of the repeated cycle of abandonment and reunion that defines elegiac love, though the cycle’s conclusion is predicted by Delia’s highly tentative performance as a puella relicta at the end of the poem. Just as the seams in Propertius’ idyllic vision of Cynthia begin to show in the puella’s angry revelation of her vulnerability to linear time, Delia’s constancy as a Penelope figure is questioned by the hero-poet’s fantasized return (1.3.89–94), which asks us to speculate on the impenetrability of the puella and the sacrosanct nature of the space that encloses her. Delia’s first mention in the poem is among the female relatives who will not be present to mourn the poet’s death. Unlike the amator’s 32 Poem 1.8 demonstrates a former rupture, accomplished through temporal and spatial distance, now sutured in the confines of the amator’s bedroom and proffers some version of temporal transcendence (sive dies seu nox venerit, illa meast, 44). And yet this poem’s hope of erotic timelessness collapses under the weight of the poet’s desire for artistic longevity, and resolves itself in the poet’s life-course alone (meam canitiem); on poem 1.8’s treatment of time and the immortality topos, see Gold 1985–6, 156, who stresses the emphatic position of canitiem and the rarity of the word in Propertius.

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mother and sister, however, Delia is not imagined to be performing any rite at the poet’s funeral; rather, her mention provides a narrative opportunity for reflection, for looking back on the poet’s departure. Delia is cast initially as a puella relicta, who attempts to secure her lover’s return first through consultation of the gods before their temples (9–10), and then through repetitive consultation of lots and omens (11–12). Despite encouraging responses, she remains unconvinced that the poet-lover will ever reverse his advance into the realm of viae that threaten his identity as a lover: illa sacras pueri sortes ter sustulit: illi rettulit e trinis omina certa puer. cuncta dabant reditus: tamen est deterrita numquam, quin fleret nostras respiceretque vias. ipse ego solator, cum iam mandata dedissem, quaerebam tardas anxius usque moras (1.3.11–16). [She drew the sacred lots of the boy three times: the boy brought back to her reassuring omens, three at a time. Everything predicted my return. Still she was never deterred from weeping and looking back at my departure. I myself, her comforter, after I had given my parting instructions, was in my worry continually seeking slowing delays.]

Delia’s repetitive efforts to thwart her lover’s departure mark her as occupying a distinctly feminine subject position, whose marginality from the linear operations of the symbolic is articulated in part through her links with another of the genre’s ritual prone female figures, the saga. As Lee-Stecum notes (1998, 107), the threefold repetition of consulting the lots binds Delia’s efforts with those of the ‘sorceress’ whose spell at the end of poem 1.2 ought to aid the amator in gaining access to his beloved (ter cane, ter dictis despue carminibus, 1.2.55–6). The puella’s efforts are, of course, comparably orthodox, but they reinforce a fundamental link in the Tibullan corpus between repeated action and erotic efficacy.33 The 33 For the semiotic resonance of repetition in Tibullus’ poetry, see Fineberg 1999, who focuses on poem 1.4, discussed further in Chapter Seven, pp. 187–9. For the role of repetition in discourse, as reflective of a larger economy of drives, cf. Kristeva 1987, 92–3: ‘[s]uch persistence of repetition at the level of small units of discourse and of coded comparisons or metaphors, along with its relaxation at the higher level of logical organization of the whole—where it nevertheless continues to be present in a muted fashion, producing not an ordered composition but aleatory resumptions— suggest the impact of the death drive in the amorous invocation’.

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mesmerizing anaphora of -re in lines 13–14 has the effect of an incantation, strengthening the power of Delia’s backward glance.34 The burden of repetition shifts (ipse ego, 15) in the following lines, as focalization shifts to the amator, whose reaction, elaborated in three couplets, balances Delia’s. The amator enacts lingering, or literally ‘slowing’,35 delays (tardas . . . moras, 16), and lays out in emphatic juxtaposition the processes of forward momentum and the means by which such momentum can be repeatedly thwarted: o quotiens ingressus iter mihi tristia dixi/offensum in porta signa dedisse pedem! (19–20, ‘Oh, how often did I, on beginning the journey, say that my stumble at the gate had given me dire omens!’). By renewing his delay ceaselessly at the threshold (quotiens), the poet-lover not only reflects on Delia’s threefold test of omens, but more emphatically predicts her constant efforts at Isis’ shrine (totiens), as he imagines her assuming the position of an exclusus amator36 before closed temple doors: quid tua nunc Isis mihi, Delia, quid mihi prosunt illa tua totiens aera repulsa manu, quidve, pie dum sacra colis, pureque lavari et (memini!) puro secubuisse toro? nunc, dea, nunc succurre mihi, nam posse mederi picta docet templis multa tabella tuis, ut mea votivas persolvens Delia noctes ante sacras lino tecta fores sedeat bisque die resoluta comas tibi dicere laudes insignis turba debeat in Pharia (1.3.23–32). [How is that Isis of yours any help to me, how does that bronze, struck time and again with your hand help, or how did it help, while you were devoutly observing the ritual, that you washed yourself purely and (I remember) slept apart in a pure bed? Now, Goddess, now help me, for many painted tablets on your temples show that healing is possible; then Delia, paying back her vowed nights, shall sit clad in linen and twice

34 Other -r sounds in these lines (and the preceding, 11–12) enhance this effect, rettulit, deterrita, nostras. At the same time, Delia can be charged with thwarting the power of her own ‘spell’, since the backward glance frequently signals a bad omen; see Putnam 1973, 76. 35 For the active sense of tardas, see Maltby 2002, 189 (following Smith 1913 and Murgatroyd 1980). 36 For Delia as an exclusus amator, cf. Putnam 1973, 78.

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daily with hair unbound she should be obliged to speak your praises, distinguished among the Egyptian crowd.]

Twice daily (bisque die, 31) Delia sings the praises of Isis, while ‘over and again’ (totiens, 24) she beats back the bronze rattle in her worship of the goddess. Latin idiom encourages us to correlate the adverb totiens, despite its syntactic independence here, with the poet’s own repeated attempts to stall his departure (quotiens, 19).37 ‘As often as’ he fashions new excuses for delay, ‘so many times’ does Delia beat her rattle in pleading reverence to the goddess. For the moment poet and puella appear to share similarly feminized subject positions, insofar as both rely on distinct modes of repetition to forestall linear progress, or at least shelter those lovers exposed to its vagaries. Ritual and formal repetitions move to the level of narrative repetition, insofar as the goddess Isis imports her own elegiac tale of repeated loss and recovery. Isis’ rituals were marked by a recognition of the goddess’s ongoing experience of lamentation, wanderings, and eventual joy in the resurrection of her brother and consort Osiris.38 The Egyptian deity, as she is entreated by Delia in poem 1.3, establishes a template for the experience of the puella abandoned within the repetitive enclosure of women’s time. Isis, the goddess often associated with the courtesan class, as the poet’s repeated tua makes clear (Smith 1913, 241),39 is here cast in the role of both a puella clausa, enclosed in her sacred temple, and as a puella relicta, since the loss of her lover—reflecting the loss of Delia’s—constitutes an integral For quotiens . . . totiens as correlatives, see OLD s.v. totiens 1a and quotiens 3a. As Putnam notes 1973, 77, Isis was long identified with Demeter, whose loss and reunion with Persephone was a key element of her devotions; the cyclical nature of Isis’ experience is defined partly through that association. Apuleius emphasizes the connection between the goddesses at Met. 11.2. For the narratological implications of Demeter’s separation and reunion with her daughter, see Konstan 1996, whose examination of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter points to Perspephone’s abduction by Hades as the means by which ‘time—the soul of narrative—invades the sacred space’ inhabited by mother and daughter, and ‘renders them characters in a tale’ (80). Isis was, of course, also frequently identified with Io (another deified heroine known for her nearly ceaseless wanderings). For the implications of the Isis myth cycle, including her reunion with Osiris, see also Lee-Stecum 1988, 110; Veremans 1983, 54; and Murgatroyd 1980, 108. 39 See also Murgatroyd 1980, 108, who, in explaining the goddess’ appeal to the courtesans of elegy, notes that worship of Isis during this period was particularly associated with women of the demi-monde; cf. Lilja 1978, 154–5. For the attempts to suppress the worship of Isis in the 20s BCE (no doubt making the phenomenon all the more apparent in political discourse), see Dio 53.2.4, 54.6.6. 37 38

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part of her mythology. As she will reunite with Osiris, so too may Delia hope to rejoin her poet-lover. The detail of ritual chastity (secubisse) not only marks the irritating devotion with which the puella observes the rites of the goddess, but essentially codifies in a sacred context the separation of lovers that must be enacted within the erotic narrative. We may in fact read the frustration of amatores over ritual chastity throughout the elegiac corpus as not merely an obstacle to sexual satisfaction (Prop. 2.33.2, 2.28.61; Ov. Am. 1.8.74, 2.19.42, 3.9.33–4), but as part of a larger narrative of woman’s isolation that the Isis-Demeter myth imports. Written into both the myth of Isis-Demeter and the story of the elegiac puella is the expectation that such a cycle of separation and reunion will endlessly repeat itself. Poem 1.3’s final image of the dutiful Delia, however, suggests that her initial representation as confined within a sacred space, with all the securities that space entails, will eventually unravel, like the threads of some tapestry that the puella ought to be weaving. As Putnam notes (1973, 74), a conjuring of Homer’s steadfast Penelope awaiting Ulysses, in its basic structure, mimics Isis’ separation from and reunion with Osiris, so aptly illustrated by Delia’s religious fervour. This particular iteration of the Penelope myth, however, weakens the cyclical assurances that the Isis tale offers earlier in the poem: at tu casta, precor, maneas sanctique pudoris assideat custos sedula semper anus. haec tibi fabellas referat positaque lucerna deducat plena stamina longa colu, ac circum, gravibus pensis affixa, puella paulatim somno fessa remittat opus tunc veniam subito nec quisquam nuntiet ante sed videar caelo missus adesse tibi. tunc mihi, qualis eris, longos turbata capillos, obvia nudato, Delia, curre pede. hoc precor; hunc illum nobis Aurora nitentem luciferum roseis candida portet equis (1.3.83–94). [But you, I pray, remain chaste and may a dutiful40 old woman sit by you as guardian. Let her tell you stories and measure out long threads

40

As Maltby notes 2002, 210, the etymological sense of the word (‘without guile’, se + dolos; OLD) may be felt here. If so, we are doubly reminded of the anus’ regular appearance in New Comedy and elegy as a woman ‘with guile’ on her mind.

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from her full distaff. And may the girls around her, devoted to their weighty tasks, let up from their work little by little, wearied with sleep. Then suddenly I will come, nor will anyone announce my arrival beforehand, but I will appear to be at your side, sent from heaven. Then run to meet me with your bare feet, just as you will be, with your hair out of place. This I pray for; may splendid Aurora bring that shining morning star to us on her rosy steeds.]

As the subjunctives indicate, the poet-lover can only hope that Delia will remain as loyal as Penelope—the adjective casta (‘chaste’) applied to Delia is rapidly called into question through the subjunctive verb that begs her to remain so. The fact that she has an anus, however ‘dutiful’, watching over her will do little to resolve his fears. Maltby (2002, 210), in citing parallels for the anus in elegy, with precedents from New Comedy, remarks that this figure ‘is not always in the role of the guardian of her mistress’ virtue’. The anus placed in charge of New Comedy’s meretrix or elegy’s courtesan-puella is motivated by an agenda antithetical to the poet-lover’s: she is an old woman who demonstrates the fears of an impoverished old age brought on by fidelity to a single lover.41 That this anus is sedula will assist the amator’s designs only with great ambivalence, insofar as she recalls the sedula luna (an intrusive busybody or the lover’s ally in prolonging the night) who watches over Cynthia, abandoned by her own antihero in Propertius 1.3. To further complicate our ability to fit Delia into the model shaped in accordance with dutiful Penelope, we observe that everyone in this tableau appears to be weaving, except Delia (Lee-Stecum 1998, 127). The poem again activates an intertextual relationship with Propertius 1.3, but the epithet applied to Cynthia, who is ‘wearied’ (fessa) and drawing out long threads (1.3.41–42), is in Tibullus 1.3 transferred to the puella (or ‘maids’; presumably a collective singular) who accompany Delia and the anus. Tibullus has conjured a cluster of elements—dutiful guardian, wearied weaver, and Penelope figure— that Propertius uses to define Cynthia as a puella relicta, and thus prompts us to figure Delia as faithfully enduring long expectant delays in her lover’s absence. Our expectations are thwarted, however: Tibullus’ poet-lover inverts the waiting game and leaves this puella— 41

For the topos in New Comedy, see esp. Plaut. Most. 196–202, and Rosivach’s discussion of Plautus’ Cistellaria and Asinaria 1998, 63–6. For the elegiac topos, see Ov. Am. 1.8, Prop. 4.5 discussed further in Chapter Seven, pp. 207–15.

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all too suspiciously—expecting nothing at all (tunc veniam subito nec quisquam nuntiet ante, 1.3.89). Bright’s (1978) contextualization of poem three within the rest of the corpus denies its role as a chronological successor to poems one and two, but suggests that the fantasy of the poet’s return functions as ‘a psychological fulfillment of what those poems longed for—and yet places it in the realm of memory and hope. Now his attention turns to the downhill side as he sees the problems of trying to hold onto [Delia] . . . ’ (153). Whether or not we attribute a strictly chronological progression to the series of poems addressing love for Delia, there is an implied linear development to the poet’s experience as an amator. Thus the poem’s conclusion both hopes for unchanging fidelity (maneas) and implies, with its questionably attentive anus and hardly industrious Delia, that the chora, as well as the women’s time that defines it, must eventually succumb to symbolic pressures. As Kristeva’s model reminds us, the semiotic chora operates always in conjunction with the linear operations of the symbolic order; it is one of elegy’s most innovative fictions to suggest that they could exist independently. Imagined as Penelope, Delia, much like Cynthia before her, can be situated in a space dominated by women’s work, typified by the repetitive cycles of weaving, and refrain from her own teleological quest or any attempts to stray from her lover. At the same time, her failure to reflect the idealized portrait that she inspires allows the poet to make a further advance out of the vicious circle of Amor—whose most painful effects are yet to be illustrated—and into the very viae that he has so long decried.

IV. A KIND OF (EN) CLOSURE: WOMEN’S TIME IN OVID’S ARS AND REMEDIA 4 2 In the Amores, Ovid largely dispenses with notions of the dutiful Penelope figure and rarely mentions either his own neglect of a puella or her patient expectation of the amator. His poet-lover’s unsuccessful attempts in Amores 2.18 to get rid of his puella (‘tandem’ dixi

42 Discussion of the Ars and Remedia in this chapter, especially section five (on Phyllis), has been revised from Gardner 2008.

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‘discede’, 5) and compose tragedy result, rather suggestively, in the penning of the Heroides (19–34). In a sense, the Heroides are Ovid’s attempt to confine the steadfast or abandoned puella to the realm of myth and thus remove her as a target of the genre’s characteristic personal ad: ‘upwardly mobile, but ideologically conflicted iuvenis seeks abandoned, unmarriageable, but devoted puella for extended erotic dalliance’. The sinister implications of this particular configuring of lover and beloved, however, are also made explicit in the poet’s erotodidaxis. As I shall demonstrate below, Ovid’s Ars and Remedia reveal with painful clarity the incongruity of those matches made in elegiac heaven, as a puella relicta endlessly awaits an upwardly mobile, if ideologically conflicted, young man. In the Heroides, mythological figures like Penelope, Ariadne, and Phyllis are allowed an ongoing lament once they have been carefully segregated from the realm of sexual goals that propel the amator-in-training.43 Within the integrated world of the Ars and Remedia, however, a courtesan-puella like Cynthia cannot indefinitely remain an Ariadne figure, because linear time proves an invaluable method and measure of sexual conquest. Conte has argued persuasively for Ovid’s critique of the elegiac code, especially apparent in his didactic works. He describes how the poet’s irony ‘is the sign of a critical consciousness that observes the text’s formation from outside and reveals its implicit practices’.44 The Remedia in particular makes explicit the narrative conventions of the elegiac genre, insofar as it addresses the predictions of closure, and departure from erotic verse that define our sense of elegy’s ending. The poem thus serves as a useful demonstration of a conceptually feminine mode of time that we have observed operating with significant obstacles in the poems of Tibullus and Propertius: this mode is defined by repetition—both in the puella’s attempts to forestall the amator’s progress, and in her actions within the mise en scène of abandonment—the lover’s eventual compliance with linear time, and the beloved’s mythologized relegation from it. Again, this image of the dutiful puella who repeats her own devotions ad infinitum is by no means consistent in Propertian and 43 cf. Mack 1988 on the non-linear nature of Heroides, ‘The letters of the Heroides are static—they have only one moment, and it is always the moment when all seems lost . . . ’ (70). 44 Conte 1994, 47.

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Tibullan elegy, but it is critical enough to the composite elegiac mistress that it becomes a standard prototype for Ovid’s erotodidaxis. The Remedia reinstates properties of women’s time—here attributed almost exclusively to the poem’s female addressees—in a world where the narrative cycles and constant deferrals that rely on those properties must be foresworn by the lovesick. In so doing, the poem makes explicit how the stories of Cynthia and Delia will end, should elegy’s poet-lovers ever fulfil their hopes for generic evolution and civic maturity (e.g. see Prop. 3.24/25, 4.1; Tib. 2.5; Ov. Am. 3.15).45 Ovid’s Remedia aims at hastening this very evolution but also, by dwelling on the topos of the abandoned puella, spells out the consequences of elegy’s gendering of time in unsettling detail.46 Before turning to the praeceptor’s cures for love, it is useful to consider the male and female lovers whom he has designed in the Ars Amatoria. In the Ars, men are closely associated with a linear and progressive notion of time, by which Ovid’s praeceptor and his successful amator, who are cast initially as ships’ captains and chariot drivers, chart their course throughout the poem. The praeceptor, beginning with directives regarding the selection of prey and concluding with optimistic triumphal images, inscribes for his pupils a smoothly consecutive beginning, middle, and end to their love stories. Under the Kristevan model, this is time as the history and teleology that define masculine subjectivity.47 Ovid highlights the relationship between time and conquest in advice—directed to his male audience—regarding the appropriate seasons (tempora) for girl hunting (1.399–418), where again the lover is likened to a ship’s captain who must avoid certain ill-omened days (1.400, 402).48 The

45

For this narrative trend in love elegy, see also Konstan 1994, 158–9, cited in the Introduction above, p. 6. 46 That is, unsettling in part because Ovid’s preoccupation with the relicta puella regularly requires his readers to see things from her perspective (as ‘focalizer’). As with Catullus’ Ariadne, a reader’s interpretation of the puella’s role in the narrative depends largely on ‘Who speaks?’ and ‘Who sees?’ (cf. Gaisser 1995, 591 and passim). 47 Kristeva WT, 192; cf. above, 54–5. 48 Ovid’s sailing metaphors are particularly relevant here, e.g. Ars 1.3–4, 1.771–2, 2.429–32; cf. also Rem. 13–14, 811–12. Ovid assigns these metaphorical roles to his students in part because he has written a didactic poem, and some of the Ars’ teleological language has been borrowed from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Vergil’s Georgics. On the relationship between the Georgics and the Ars, see Leach 1964, esp. 150–1. Leach notes the high frequency of opus, labor, and via in both poems. Myerowitz 1985, 79–103, argues that ‘love’s journey’, also a commonplace in

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praeceptor emphasizes his own teleological strides by introducing the Ars as a course he will run in his chariot (haec nostro signabitur area curru, 1.39) and, in closing, letting loose the swans that carried him to the finish (lusus habet finem: cycnis descendere tempus, 3.810).49 Love’s linear course is further marked by exempla that contrast the lover-in-training’s haste with the puella’s delay. In the Ars, Achilles represents an ideal model of conduct for a man that requires the conquest and swift abandonment (properaret, 701) of a woman, like Deidamia, who seeks to delay him: vis ubi nunc illa est? quid blanda voce moraris/auctorem stupri, Deidamia, tui? (1.703–4, ‘Where is that force now? Why do you delay the author of your own disgrace, Deidamia?’). When delay is recommended to men at the end of book two, its primary function is to allow the pupil-in-training to linger over the joys of sexual conquest: crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas/sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora (2.717–8, ‘Believe me, the pleasures of sex ought not to be rushed, but ought to be coaxed gradually with lingering delay’). Even in such circumstances, however, the anomaly of post-coital delay can bring with it a measure of temporal anxiety, one that prompts the resumption of de rigueur linear form: cum mora non tuta est, totis incumbere remis/utile et admisso subdere calcar equo (2.731–2, ‘When delay is not safe, it is useful to press forward with all your oars and to spur a willing horse’). Thus, while the suspension of linear progress, often conceptualized through mora, in previous elegy applies alternately to lover and beloved, Ovid’s Ars re-assigns such a function to his female pupils with little flexibility. Where men are constantly prompted to move forward, the praeceptor’s female addressees are reminded that delay is their ‘greatest procuress’: grata mora venies, maxima lena mora est (3.752, ‘you will arrive well-wanted with delay, delay is the greatest Hellenistic epigram, is the defining topos of the Ars Amatoria. While Ovid’s predecessors often use images of physical progress to emphasize the difficult aspects of eros—e.g. for love as a difficult sea voyage, AP 5.169, 190; cf. AP 5.156—Ovid’s use of metaphors related to love’s journey is overwhelmingly positive. Myerowitz also argues that the topos is less suitable to Ovid’s female addressees, since ‘female eros is a priori destructive’ (84). 49 The circularity of the Circus Maximus—or any site for a chariot race—of course, imports a level of irony to the notion of forward progress, though it does aptly illustrate a goal—an end to the circularity—at which all lovers aim.

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procuress’).50 A woman’s vices can in fact fade from view under the glossy lens of delay: men in Ars Two (641–62) are instructed that they need linger in love only for a while in order to overcome any disdain for a woman’s shortcomings (quodque fuit vitium, desinit esse mora, 2.654). While delay and strategic confinement at this stage in a relationship appear advantageous for both sexes, they consistently function to enhance a woman’s charms and therefore eventually to retard a man’s course of action or his very desire for action. Yet it is perhaps because of the female pupil’s reliance on mora in her efforts to seduce a lover that she fares so poorly when Ovid reshapes elegiac topoi in didactic form.51 By appointing mora the puella’s ‘greatest procuress’ the praeceptor assigns to his female pupils the role not only of detaining erotic fulfilment, but also of slowing narrative progress, a role perhaps suitable for elegy, but no longer appropriate for the teleologically shaped curriculum that Ovid’s praeceptor hopes to advance.52 Throughout the Ars women, though equally armed (pares, 3.3) with the praeceptor’s advice, act primarily as passive, inert traps, concentrating their efforts largely on the power of allure. As Myerowitz-Levine has noted, the ‘course’ women chart is circular rather than progressive, bringing them back to the very bedroom from which they began.53 Ovid’s third book of the Ars defines the puella’s life in terms of rhythm, repetition, and confinement, temporal properties whose application to the beloved in many ways anticipates the experience of feminine subjectivity that Kristeva outlines,54 a subjectivity we have already observed embodied in and challenged by the puellae of Propertius 1.3 50 cf. the praeceptor’s advice to the puella-in-training that her delayed response to a letter (post brevem moram) only goads the male amator further (3.473). 51 The problems faced by women in Ovid’s erotodidaxis have been examined largely with a focus on the Remedia, though, as the studies of Myerowitz 1985 and Downing 1990 suggest, female pupils are denied a viable approach to love in the Ars as well. For women in the Remedia, see Davisson 1996, esp. 240–5, and Brunelle 1997, cited below (n. 61). 52 See also Sharrock 2006 who examines how excursuses, e.g. mythological narratives, as distinct from instructional parts of the Ars, advance the student-amator’s progress (‘in structural and formal rather than merely thematic ways’, 25); she identifies, by contrast, relatively few excursuses to advance the student-puella’s progress: ‘[v]ery little happens in Ars 3, because there is very little for the primary character to do, except adorn herself and wait’ (37). 53 Myerowitz-Levine 1981/82, 30–56, esp. 38–9. 54 ‘As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time

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and Tibullus 1.3. Fictive female readers of the Ars regularly feel the pressures of their own biological rhythms, most obviously in the form of pregnancies to be avoided (3.82–3), though the praeceptor also implies that the inevitable failure of those rhythms (3.61–4; cf. 3.77–8) will hasten the processes of physical deterioration (3.69–80). The roles assigned to women, often taken from the markedly seasonal—and thus cyclical—provinces of agriculture and animal husbandry, constantly stress the feminine power of passive allure, as women draw men into their traps.55 Because these women are reminded repeatedly of the activities, movements, and speech in which they cannot engage, their instruction is largely one of containment rather than expression or action.56 If a male lover like Achilles enhances his desirability through his eagerness to depart, the female beloved enhances her own by an inaccessible and immobile condition. Using the Danae exemplum (a favorite throughout the Ars) the praeceptor reminds his readers in the Amores (3.4.21–2) that underexposure increases feminine allure.57 Though the praeceptor counsels his female pupils on how to move and walk in a becoming manner, it is significant that his advice has little to do with getting anywhere. A woman’s gait should be feminine (femineo . . . gradu, 3.298), and designed only to capitalize on attractive physical features (3.299–306). For similar reasons of self-promotion the praeceptor encourages his female pupils to make known through the history of civilization. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality. . . . On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is a massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word “temporality” hardly fits.’ Kristeva WT, 191; repeated from Introduction, pp. 22–3. Italics original. 55 For Ovid’s use of agricultural—and specifically Vergil’s georgic—imagery, see Leach 1964. Ovid’s praeceptor rarely assigns women a role in actively pursuing their prey (cf. Myerowitz-Levine 1981/82: 46–7). 56 Downing 1990, 239 has argued that the praeceptor’s endorsement of different postures to hide the body’s flaws (3.261–90), as well as his recommendations that women conceal themselves under layers of makeup and hairpieces (cf. 3.129–68, 193– 250), bring about the puella’s transformation into a lifeless work of art. 57 Ovid’s praeceptor also uses Danae’s story to make the opposite point, that a woman’s desirability is increased by exposure: quis Danaen nosset, si semper clausa fuisset/inque sua turri perlatuisset anus? (3.415–16, ‘who would have known Danae, if, always confined, she had grown to old age in her own tower?’). The praeceptor undermines his own directive, however, since Jupiter’s interest in and rape of Danae occurred in the very tower that the speaker now suggests impedes her success as a female beloved.

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their way out of the house now and then (saepe vagos ultra limina ferte pedes, 3.418). And yet the very notion that women must be prompted to roam about in the public eye reminds us that more often they are found on the other side of the threshold. The conversation between the famously wandering Odysseus and his isolated captor Calypso along the seashore at the beginning of Ars Two (123–44) perhaps best illustrates the different behaviours prescribed for men and women in Ovid’s erotodidactic project.58 Calypso repeatedly (iterumque iterumque) employs delaying tactics, while Odysseus reviews his heroic deeds, all the time remaining focused on departure. The praeceptor has poised both characters appropriately on the shore (litore constiterant), between the course of history and the stasis of elegiac love, enacting a struggle between nature and civilization, glory and ignominy, the eternal cycles of the sorceress and the linear progress of the hero. The ocean’s waves, a marker of nature’s own cyclical rhythms, erase the hero’s deeds drawn upon the sand (2.139–40) and enact a momentary triumph for women’s time, but one that fails to alleviate the frustration arising from the irreconcilable natures of the two characters involved. In the Remedia, the tale of Phyllis (591–608) again places a heroine upon the seashore, but her solitary state both reminds us of how the tale of Ulysses and Calypso must end, and more fully explains the disastrous results of interaction between men who need to be moving along and women who want them to stay.

V. PHYLLIS IN THE REMEDIA The momentary delay that allows a semi-divine woman such as Calypso and a hero like Ulysses to maintain a relationship in the Ars proves most inconvenient for the amator in the Remedia who is 58 On the Calypso and Ulysses scene as paradigmatic of the opposition between culture and nature in Ovid’s Ars, see Myerowitz-Levine 1981, 54–6. As Professor Konstan reminds me (per litteras) Ovid’s configuration of Calypso and Ulysses here relies on the competing temporal modes that originally inform Homer’s version of the story: Odyssey Five opens with the immortal Aurora leaving behind Tithonus (Od. 5.1–2) and setting the scene at Ogygia, where Calypso promises Odysseus the very immortality that he rejects in order to rejoin historic time and, incidentally, a wife who will grow old (Od. 5. 203–24).

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ready to re-enter the world of linear time and its adjunct game of sexual conquest. In this poem mora is reformulated as the turning point between love as ars and love as morbus (‘sickness, disease’) and cast as a leading cause of illness among lovers (83–114). While both sexes attempt to ward off emotional diseases associated with love, Ovid’s exempla reveal a scenario in which men, such as the Greek hero Philoctetes (Rem. 111–14), manage to overcome the infection caused by delay (mora), rejoin the historical flow of time, and help bring the Trojan war to a conclusion. Conversely, women such as the infamous Myrrha are left behind to suffer an eternity— Kristeva’s ‘monumental temporality’—entombed in the rigid bark of the Myrrh-tree (Rem. 99–100). The heroine’s failure to quickly (cito) suppress her incestuous desire for her father Cinyras results in an irremediable condition of pregnancy and immobilized concealment (non tegeres vultus cortice . . . tuos, 100). She and Philoctetes both experience delay, but their respective failure and success at overcoming it implies that mora is somehow in the very nature of the Remedia’s female addressee. Here, Kristeva’s association of women with space and men with time illuminates Ovid’s configuration of men and women in the Remedia.59 As noted above, the feminized, semiotic chora emerges from a longstanding conceptual divide that accords women and men respectively spatial or temporal associations.60 In Ovid’s poem, women are constantly the spaces left behind or avoided, while men move about in time, acting as the very antithesis of delay. Despite the praeceptor’s restrictions on female motility in Ars Two and Three, however, women are not static, immobile, or lifeless, but instead have drives and desires, pulsions—to use Kristeva’s term—that are to be (only tenuously) repressed. As such, the poet’s mythological exempla dramatize the tension we observed earlier between Cynthia envisioned first as a lifeless artefact and then engaged with as a desiring subject, a tension that also structures Delia’s transformation from cloistered devotee of Isis to highly problematic Penelope figure. In all these instantiations of the puella, we may assume a descriptive model in Kristeva’s appropriation of the Platonic chora, in its capacity as a ‘non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a 59

Kristeva WT, 190. For her explanation of the chora as a matrix existing prior to language, see esp. RPL, 93–8. 60 See above, p. 151; cf. Kristeva WT, 191.

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motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’ (RPL, 93). The example of Phyllis (Rem. 591–608) illustrates these restricted impulses, for it demonstrates that women who attempt to leave their well-defined spaces do not get very far, but instead remain stuck, like a skipping record needle, in a groove they are bound to repeat. Her fate in an elegiac context, moreover, prompts us to reflect on her generic forerunners, Cynthia and Delia: it reminds us not only of the properties of women’s time that make the puella so alluring, but also explains why, in the face of their amatores’ linear proclivities, they will eventually be left behind. The tale of Phyllis’ solitary abandonment is the heroine’s fifth appearance in Ovid’s didactic poetry. While she is consistently depicted as an abandoned puella, her story has been used to explain a recommendation for absence (Ars 2.353), the deceptive nature of men (Ars 3.37–8; 3.346–50), and the necessity of heeding the praeceptor’s advice (Rem. 55–6). A full understanding of the significance of Phyllis’ story at this point in the Remedia requires us to examine its context, an exhortation to friendship and sociability.61 As with the examples of Myrrha and Philoctetes, the praeceptor contrasts positive masculine action with negative feminine reaction. He uses the tale of Orestes, encouraged by his comrade Pylades to win back Agamemnon’s kingdom, as a foil to Phyllis’ lonely isolation. Essentially, Orestes inserts himself into the symbolic order and the socio-symbolic contract so crucial to historical time, where Phyllis fails to do so. Underlying this surface contrast of comitatus vs. incomitata is a difference grounded firmly in a construction of gender that posits a matricide on the one hand and a bacchant on the other: semper habe Pyladen aliquem, qui curet Oresten: hic quoque amicitiae non levis usus erit.

61

According to Henderson 1979, 114–15, the story of Phyllis’ return trips to the beach to look for Demophoon probably originated in Callimachus. Hyginus (Fab. 59) also refers to the legend. Commentators have remarked on the elevated tone of the Phyllis passage; Brunelle 1997, 90–2 summarizes these remarks and uses the heroine’s story as an illustration of how male and female students are addressed differently— and given unequal attention—in the Remedia. In contrast to the praeceptor’s tendency to encourage indecorous behaviour among his students, a tendency reflected in the poem’s overall lack of formal decorum, an emphasis on Phyllis’ physical beauty in the passage and the elevated manner in which her story is told remind us that ‘ . . . the control of decorum required for falling into and out of love cannot be attained by women’ (106).

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[Always have around some Pylades, the sort who stood by Orestes: this also is an important use for friendship. What ruined Phyllis, other than the isolated forests? The cause of her death is certain: she was unaccompanied. She used to go about, just as the foreign throng was accustomed to go about, with hair streaming, celebrating triennial rites for Bacchus.]

Thus Orestes, because he has assumed a place in the socio-symbolic contract, evolves from an anonymous exile trapped in time by the dictates of Clytemnestra into a successful hero who slays his mother, reclaims his rightful title, and re-establishes the supremacy of the male parent.63 Phyllis, likened to a bacchant and mourned only by the woods hidden (secretae) beyond the civilized realm, suggests the potential to undermine the socio-symbolic contract by acting out aggression against the male.64 As a bacchant, her socially marginal position is, in fact, not unlike that of Clytemnestra, whose presence is felt implicitly in the text: both women serve as reminders of how 62 Kristeva’s comments (from ‘About Chinese Women’) on women outside the temporal symbolic order further clarify the opposition drawn here in the Remedia: ‘it is thus that female specificity defines itself in patrilinear society: woman is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a bacchanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian Dionysian orgy’ (154, as excerpted and included in Moi 1986). 63 For an insightful analysis of gender in the myth of Orestes as well as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia Trilogy, see Zeitlin 1978. Zeitlin calls attention to the ‘dysfunction of the social order’ (156) resultant from Clytemnestra’s rule and the correction of that dysfunction enacted in the Eumenides. 64 On the symbolic inversion of the Dionysiac ritual, see Keuls 1985, 349–79. Keuls does recognize a conciliatory function in these rites, which ‘promoted a resolution of antagonism in harmonious family life’ (373). Her argument here seems plausible, despite the generally controversial nature of her work—e.g. her thesis concerning the exceptionally phallocratic social structure of Athens. For a critique of the most recent edition of The Reign of the Phallus, see, e.g. J. Neils, BMCR, 94.05.05. See also Segal 1978, whose analysis of Euripides’ Bacchae emphasizes the role reversals and ‘confusion of basic polarities’ (186) integral to myths surrounding Dionysus. Segal recognizes the tragedy as part of Athenian culture’s remarkable ability to criticize social norms, ‘to find a socially acceptable frame which allows the anti-culture, the suppressed values and drives, to emerge and find a coherent, articulate shape’ (190), though in the drama he finds no real resolution to the basic oppositions integral to Dionysiac worship.

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woman’s traditional position outside the realm of men’s time incites their alliance with subversive or violent political movements (WT, 201). Appropriately, while the simile defines Phyllis as part of a crowd, barbara turba, the very foreign and female status of that crowd is used to reiterate her condition marginal to the symbolic order. The praeceptor arranges his material in a way that contrasts time as it applies to masculine subjectivity—linear, heroic, and an integral part of the social contract—with the time of women—foreign, immobile, abandoned, and ultimately alone; in other words, what Kristeva describes as ‘the unnameable repressed by the social contract’ (WT, 196). Phyllis is indeed ‘unnameable’ insofar as her literally marginal status on the sea-shore, in harenosa humo (596), designates her as a subject without access to language.65 The social bonds and shared language of Orestes and Pylades allow them to move forward in time, to complete the heroic act of matricide. Because Phyllis lacks such a bond, she has no place in the socio-symbolic contract, and eventually no access to language or the syntactical and linear progress that it enables: ‘perfide Demophoon’ surdas clamabat ad undas,/ruptaque singultu verba loquentis erant (597–98, ‘“Faithless Demophoon,” she kept shouting to the unhearing waves, and her words were broken off in mid-sentence by a sob’.) After she cries out the name of her faithless lover, Phyllis’ identity begins to merge with the very sea that bars her access to the social contract. The waves are unhearing (surdas), but also, like Phyllis, unheard.66 The heroine’s words are broken by her own incomprehensible sob, or singultus, a word that also suggests the gurgling sounds of water.67 In her distress, Phyllis treads a curious foot path, the tangible inscription of her indecision: limes erat tenuis, longa subnubilus umbra, qua tulit illa suos ad mare saepe pedes. nona terebatur miserae via: ‘viderit’ inquit, et spectat zonam pallida facta suam.

65 As such she is emblematic of a sexual difference that ‘ . . . is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning’ (WT, 196). 66 For surdas as ‘unheard’, cf. OLD s.v.3–4. 67 For singultus as indicating the gurgling sounds of water, OLD s.v.1a.

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[There was a footpath, clouded over by the long shadows, where she often bore her own feet to the sea. The ninth path was being worn away by the wretched girl: ‘He’ll see,’ she says, and growing pale looks down at her belt. She sees the branches: she hesitates and shrinks back from the deed, and now she fears and brings her hands to her own neck.]

As the praeceptor describes it, this limes marks an effort to escape that is constantly (saepe) thwarted by the ocean. Our praeceptor deliberately exploits the ambiguity of the somewhat ‘clouded’ (subnubilus) limes, which as a ‘foot-path’ represents a way out, but as a ‘boundary line’ suggests division, isolation, and entrapment.68 Phyllis’ situation is further obscured by a shadow, longa umbra, and a tally of the paths worn away beneath her feet, nona terebatur miserae via (601). Nine paths she treads before at last looking with resignation at the belt, or zona, around her hips.69 Curiously, an earlier reference to these paths in the Remedia suggests that had she lived, Phyllis, trapped in the repetitive enclosure of women’s time, would only tread them more often (saepius) rather than ever escaping her plight (vixisset Phyllis, si me foret usa magistro, / et per quod novies, saepius isset iter, 55–56). Appropriately enough, the same ‘belt’ that contains Phyllis’ sexuality, once undone and used as a noose, quickly becomes her undoing. Ovid’s praeceptor, allowing a final glimpse of Phyllis’ deliberations, articulated through an abrupt accumulation of verbs in the ongoing present tense,70 offers another option available to women encountering the difficulties of linear time. Phyllis’ final actions deviate from the terrorist leanings of Clytemnestra and the mob of bacchants, and instead find common ground with the behaviour of those women described by Kristeva who are ‘more bound to the mother’. These women, when faced with the option of gaining access to the temporal scene, ‘refuse this role and sullenly hold back, neither speaking nor writing, in a permanent state of expectation, occasionally punctuated by some kind of outburst; a cry, a refusal, “hysterical symptoms”.’71 OLD s.v.1 for limes as ‘boundary’; s.v. 3 for limes as ‘foot-path’. The detail is aetiological, and used to explain the name of the ‘Nine Roads’ on the Strymon; see Henderson 1979, 114. 70 The tense shift, a striking departure from the rest of the exemplum (narrated largely in the imperfect), begins with spectat (602) and concludes with refert (604). 71 Kristeva, ‘About Chinese Women’, 155 in Moi 1986. 68 69

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Rather than granting his heroine the teleological closure of suicide, Ovid’s praeceptor leaves her in a similar state of frantic indecision. With the (mock-) pathos of direct address (Sithoni) and a regrettably unfulfilled wish, the praeceptor drives his point home. It is Phyllis’ isolation that seals her fate:72 Sithoni, tunc certe vellem non sola fuisses; non flesset positis Phyllida silva comis. Phyllidis exemplo nimium secreta timete, laese vir a domina, laesa puella viro (Rem. 605–9). [Sithonian, then surely I would have wished you were not alone; the forest shedding its leaves would not have wept for Phyllis. By the example of Phyllis, fear excessively secluded places, man wounded by a mistress, girl wounded by a man.]

Yet the Remedia, as well as the Ars in its entirety—not to mention the pseudo-Penelopes of Propertian and Tibullan verse—reminds us repeatedly that women conceptually exist in isolation, behind locked doors, remaining fixed in time and space. Phyllis’ experience as a puella relicta allows us a better understanding of the abandonment that the socially marginal, courtesan-puella of Tibullus and Propertius will experience when women’s time has fewer advantages to offer the truant amator. Though women in Ovid’s eroto-didaxis may threaten to delay their lovers in this sort of atemporal existence, as Calypso does with Ulysses, they are almost inevitably abandoned. Men, on the other hand, as the ships’ captains in Ovid’s sailing metaphors, are rarely left behind, but are constantly moving forward to rejoin the progress of history and the social contract that accompanies it. The puella, at least as she is drawn in the narrow view of her poet-lover, cannot exist when the closed circuit of elegiac love is opened up to a greater world filled with competing ideologies. As noted earlier, this ‘opening up’ or disclosure is arguably the paramount function of the Remedia.73 The properties that Kristeva attributes to the temporal experiences of women—circularity, repetition, and a spatial designation that 72 cf. Henderson’s 1979 comment on the scene: ‘This is a subtle touch by Ovid, who breaks off his narrative while the girl is still rehearsing the act and steeling herself to perform it’ (115). 73 See Conte 1994, 49, 59, and passim, on the ‘powerful closure’ of elegy and its difficulties when confronted with the external world.

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cements their a-teleological status—allow us to understand better why women are so easily defeated when elegy is rewritten as didactic poetry. Kristeva’s model of the relationship between human biological drives, located in the chora, and the language those drives produce also structures the elegiac model of desire, defining the relationship between the puella and her reluctantly symbolic suitor. The ancient roots of this way of thinking about, and gendering, language processes extend at least as far back as Plato and play a significant role in shaping the specific terms of the elegiac lament. By extending the terms of her linguistic model—experienced on an individual level, as a sujet en procès—to the greater realm of social interactions, Kristeva offers women’s time—on a universalizing level—as an insight into the processes that have resulted in woman’s marginalization and suggests possibilities for her salutary integration within the social contract. The elegists’ interest in women’s time, by contrast, does not reflect the concern of a few writers to reintegrate the marginalized puella, but rather provides a mirror for self-reflection as these writers contemplate their own integration—or resistance to integration—as masculine, if frequently feminized, subjects of the new Augustan social order. That women’s time ultimately fails as a model for elegiac subjects whose narrative trajectories cannot accommodate stasis and repetition ad infinitum, does not undermine its ideological import and structural role in forestalling, however temporarily, the inevitable. Having contested the myth of the puella’s eternity, a myth whose appeal to the male amator and detriment to the genre’s female subjects is codified and dismantled through Ovid’s didactic poetry, we are now left to contend with the change she often bears.

7 Nature, Culture, and the Puella Anus ‘Gender becomes a powerful language for talking about the great existential questions of nature and culture, while a language of nature and culture, when and if it is articulated, can become a powerful language for talking about gender, sexuality, and reproduction, not to mention power and helplessness, activity and passivity . . . ’ (Ortner 1996b, 179) ‘The morning sun, when it’s in your face, really shows your age, but that don’t worry me none; in my eyes you’re everything.’ (Stewart/Quittenton, Maggie May, 1971)

I. NATURALIZING THE ELEGIAC PUELLA Throughout this book we have observed in elegy a sensitivity to linear time that may be understood as a counter-current running against, and calling into question, the suspension of time associated with the puella and her conceptual link with mora. These two competing modes of time generate a friction that propels the amator’s narrative and, while that narrative trajectory is linear only in fits and starts, the very inconsistency of its motion necessarily jars the lover from any complacent erotic posturing. Thus, as demonstrated in Chapter Six, the beloved’s static existence as a puella relicta ultimately proves to be a myth required for sustaining the poet-lover’s existence in the chora, and eventually propelling him away from it. This propulsion, whether regrettable (Propertius 1.3, Tibullus 1.3) or a necessary index of sexual conquest (Ovid’s Ars and Remedia), reminds us that the delay characteristic of women’s time is not an unmixed blessing for the elegiac subject. Linear time, an element crucial to the development of

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the elegiac affair, must pass, in part to measure the speaker’s endurance, his consistent devotion over time, as opposed to the beloved’s variable nature.1 The following discussion concerns what the puella faces at the end of her life course; it concerns the wrinkles and age spots in elegiac poetry, and considers the matter of why in fact an immortal beloved, a poetic magnum opus, should be designed to expire, like those tragic Replicants in a popular science-fiction novel. The anxieties born from the amator’s inability to control temporal progress are expressed in projections, whether somber or quaint, of old age. Elegy’s poet-lover manages his temporal anxieties, in part, by transferring them to his puella and depicting her as ultimately more susceptible to the ravages of time.2 In other words, although we have seen in Chapter Six that the poet-lover of elegy often constructs and appropriates the timelessness of his beloved, he will also use time to distance himself from her. In the present chapter I argue that elegy measures the temporal distance between lover and beloved by invoking the commonly acknowledged link between woman and nature. This link assumes that woman, like nature, is threatened by decay in a way that man is not. The methods used by our elegists to strengthen this bond will be discussed in parts two to four of this chapter, and will be followed by discussion of the genre’s clearest expression of the puella’s temporal vulnerability, the lena, whose representation in elegy links her in particular with that realm beyond the civilized world. In her influential 1974 article ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, S.B. Ortner offers a compelling argument that a universally acknowledged link between woman and the natural world is largely responsible for woman’s universal subordination.3 For Ortner, 1 cf. Allen 1950. For different expressions of the lover’s temporal endurance, see Prop. 2.8.13, 2.11.55, 2.17.12, 2.24a.32, 2.33.1–2, 3.6.40, 3.16.9, 3.20.19–20, 3.21.31–32; cf. Tib. 2.5.109, Ov. Am. 1.3.5, 3.10, 3.11.1. 2 In her analysis of time in Horaces’ Odes, Ancona 1994, demonstrates that the poet-lover struggles to assert his autonomy and exemption from time’s destructive properties by either surmounting or distancing himself from his beloved’s temporality, esp. 14–21. For Ancona, temporality, ‘ . . . the contingency the male poet/lover wants to but cannot control . . . ’, explains why love ‘fails’ in the Odes. 3 Ortner’s original thesis came under critical fire that has since prompted her to revisit the topic and clarify some of the assumptions on which her argument relied (cited as 1996b). Most often she has been criticized for asserting the universality of male domination, a position she has now modified, allowing for different definitions of egalitarianism. Still, anthropological studies that examine societies in which there is

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‘nature’ broadly defined is that ‘nonhuman realm’ into which humans are born and which human beings seek to transcend through culture.4 Approaching the situation of women from physiological, social, and psychological perspectives, Ortner reveals how woman’s reproductive and nurturing roles, her domestic duties, and her interpersonal relationships tend to reinforce her links with nature. These links do not deny woman a relationship with humanity, but instead situate her in an intermediate position between culture and nature, a position that in turn makes her a crucial mediating figure between the two poles of culture and nature. Because women occupy this middle ground, they are often assigned by culture what Ortner describes as ‘greater symbolic ambiguity’ (1996, 39). In her association with nature, woman is always located on the fringes of culture, and thus she often represents extremes; that is, she is seen as superior or inferior to humanity as it is defined by the male. As a result, woman, in her symbolic capacity, is able to convey apparently contradictory meanings and suggests either subversion or transcendence—e.g. as witch or saint. From different perspectives, woman can appear ‘to stand both above and below culture, [but] is simply outside and around it’ (39). Woman’s ambiguous status thus explains how the elegiac puella both transcends linear time, as the immortalized artefact of her poet-lover, and, as I shall demonstrate, succumbs to time’s deteriorative effects. Ortner has been pressed to prove the universality of a nature/ culture opposition; that is, to prove the significance of this structure to a post-structuralist world. She concedes the point that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ grossly defined are not unproblematic conceptual categories, and that the opposition between them is not felt equally by every society (1996b, 177). In examining the elegiac woman, we shall observe that she is often linked with elements or forces that are not obviously part of the natural world, but are from some perspectives outside of culture’s domain. And in fact Ortner’s revised thesis regarding the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ argues more no formal ideology regarding male supremacy and in which gender is virtually irrelevant as an organizational principle reveal that men tend to occupy positions of authority (1996b, 175). 4 Ortner 1996 (original publication, 1974) 25–6. She recognizes, of course, that nature and culture are both strictly conceptual, rather than ‘real’, categories.

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confidently for a universal problem of the relationship ‘between what humanity can do [culture] and that which sets limits upon those possibilities [nature]’ (1996b, 179). When considering the relevance of Ortner’s argument for the elegiac puella, we confront solid evidence that this polarity—or ‘patterning of relations’—is used to articulate a struggle over the limits of human potential in broader Roman literary discourse. Latin literature often explicitly describes the course of human evolution as a conflict between natura, the restricting conditions in which the material world, including human beings, comes into existence (from nascor, ‘I am born’, OLD s.v.1–2), and cultus (from colo), a word primarily signifying the process by which human beings inhabit or tend to the world around them (colo OLD s.v.1–2). The meaning of cultus, however, can extend to processes of education, adornment (OLD s.v.3–5), and ultimately a more generalized concept of ‘civilization’ (OLD s.v.9). Although, as Catherine Edwards notes, ‘nature’ is occasionally judged superior to human efforts at cultivating the world, and invoked by philosophers to justify their moral imperatives,5 the progress of human civilization and mastery of nature is consistently celebrated in Roman literature. Epic verse in particular has demonstrated the tension, equally productive and devastating, between natural and civilized worlds. Alison Keith (2000, 36–64) has examined how the struggle between man and nature, as articulated in epic verse, is essentially a gendered one, evident especially from the Lucretian figure of Venus-Natura, but also from Ennius’, and eventually Vergil’s, tendency to enact the crucial foundation myths of Rome over the female body. Woman becomes the very ground upon and against which Roman civilization emerges. Livy’s history, despite its attribution of key roles to women in solidifying Roman hegemony, also defines woman largely by her natural and perishable condition. This condition is perhaps most evident from the historian’s account of the Sabine women, which makes a clear distinction between the transcendental aspects of culture achieved by the male citizens of the fledgling state (magnas opes sibi magnumque nomen facere, 1.9.3) and the biological need to incorporate women into the population (sed 5

See Edwards 1993, 138–44 and passim, who often cites Seneca the Younger, in her discussion of Stoic disdain for that which is considered ‘unnatural’ (contra naturam).

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penuria mulierum hominis aetatem duratura magnitudo erat, 9.1). Such a narrative constructs the promulgation of cultural continuity, the potential for Rome’s magnum nomen to last beyond ‘only one generation’ (aetatem),6 as distinct from but utterly dependent on woman’s reproductive role. We are thus reminded of woman’s critical role in propagating the species, or as Ortner describes it, in those aspects of humanity that do not outlast a generation, as opposed to man’s role in producing an intangible and thus imperishable record of Rome’s great name. Against this background of epic and history exists a similarly gendered struggle in elegy. Woman in the works of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid becomes loosely identified with nature, or more broadly with the forces that man—and culture—works to control and shape to his own ends. A thorough body of scholarship has emerged to address both the puella’s role as an object of the poet’s artifice,7 and to a lesser extent, the beloved’s failed attempts at self-cultivation.8 The following sections document how the puella’s natural status, while making her a ripe object for the amator’s immortalizing artistry, also strengthens the bond between her and the temporal rhythms of the natural world that so frequently pose a threat to youthful eroticism; I hope to demonstrate how, despite the amator’s plaintive concessions to his own eventual old age, elegiac rhetorical strategies that identify the puella with the natural realm effectively leave her—not to mention the other female figures of elegy: saga, anus, or lena— subdued and quickly deteriorating under the transcendent foot of the poet-lover.

II. TIBULLUS, MARATHUS, AND PHOLOE: CARPE DIEM STRATEGIES For R.O.A.M. Lyne, the elegiac poets differ from Horace in their treatment of erotic themes particularly in their refusal to relegate 6 For translation of the accusative here, see Greenough 1988 (reprint of 1890), 30; cf. Ogilvie 1970, 67. 7 See especially Wyke 2002 (revised and reprinted from 1987 and 1989 essays published in JRS and Helios); Sharrock 1991, and Keith 1994. 8 e.g. Downing 1990 and Rimmel 2005.

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love to the province of youth (1980, 204).9 Though Lyne is sensitive to the inconsistencies of attitudes expressed, for instance, in Tibullus’ introductory poem (1980, 67), a closer inspection may prove that the exceptions to the rule of ‘love until (or even after) death’ outnumber its supporting examples. Such exceptions—that is, moments where the elegists appear to concur with Horatian sentiment—arise not only through explicit rejoinders to ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. The elegiac puella’s heightened vulnerability to linear time, unlike that of her counterparts in Horace and the poets of the Greek Anthology, is demonstrated by sustained imagery that develops her natural, and thus perishable, qualities throughout a series of poems, allowing us to observe her deterioration over the linear movement of the libellus. As such elegy innovates in applying highly conventional rhetoric to a relatively consistent love object, whose life course is demonstrated as a foil to the amator’s emphatically stated iuventas. Tibullus programmatically introduces the carpe diem motif as a rhetorical strategy aimed at securing Delia’s erotic affections before unseemly old age creeps up on them (dum fata sinunt, iungamus amores, 1.1.69). As we have seen, poem 1.6, the last of the Delia series, offers a visual demonstration of a time when perhaps the fates will not allow, as a cautionary tale to the unfaithful puella depicts an impoverished woman, conquered by old age (1.6.75–84). A similar focus on temporal pressures as grounds for hastening the culmination of an erotic affair is expressed in poems 1.4 and 1.8: these poems offer an instructive anomaly within Augustan elegy insofar as they allow us to view the future deterioration of both a male and female love object. While both suffer the loss of iuventas when viewed in the context of nature’s obstinately changing seasons, the puella’s old age is constructed as altogether lacking the ars and the options available to a passive puer turned active amator. Moreover, though the speaker as praeceptor, especially in poem 1.4, employs rhetoric that relies on the puer’s vulnerability to old age, he does not graphically reveal the incarnation of that vulnerability as he does for the puella.

9

For Horace’s treatment of old age and eroticism, see also Ancona 1994, 57, who argues that the poet ‘makes the terrors of time become a rationale for the rhetoric of seduction’; discussed further above, Chapter One, pp. 10–11.

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In poem 1.4, Priapus counsels a lover in pursuit of a puer delicatus; we learn at the end of the poem that the god’s advice is meant for a certain Titius, though the poet-lover, under the tortuous spell of Marathus, can perhaps glean something from the lesson as well. Priapus advocates the virtues of patience and temporal endurance for the amator, who initially has time on his side: longa dies homini docuit parere leones;/longa dies molli saxa peredit aqua (17–18, ‘the long day taught the lions to obey man; the long day has eaten away rocks with gentle water’). All the same, Priapus’ advice turns out to be somewhat ill-suited for conquest of the puer, whose beauty, like that of the puella, is highly perishable:10 at si tardus eris errabis, transiet aetas quam cito! non segnis stat remeatque dies. quam cito purpureos deperdit terra colores, quam cito formosas populus alta comas! quam iacet, infirmae venere ubi fata senectae, qui prior Eleo est carcere missus equus! vidi iam iuvenem premeret cum serior aetas, maerentem stultos praeteriisse dies. crudeles divi. serpens novus exuit annos; formae non ullam Fata dedere moram. solis aeterna est Baccho Phoeboque iuventas, nam decet intonsus crinis utrumque deum (1.4.27–38). [But if you are slow, you’ll err. How quickly youth will pass by! The day does not remain sluggish, nor does it return. How quickly the earth loses its vibrant colours! How quickly the tall poplar loses its lovely ‘hair’! How he lies there, when the fate of a weak old age has arrived, the horse that formerly was sent forth from the Olympian gate! I have just recently seen a young man lamenting that days spent foolishly have passed him by, while older age was pressing upon him. The gods are cruel! The snake renewed sloughs off his years; the fates have not allowed any delay for beauty. Youth is eternal for Bacchus and Phoebus alone, for unshorn hair suits each god.]

10 Fineberg 1999, 425 notes the jarring effect of the transition from those lines advocating patience to those stressing temporal urgency: ‘[t]he veneer of patience and control in the longa dies and annus repetitions in 17–20 is shattered by the sudden repetitive intensity of quam cito/quam cito/quam cito/quam (27–32), which speak not of what time can accomplish, but of what it takes away’.

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After all that a longa dies can achieve for the pursuit of youth’s beauty, its effects are nullified by the very fact that the day is not longa, but instead moves with alarming speed (non segnis; cf. Lee-Stecum 1998, 144). As an erotic ideal, delay (mora) is problematized within a context of a material, and highly perishable world. Priapus’ contradictory precepts codify as elegiac practice the temporal inconsistency—one advocating lengthy endurance for the lover and a heightened awareness of time for the beloved—that governs the lives of its erotic subjects. Comparisons between the beloved and the constantly changing natural world further demonstrate the impermanence of the puer’s physical beauty. Like the landscape and the lofty poplar tree (populus), the puer will experience decay; but his trajectory towards death, unlike theirs, is emphatically linear, offering no chance for renewal. As with various poems of the Augustan period, as well as those of the Palatine Anthology, the transformations of nature are established as the template against which the life course of the beloved is measured.11 By contrast, the amator is in possession of artes that bridge generational divides and outlast the natural course of aging: tempus erit cum me Veneris praecepta ferentem/deducat iuvenum sedula turba senem (79–80, ‘there will be a time when an attentive crowd of young men follows me, an old man, as I bring forth the teachings of Venus’). And yet Tibullus’ poem allows us to view life’s trajectory from surprising vantage points that encourage us to conflate the identities of lover and beloved. For instance, is it distinctly the beloved whom time threatens in the passage? Bright’s (1978, 234–5) assessment of the carpe diem topos here suggests that, despite the puer’s implicit vulnerability, the amator’s erotic identity is also under threat: ‘ . . . [t]his is a favorite figure of Tibullus, who feels Time’s winged chariot at his heels more keenly than the other elegists: we saw how the old man in 1.2 was a representative of Tibullus’ own suffering with Delia’. Thus, we observe ‘ . . . Tibullus looking in the mirror’ (234) as Priapus warns of the youth (iuvenis) who mourns the passing of foolishly spent days. It is, moreover, the image of amator as praeceptor (or magister, 1.4.75) who in his old age, as senex, dominates the poem’s 11

cf. Hor. c. 2.11.9, 4.10.3–5; AP 12.39, AP 5.28, as well as a list of parallels cited in Smith 1913, 273–4; see also Sharrock 1994, 41–2 for a particular emphasis on flower imagery (i.e. the ‘bloom of youth’).

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conclusion, an image made all the more painful through a demonstration of the tortuous ‘slow love’ that will lead up to his senescence (1.4.79–82). Tibullus’ depiction of mournfully lost youth in poem 1.4 thus fails to designate whether amator or male beloved should be more sensitive to Priapus’ warnings of wasted youth (stultos . . . dies), an elision made all the easier by the homosexual terms of the relationship. At the same time, in articulating the threat posed to erotic identity, Priapus, rather than foregrounding an image of destitute old age so often associated with the puella, signals the advent of the age of maturity. This maturity is implied by the shorn hair (formosas comas; Maltby 2002, ad loc.) of the ‘lofty poplar tree’, posing as foil to the unshorn hair of Bacchus and Apollo (33–34)—and signalling that time when a puer delicatus may assume his role as an amator. Moreover, if we identify the Marathus of poem 1.4 (81) with the lovesick Marathus in poem 1.8 (49, 71), the implied narrative of the libellus converts a former puer into an active, desiring amator.12 No such transformation is allowed for the mature puella, whose pursuit of youth only serves to underscore her senescence. The Tibullan speaker has much to say about Pholoe’s future in poem 1.8. As in 1.4, we find the speaker in a didactic role, though not altogether disinterested, since he remains a lover of Marathus, who is the lover of Pholoe.13 The poem is unique in that it constantly juxtaposes the puella’s role as a love object with the puer delicatus in a similar position.14 This juxtaposition allows a useful comparison of male and female beloveds and their respective relationships to nature and experiences of temporality. After Tibullus’ praeceptor amoris explains his credentials (1–8), he wryly condemns Marathus’ artful fastidiousness (9–14) and contrasts such efforts with Pholoe’s lack of ars: illa placet, quamvis inculto venerit ore/nec nitidum tarda

12 As such we are offered a window onto the future of a male beloved, something rarely observed in Greek epigram and Latin erotic verse. As Richlin observes 1992, 34, ‘[t]he poems to pueri generally imagine them as timeless . . . these boys are never viewed as potential adults who will become freedmen, carry on business and government, have children, or grow old’. 13 Murgatroyd, 1980, 233–4, notes the poem’s novel presentation of the dynamics between speaker, puer delicatus, and puella. 14 For the eventual transference upon maturity of a former puer’s love to young women in Hellenistic poetry, cf. Cairns 1979, 140 n. 60; the treatment in Augustan love elegy is unique to Tib. 1.8, despite parallels in Propertius 1.20.

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compserit arte caput (15–16, ‘she pleases, even if she comes wearing no make-up, and has not arranged her lustrous hair with careful artistry’). Though Pholoe’s lack of effort is stated as a concession (quamvis), implicit in the terse couplet is an ideal of uncultivated beauty, like that demonstrated in the second poem of Propertius’ Monobiblos.15 Marathus’ efforts, by contrast, are drawn out with a redundancy of language (quid . . . quid . . . frustra . . . frustra) that makes them appear all the more excessive. In their present circumstances, lover and beloved could not be more unlike in their approaches to self-cultivation. When Tibullus’ praeceptor addresses Pholoe, however, we find that Marathus’ eager adornment has anticipated Pholoe’s future: non lapis hanc gemmaeque iuvant, quae frigore sola dormiat et nulli sit cupienda viro. heu sero revocatur amor seroque iuventas, cum vetus infecit cana senecta caput! tunc studium formae est, coma tunc mutatur, ut annos dissimulet viridi cortice tincta nucis, tollere tunc cura est albos a stirpe capillos et faciem dempta pelle referre novam. at tu, dum primi floret tibi temporis aetas, utere! non tardo labitur illa pede neu Marathum torque. puero quae gloria victo est? in veteres esto dura, puella, senes (1.8.39–50). [Stones and gems do not please her who sleeps alone in the cold and is desired by no man. Alas, too late is love, and too late is youth recalled, when grey old age has dyed an old head. Then there is (i.e. desperate) enthusiasm for beauty; then hair is changed so that, painted with the green rind of a walnut, it may hide its years. Then there is much effort to remove white hairs from the root and to restore a new face with skin removed. But you, as long as the time of your early youth flourishes, enjoy it: that time does not glide by with a slow foot. Don’t torture Marathus. What glory is there in the conquest of a boy? Girl, be hard on experienced old men.]

15 As Smith notes 1913, 346, a locus classicus for the theme of unadorned beauty is Plaut. Most. 287–91, a passage influential in shaping the character of elegy’s courtesan. If Scapha’s advice regarding beauty hovers here in the reader’s horizon, so too do her remarks on the courtesan’s old age (Most. 199–202).

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As Cairns notes in his exposition of Hellenistic technique in Tibullus 1.8, lines 39–50 constitute a point of ‘central structural importance’ and function as a demonstration of the poem’s central theme, the contrast between youth and old age (1979, 141). Verbal and situational parallels within Tibullus 1.8 force us to evaluate Pholoe’s desperate old age against the backdrop of Marathus’ desperate youth. The puer’s frantic indecision over temporary adornment (mutatas . . . mutantur, 10–13) becomes, for the puella, an indication of permanent transformation (tunc coma mutatur). The litotes in nec tarda arte (16) that hinted earlier at her casual indifference now signals the swift approach of undesirable old age (non tardo . . . pede). Such links indicate that both Pholoe as anus and Marathus as amator labour in vain to alter the givens of their natural existence, but the language detailing the puer’s vanity marks him as a cultivator extraordinaire, while the older Pholoe’s attempts place her on a lower register in the hierarchical opposition between culture and nature. Like Marathus of the poetic present, she will become a pretender, though of a much cruder kind. Where the puer carefully prunes and binds, the old woman simply hides or uproots. Pholoe’s impossible wish to reverse the effects of time reveals an essentially bestial nature as the speaker attributes to her the sort of skin (pellis) most often used to describe animal hides.16 Clearly Tibullus’ speaker remains interested in the ephemeral nature of both male and female beauty, a physical deterioration he does not shirk from recognizing in himself. All the same, he lays the foundation for a gendering of time insofar as he cannot imagine a destitute future for the puer as he does so vividly for the puella, left alone and exposed to the elements (frigore sola). Though the male beloved will lament his passing years, as noted in poem 1.4, the very scenario presented in poem 1.8 allows us to view the puer/iuvenis as a nascent, if fledgling, amator.17 The physical incarnation of old age is reserved for the puella alone, whose gender predetermines the only lot 16 Pellis is used primarily with reference to animals (OLD s.v. pellis 1a; Maltby 2002, 314 though parallel applications to human skin can be found (e.g. Hor. Ep. 17.22). The phrase dempta pelle is unusual, however, and the removal of skin suggests a snake shedding its outer layer; see Murgatroyd’s 1980 discussion of 1.8, citing Dissen 1835. Reminiscence of the snake’s shedding its skin in poem 1.4 (35) imports a great deal of irony into the text, since it also reminds us of the renewal that humans are explicitly unable to accomplish. 17 A role further developed in the following poem (1.9, esp. 43–4).

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allowed to her, that of beloved. Should we lose sight of the portrait of withered senescence that threatens Pholoe in her attempt to call back love and youth (revocatur . . . amor seroque iuventas, 41), the poem’s final lines return us to it (quam cupies votis hunc revocare diem, 78), expressing regret not only for love lost, but also for time’s irreversible effects.18

III. UNVEILING AURORA: GENDERING TIME IN PROPERTIAN LOVE ELEGY Cur haec in terris facies humana moratur? (Prop. 2.2.3)

Priapus’ didacticism in Tibullus 1.4 reminds us that mora, when set against the temporal movements of the natural world, poses distinct problems for the elegiac beloved. The disparate fates allotted to Marathus and Pholoe, moreover, are reflective of how maturity is articulated in different terms for a male and female beloved. In fact, the puella’s unique sensitivity to linear time, more apparent in light of the puer’s relatively resilient future as amator, further explains her role as the genre’s favorite love object. A puella is of course the only love object in the elegies of Propertius,19 whose second libellus further complicates the relationship between eroticism, delay, and a mortal beloved by questioning the transcendental quality of Cynthia’s beauty. Poem 2.2—quoted above—poses a question:20 ‘why does this beauty, (as if) mortal, linger on the earth?’ The question regards not only the mortal (humana) status of Cynthia’s beauty, but also

18 As Putnam observes 1973, 136, the speaker’s use of revocare, echoed from 1.8.41, deals a double blow. See James 2003 on different destinies awaiting male and female beloveds. She describes a situation in elegy in which ‘Age pursues Youth’ and an eventual gender divide since ‘the men will have the resources to pay for sex, but the women will simply be abandoned’ (11). If Marathus is of servile status, his resources will of course be limited; yet his biological sex makes it de facto more acceptable for him to assume the role of the active amator; see in Roman Sexualities (Hallett and Skinner, eds, 1997) especially the essays by Hallett and Parker. 19 That is, the only love object explicitly desired by the poet-lover; poem 1.20 treats Gallus’ love for a puer through the exemplum of Hercules and Hylas. 20 Cynthia is not named explicitly in the book until poem five, though, as the only addressee (or clearly identified dura puella, 2.1.78) in the sequence up to that point, we are encouraged to identify the puella in this poem as Cynthia.

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poses a problem of continuity: how could such divine splendour remain static over time (or ‘delay’, moratur) among mortals (in terris).21 The puella’s status as a natural object of the poet’s artifice allows her two possibilities within the realm of linear time: along one path, as an opus and product of ars, she is granted immortality, the kind of temporal endurance that Ortner allows for that ‘medium of technology and symbols’, in which man ‘creates relatively lasting, eternal, transcendent objects’ (1996a, 29). Tibullus’ occasionally sentimental, more often sinister demonstration of his beloved’s convergence with nature’s deteriorative processes leaves the puella with little hope for post-elegiac survival, though we are reminded that the beloved’s beauty can live on, for better or worse, in the carmina of the poet.22 Propertius more confidently grants to Cynthia a quasi-divine status, familiar in the context of scholarship that has frequently asserted her artificiality and role as a signifier of aesthetic prerogatives: as his poet-lover’s lasting artefact, Propertius offers a Cynthia of everlasting beauty (forma perennis, 3.10.17) and immortalizing fame (1.4.2–8), whose hard living should be her undoing, but is not (2.33b.33–6).23 Another path lies ahead, however, and one where the puella’s links with perishable nature confirm her humana—rather than divine— status. If we look more closely at Cynthia, with air brush and matte finish removed, the fine lines appear. The following discussion examines a series of poems from book two, culminating in poem 2.18, where the myth of Aurora and Tithonus intricately entangles Cynthia’s perishable nature with the poet-lover’s own. I argue that this entanglement replicates in miniature the course of life that the elegiac corpus assigns to lover and beloved: the puella follows a path occasionally veering towards transcendence of time and aging, especially when described at the zenith of her beauty, but concluding in 21

Richardson 1977, 219 explains the adjective as predicative, so that the overall sense is predicative: ‘why is this beauty mortal?’ This interpretation is natural enough, but overlooks the nuances of moratur. Fedeli (2005, 109; cf. Camps 1967, 79) suggests ‘continui a vivere’ and cites a tradition of exceptional humans—usually men—whose superiority attracts the attention of the gods and/or earns them a place among the gods. Horace uses a similar expression (c.2.2.3–4), though as an indication of his own poetic immortality rather than any divine quality of a beloved. 22 cf. 1.9.47–50 for the poet’s regret over the permanence of his verses, though the beloved in this case is the puer Marathus, rather than a puella. 23 Vino forma perit, vino corrumpitur aetas/vino saepe suum nescit amica virum/ me miserum, ut multo nihil est mutata Lyaeo!

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grotesquely decrepit old age. The amator, now and then careening towards transcendence on the heels of his mistress, ultimately finds that the end of his erotic path, carefully charted in the boundaries of youth, is by no means the end of his mortal, or in fact poetic, one. As the relationship between the poet’s ars and his puella’s aetas proves increasingly contentious, we are left with little doubt about who will have the final, imperishable word (scribam igitur, quod non umquam tua deleat aetas, 2.5.27). For Propertius, thoughts of mortality— rather than merely constituting a not so subtle plea for sex, now— frequently lead to thoughts of aging and, more specifically, an interest in how the puella’s and amator’s stories conclude, after the puella has been written. As such, the beloved’s demise provides a springboard, so to speak, for her poet’s post-elegiac enterprises. Poem 2.18 offers a variant of the Tithonus myth that assumes the goddess’s unfailing love for the hero, despite his decrepitude, as a foil for the disdain that Cynthia feels for her lover, even in his youth.24 At the conclusion of the exemplum in 2.18, the amator implicitly restructures the comparison between himself and Tithonus as an analogy between Tithonus and Cynthia: at tu etiam iuvenem odisti me, perfida, cum sis/ipsa anus haud longa curva futura die (19–20, ‘but you hate me, even in my youth; though you yourself will be a bent old woman in a very short time’). On the one hand, a poem about Cynthia’s and her lover’s aging is motivated by Propertius’ anxieties about his own mortality, and his preoccupation with defining himself as a iuvenis, rather than marking Cynthia’s senescence.25 On the other hand, the language in book two that increasingly naturalizes Cynthia, and makes her more susceptible to time’s ravages offers a strategy for the poet’s longevity, for aligning himself with transcendental cultus and resisting the restrictions of time increasingly pressed upon him.

24 Other variants of the myth, e.g. that articulated in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, point to Aurora’s eventual lack of erotic interest in her aging lover. T.K. Hubbard 1986, 302 n. 42, without the benefit of the ‘newly’ reconstructed Sappho poem, views Propertius’ version as an innovation, though I am of the opinion that poem 2.18’s concluding posture of intimacy shared by speaker and addressee owes something to Sappho; see further below, pp. 204–5. 25 Such an interpretation reflects the view of feminist scholars, such as Jan Montefiore 1987 (cf. Ancona 1994, 17), that male authored poetry on a female, or feminized, beloved is innately a discourse on the self: a meditation on identity and autonomy, ‘an occasion for the lover’s self-creation’.

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First, a few caveats: poem 2.18 has undergone the scalpel in effort to correct what has been perceived as discontinuity between the poem’s first four lines, which advocate a lover’s silent suffering, the following sixteen on Aurora and Tithonus (4–20), the couplet of lines 21–22, and the poem’s final segment, on Cynthia’s recent dye-job, which most editors, including Fedeli, label 18b.26 In spite of such perceived incoherence, there remains a continuous thread linking the poem’s opening didacticism, its focus on Aurora and Tithonus, and the couplet of 21–22. These two concluding lines restate Cupid’s fickle nature: quin ego deminuo curam, quod saepe Cupido/huic malus esse solet, cui bonus ante fuit (‘often Cupido is accustomed to be bad to the one whom he was good to earlier’). As such they not only address the puella’s present disdain for the poet and assume her affections for a rival, but also demonstrate the poet’s temporal endurance as the antithesis of Cynthia’s variable nature. The passage on Cynthia’s newly dyed coiffure (18b, lines 23–38), moreover, showcases the very signs of physical deterioration that mark Tithonus’ experience of old age. The question of a precise conjunction or disjunction of those lines concerning Aurora and Tithonus with those preceding and following them in the manuscripts raises along with it the matter of poem 2.18’s larger context and its significance in what Theodore Papanghelis has described as the ‘recalcitrant material’ that constitutes book two (1987, 141). There is, from the book’s initial Iliadic and erotic struggles in poem 2.1, a subtle but persistent process of demystification, of unveiling and desiccating the lively dominatrix Cynthia, who lorded over the Monobiblos. Scholars like Papanghelis have shown how the poet-lover’s preoccupation with death, and ‘love in death’, or Liebestod, function to unify thematically book two’s contents, but have mostly overlooked how the puella’s mortality is transformed in the process. That is, critics have ignored how Cynthia, following her

26 cf. also Hubbard, who cites more or less successful attempts to unify the poem. While Hubbard’s own reading of the poem’s unity has much to offer, I am not persuaded by his argument that the first four lines of the poem constitute a silencing of the mistress’s complaints, 1986, 292–3. In the context of book two, and especially in light of the poems immediately preceding 2.18, it makes little sense for the poet to tell Cynthia that she should cease complaining, and deny that she has seen anything—for Hubbard, the poet’s grey hair—or that anything has caused her grief—which Hubbard does not directly address. Heyworth’s 2007b OCT prints the poem as one entity with various lacunae sprinkled throughout.

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role in generating the greatest history (maxima historia), is increasingly assimilated with the realm of nature that lies above and beyond those transcendent artefacts of human culture, so that there emerges between poet and beloved an increasing discrepancy in the temporal trajectory that each follows. As we have observed, poem 2.2 presents Cynthia as quasi-immortal, asking how—and perhaps how long—a beauty like hers can linger on the earth; but it simultaneously queries the possibilities of the puella’s future physical self. In the poem’s final couplet (2.2.15–16), the amator requests that ‘old age may not change this beauty, even if she will live as long as the Cumaean seer’ (i.e. the Sibyl, who, like Tithonus, lived forever, while continuing to age): hanc utinam faciem nolit mutare senectus,/etsi Cumaeae saecula vatis aget. The optative expression here (utinam) measures the distance between poetic flights of fancy and the realities of change over time. The verb mutare, moreover, harkening back to the pitiable changes that Pholoe will suffer in old age (1.8.43), demonstrates the variability of the physical form and raises the question of what aspects of human subjectivity can escape the transformations of senectus. In poem 2.9 the poet-lover again associates his puella with variable elements, this time those distinctly drawn from the natural realm, in a simile used to emphasize her capriciousness (non sic incertae mutantur flamine Syrtes, 2.9.33). The second libellus thus lays the groundwork for a construction of woman as natural and variable, an effective contrast to the permanence that the poet as artifex can accomplish. Poem 2.15 allows us to map further the terms of this contrast: in typically Propertian meandering fashion, the poem first celebrates a night spent with the mistress (1–10), turns to chastise her for her modesty (11–24), then valorizes a life devoted to love (25–40), especially when compared to the life of the soldier (41–48), and concludes with remarks on the transient nature of all human life (49–54). In their movement from the immortalizing flush of erotic success to dour awareness of human mortality, the amator’s reflections stage in relatively covert fashion the table turning that will blatantly conclude the Aurora and Tithonus poem. The poet-lover claims that nights spent with his mistress allow him to transcend time: si dabit et multas, fiam immortalis in illis (39, ‘if she will give many more, I’ll become immortal in them’). And yet strategically arranged in the poem are references to the relentless passage of time, so that what begins as the celebration of a single endless

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night becomes a sombre reflection on the night’s inevitable conclusion.27 Two passages in particular serve the poet’s carpe diem rhetoric, the first of which rather inelegantly aims the threat of time squarely at the beloved. Increasingly frustrated at the puella’s coy demeanour, the poet-lover presses her, under the threat of violence, to disrobe: quin etiam, si me ulterius provexerit ira, ostendes matri bracchia laesa tuae. necdum inclinatae prohibent te ludere mammae: viderit haec, si quam iam peperisse pudet. dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus amore: nox tibi longa venit nec reditura dies. atque utinam haerentis sic nos vincire catena velles, ut numquam solveret ulla dies! (2.15.19–26) [But indeed, if anger provokes me further, you will show bruised arms to your mother. Not yet do sagging breasts prevent you from having fun: if any woman feels shame at having given birth, let her worry about that. While the fates allow us, we will sate our eyes with love: for you a long night has arrived, nor will the day return. Would that you’d wish for chains to bind us clinging together in such a way that no day would ever part!]

In attempting to persuade his beloved, the poet-lover has juxtaposed the lofty sentiment of life’s swift passage with a curiously realistic reference to sagging breasts, linking them together with mirroring temporal adverbs (necdum . . . dum). The amator’s comment on ageappropriate behaviour reminds us of a possibly indecorous future that awaits the beloved. She is ‘not yet’ (necdum) afflicted with sagging breasts (inclinatae mammae), but the lines immediately preceding and directly following this statement remind us that she soon will be. In line 22 the poet-lover stresses the deteriorative effects of childbirth; line 20 perhaps alludes, by reference to the puella’s mother, to a generational succession fixed for the beloved, one ordaining that the youthful puella may one day become a mother and procuress for her 27 On the structure of 2.15, see Richardson 1977, 255, who notes that themes of light and darkness in lines 1–24 are answered by two blocks of twelve verses dealing with matters of eternity and transience. The themes of the two sections are brought together in the poem’s coda. Other critics have been less convinced of the poem’s unity; cf. Butler and Barber 1969, 215, citing Housman and Postgate on attempts to correct the poem’s lack of coherence.

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own daughter.28 The puella has not yet suffered the effects of time and procreation, but their impending advance is less than subtle (dum nos fata sinunt, 23).29 Propertius 2.15 concludes with a similar sense of urgency and with similar implications for the puella’s mortality. From lines 37–48 the poet moves seamlessly from his claims of Cynthia-induced temporal transcendence (quod mihi vitae longus et annus erit, 37–8) to a rejection of mounting casualties of war that attend Roman military success. Actium and a Rome besieged by triumphs have done little more than litter the sea with corpses (43–6). And yet Cynthia’s immortalizing beauty, championed by implication, is called into question by the poem’s conclusion: tu modo, dum lucet, fructum ne desere vitae! omnia si dederis oscula, pauca dabis; ac veluti folia arentis liquere corollas, quae passim calathis strata natare vides, sic nobis, qui nunc magnum spiramus amantes, fortisan includet crastina fata dies (2.15.49–54). [Only you, while the day remains, enjoy the fruits of life! If you give me all your kisses, you’ll give too few; but just as leaves fall from dried up garlands, so for us, who as lovers now live large, perhaps tomorrow will seal our fates.]

Through the word order of line 49, with its stressed personal pronoun (tu), the poet-lover directly orders his puella to make the most of life. The simile used to press the point keeps her directly in view and makes her its primary element of comparison: she is to look (vides) at the petals (folia) strewn upon the wine, just now fallen from withered crowns (arentis corollas), and interpret from them her own perishable nature. Significantly, the beloved’s beauty is also likened to folia, again swimming (natant), though this time in pure milk, at Propertius 2.3.12 (utque rosae puro lacte natant folia). There, the comparison 28 See Camps 1967, 126, who suggests a parallel with New Comedy, in which the courtesan’s mother is sometimes her procuress. For an extended treatment of the matter, see Rosivach 1998, 51–75. 29 Ovid’s erotodidaxis, exploiting the apparent minutiae of his predecessors, will make more obvious references to the deteriorative effects of childbirth (Ars 3.82, 785–6; cf. Am. 2.14.7–8). In doing so the poet of the Ars makes explicit the puella’s acute sensitivity to the ravages of time so casually implied in Propertian verse.

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is a more flattering one, as vibrant rose petals against a white background suggest a puella in the bloom of youth. In poem 2.9, we find that the puella’s temperament is also likened to ‘trembling leaves’ (tremefacta folia, 34), a sign of her ephemeral and capricious nature. By echoing in poem 2.15 folia’s earlier metaphorical applications, the speaker draws a linear trajectory for his beloved that begins as undefiled splendour, but ends with colourless desiccation. Sic nobis of the poem’s final couplet will soften the blow with a generalizing first person plural, but the poem’s organization, moving from a nearly immortal poet-lover to the fragile existence of his beloved-addressee (tu), implies that the puella is more susceptible to decay. The beloved’s heightened vulnerability to change over time is extended throughout those poems immediately preceding the Aurora and Tithonus poem.30 In poem 2.17 that change is not indicated by a physical transformation of the self, but by painfully fickle affections, made more variable by comparison with the amator’s endurance of ‘bitter nights’ (amaras noctes, cf. 1.1.33). The poet-lover’s concluding remark in poem 2.17 that he would dare not change his mistress (dominam mutare cavebo, 17), in spite of her temperament, illuminates her inconstancy in the light of his rock-solid devotion. The changing (of the) mistress, however, with its potentially ambiguous use of the accusative as subject or object of change,31 also predicts a transformation of Cynthia’s status from divine to merely mortal, as clearly as the ‘old age’ of poem 2.2 is denied the power to change (mutare) her beauty.

IV. AURORA UNVEILED This survey of the puella’s transformation in book two has so far shown us how her divine status is initially asserted, only to be gradually withdrawn, and made increasingly subject to scrutiny. Thus Cynthia’s identity as an Aurora figure has been compromised 30 cf. also poem 2.16.22, where the puella who ‘would become grey in a single house’ (una fieret cana puella domo) upholds a standard of fidelity clearly neglected by Cynthia. 31 Though most translations, of course, eliminate the ambiguity of the Latin; cf. Viarre 2005, 55; Lee 1996, 46; and Goold 1990, 175.

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well before the poet-lover elaborates on the discrepancy between mistress and goddess in poem 2.18. After playing the exclusus amator in poems 2.16 and 17, the poet-lover of 2.18 (1–4) rethinks his strategy for erotic conquest, dons the guise of praeceptor amoris and assumes a hypothetical addressee, a lover-in-training. In a jarring moment of self-awareness, the Propertian amator realizes that his many querelae, narrated in the immediately preceding poems, may have prompted his beloved’s hatred (odium, 1). This addressee, the unidentified neophyte, will not resurface until lines 21–22, and then only implicitly: the didacticism that concludes the Tithonus exemplum, a reminder of love’s vicissitudes rather than of the puella’s lack of tolerance for whining suitors, is directed at a highly impersonal ‘anyone’ (huic/cui). Still, it is part of a frame that allows the poet-lover to consider his own situation, epitomized in the myth of Aurora and Tithonus, at a less excruciatingly close distance. But what have silent suffering and love’s inconstancy to do with this particular myth? Richardson (1977, 264) describes the Aurora/ Tithonus passage as a ‘more than casual inclusion, far more important than the ordinary mythological exemplum in P’.32 The singleminded constancy of the amator, emblematized through Aurora’s unfailing love for Tithonus, inscribes a position against which the fickle nature of the puella is measured. As such the amator will remain in a state of abjection unless he can capitalize on his endurance and convincingly identify Cynthia’s changing affections— already illustrated through conceptual association with nature’s transience—with the changing forma that threatens her in old age. In his rendering of Aurora’s devotion to Tithonus, the amator enacts this identification through language that recalls and revises the youth and divinity of erotic subjects both in the Monobiblos and earlier in book two. If we consider the poem a response to Sappho’s treatment of the myth, moreover, we can detect a studied divergence in the way that the amator structures his poetic voice in relation to the exemplum that he describes.

32 Veyne 1988, 116–31, and to a lesser extent, Papanghelis 1987, 5, have understood Propertius’ use of myth more generally as a function of the poet’s Hellenizing ornamentation, an extension of what Boucher describes as Propertius’ ‘tempérament visuel’ (1965, 49–60). Other critics, however, have detected in the poet’s mythologizing an attempt to raise individual experience to a universal level. See, e.g. Allen 1962, 130; for a brief review of the debate, see Papanghelis 1987, 5–6.

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Propertius begins his rendering of the myth by positing its immediate relevance to the amator’s erotic situation: Quid mea si canis aetas candesceret annis,33 et faceret scissas languida ruga genas? at non Tithoni spernens Aurora senectam desertum Eoa passa iacere domo est: (2.18.5–8) [What if my age shines with grey years, and a drooping wrinkle cuts my cheeks? Aurora, not scorning the old age of Tithonus, did not allow him to lie deserted in her Eastern home.]

This passage is not the first to foreground the poet-lover’s age (mea aetas).34 As observed in Chapter Three, aetas is represented in the Monobiblos as a youthful time of life well suited to erotic exploits (aetatis tempora dura, 1.7.8), rather than a career in military service (Tullus of 1.6), or verse that would celebrate such a career (Ponticus of 1.7). In a more complicated textual interaction, the reference here in poem 2.18 to a hypothetical old age harkens back to the poet’s musings earlier in book two on his own death, tragically premature, as he is struck in prima aetate (2.8.17). And yet the exemplum of 2.18 embarks on a journey far away from Liebestod, so that a glorious love in death has been replaced by a perversely impar (‘unequal’),35 if poignant, love in eternal old age. The amator’s desire to envisage some form of closure for his erotic narrative leads him down two alternate paths, neither of which culminates in erotic contentment: there is a path of self-immolation upon which Cynthia must forcibly accompany him; and there is the path to gradual old age, on which time’s passage will eventually distinguish lover from beloved. To evoke further a visual image of the poet-lover’s senility, Propertius draws a drooping wrinkle (languida ruga) upon the amator’s cheeks, a move that both tropes and individualizes old age: he will bear a characteristic sign of aging lovers in erotic poetry, and yet this languida ruga, a sort of wrinkle in time, in the only other uses of 33 As bracketed in Fedeli. Editors are divided over reading canesco, from caneo/ canus ‘become white/grey’, or candesco, from candeo ‘shine, be illuminated’. Comparanda in Tibullus are persuasive: 1.10.43, for candesceret. 34 Enk 1978, 128 rather misses the point by noting that ‘aetas mea nihil aliud significant quam ego’. 35 I use the term here in reference to the restrictions governing the ages of spouses under the Augustan marriage laws; a woman over the age of 50 was considered illsuited for a man younger than 60. See above, Chapter Two, pp. 47–8 n. 48.

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languidus in the corpus, recalls the sleeping Cynthia of poem 1.3, whom the lover describes as a ‘depleted’ Ariadne (1.3.2). In the same poem, Cynthia uses languidus as a term of reproach for the drunken (languidus) amator, heady with youth, debauchery, and expectations.36 The adjective’s former applications in the Monobiblos, which forcefully, if ironically, entangle the identities of lover and puella, give the astute reader pause, and prompt the question of precisely to whom this languida wrinkle applies. Perhaps even more sinister is the ruga itself: while surely nodding to the evolution of the amator’s life course, it also anticipates those rugae that haunt Cynthia in old age (3.24/25.32).37 While a linear reading of the Propertian corpus has not yet revealed Cynthia’s wrinkles, the unstable identifications enacted by Aurora and Tithonus in poem 2.18 insinuate a process of deterioration. Initially, we are asked to identify the forever aging hero (2.18.8, iacere) with the amator, who lies weary from lovemaking just three poems ago in the sequence as it has been arranged (iaces, lente! 2.15.8, cf. 2.14.32, vestibulum iaceam mortuus ante tuum). Similarly, Aurora reflects upon Cynthia’s role in the erotic scenarios of book two: illum saepe suis decedens fovit in ulnis quam prius abiunctos sedula lavit equos; illum ad vicinos cum amplexa quiesceret Indos, maturos iterum est questa redire dies; illa deos currum conscendens dixit iniquos, invitum et terris praestitit officium. cui maiora senis Tithoni gaudia vivi quam gravis amisso Memnone luctus erat. cum sene non puduit talem dormire puellam et canae totiens oscula ferre comae (2.18.9–18). [Descending, she often cherished that one in her arms sooner than she carefully unhitched and washed her horses; while embracing him she rested near neighbouring India, and complained that the day came again too quickly. Mounting her chariot she claimed that the gods were

36 The languida ruga itself is not an exceptional collocation; in Cicero, the adjective applies to the kind of predictable old age (languida et iners) that Cato does not experience (Sen. 26). 37 The only other use of ruga in the Propertian corpus refers to Lynceus’ expression of severity in response to the poet-lover’s jealous accusations (2.34.23, ruga severae vitae).

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unjust, and, unwilling, provided her services to the earth. The joy that she felt for old Tithonus while he lived was greater than her grief at the loss of her son Memnon. Nor did it cause shame for this sort of puella to sleep with an old man and time and again to bring kisses to his grey hair.]

The goddess’s lament that the day, and thus her departure, returns too early echoes a similar complaint attributed to the elegiac puella in poem 2.15. The poet assures his beloved in poem 2.15 that, ‘for you, a long night has arrived, nor will the day return’ (nox tibi longa venit nec reditura dies, 2.15.23–4). Some translators have simply omitted the tibi in this couplet (Lee 1996, 43), or assumed its deictic function, ‘look here!’ (cf. ‘voici’, Viarre 2005, 51);38 yet tibi implies that Cynthia alone has the power to transcend time within a poem whose larger context, tying Cynthia’s beauty to withering rose petals, reminds us that such temporal concerns are uniquely hers. In light of the returning day that haunts Cynthia in poem 2.15, the desire to put off the coming day three poems later in the libellus carries with it a context that complicates Cynthia’s status as an immortal Aurora. The puella is conspicuously bound to the temporal rhythms determined by the natural world; in a sense, she is the temporal rhythm of the world—at least, as an Aurora figure, the arbitrator who, along with the night-bearing luna, matters most in the elegiac universe. At the same time, the threat of beauty transformed by senescence is something that, as we have observed elsewhere in book two, Propertius applies primarily to Cynthia. Thus, when Tithonus’ old age emerges here as antithetical to the youthful dalliances of erotic poetry, that old age is more readily contained in the body of the puella. By the poem’s conclusion, Aurora’s visage proves such an ill fit for Cynthia that, in the contest between lover and beloved for poetic immortality, the puella’s defeat is all but assured. Following the reminder that Aurora’s joy in her role as Tithonus’ beloved trumps her sorrow at the loss of a son—perhaps a wry comment on Cynthia’s maternal instincts?—the poet concludes his portrait of goddess and lover in bed. There youth itself, connoted in line 17 by the generically and artificially youthful puella, cozies up with old age (cum sene . . . talem puellam domire). Propertius’ choice to name Aurora as a puella, a term applied so often to the mistress of 38

But cf. Goold 1990, 165, ‘a long night is coming for you’.

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elegiac poetry, and frequently to Cynthia herself, is perhaps unsurprising given the goddess’s role in the genre’s frequent nocturnal scenarios. Still, the poet reminds us that she, as talis puella, must be distinguished from Cynthia. Have we any doubts about the difference, the following couplet deals a fatal blow: at tu etiam iuvenem odisti me, perfida, cum sis/ipsa anus haud longa curva futura die (19–20, ‘but you hate me even in my youth, faithless one, even though you yourself will be a bent old woman in a day not far off ’.) As the presently youthful amator squares off against his disdainful beloved, we note that the poem has traversed a path leading from the potential transformation of the speaker’s youth (mea aetas) to a portrait of Cynthia, soon to be (haud longa die) an old woman (anus) bent (curva) with years. The image of the grey-haired mortal in bed with his puella suggests that Propertius may have been inspired by Sappho’s recently restored poem on a similar theme.39 In the poem the aging speaker identifies herself with Tithonus in order to distinguish herself from the ÆE  (‘children, young women’) whom she addresses. These women are warned to seek the privileges of youth while they can, but also, within the logic of a poem that polarizes youth and old age, are likened implicitly to the ‘ever youthful bride’ (IŁÆÆ ¼ŒØ, 12), Aurora (McEvilley 2008, 453). The sentimental portrait of Dawn reclining in the arms of the aging Tithonus, whom the goddess stole in his youth (Æ [Œ]º ŒÆd  , 11), in fact diverges from a better-known variant of the myth, in which Aurora (Eos) eventually developed such disdain for her lover that she sequestered him in a room, leaving him to babble endlessly.40 The reconstructed fragments parallel Propertius’ treatment of the myth insofar as Sappho’s reflections on the vagaries of old age imply 39 The ‘New’ Sappho is actually two older fragments (fr. 58–9) from the Oxyrynchus Papyri supplemented with a fragment acquired by the University of Cologne in 2004. For this discussion, I rely on M.L. West’s restored text and translation (included in Obbink 2009, 15–16, though scholars are not in absolute agreement on the poem’s original text and, in particular, on the poem’s ending, which many would extend four lines beyond West’s text; for a helpful overview of the textual problems as well as some interpretive essays that situate the poem in the larger context of archaic Greek poetry, see the collection edited by Greene and Skinner 2009. 40 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 218–38; see above Chapter One, p. 4. It is this less affectionate portrait of the lovers that Ovid has in mind in his anti-kletic hymn to Aurora, who is all too eager to leave her ‘doddering husband’ (senior maritus, Am. 1.13.1) behind her.

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an identification between her poetic persona and Tithonus. Where Sappho graciously concedes to old age and its waning eroticism (lines 3–7), however, Propertius 2.18 represents the amator as only a potential Tithonus, who is still a ‘young man’ (etiam iuvenem, 19) in the poetic present. The Propertian elegy also replaces Sappho’s concluding affirmation of the eternal youth that graces the goddess (‘always being immortal’) with a reminder of Cynthia’s future anus status.41 Thus, insofar as it can be situated in a productive intertextual relationship with Propertius 2.18, Sappho’s poem underscores the table turning enacted by the amator in light of its speaker’s own gracious concession to old age. The reversal of subject positions, so that Cynthia—rather than the Propertian poet—assumes Tithonian decrepitude, is punctuated by poem 2.18’s pointed reinvestment of Sappho’s personal pronouns: the Greek poet begins her treatment drawing a contrast between youthful ÆE  addressed at the end of its opening line and then treats her own condition by introducing the third line with an emphatic  Ø (‘as for me’). Propertius inverts the movement by initiating the poem with the thought of his old age and closing his treatment with a couplet directed at his addressee Cynthia (at tu) as anus. The tentative restoration of Sappho’s text makes any attempt to evaluate its relevance to Propertius 2.18 highly speculative. And yet the age disparity between speaker and addressee(s) that prompts reflections on this particular myth—as well as the tendency of both speakers to align or misalign themselves with Tithonus—suggests an active appropriation on the part of the Augustan poet, an appropriation that rejects the Sapphic speaker’s concession of old age and transfers it onto the beloved. Such a rejection, glimpsed partly through personal pronouns, is also apparent in Propertius’ treatment of deictic pronouns. Rothstein (1979, 328), noting the anaphora and changing gender of ille in lines 9–14, remarks that the effect is one of marking a contrast not only between Tithonus and poet-lover, but also between Cynthia and Aurora (illum . . . illum . . . illa); and it may be worth adding that the feminine form, as the third and final in a series, falls a bit heavier on the ear. 41 That is, of course, if the Sappho poem does not extend further and (like the Propertius poem) return to the speaker’s present; see Edmunds 2009, who argues on the basis of mythical exempla used in other archaic poets that Sappho’s poem must have extended beyond the Tithonus exemplum.

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The last two couplets in Propertius’ treatment of the myth thus continue to work harder at drawing a discrepancy between Cynthia and the goddess than at lingering over the relationship between Tithonus and the amator.42 As we shall observe in Chapter Eight, Propertius will try on the mask of Tithonus once more in poem 2.25, but there the poet as aged lover is used to measure the constancy—or more fancifully, the eternity—of his devotion, rather than his material transformation: at me ab amore tuo deducet nulla senectus,/sive ego Tithonus sive ego Nestor ero (9–10, ‘but no old age will lead me away from your love, whether I will be a Tithonus or even a Nestor’). The very physical image of Cynthia as a ‘bent’ old woman in poem 2.18, by contrast, emerges as all the more striking when considered alongside the portrait of a puella whose statuesque beauty signalled her quasi-divine status earlier in book two (maxima toto corpore, 2.2.3–6). In the lines that follow the Aurora/Tithonus exemplum, the poetlover chastens Cynthia for cheating nature by changing the colour of her hair (ut natura dedit, sic omnis recta figura est, 2.18b.25). Such a prescription for beauty underscores the futility of resisting nature’s deteriorative processes, less flatteringly materialized in the topos of the aging puella. In light of a thematic consistency that weds the ‘naturalized’, and perhaps aging, Cynthia here to her demonstrably mortal status as an anti-Aurora earlier in poem 2.18, I am inclined to follow editors who do not separate 2.18 a (1–22) from 2.18 b (23–38). Hubbard (1986, 296), moreover, interprets the remark on hair dyeing as a clear instance of age-based slander, which accords perfectly with the exemplum narrated in the first part of the poem. As we have seen in Tibullus’ vision of Pholoe’s future, plucking hairs, or dyeing them, is a typical method used by elegiac lovers to hide the tell-tale signs of old age (Tib.1.8.43–4). Ovid will make the theme conventional in Ars Three (161–8) where the praeceptor reminds female pupils of the possibilities for ‘washing that grey right out of their hair’, possibilities apparently denied to the aging male pupil. In Propertius 2.18, criticism of attempts to improve upon nature, along with the half-jeering reassurance that a readily available Cynthia is pretty enough for him (mi Formosa sat, si modo saepe venis, 2.18b.30), rephrase those veiled

42 cf. Hubbard 1986, 295, who argues that the ‘real point of the contrast’ is not between Tithonus and the poet-lover, but between Aurora and Cynthia.

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threats made earlier in the poem, and further the puella’s gradual demystification.

V. THE LENA/ANUS FIGURE: A MOST LIKELY EVENTUS Propertius 3.24/25 reflects on the comparison between Cynthia and Aurora, as if it were an aspect of the amator’s former, pathological delusion, now gratefully behind him: at color est totiens roseo collatus Eoo,/cum tibi quaesitus candor in ore foret (7–8, ‘and your complexion I compared time and again to rosy dawn, although that radiance [or “pallor”] on your face was false’).43 As observed at the opening of this project, in withdrawing his failed apotheosis of Cynthia, the poet offers instead a portrait of the puella as an ‘old woman’ (anus), one that fills in the outline of Cynthia’s future sketched at the end of poem 2.18: at te celatis aetas gravis urgeat annis, et veniat formae ruga sinistra tuae! vellere tum cupias albos a stirpe capillos,44 a! speculo rugas increpitante tibi, exclusa inque vicem fastus patiare superbos, et quae fecisti facta queraris anus! has tibi fatales cecinit mea pagina diras: eventum formae disce timere tuae! (3.24/25.31–38) [May heavy old age press upon you with hidden years, and may a cruel wrinkle mar your beauty! Then you’ll desire to pluck white hairs from your head, alas, as the mirror decries your wrinkles; locked-out in turn you will endure arrogant disdain, and as an old woman you’ll regret the things you’ve done! My page has sung these grim fates for you: learn to fear the outcome of your beauty!]

43 Contra Camps 1966, 165, who asserts that the comparison has not been made anywhere in the corpus. While the terms of comparison (rosy ‘morning star’ = Cynthia’s complexion) are not identical to those in poem 2.18 (Aurora = Cynthia), they are surely suggestive of them; Eous, echoed from 2.18.8 (Eoa . . . domo) is easily taken as metonymy for Dawn, cf. Richardson 1977, 411, who cites Vergil, Geor. 1.288. 44 Tränkle 1960, 98 notes the reminiscence of Tib. 1.8.45: tollere tum cura est albos a stirpe capillos.

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At the very moment when the poet-lover renews himself and reverses the damage he has suffered (vulnera coiere, 18), Cynthia appears to come undone: age (gravis aetas) presses heavily upon the puella; the mirror decries her wrinkles (rugas), as she desperately plucks the hairs from her head. The day predicted in poem 2.18 (‘in no way far off ’) appears, in its abundance of graphic detail, all the more imminent. Despite her best efforts, she will be shut out (exclusa) like so many lovers before her and will endure the very ‘scorn’ (fastus) she inflicted on the poet-lover in the first poem of the Monobiblos (1.1.3). Tibullus’ pragmatic advice to Pholoe (1.8.39–50, discussed above) and perhaps Horace’s apparently detached warning to Lydia (Odes 1.25), as well as the traditions of Hellenistic epigram,45 may have contributed something to Propertius’ portrait of the aging courtesan. In poem 3.24/25, however, the lover’s interest in Cynthia’s fate is personal and immediate (it will occur in mea pagina), rather than sneering or remote. The link between Cynthia’s beauty and the lover’s immortality is severed at last, as the speaker assumes a vatic stance, emphasizing his authority over the future, while revealing the beloved as utterly subject to that authority. Still, the corpus of elegy insistently and self-consciously challenges the poet-lover’s authority over his beloved’s future. This challenge is issued most directly through the body and voice of the lena, who frequently councils the puella to resist—and inevitably disparage— the amator’s artistic authority. It is a characteristic irony of the genre that the same carpe diem rhetoric that the impecunious poet-lover uses to seduce a puella is used by the lena to ensure that the puella will reject him.46 At the same time, the lena ultimately confirms the poet’s more fundamental goal in that she demonstrates the inevitable conclusion of the puella’s physical existence, for which (as Tibullus 1.8 reminds us) material wealth offers no antidote. Gutzwiller (1985, 111) notes the significance of earlier predictions of Cynthia’s old age, when revisited after a reading of elegy 4.5: as a procuress who councils, from experience, how to spend one’s youth most profitably, ‘ . . . Acanthis is an older version of what the reader knows Propertius will abandon 45 For discussion of invective that charts the aging processes of women, not all of whom are identified as courtesans, in the Palatine Anthology, see Richlin 1992, 51–2; 235, n. 32. 46 See Myers 1996, who argues that all three elegists portray the lena as a usurper of the poet-lover’s power to instruct and construct the puella. As such, the lena is a threat to the poet’s literary potency.

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Cynthia to become’. Following Gutzwiller’s hunch that Acanthis functions as a physical demonstration of Cynthia’s future, I would like to examine further how the lena and puella are wed through linguistic reminiscence and situational parallels,47 and in so doing reveal more clearly the eventus (‘outcome’) of the beloved’s life course as it is inscribed in the elegiac corpus. In her study of the lena of love elegy, Myers (1996, 9) stresses this figure’s unnatural qualities: the lena’s active control over the water, sky, and celestial objects is regularly portrayed as contra naturam. At the same time, the poet-lover of elegy regularly attempts to exclude the procuress from cultural auctoritas, or, if he grants her any artistic authority, usually manifested in the power of her carmen,48 her art is implicitly devalued when the poet-lover expresses doubts over its efficacy (Prop. 1.1.23, Ov. Am. 1.8.15, Tib. 1.2.61; cf. 1.8.17–26).49 Moreover, the poet-lover’s excoriation of the lena, often stressing her sub-human status, enacts an alliance between the procuress and the natural world. Such contradictory impressions of the lena’s relationship to nature remind us of the dangers of imposing easy polarities on rather difficult and polysemic texts. And yet all portraits of the lena in elegy emphasize her bestial nature. As an older woman, she is subject to the same abuse reserved for the anus figure, whose common assumption of animalistic qualities in Roman literature distances her from humanity (Richlin 1984, 77).50 Tibullus does not offer a full character sketch or speaking role to the lena, but does assign her distinctly animalistic qualities. The poet-lover’s curses against the callida lena of 1.5, who is also cast as a sorceress (saga rapax, 59), transform her into a creature less than human. She will feast on a savage banquet of raw meat (49) and, ignoring human social conventions, will run naked through the city, howling like a bacchant and hunted by a pack of dogs. The speaker also imagines her enslaved to her belly (fame stimulante, 53) and thus

47

cf. Gutzwiller 1985, who notes parallels between Prop. 1.2, 3.24/25 and 4.5. Prop. 4.5.5–15; cf. 1.1.19–24 and 2.4.15–16; Ov. Am. 1.8.5–20; Tib. 1.2.43–64, 1.5.11–12; cf. 1.5.41–42. 49 It should also be noted, however, that the Propertian poet-lover doubts the traditionally male vates as much as he does the anus-witch figure: nam cui non ego sum fallaci praemia vati?/quae mea non decies somnia versat anus? (2.4.15–16). 50 cf. Rosivach’s 1994/95, 115 remarks that the anus assumes many characteristics that are the opposite of those the older Roman male would like to apply to himself, such as seriousness, rationality, and self-control. 48

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akin to the order of beasts according to a Roman literary and philosophical tradition that defines humanity in part by its ability to transcend physical appetites.51 This saga rapax will scavenge tombs for bones left behind by wolves (ossa relicta, 54), thereby lowering her stature beneath even that of untamed nature.52 By the speaker’s curse, her interests become entirely physical and corporeal, in contrast to his own spiritual and emotional needs: as she picks over abandoned (relicta) bones, he laments the abandonment of Venus’ law (relicta lege, 58).53 At the end of his poetic project Tibullus places a similar curse on Nemesis’ lena Phryne (tunc tibi, lena, precor diras, 2.6.53). The amator’s vitriol lacks the same graphic depiction of his rival as sub-human, though she is tellingly designated by the Greek word for ‘frog’. Instead the poet-lover focuses on a subtle identification between lena and puella, in the very act of trying to distinguish them (lena nocet nobis; ispa puella bona est, 2.6.44). Both Ovid and Propertius follow Tibullus’ lead in investing the procuress with bestial and natural qualities while also stressing her physical deterioration as an incarnation of the puella’s future. Just as Tibullus had chosen the Greek word for frog (çæÅ) in naming the bawd of poem 2.6, Ovid names Dipsas after a poisonous viper as well as the violent thirst resulting from its bite; Acanthis may refer to a type of shrub.54 Like Tibullus’ verax saga of poem 1.2 and the rapax saga of poem 1.5, Dipsas and Acanthis are thought to have an uncanny power over nature. Their mastery over the natural world is countered, however, by a characteristic tendency to assume animal forms, thus becoming submerged within nature (cf. Prop. 4.5.13–14; Am. 1.8.11–14).55 Moreover, each poet-lover emphasizes the lena’s 51 e.g. Sallust BC, prologue, 2.7; Tac. Germ. 15.1; Lucr. 3.912–930, 1003–1010, et passim (cf. the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia); Sen. Ep. 110.11–14. 52 cf. Putnam’s 1973, 105 remarks on the lena’s imagined transformation: ‘ . . . in seeking out bones left over by wolves, she becomes wilder than they, a victim of lycanthropy. Her wildness grows as the curse intensifies’. 53 In poem 1.6, we find another procuress figure, Delia’s aurea anus mater. For Gaisser, the epithet aurea (lit. ‘golden’) signals the procuress’s ‘venal’ or ‘grasping’ nature, Gaisser 1971, 210–11; she follows F. Leo 1881 in detecting sustained irony throughout the poem. 54 As Hutchinson notes 2006, 149, there is also a play on the Greek ¼ŒÆŁÆ, ‘thorn’, anticipating all that will be left of the roses described by the lena at 4.5.61–2 (see below, pp. 211–12). Reptile names (cf. Dipsas) are commonly ascribed to prostitutes; see McKeown 1989, 202. 55 By comparison, Orpheus, the archetypal male poet figure, exists in a sympathetic relationship with nature while also assuming mastery over it, but never assumes a

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chthonic properties, making literal her position below that of the poet on the scale of human transcendence over nature: Dipsas practices necromancy and cleaves solid earth (solidam humum) with her song (17–18; cf. Tib. 1.2.47–8); Acanthis’ speech is reported posthumously from the poet as he stands over her very grave (4.5.1–2, 75–8).56 In the concluding image of 4.5, the speaker envisions nature, in the form of a fig tree, gaining mastery over Acanthis’ paltry and crumbling tomb (urgeat hunc supra vis, caprifice, tua, 76). The cumulative effect of sepulchral, chthonic, and natural imagery is a forceful demonstration of the lena’s mortal and perishable status. More powerful than the imagery that introduces and concludes her advice, however, is the advice itself, and in particular the words Dipsas and Acanthis use to convey a sense of temporal exigency. For Acanthis the evanescence of nature’s beauty provides a suitable metaphor for the puella’s experience of age: dum vernat sanguis, dum rugis integer annus, utere, ne quid cras libet ab ore dies! vidi ego odorati victura rosaria Paesti sub matutino cocta iacere Noto (4.5.59–62). [While your vitality is in full bloom, while your years are free of wrinkles, enjoy them, in case tomorrow drains anything from your beauty! I have seen roses of sweet-smelling Paestum that were about to bloom lie parched under the morning breeze.]

The first couplet—dense with temporal imagery (vernat, annus, cras, dies)—pairs the notions of youth and integrity, of a completion or wholeness that age slowly steals (more commonly, ‘nibbles, drinks’) away. For the courtesan-puella time (lit. the ‘year’, annus)57 is both her greatest asset and her most pressing concern. The swiftness of old

sub-human form. I do not wish to elide significant differences in the magic arts practiced by Acanthis and Dipsas. Gross 1996 rightly notes Ovid’s peculiar emphasis on Dipsas’ ‘incantatory puissance’, one aspect of her remarkable verbal ability that poses a direct threat to the lover’s own amatory rhetoric (198). 56 Shifts in tense suggest at some points in the poem that the lena is still alive. It is perhaps best to consider (with Richardson 1977, 441) Acanthis as recently dead, though quite alive in the poet’s memory. This very ambiguity may be symptomatic of Propertius’ interest in time, mortality, and immortality as a means of characterization. 57 Hutchinson 2006, 149 notes that annus—rather than anni—is unusual, and may suggest a poetic equivalence between the span of a lifetime and a single year.

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age’s approach is expressed through the poignant image of flowers withered prematurely under the hot morning sun.58 The future active participle that describes the roses (victura) is immediately met with the perfect passive (cocta), leaving little time in between for the full bloom of either the flowers or the puella. As Hutchinson notes (2006, 149–50), those wrinkles that threaten the beloved (rugis) are echoed in a later reference to Acanthis’ rugosum collum (67, ‘wrinkled neck’): not only is the lena no longer integer rugis, but also, as a ‘thorn’, metonymically reflects on the cocta Rosaria (61–2) she envisions for the puella’s future. Acanthis’ status as an indication of Cynthia’s future becomes clearer after the lena has concluded her advice and the poet-lover resumes his physically graphic account of her final days.59 He makes an almost casual reference to her faded or moldy mitra, a turban traditionally worn by prostitutes,60 and significantly recasts his beloved’s ‘bent’ form from poem 2.18 (curva, 20) in the shape of the bent and crumbling home (curva pergula, 70)61 in which the lena breathes her last. As Janan’s sensitive Lacanian reading of Propertius 4.5 suggests, the antitheses upon which the lover attempts to construct his beloved are in many ways revealed as inadequate by the Acanthis elegy. Just as the poet-lover comes up short in trying to define what is so alluring about Cynthia, he is inconsistent in expressing what is so abhorrent about the lena. These conceptual polarities—nature/culture; man/woman; young/old—are further weakened when we see that the puella and the lena, or the poet and lena, for that matter,62 are not so different after all. And yet, for his very post-mortem survival, the poet-lover must assign natural, material, and perishable properties to woman—perhaps not to the puella victura, but to the puella cocta, though they are, in the end, one and the same.

58

Another reference to the famous roses of Paestum, in Vergil’s Georgics, stresses their longevity and power to bloom twice annually under the careful attendance of the Cilician gardener: canerem biferique rosaria Paesti (4.119). 59 Warden 1980, 65 cites the portrait of Acanthis, and in particular the procuress’ ‘foul breath’ or ‘rotting spirit’ (animam putrem, 69), as an illustration of Propertius’ fascination with the physical aspects of death. 60 As noted by Richardson 1977, 297 on the puella’s Sidonia mitra at 2.29.15. The mitra’s use, of course, was by no means restricted to prostitutes. 61 NFL have curva; Butler and Fedeli read curta (‘damaged, broken’). 62 Myers 1996, 10–12 demonstrates the similar strategies and goals of poet and lena.

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The dictates of the lena, abhorrent as they are to the poet, plot a necessary segment of the beloved’s life course, and further the distance between a modality entirely dependent on a material and thus perishable world, and one that can outlive the physical form both by the unflinching endurance of amor, and the immaterial ars that such love generates. Ovid’s Dipsas, also treating the timesensitive aspects of the puella’s profession,63 draws from the realm of nature for a demonstrative simile, but culls the archives of human culture as well: labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas, ut celer admissis labitur amnis aquis. aera nitent usu, vestis bona quaerit haberi, canescunt turpi tecta relicta situ: forma, nisi admittas, nullo exercente senescit; nec satis effectus unus et alter habent (1.8.49–54). [Passing youth goes unnoticed and slips away imperceptibly, just as a hurried river slips by with its waters let in (i.e. propelling it). Bronze shines with use, a lovely garment seeks to be worn, abandoned houses grow grey64 with shameful neglect: unless you let lovers in, beauty grows old while no one is exercising it; and one or two won’t quite do the trick.]

The poignancy of Acanthis’ withering roses is altogether absent from Dipsas’ exhortation.65 Certainly there are elements, aspects of the future and its accompanying aging process, that, like the swift stream of a river, are beyond human control. At the same time, Dipsas also stresses a world subject to human cultivation and thus assumes the 63 Commentators since Luck 1955, noting verbal and situational parallels in Propertius 4.5 and Am. 1.8, have attempted with little success to establish the priority of either poem. Luck’s argument assigns priority to Propertius 4.5, contra Tränkle 1960, 140–1; see McKeown 1987, 199–201. More recently, James 2003, 101 n. 8 has noted that Ovidian priority may be assumed, given that poet’s fondness for didacticism, but that ‘Ovid winds up with the last word . . . by virtue of revising the Amores, so that there is no doubt that Am. 1.8, as it stands, is aware of Prop. 4.5’. Gross’s study 1996 has the virtue of revealing the significantly different goals of the two elegies in spite of their similarities. 64 As McKeown notes 1989, 229, canescere (lit., ‘grow grey’) is rarely (and with some awkwardness) applied to inanimate objects; I have retained a literal translation here in a larger aim of consistently marking the vocabulary of aging as it occurs throughout the elegiac corpus. 65 See Gutzwiller 1985 on the difference in tone between Ovid’s portrayal of Dipsas and Propertius’ characterization of Acanthis.

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role of cultivator so often played by the poet-lover. This is not an altogether unexpected turn of events, since, by the lover’s admission, she practises her own artes (5–6). As a cultivator, she embarks on her persuasive efforts with the back-handed compliment that her pupil’s cultus is not worthy of her physical form (dignus corpore cultus abest, 26). In Dipsas’ eyes, the puella is not so much like a blossoming flower as she is akin to so many products of cultus, whether bronze, fabric, or domestic architecture. But Ovid’s Dipsas, despite her best efforts as a practitioner and advocate of human cultus, remains ultimately aligned with nature: her aims are entirely material and in the end will be trumped by the poet-lover’s artistry. Her interest in currency is thoroughly embedded in human culture, but as a reflection of material, perishable goods, money is devalued as a lower form of cultus, one closer to the materially restrictive ‘nature’ than the poet’s ars. Where the lena promises financial security, the poet offers—albeit somewhat speciously—a sort of immortality (iunctaque semper erunt nomina nostra tuis, 1.3.26), and the relative value of each, from the poetlover’s perspective, becomes clear in the poem’s conclusion.66 For the material world espoused by the lena becomes reflected in her own swiftly decaying material form. Dipsas has lost most of her greying hair and her cheeks have become marred by wrinkles (albam raramque comam, rugosas genas, 111–12). Should the speaker have his way, she will lack a roof over her head and suffer an impoverished old age (inopemque senectam, 113) rather than a felicitous literary Nachleben. Of course, if the puella fails to heed the lena’s advice, this is the same future that awaits her. In concluding her remarks, Dipsas emphasizes how her own future is inextricably wound up with that of her pupil: haec si praestiteris usu mihi cognita longo nec tulerint voces ventus et aura meas, saepe mihi dices vivae bene, saepe rogabis ut mea defunctae molliter ossa cubent (1.8.105–108).

66 In both Amores 1.8 and Propertius 4.5, the lena counsels a philosophy of materialism that devalues the poet-lover’s art. As Myers notes 1996, 13, this philosophy prompts a ‘defense of the elegiac choice’ and ultimately enhances the value of the lover’s poetry ‘by disassociation from her materialistic concerns’.

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[If you’ll carry out these things I’ve learned through lengthy experience and the wind and breeze won’t carry off my words, often you will speak to me living well, and often you will pray that, once I’m dead, my bones may lie at peace.]

Dipsas uses the second person singular (praestiteris, dices, rogabis) and restates from a puella’s perspective what appeared as unmitigated self-interest earlier in the poem, namely, that puella and lena exist in a symbiotic relationship (non ego te facta divite pauper ero, 25–26). More importantly, the procuress reminds us that she counsels from experience, in other words, her own experience as a former courtesan (haec usu mihi cognita longo). The poet-lover’s desire to transfer mortality to the female beloved and retain cultural transcendence for himself is made more evident in Ars Three (59–100), where Ovid’s praeceptor plays the lena and offers advice on aging similar to that of Acanthis and Dipsas. Sharrock (1994, 39–50) has demonstrated the overworked tradition of carpe diem rhetoric that the praeceptor draws upon here,67 a pastiche of previous concerns from elegy and erotic epigram regarding the beloved’s perishable status. Ovidian innovation thus lies in the dynamic he creates between his praeceptor, a former amator, and his addressee, who in book three is offered up explicitly as a non-elite woman, quite possibly a meretrix: venturae memores iam nunc estote senectae: sic nullum vobis tempus abibit iners. dum licet et veros etiam nunc editis annos, ludite: eunt anni more fluentis aquae. nec, quae praeteriit, iterum revocabitur unda nec, quae praeteriit, hora redire potest. utendum est aetate: cito pede labitur aetas nec bona tam sequitur, quam bona prima fuit. hos ego, qui canent, frutices violaria vidi; hac mihi de spina grata corona data est (3.59–68) [Now be mindful of old age, soon to arrive: thus no stretch of time will idly (or, ‘without Ars’; Gibson 2003, 112) depart from you. While you can and you are making your real age public, play: the years go by like a

67

As well as in the passage’s analogue, addressed to men in Ars Two; see further below. Ovid’s innovation, for Sharrock 1994, lies primarily in using such hackneyed themes as part of a larger strategy of seducing the constructed reader of his poem.

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flowing stream. Neither will a wave that has passed by be called back again, nor is an hour that has passed by able to return. Youth must be made the most of: youth glides by on a swift foot, nor is the age that follows as good as that which was first. Those stalks, which are greying (i.e. withering), I have seen as violet beds; from this thorn a pleasing garland was made for me.]

It is no accident that the passage is introduced by one of Ovid’s famously ineffective disclaimers, excluding matronae from the praeceptor’s target audience, those puellae allowed by modesty, law, and custom (quas pudor et leges et sua iura sinunt, 58). The youth and beauty of the meretrix (among those puellae ‘allowed’ by the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis of 18 BCE) is significantly more time-sensitive than her marriageable counterpart.68 That sensitivity is compounded by the speaker’s comparisons of the puella with the rhythms of the natural world, an instructive relationship that, as Myerowitz-Levine has demonstrated, extends throughout Ars Three.69 Moreover, while the passage clearly invokes other didactic perspectives on time’s ill-effects in the elegiac corpus,70 the model of praeceptor instructing an audience of puellae most closely conforms to that of the lena advising her pupil-meretrix on the arts of seduction.71 As the succession of years continues, we find Ovid invoking the familiar topos of the aging courtesan: tempus erit, quo tu, quae nunc excludis amantes,/frigida deserta nocte iacebis anus (3.59–60, ‘there will be a time, when you, who now shut out lovers, will lie an old woman left cold in the lonely night’). While the praeceptor, perhaps out of self-interest (Gibson 2003, 109), avoids direct mention of poverty, the cold, locked-out nights and imperative 68 While Roy Gibson leaves tantalizingly open-ended the identity of Ovid’s intended (or ‘real’) addressee in Ars Three 1998, 310–11, he demonstrates that a considerable portion of the praeceptor’s advice is inappropriate for the matrona, whom so many readers have found lurking behind the mask of Ovid’s avowed addressee. 69 I am greatly indebted throughout this discussion to Myerowitz-Levine 1981/82, who argues that Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is a forceful demonstration and critique of the idea that ‘women are somehow closer to nature than men’ (36). For further discussion of her Ortner-inspired illumination of Ovidian erotodidaxis, see above, Chapter Six, pp. 171–3. 70 We also hear echoes of the jilted Propertian amator, Priapus, and the ostensibly impartial Tibullan amator (Prop. 3.24.30; Tib. 1.4.28–30, 1.8.47–8). 71 cf. Prop. 4.5 (vidi, 67); as Gibson notes 2003, 114, vidi is common in didactic poetry, but also ‘rather pointed’ in a passage where the praeceptor is borrowing the sentiments of Propertius’ Acanthis. cf. also Ovid’s own Amores (1.8.49–50).

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not to have children (81–82) address temporal crises that threaten someone who relies on material compensation for her sexual favours.72 Ovid not only foregrounds the premium placed on temporal viability, but, by defending its importance at length within the context of an Ars addressed directly to puellae, casts it as an explicitly gendered concern. Significantly, men in Ars Two receive similar advice regarding their physical condition (forma bonum fragile est, 113), but are assured that material decay may be compensated for by mental talents (ingenium, 112). As Sharrock (1994, 46) notes in tracing the conventional language of literary seduction beneath that of practical instruction in the two passages: ‘the major difference in content between the two versions seems to be that the boy is promised advancement in wisdom through his submission, while the girl is only promised that she has nothing to lose’.73 And yet Ovid is not only seducing his readers, but also reminding them of how amator and puella, and their respective relationships to cultus, have been constructed in previous elegy. It is the intangible products of human intellect, well-illustrated in the Ulysses exemplum that follows, that survive until death (solus ad extremos permanet ille rogos, Ars 2.120). Such endurance is fortified by ‘arts of the freeborn’ (ingenuas artes, 121), not only developing linguistic talents, but perhaps, like the elegiac amator, even hammering out a poem or two. By contrast, the fictive female readers of the Ars are warned that the sum of their goods (bona, 79) is perishable. For them, unlike the poetlovers of previous elegy, time cannot be iners (3.60), that is, both inactive and without (Ovid’s) art, as the praeceptor plays on the same duplicity of the word that inaugurated the first poems of Propertius and Tibullus. Ars Three will impart a certain type of art to its meretricious readers, but it is not the kind of ars that creates poetic immortality, only an ars that can enhance the techniques of seduction within the very narrow temporal window of opportunity available to them. In the end of her highly perishable life course, the would-be

72 Advice about bearing children skirts a sensitive issue: we have seen the threat posed by childbirth to the meretrix’s physical and economic well-being; at the same time, should we decide to posit a matrona behind the meretrix, the praeceptor is giving advice that explicitly (brazenly) undermines the directives of the Princeps. 73 But cf. Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Facial Treatment for Ladies), which stresses the importance of good character for women and the power of ingenium to withstand the vagaries of time (43–50). The change of sentiment is remarkable, if perhaps a tad ironic in the context of a poem overwhelmingly concerned with improving woman’s physical appearance.

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puella remains a withered rose that the poet will one day fashion into a pleasing garland (hac mihi de spina grata corona data est, 68), an apt illustration of the elegiac beloved’s gradual senescence that we have documented in Tibullus’ treatment of Pholoe and Propertius’ Cynthia of book two. As we shall observe in the next chapter, the elegiac subject, having established a shelf-life for his beloved, can use his ars to move beyond her on the temporal trajectory implied in the elegiac narrative. The poet-lover will turn to other concerns and poetic projects that promise to free him from the mortal coil, the brief name on a paltry grave (et breve in exiguo marmore nomen ero, Prop.2.1.72), that threatened him in his affair with the puella. As the praeceptor of the Remedia instructs his pupils, the path of civic responsibility, or versifying civically responsible themes, offers one way to avoid a puella, who, after all, is not who she appeared to be (Rem. 151–168, 344). Such advice constitutes an accurate reflection of the poet-lover’s strategies in earlier elegy that claim to move beyond the puella and poetry about her in making a bid for generic evolution. Careful analysis of elegy’s departure strategies, however, will demonstrate that the evolution predicted by the amator and catapulted by his beloved’s physical withering is neither straightforward nor unimpeded, and lacks the very closure that the comfortably linear movement of time has promised.

8 Departure Strategies: The Elegist in Men’s Time The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Tithonus)

We have just examined the fate of the elegiac puella as it is implicitly and explicitly written into elegy’s loosely constructed narrative. Once the poet-lover assigns her a place in the linear trajectory of time, she can no longer offer her amator the stasis, inertia, and cyclical furor with which she is credited in other parts of the corpus. The puella’s aging out of the genre is gradual but inevitable, the result of the poetlover’s subtle and persistent equation between woman and nature that defines her as particularly subject to moral and physical decay. And yet the fact that neither Propertius nor Tibullus ever bids a final adieu to the mistress should trouble our ‘sense of an ending’ here:1 for our elegiac poet places one foot on the path to responsibility, but leaves the other firmly planted in Neverland, accepting that ‘after 1 I borrow the phrase from Kermode 1966, who explores the connection between a story’s conclusion and its power to convey meaning; cf. Gardner 2008, 69.

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many a summer dies the swan’ while, at the same time, resisting the many teleological imperatives that were gradually shaping the Roman ideological landscape. This chapter returns to a more direct engagement with the Augustan framework of elegy that contextualized the amatores’ arrested development earlier in this project. I resume a focus on the poet-lover’s life course and examine his promises for the future, looking in particular at moments when the amator appears to fulfil expectations of generic evolution; he does this partly by articulating an implicitly sympathetic relationship with various personae of the Augustan symbolic (Messallinus, Tullus, and Cornelia of Propertius’ fourth book), who appear to conform to the new standards of biological and civic maturity. That evolution, however, is undermined through a return to the puella, despite the fact that decrepit and explicitly mortal representations make her ill-suited to inspire a lover’s erotic truancy. The older male lovers depicted in elegy are not a particularly attractive lot. The Propertian speaker’s elegant rendering of the Aurora and Tithonus myth reveals anxieties about his own desirability later in life. At the same time, the elegiac amatores also use old age—referencing it from a careful distance—to signify the constancy of their passion. In a contemporary moral climate whose fickleness mirrors that of the inconstant puella (non tamen ista meos mutabunt saecula mores, 2.25.37), the Propertian poet-lover reclaims the forever deteriorating but never dying Tithonus, as an emblem of his erotic longevity: miles depositis annosus secubat armis, grandaevique negant ducere aratra boves, putris et in vacua requiescit navis harena, et vetus in templo bellica parma vacat: at me ab amore tuo deducet nulla senectus, sive ego Tithonus sive ego Nestor ero (2.25.5–10). [The aging soldier sleeps alone, with his arms laid down, and very old oxen refuse to take on the plow, even the rotting ship rests on empty sand, and the old shield of war lies idle in the temple: but no old age will lead me away from your love, whether I will be a Tithonus or even a Nestor.]

The poet-lover couples Tithonus with Nestor here, in part, to conjure the paradigmatic figures of old age. Senectus may not suit the soldier, but will do quite nicely for Properitus’ poet-lover. Within the context

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of book two, however, we cannot help but also read the passage in a dialectical relationship with poem 2.18, where the poet ingeniously transfers Tithonus’ old age from himself to his beloved Cynthia. As such, the pronouncement rings hollow coming from a speaker, firmly entrenched in youth, who has already outlined a less than flattering portrait of Cynthia ‘in a day in no way far off ’ (2.18.20). So too the Tibullan speaker inconsistently evaluates eroticism in old age: his disparaging remarks about the older male lover (Tib. 1.1.71–73, 1.2.91–98, 1.8.29–30, 1.9.73–74) are countered by a romanticized notion of enduring love, unimpeded by age (1.6.85–6, 2.2.19–20, 2.4.45–50), and reflected in the aging farmer of poem 1.10, who enjoys domestic harmony, rather than the more typical discord and jealousy, with an attentive uxor (1.10.39–42). Ovidian elegy suffers similar contradictions: Tithonus makes an apt figure for the jilted, undesirable amator of Amores 2.5 (35–6; cf. Mckeown 1998, 96), and the speaker expressly restricts the aged from love’s militia in Amores 1.9 (turpe senex miles, turpe senilis amor, 1.9.4; cf. 1.13.1). All the same, the praeceptor in the Ars makes a strong case for the mature male lover (ille vetus miles sensim et sapienter amabit, 3.565) and in doing so softens the disparaging tone of the less seasoned speaker of the Amores. As is characteristic of Ovidian erotodidaxis, the speaker’s advice, aimed at a decidedly less elevated audience, exposes and corrects the idealism of previous elegy.2 How are we to reconcile these conflicted attitudes towards the senex-amator of elegy, particularly within a literary and cultural climate that defines eroticism as the province of youth? By speaking of his post-iuventas role as the devout paramour of Cynthia, has the Propertian amator adopted another pose of arrested development, similar to that fuelling the poet’s predicament in poem 1.1?3 If so, examination of the soon-to-age puella, and the lack of desirability that, as we have seen, defines her future, renders the poet’s promises somewhat specious. The elegiac women discussed in 2 A similar motive may be used to explain the praeceptor’s recommendation of a more mature female beloved in the Ars (2.663–702). Though it is also likely that the praeceptor speaks in the best interest of his male audience members here, since the more mature puella makes a more responsive sex partner. cf. Mack 1988, 62, who notes Ovid’s tendency to point to ‘real life behind the elegiac conventions.’ 3 Echoes of the Monobiblos in poem 2.25, confirming a correlation between love’s lateness and its greatness, suggest that our lover’s attitude has not changed much: si qua venit sero, magna ruina venit (2.25.28; cf. 1.1.25, 1.7.26).

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Chapter Seven constitute the speakers’ attempts to transfer mortality from themselves onto a female—or, more problematically,4 a feminized male—beloved. All the same, by designing a perishable puella, the poet simultaneously sounds the death knell for his own status as an amator. As the complicated attitudes towards elderly eroticism imply, the unfortunate eventus of the puella threatens to strip the poet-lover of his ‘lover’ status, and leaves him grasping for a new poetic identity. The present discussion concerns those strategies used by the Augustan elegists for assuming a post-erotic identity, strategies that are offered up as a means of attaining a distinctly linear permanence, not the recurring and pathless immortality described by Kristeva’s model of women’s time, but a longevity that is measured by and altogether dependent on the movement of historical time. The poetlover’s claim of post-mortem survival is a regular feature of elegiac discourse—indeed of a great deal of poetic, and especially Augustan, discourse—though the elegists uniquely and perhaps unavoidably entangle their beloveds in schemes for immortality. The puella’s afterlife, however, is bound by the terms of her creation as an erotic subject. By contrast, all three elegiac speakers project an existence for themselves beyond the limits of erotic elegy through references to other literary projects, while simultaneously planting seeds of doubt regarding their ability to meet such aspirations. Elegy is overtly preoccupied with the end of things. As I will demonstrate, all of our amatores express anxieties about their literary futures and propose various solutions along the way to exercise a kind of control over what awaits them. Such control is at times strategically aligned with the more secure permanence offered by the Augustan vision of Roma aeterna, in particular, that vision as it is embodied in Rome’s distinguished, orthodox elite. It is the argument of the present chapter, however, that both a linear, historic impulse and its retraction in the repetitive querelae of women’s time constitute definitive characteristics of the elegiac subject position. In fact we may detect a basic pattern that emerges within the corpus, one marked by high expectations and humble recantation. This is, of course, not to deny significant differences between each elegist’s attitude towards ‘that which remains’ (quod superest, Prop. 3.17.19; cf. 3.5.47) of his life after love. As will become apparent, each elegist entertains a unique

4

See above, Chapter Seven, pp. 187–92.

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vision of post-erotic identity: celebrating Messallinus’ priesthood while still in Nemesis’ thrall, memorializing the matron Cornelia’s virtues as a Callimachus Romanus, and spinning out a carmen perpetuum in hexameters from the world’s origins to the Augustan era imply different levels of commitment to artistic evolution, and different degrees of separation from the puella. But these efforts are fundamentally united insofar as they engage the new ideals of human maturity in the Augustan Principate in order to chart a sequence of evolution from—and subsequent return to—the halting gait of erotic elegy.

I. POETS-NOT-LOVERS: FUTURE LITERARY PROJECTS Given the fears of aging that haunt the elegiac corpus, we may face with some scepticism the bravado that often accompanies elegiac claims for immortality (Prop. 3.1.36–38, 3.2.21–22, Ov. Am. 1.15.42, 3.15.20).5 Tithonus, ostensibly offered as a decrepit solution to the problem of love’s conclusion, on a deeper level speaks to a fear of identity lost with the passage of time, that is, a fear of future nonexistence.6 In order to compensate for the gnawing possibility, felt acutely by Tibullus (1.9.47–50) and perhaps lurking beneath the trope of overcompensation in Ovid and Propertius, that the immortality of ars only secures the amator’s past existence—a recollected identity subject to manipulation and interpretation—our elegists adopt another strategy for assuming a kind of auctoritas over future time: a careful reformulation of poetic identity offers the possibility of a more graceful senescence. Despite the Tibullan amator’s reluctance to speak with confidence of future poetic endeavours, he does make a 5 To a certain degree the elegists are again indebted to Callimachus, whose Aetia (fr. 1, 29–38) prologue indicates a distinct preoccupation with old age while simultaneously invoking comparisons between the speaker and the cicada, a creature known for shedding its skin and experiencing a sort of renewal. For references to old age in the Aetia and their link with rejuvenation in Callimachus’ Somnia, see Cameron 1995, 174–84. 6 Lucretius attempts to assuage this fear in De Rerum Natura (sic, ubi non erimus,. . . scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,/accidere omnino poterit sensumque movere, 3.838–41). For a nuanced discussion of ancient attitudes (esp. Platonic) towards securing a post-mortem identity, see esp. Sorabji 1983, 175–6.

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noteworthy effort to renounce the temporal inertia that ties him to Delia’s, and eventually Nemesis’, doorstep. Through the poetic monument of poem 2.5, he stakes a claim in the promise of Rome’s indelible future as an extension of its illustrious past. His investment in Rome’s future, matched by an attempted renunciation of Nemesis in poem 2.6, however, is followed by a recantation, one that creates a template for the elegiac conclusions of Propertius and Ovid. We have already examined Tibullus’ efforts to expand the limits of the genre and look outside the isolation of elegiac love, most notably in poem 1.7, where the speaker celebrates the birthday, military success, and Via Latina of his patron Messalla. A focus on Messalla’s triumphal procession and role in generational succession (1.7.5, 55), not to mention the decidedly linear structure of a road, identify the patron and poet as operating within the sphere of men’s time. A similar impulse to share in the Roman historical process drives Tibullus’ commemoration of the appointment of Messalla’s son, Messallinus, to the priestly college of Quindecimviri. Poems 1.7 and 2.5 are linked through conspicuous references to the Roman triumph,7 as well as an emphasis on generational succession. In poem 2.5 the naming of Messallinus as a novus sacerdos marks his youth as well as his status as a recent initiate and echoes the novi triumphi attended by the Roman youth in the poem for Messalla.8 The invocation to Apollo, in whose temple the prophetic Libri Sibyllini were entrusted (probably in 28 BCE), emphasizes the god’s unshorn hair (longas comas, 2.5.8), and thus similarly forges a link between the potential of youth and its implications for Rome’s future (tu procul eventura vides, 2.5.11). For Bright (1978, 73), moreover, the curious reference to the triumphalis laurus (2.5.5) that adorns Apollo’s head recalls Messalla’s own triumph (as celebrated in 1.7.5–8) and thus initiates the poem’s preoccupation with the father-son relationship, demonstrated further through the Sibyl’s prophecy to the famously pius Aeneas.9

7 Galinsky 1969, 77–80 discusses the underlying similarities of the triumph theme as employed in poems 1.7 and 2.5, concluding—perhaps a bit hastily—that Tibullus refers to the triumph in an ‘entirely straightforward manner’, and with the ‘loftiness which it had traditionally been accorded in Rome’. 8 For the youth of Messallinus and his inclusion in the list of Quindecimviri Sacris Faciundis for the year 17 BCE, see Murgatroyd 1994, 163, who cites Syme 1978, 118 on the custom allowing nobiles to enter the priesthood at an early age. 9 For a comprehensive treatment of the Aeneas segment of the poem, with comment on its relationship to Vergil’s Aeneid, esp. 8.36–65, see esp. Ball 1975, Bright

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By establishing such verbal and thematic links between poems 1.7 and 2.5, the poet-lover leads us to expect the same kind of conclusion to his affair with Nemesis that we observed in his silence about Delia after poem 1.6.10 And, in fact, the speaker implies an even greater commitment to the Augustan vision of a restored citizen body by drawing a rustic picture of familial succession in the context of a festival commonly recognized as a celebration of Rome’s birthday, the Parilia: et fetus matrona dabit, natusque parenti oscula comprensis auribus eripiet, nec taedebit avum parvo advigilare nepoti balbaque cum puero dicere verba senem (2.5.91–4). [The matrona will bear offspring, and the child will grasp his father’s11 ears and snatch kisses from him; it will weary neither grandfather to keep watch over his small grandson nor the old man to make baby talk with a young boy.]

If we date the composition of poem 2.5 to late 18 BCE,12 the poem’s ideological underpinnings might be in part explained by the poet’s reaction to a newly revived force, part salutary, part dangerously coercive, in the Augustan symbolic: the Augustan marriage laws. Rome’s future in the poem is secured not only by the leadership of the Princeps in a new age confirmed by the Sybilline books, to be officially

1978, and Cairns 1979, 65–86; cf. Murgatroyd 1994, 165–7; for a sceptical approach to Tibullan echoes of the Aeneid, see McGann 1970, 777–8, who is primarily concerned with disproving Tibullus’ knowledge of Vergil’s published poem; see further below. 10 cf. Bright 1978, 219, who also notes the similar tones of 1.7 and 2.5, and points out that poem 1.7’s placement after the Delia series might lead the reader to expect that 2.5 marks a similar conclusion to the Nemesis series; the reversal that occurs is thus all the more arresting. 11 Parens can refer to either a father or mother, though the frequently recognized allusion to Verg. Geor. 2.523–6 (cf. Murgatroyd 1994, 223), where the recipient of the sons’ (nati) kisses is the agricola, suggests that Tibullus has the father in mind; cf. Lee 1990, 67, who also translates ‘father’. 12 The date of Tibullus’ death as a terminus ante quem for this elegy is a matter of some contention; most arguments are derived from the poem’s intertextual relationship with the Aeneid and the ambiguously worded testimony of Domitius Martus, who addresses Tibullus in death as a Vergilio comitem (cf. McGann 1970), suggesting either that the poet died in 19 BCE along with Vergil, or that he died sometime afterward and was sent as a comrade to accompany the epic poet in Hades. Most arguments deny, or avoid discussing, the relevance of the date of Messallinus’ priesthood, which was not until 17 BCE.

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ushered in by the Secular Games of 17 BCE, but also by the renewed biological productivity of Roman citizens.13 In the passage, the matrona’s strictly reproductive role is foregrounded as her children are strikingly referred to as fetus, a term most often used to describe the offspring of livestock.14 At the same time, the speaker restricts generational concord to male participants in this agrarian fete, making the pietas that Aeneas showed his own father, so crucial to the stability and longevity of empire, a markedly masculine virtue. Murgatroyd (1994, 223), in particular, notes the careful interlocking of generational signifiers, as youth is repeatedly juxtaposed with old age (avum puero . . . nepoti senem).15 In the speaker’s prophecy, generational ties are strengthened explicitly through the linguistic initiation of the young, as childhood babble (balbaque . . . dicere verba) is transformed into more communicable, symbolic components of language. Beard argues (1987, 8) that the flexibility of the Roman calendar—that is, its potential for layering and revising the aetiologies used to explain certain festivals—made it an especially effective tool for shaping Roman identity.16 The particular layer added here by Tibullus, 13

cf. Miller 2009, 261 and Cairns 1979, 85 on poem’s relationship to the Secular Games. Maltby 2002, 458 notes that this and Vitruv. 2.9.1 are the first applications of the term to human offspring and suggests that the word ‘serves here to link human productivity with that of the farm.’ cf. Var. L. 9.28, Lucr. 2.358, etc.; see OLD, s.v. fetus 3a, where the term refers to offspring rather than the process of parturition. 15 See also Évrard 1978, 128, who comments on the implicit familial relationship between senex and puer in the passage and notes the generic quality of the characters throughout the tableau, consistent with Tibullus’ widespread tendency to rely on a classe d’ âge in painting various scene types. 16 Thus, the most well-known accounts of the Parilia as marking Rome’s birthday could also tolerate divergent explanations—e.g. that the Parilia was a festival of shepherds and rustic deities, esp. Pales and Pan, that pre-dated Romulus’ founding of the city. I should note that Beard examines the peculiarly non-linear aspects of the Roman calendar, that is, the way that the Roman calendar year was not syntagmatic— as is, e.g. the Protestant calendar, which relies on a linear succession of ritual days to narrate the life of Christ. Instead, she argues that the paradigmatic quality of the Roman calendar—the way that ritual days gain significance not through ‘their position in any particular sequence, but through all the associations of opposition or similarity that they evoke in the mind’, 7–8—made it especially open to the accumulation of new meanings, and new possibilities for defining Roman identity. Her points are well taken, and I would aver that there is something delightfully cyclical about the Roman calendar, though it seems to me that Tibullus has in poem 2.5 decided to present the layered meanings of the Parilia in a distinctly teleological fashion, as the poem proceeds from Rome’s founding, through a period of civil discord, and up to the present day. 14

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whose account of Rome’s birthday links it with the present Augustan era, addresses a new interest in repairing generational rifts, by presenting an idealized model of the evolution of the human life course. Reference to another group of young men (pubes, 95) allows the Tibullan speaker to return to erotic themes and locate his own persona within the broad spectrum extending from youth to old age. If love’s emergence in the history of culture that concludes poem 2.1 allowed for possible transgressions of age-appropriate eroticism (hic dicere iussit/limen ad iratae verba pudenda senem, 73–4), poem 2.5 confines amor within the strict boundaries of youth (101–2), whose erratic behaviours are implicitly contained by the parens, senex, and avus that the iuvenis will eventually play, as well as by the matrona who awaits him in the future. Thus, despite the erotic segue that concludes Tibullus’ Parilia, we are given little to anticipate Nemesis’ disruptive entrance into a poem concerned largely with the historical progress and intergenerational concord that should continue to pave the way for Rome’s grandeur. Invoking Apollo to disarm and disavow his skill at archery, a skill appropriated by Cupid and used against the poet (mihi), Tibullus’ speaker records the extent of his own servitium—a single year against the backdrop of Rome’s entire past and projected future: ars bona sed postquam sumpsit sibi tela Cupido eheu quam multis ars dedit ista malum, et mihi praecipue, iaceo cum saucius annum et faveo morbo, cum iuvat ipse dolor. usque cano Nemesim, sine qua versus mihi nullus verba potest iustos aut reperire pedes (2.5.109–12). [Art is good, but after Cupid took up weapons for himself, alas, that art has given hardship to many, and to me especially, since I lie wounded for a year now and I take pleasure in my sickness, while the pain itself is pleasing. Continuously I sing of Nemesis, without whom no verse is able to discover the right words or rhythm.]

To this year (annum), no doubt imprecise when measuring love’s servitude (Putnam 1973, 194), we must compare both the nubilus annus (76) that marked the civil discord following Julius Caesar’s death as well as the felix et satur annus (82) initiated by the Parilia

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festival.17 Whether or not annus is to be taken literally, it clearly echoes those other pivotal moments integral to poem 2.5’s vision of Rome and suggests the speaker’s efforts to position himself and his course of life relative to that of the Roman state: by verbally linking a year of past civil discord with one of future prosperity, the amator creates a temporal framework within which he measures his erotic longevity. And yet by stressing the repetitive nature of his elegiac lament (usque), the amator confuses the linearity of a year, thwarts its closure by constant return to love’s pleasing malady. Modes of time are thus explicitly juxtaposed in determining the difference that a single year makes, on the one hand, for the past and future of the Roman state and, on the other, for the life course of the poet as amator. Against the amator’s renewed return to eroticism, we can also measure Messallinus’ anticipated journey on the cursus honorum, as the poem begins by marking his priesthood and concludes by predicting his triumph. In finding closure to this ‘most ambitious of Tibullus’ poems’ (Bright 1978, 66; cf. Maltby 2002, 430), the speaker attempts to reconcile his roles as a double agent, acting on behalf of the state, formally assuming the Sibylline stance as vates (114), and also trying to serve his puella, identified as the source of his artistic inspiration (111–12). By what may appear paradoxical according to the antitheses that have structured elegiac ideology—as Perkins puts it, we have here a ‘reversal of the usual elegiac recusatio’ (2000, 54)—Nemesis’ favour will allow him to rejoin the greater stream of time, as defined in accordance with masculine subjectivity, and chart Messallinus’ progress within it: tunc Messalla meus pia det spectacula turbae et plaudit curru praetereunte pater. annue: sic tibi sint intonsi, Phoebe, capilli, sic tua perpetuo sit tibi casta soror (2.5.113–122). [Then let my Messalla, as a father, give the crowd a dutiful display and applause, as the chariot passes by. Assent to this: thus, Phoebus, may your hair always remain unshorn and thus may your sister remain eternally chaste.] 17 Bright 1978, 94 notes the echo, but looks away from its temporal and teleological associations, and more toward the variant moods conjured by each reference to annus: ‘There, as we saw, annus implied a quality of life, a state of existence, distinguishing the gloom of the past from the bright promise of the present. So here, Tibullus is repeating that mode of reference in order to characterize his relationship in love’.

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To bolster the linear progress explicit in Messallinus’ triumph, the poem iterates the succession of honours and generations that defines the relationship between father and son. Tibullus’ poet-lover offers some promise that he will continue to treat in verse matters of national pride and the stabilization of Roman dominance through familial tradition (ut Messallinum celebrem, 115). At the same time, all aspirations remain quietly but critically contingent on Nemesis’ uninterrupted affections—so far, a generic impossibility. The poem’s concluding imprecations to Phoebus Apollo (121; cf. 106) evoke a specifically Augustan incarnation of the god (Miller 2009, 262). The speaker’s hopes that Apollo will remain forever unshorn (intonsi . . . capilli),18 that is, never partake in the Roman ceremony that marks the age of responsibility, balances an image of the Wunderkind Octavian/Augustus against the developmentally resistant amator and in so doing presses the amator’s commitment to grow up and evolve generically. The eternally youthful Apollo, moreover, looks back to Priapus’ advice in poem 1.4, which casts the god’s unshorn locks as a foil to the physical experience of aging that defines and delimits the erotic identity of mortals (intonsus crinis, 1.4.37–8). By activating Priapus’ caveat against eroticism continued beyond the bloom of iuventas, the speaker strengthens his pledge to move on with poetry that engages history and requires his own insertion into linear time. And yet the incongruity of Apollo’s roles in poem 2.5 recommends caution in evaluating the poet-lover’s commitment: his earlier request to the same god that he complete the pax Augusta by disarming Cupid undermines the solemnity and affected sincerity of his larger vatic predictions concerning the felix annus to be enjoyed by the Roman citizenry (Miller 2009, 264). Miller’s astute reading of poem 2.5’s conclusion resists resolving the tension between the poet’s stated imperatives and the erotic force, Nemesis, that thwarts those imperatives (2009, 246). I would argue, however, that a form of resolution is offered in the recapitulation that structures the following, final poem of the Tibullan corpus. Poem 2.6, announcing Macer’s abandonment of love and pursuit of

18 ‘Unshorn’ hair is, of course, one of Apollo’s regular attributes (cf. Putnam 1973, 195), though, as Smith notes (1913, 417), Tibullus makes reference to it with peculiar frequency. Bright 1978, 96 notes a contrast between the freedom of the unshorn god emphasized in the final couplet and the restraint associated with him at the start of the elegy.

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military glory,19 replays the amator’s wavering at the end of 2.5, but with considerably less ambiguity. The speaker of poem 2.6 playfully challenges Cupid to ‘call back the deserter’ (iterum erronem . . . voca, 6), Macer, but then issues his own bid to follow suit, to leave love’s ranks and cultivate a new-found interest in patriotic themes. The poet-lover seeks the ‘camp’ (castra) of the soldier, rather than that of the lover, but soon recants in frustration, as hopeful subjunctives (valeatque Venus valeantque puellae, 9) yield to a matter-of-fact perfect tense: iuravi quotiens rediturum ad limina numquam!/cum bene iuravi, pes tamen ipse redit (13–14, ‘I swore time and again that I would never return to her threshold! Though I swore sincerely, nevertheless my very foot returned’). The speaker’s repeated swearing off and returning to his mistress is mirrored by the verbal repetition of iuravi and rediturum-redit. As Putnam notes in his introduction to the poem (1973, 196), the especially frequent anaphora in poem 2.6, with its ritualistic connotations, is an appropriate conclusion to the Tibullan corpus. The poet’s mesmerizing repetition also makes the departure from the progression of triumphal chariots and return to the circular trap of erotic servitude especially pronounced. Signalling the positionality critical to defining any subject’s relationship to the symbolic order,20 the speaker is stationed at Nemesis’ threshold (ad limina)—that margin between erotic plenitude and symbolic pressure—where he endlessly awaits and constantly renews his lament, finding a form of (non) closure for his elegiac project. Content reflects form as the speaker’s frenzied, repetitive rebuke of the goddess Hope (Spes) raises doubts concerning not only the lover’s desires in the present elegy, but also the prophetic vision of poem 2.5. Mention of Spes in poem 2.6 constructs a ring composition, harkening back to the Spes that introduced the rustic piety of poem 1.1(9).21 Such a ‘ring’, however, effectively answers the positive potential 19 As often in elegy there is some ambiguity as to whether Macer wishes to actually join the army or write poetry about military matters; see Putnam 1973, 196. 20 Gender and subjectivity as defined by positionality—i.e. relationship to the symbolic—rather than essence underpins a great deal of Kristeva’s work, but see esp. 1974b (‘La femme’) and further clarification and criticism of Kristeva’s antiessentialism in Moi 1985, 163–6. 21 Maltby 2002, 472 notes the echo of 1.1.9. The speaker’s emphasis on ‘hope’ may also enhance his characteristic youth; cf. Aristotle Rhet. 1389a for the common attribution of hope (Kº ) to the young.

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embedded in the rusticus’ ‘hope’ at the beginning of the corpus with a deeply cynical attitude towards human expectations that concludes the poet’s oeuvre. The poet casts himself as a seer (vates, 2.5.114), but undermines his prophetic authority in poem 2.6 through a bitter tirade against his own vulnerability to misguided expectations. The glorious spectre of an empire drawn amidst the poet’s hopes for Messalla and his progeny is answered ultimately with a pronounced interest in death.22 The poet-lover conjures the bones of Nemesis’ young (parva, 30) sister, with all the innocence and unfulfilled promise she represents (per immatura ossa, 2.6.29). The amator’s proposal, due reverence for the dead in exchange for Nemesis’ affection, suggests that only he can give the dead girl’s life its necessary closure (sic bene sub tenera parva quiescat humo, 30). The option of death as a form of closure extends also to the Tibullan persona, who first considers the possibility of his own death, only to have death’s finality interrupted by the promises and reassurances of hope (iam mala finissem leto, sed credula vitam / Spes fovet, 19-20). The poet-lover’s formulation of death later in the text, however, corrects the impulse towards it as a means of escape from erotic suffering by recasting death as entrapment, a repeated experience in present time (tunc morior curis, tunc mens mihi perdita fingit, 51). Here we observe the operations of elegy working in conjunction with what psychoanalysis regards as the most instinctual of drives, generating a dominant ‘destructive wave’ in the human organism,23 the death drive, formulated by Kristeva as the logical end point that governs linear time: It has already been abundantly demonstrated that this kind of temporality is inherent in the logical and ontological values of any given civilization, that this temporality renders explicit a rupture, an expectation or anguish which other temporalities work to conceal. It might also be added that this linear time is that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb; topic–comment; beginning–

22

cf. Bright 1978, 216–27 on death as a central theme in the poem. Kristeva RPL, 95 refers primarily to the Freudian theory of drives articulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1953, cited in RPL,128). She clarifies the relationship between the death drive and the semiotic chora: ‘ . . . the semiotic chora, converting drive discharges into stases, can be thought of both as a delaying of the death drive and as a possible realization of this drive, which tends to return to a homeostatic state’ (RPL, 128, n. 23). 23

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ending), and that this time rests on its own stumbling block,24 which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation—death (WT, 192).

It is this kind of stumbling into stillness and closure that the Tibullan lover is denied, in a Tithonian experience of desire that constantly recognizes but defers the impulse towards death. The poet-lover reserves his final remarks for the lena, whose own future will be marked with a similar lack of closure (satis anxia vives, 53). The poet’s confidence in the male lineage that constitutes Rome’s past and future is at the end of the collection undermined by his own sober fixation on a single puella, whose own ‘history’ is invoked in the figures of parva soror, mature dura puella, and decrepit lena, and whose yet-undecided fate is inextricably linked with his own. The arc of poetic evolution that we are inclined to trace throughout book two’s final poems is defined by a distinctly regressive motion, a recantation that restores the lover to women’s time.

II. PROPERTIUS: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A (NOT-SO) YOUNG MAN The Propertian poet-lover speaks with much greater gusto about the possibility of outgrowing his erotic interests. As observed earlier in this project, the speaker of poem seven of the Monobiblos declares his current, age-appropriate vocation as a lover among complaints about Cynthia’s infidelities: nec tantum ingenio quantum servire dolori cogor et aetatis tempora dura queri. hic mihi conteritur vitae modus, haec mea fama est, hinc cupio nomen carminis ire mei (1.7.7–10). [I am forced to serve not my talent so much as my pain and to complain of the difficult times of my youth. This is the measure of life worn away by me, this is the grounds for my reputation, from here I wish the name of my poem to proceed.] 24 ‘ . . . qu’ il se soutient de sa butée, . . . ’ Kristeva 1979, 7. We might also translate, ‘that which is anchored by its own obstacle’. As Paul Allen Miller reminds me (per litteras) a ‘butée’ can refer to the keystone in an architectural vault. Kristeva’s image thus connotes that element critical for holding a structure together, while also limiting its vertical extension.

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A decidedly mixed message emerges as the poet counters the sombre acceptance of a fate and fama determined by his erotic pursuits, with the implication that his current state of servitium amoris is but a passing phase, characteristic of his youth (aetas). It appears that he has not yet begun to serve the ingenium (nec tantum ingenio . . . quantum dolori) on which he will eventually pride himself.25 The speaker’s claims of age-determined generic propriety make their way into later poems, particularly his recusationes.26 Most notably, in poem 2.10 he abandons his approach of loftier political themes (sed tempus lustrare aliis Helicona choreis, 1), begging pardon for his youth (aetas prima, 7) more suited to erotic verses, all the while offering the tantalizing possibility of generic evolution (bella canam, quando scripta puella mea est, 2.10.8). It remains to define just what sort of poetic future awaits the Propertian elegiac lover and whether that future holds a more secure place in the stream of historic time than is ultimately available to Tibullus’ poetic persona. This discussion looks to the amator’s evolution in book three as the poet charts his movement away from amorous themes and posits an escape from erotic suffering, not in death, but in generic experimentation. At the same time, we can detect a pronounced regression from that course of development, similar to the backsliding experienced by the Tibullan amator. While Propertius concludes his second book of poems with a ringing endorsement of the love elegist’s ars (2.34), book three regularly glances toward non-elegiac projects. Poem 3.5 includes what is perhaps the poet-lover’s most obvious statement of intent: atque ubi iam Venerem gravis interceperit aetas, sparserit et nigras alba senecta comas, tum mihi naturae libeat perdiscere mores quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum, . . . (3.5.23–6). [But when heavy age will have put an end to lovemaking, and white old age will have sprinkled my raven locks, then may I delight in learning the ways of nature, (and in learning) which god skilfully governs this house of the world . . . ]

25

For the significance of ingenium in Propertius and its relationship to the vatesconcept, see Newman 1967, 82–95. 26 See Chapter Five, pp. 119–22.

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‘Heavy (old) age’ clearly holds more promise for the former amator than it will for the former puella, as Cynthia is imagined in poem 3.24/25 (at te celatis aetas gravis urgeat annis, 31). At this point in his elegiac narrative, the speaker does not imagine writing any other sort of poetry, but instead looks forward to more philosophical and scientific pursuits, and hopes to learn thoroughly the ways of nature (mores naturae, 25). Before we assume that the speaker intends to abandon poetry altogether, though, it is worth noting that the subjects that interest him are also at the centre of three of the most influential poems of the day, Aratus’ Phaenomena, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and Vergil’s Georgics. Intertextual engagement, particularly with Vergil’s Georgics,27 suggests that the poet-lover imagines for himself a place in the succession of writers treating matters of natural science and philosophy. Furthering hints of generic evolution is the reminiscence of poem 2.34, where the same subjects—the nature of life and death, the movement of the heavens (2.34.51–4)—were offered to Lynceus as precisely those that a man in love should avoid at all costs. A prevailing interest in temporal matters, in accordance with the rising and falling of heavenly bodies, largely determines the speaker’s panoply of natural phenomena: the cycles of the moon, movement of constellations, the changing of the seasons, and the end of the world as we know it (sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces, 31). Somewhat predictably, the poet-lover’s metaphysical speculations are eventually dominated by reflections on death and the afterlife, topics introduced earlier in the poem (9–18) to provide a rationale for his adherence to Amor, the ‘god of peace’ (deus pacis, 1). As he considers the possibility of punishments in the afterlife (39–46), with Epicurean-Lucretian scepticism, the poet conveys a hint of resolve, acquiescing to the possibility of future non-existence. Belying such resolve, however, is an anxious preoccupation with the end of things. While the speaker’s interests are not so rigidly linear as to exclude the more cyclical patterns that determine the mores naturae, he ultimately insists on looking toward the ‘outcome’ of his life, punctuating the elegy with a striking oxymoron by using exitus, a word normally connoting ‘death’ (Richardson 1977, 337), to describe his retirement pursuits: exitus hic vitae superest mihi: vos, quibus arma/grata magis, Crassi signa referte domum (47–8, ‘this 27 See Camps 1966, 72 and Richardson 1977, 335 for the reminiscence of Verg. Georg. 2.475–94.

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outcome of life remains for me: you, who take greater delight in arms, bring home the standards of Crassus’). The only other use of exitus in the corpus quite explicitly refers to love in death, the Liebestod shared by the amator and Cynthia as they are drowned at sea (exitus hic nobis non inhonestus erit, 2.26.58). The shift in connotation here mirrors a significant shift in the way that the poet envisions his literary itinerary and the end of his life. But just how has the poet revised his literary agenda? The lofty ambitions voiced in poem 2.10, vows to celebrate Parthia’s grief over Roman vengeance of Crassus’ defeat (13–14), are for the moment utterly rejected.28 It seems as though the poet-lover has replaced one telos—singing the deeds of Caesar—with another—an interest in natural science. Though both endings require a turning away from the elegiac affair, they also suggest turning in very different directions. And, if the poet-lover programmatically projects an exitus at the beginning of book three,29 what are we to make of his promises to Maecenas in poem 3.9 that under the patron’s guidance (te duce) he will take up themes of recently revitalized Roman myth along with more contemporary military matters? In particular, the poet promises to sing of Augustus’ triple triumph and the ongoing conflict with Parthia (53–4), though we have already observed that his commitment is highly contingent on a maturity not yet attained.30 As book three unfolds, the poet-lover continues his somewhat inconsistent meditation on the outcome of his life. By poem 3.17 he vows the remainder of his time to Bacchus, using suspiciously familiar language. Not only will he move beyond elegiac stasis by working the land as a farmer (15, a sure remedium for elegiac love as Ovid’s praeceptor amoris would have it, cf. Rem. 169–198), but he will become a follower of the god and poet of his virtues: quod superest vitae per te et tua cornua vivam,/virtutisque tuae, Bacche, poeta ferar (19–20, ‘I will live out what remains of my life through you and your horns, Bacchus, and I will be famed as a poet of your power’). The miseries of love have foisted upon the poet-lover an altogether 28 Stahl 1985, 198 views poem 3.5 as a comment on 3.4 in which Propertius co-opts the terrain of moral philosophy in order to define ‘what separates him from men of arma’. He also interprets the poem as an oblique condemnation of Augustus’ plan for a Parthian expedition. 29 See Camps 1966, who reads the first five poems as a ‘series . . . on the poet’s literary purpose and achievement which head the present book’ (72). 30 See the discussion of Propertian recusationes in Chapter Five, pp. 119–22.

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different ending to his life than the one projected in poem 3.5 (exitus hic vitae superest mihi, 47) or implied in poem 3.9. His proposal in poem 3.17 for what remains of his life suggests plans for lyric or tragic poetry (non humili coturno, 39; Pindarico ore, 40) rather than for philosophical or epic verse. Nearer the end of book three, in poems 21 and 22, the poet-lover considers the impact of two linear trajectories on two elite Roman men, one path taking the amator away from Rome and the other returning Tullus to Italy. In spite of their contrary motions, both journeys—those viae characteristically eschewed by elegiac lovers— move the amator further away thematically from erotic servitium. In poem 3.21 the speaker proposes a trip to Athens, in part to satisfy intellectual curiosity (25–30), but more critically for the remedia against elegiac love that movement through time and space have to offer (aut spatia annorum aut longa intervalla profundi, 31). In poem 3.22, a paean to Italy, the speaker reminds Tullus of the services he owes his fatherland (3.22.39–42), despite his own earlier defence in the Monobiblos, addressed to the same Tullus,31 that he is unable to perform military service on account of his youth and erotic entanglements (1.7.7–8). The poet-lover’s change of heart may be interpreted as a signal that time has passed, as a change in attitude reflects substantial narrative progress.32 More specifically, the speaker reminds his addressee of the cursus honorum (3.22.40), the graded and age-restricted entry into political life whose requirements were modified by Augustus, which the amator has hitherto managed to avoid. As Courtney notes (1970, 52), the speaker implies a direct contrast between the opportunities available to himself—limited since Cynthia has humiliated him—and to Tullus, who may return to an honourable life. We may, in fact, be tempted to see former defiance of conventional political structures now transformed into deference. 31

On Tullus of poem 3.22 as the Tullus addressed in the Monobiblos, and the significance of his reemergence here, see Camps 1966, 154; see also Stahl 1985, 205–12, and n. 33, below. 32 By understanding the poem within the context of an ongoing deliberation of the effects of space and time on elegiac love, we may allow it a somewhat more generous evaluation than it has received thus far; most critics have viewed the poem as a Laudes Italiae, inferior to Vergil’s in the Georgics. Stahl 1985 rightly argues against evaluating the poem solely as a Vergilian imitation, but views it as a ‘cheap and almost rhetorical declamation’ commissioned by Tullus’ family (208). The poem is I think best interpreted as another experiment in genre and theme, part of the poet’s larger exploration of identity and voice that structures book three.

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The final two poems of book three, which include a witty lament over the loss of the poet’s doctae tabellae as well as the famous farewell to Cynthia, further indicate the departure from elegy that the poet-lover has promised all along. The ambivalently coveted delay (1.1.35–6)—as well as the lentus/lenta lover whose fickleness or adherence enacts such delay—is reduced to little more than a soundbite: fortisan haec illis fuerint mandata tabellis:/‘irascor quoniam es, lente, moratus heri’ (3.23.12, ‘perhaps these commands were given on those tablets: “I am angry, since you, sluggard, lingered yesterday”’). By reducing the language of elegiac stasis to a generic commonplace, the poet signals that his tabellae, after enduring multiple overwrites, rewrites, and revisions (3.23.3), are no longer available for erotic composition. Book three’s conclusion makes his generic closure painfully clear: five years of servitude (quinque . . . annos, 3.24/25.23) are now as woefully evident as the years (celatis annis, 31) that Cynthia will unsuccessfully try to hide from future paramours. As has been noted by critics, book three rounds out what can be described as a narrative progression moving from ‘erotic madness to celibate wisdom’.33 Putnam (1980, 107) rightly stresses the metaphor of the journey as a unifying principle of book three. And yet, in spite of the resolution that defines poem 3.24/25, it is difficult to read that journey as a smooth and steady departure, since the poet’s inconsistent references to his own future suggest that any progression away from his beloved is uncertain at best. Book three certainly broadens the range of elegy’s possibilities for Propertius,34 paving the way for the aetiological themes of book four. The poem that opens that particular libellus, however, will bring an abrupt halt to the poet’s aspirations as a Roman Callimachus, as he loses control of his programme, and recants in a way that dramatizes and exaggerates the 33 Wyke 2002, 80. For an argument concerning the overall unity of Propertius’ first three books, as well their publication as a group, see Williams 1968, 480–8. Williams’ argument is not without its flaws—e.g. he rather selectively uses Catullan parallels to explain any inconsistencies in the chronological development of the Cynthia affair; he avoids biographical fallacies, but insists that puella referred to throughout the three books must be Cynthia. He does, however, rightly note a number of important structural parallels in books one and three, for instance, the significance of Tullus as an addressee in poem 3.22 and his function in rounding out the collection (490). See also Courtney 1970 on how book three (poems 17–24 in particular) is meant to lead to a final break between the poet-lover and Cynthia. 34 cf. Putnam 1980, 98 on Propertius’ ‘growth of self-consciousness’ and increasing tendency to address ethical issues from a less narcissistic perspective in book three.

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whimpering change of heart suffered by the Tibullan amator, in his own retreat from Macer’s camp.

III. PROPERTIUS: BOOK FOUR Propertius’ fourth book of poems initially promises to complete the amator’s transfer out of the cyclical trap of women’s time and into the realm of history, or more specifically aetiology, where it is the business of poets to chart the forward movement of time, the causes (aitia) of things, rather than to champion temporal delays. Of course, aetiologies also structure the relationship between then and now by looking backwards, and, rather than simply charting a process of amelioration, can dwell on the prospect and promise of return. Book four’s opening confrontation between the Propertian speaker, who hopes to outline a process of Rome’s glorification, and an aptly chosen astrologer, Horos, who stops him from doing so, establishes a distinctly bipolar poetics that will determine the prevailing tensions in elegies two to eleven. Though tensions between public and private, amor and Roma/arma, male and female constantly assert themselves in the text, they have, under careful scrutiny, proven increasingly difficult to stabilize.35 Among these unstable polarities I would add a distinctly temporal friction between the history and future (dicere fata) of Rome that our speaker longs to sing and his own past identity as an erotic poet, introduced in the first poem of book four and established as an integral part of the book’s remaining carmina.36 Book four’s interest in various temporal modes—for instance, the progress of an empire through the ages versus the triumph of Cynthia in a single night (hac nocte, 4.8.1)—are in a sense the condensation and culmination of an interest in the gendering of time that has extended in appropriately piecemeal fashion throughout Propertius’ poetry. Significantly, the 35 See Stahl 1985, 248–305, Wyke (2002, revision of 1987) esp. 82–5, and DeBrohun 2003, 9–28 et passim, on the bipolar poetics of book four and the two conflicting programs offered in poem 4.1. Janan’s 2001 exposition of book four reveals most forcefully the difficulties of stabilizing the basic polarities of the text. 36 As Welch notes 2005, 34, Horos’ speech regarding the amator’s personal history demonstrates the futility of Propertius’ efforts to sing the fate of Rome (dicere fata) in the first part of 4.1, since he ‘can never view the city unprejudiced by his sad past’.

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poet-lover’s range of legendary and historical subjects in the first half of poem 4.1 bears a resemblance to those mentioned in the deferral to Maecenas of poem 3.9, so that for a moment he appears to fulfil a former promise.37 He now speaks of building his own walls out of reverent verse, walls to equal the foundations of Rome itself: optima nutricum nostris lupa Martia rebus, qualia creverunt moenia lacte tuo! moenia namque pio conor disponere versu: ei mihi, quod nostro est parvus in ore sonus! (4.1.55–8). [Wolf of Mars, best nurse of our state, what great walls grew from your milk! I am trying to arrange walls in reverent verse: as for me, how small is the sound in my voice! But still, whatever river flows from a meager breast, all of it will serve my fatherland.]

The drama and immediacy of the poet’s announcement are conveyed by the present tense of conor,38 the significance and magnitude of his enterprise by the very length of the second pentameter. An elision at the end of the first hemistich makes the line nearly as long as its preceding hexameter, though it is ironically spoken with a ‘small sound’ (parvus sonus). Moreover, disponere (‘station, arrange’), used as frequently to describe the stationing of troops and weaponry as to mark the arrangement of parts in an oration,39 elides the language of grammar and syntax with larger structures of the symbolic in a way that connotes time’s associations with masculine subjectivity. As the speaker attempts to construct metaphorical walls (moenia) with his verse, he indicates the underlying kinship that links poetry as a symbolic project with greater ideological structures that promote the expansion and containment of an empire. The ingenium (66) formerly enslaved to Cynthia in the Monobiblos has

37 There are of course important differences in the speaker’s catalogue of mythological and historical subjects he will eventually sing in poem 3.9 and those he is now singing in poem 4.1. Still, the caeso moenia firma Remo of 3.9.50 and Aventino rura pianda Remo of 4.1.50 suggest similar trains of thought. The correspondence is further suggested by Richardson’s 1977, 355 transference of an arguably misplaced couplet (4.1.87–8) into the text of 3.9 (between 48 and 49). 38 Fedeli reads coner; Stahl 1985, 259 (also reading the subjunctive) suggests that the present tense leaves open-ended whether or not the proposed goal will be reached. 39 For disponere used of the strategic arrangement of troops and military armaments, see, e.g. Cic. Phil. 5.9, Caes. BC 3.5.2, Liv. 9.36.10; for the word as applicable to ancient rhetorical theory, see Rhet. Her. 4.16, Cic. de Orat. 3.96.

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been freed up for versifying Rome’s past (sacra dies et cognomina prisca, 69) and predicting its future (omina, 68). This entrance into the foundational and teleological structures of time is brought to an abrupt halt, however, as Horos makes a conspicuous turn away from the relatively impersonal movement of historical time (hactenus historiae, 119) and toward time as it is experienced in the human life course. The interlocutor, whose name in Latin connotes temporal boundaries (‘hour, season’) and in Greek refers to spatial limits,40 explicitly rejects the poet-lover’s knowledge of the future (quo ruis imprudens, vage, dicere fata, Properti? 4.1.71)41 and assumes for himself the title of vates (75), with ample illustrations to verify his predictions. The astrologer’s precept, that the poet-lover return to personal and amatory themes (4.1.120; cf. 135–6), rather than precluding the movement of linear time, redirects it as a measure of the individual’s course of life. As Hutchinson’s commentary on poem 4.1 demonstrates (2006, 60), prediction remains a fundamental organizing structure of the poem, and not simply prediction as a revelation of future events, but as it ‘relates to the position and changes of entities in time’. On this point the scholar observes important thematic links between 4.1.1–70 and Tibullus 2.5—with both poems, of course, nodding to Evander’s Ur-Rome of Aeneid Eight. I would add that the second half of the elegy is also critically engaged with its Tibullan predecessor, insofar as Horos’ following exhortation may be read as a more expansive attempt to remove the elegist from the progress of Roman history and address the problems of a poet shedding his past identity as an amator. For this is precisely the problem that Tibullus faces in poem 2.5, as he points to Nemesis as both his source of inspiration and his stumbling block to generic evolution. Similarly, Propertius 4.1 demonstrates with greater detail that the amator’s past, from the collection of a father’s remains, defined distinctly in terms of temporal impropriety (ossa . . . non illa aetate legenda, 127–8), to his loss of the childhood bulla and assumption of the toga libera (131–2), remains imminently relevant to his present

40

 ˇæH. For the bilingual implications of Horos’ name, see Debrohun 2003, 20. Following Fedeli; Hutchinson daggers vage, though the vocative, referring to the poet as a ‘wanderer’, i.e. one who is characteristically driven off course and prone to move without an organizing telos (OLD s.v. esp. 1, 4), seems appropriate to the context. 41

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enterprise. By reminding the would-be prophet of Roman glory of these rites of passage, Horos also reminds him of what he had attempted to avoid through devotion to his puella: Apollo/et vetat insano verba tonare Foro (133–34, ‘and Apollo forbids you to thunder in the mad Forum’). The poet-lover must continue to avoid thundering—whether in the forum or elsewhere—but Horos, by reviewing these stages in his addressee’s life, gives his love for the puella a historical context, and assigns her the role of a telos par excellence, the pinnacle at which his entire course of life has aimed. As such, the puella must remain in book four’s Callimachean and aetiological landscape (140), though she is drawn quite differently once she has left that privileged space of delay that the poet had for so long assigned her. Throughout Propertius’ final book, though erotic interests come sporadically to the fore, the cyclical, timeless nature of the amator’s erotic entanglements is countered by constant gesturing toward the end of the human life course. And yet the culmination of human subjectivity in death is also conspicuously thwarted, so that closure remains unsettlingly forestalled. One of the most salient features of the book, its focus on the mortality of various elegiac women,42 functions as a revealing and explicitly gendered foil for the longlasting, if not quite eternal, monuments that are the poet’s aetiological focus. Various transcendental products of human culture—artefacts that have outlasted a single generation—follow the emphatically situated ‘walls’ (moenia) of poem 4.1: a statue of Vertumnus (4.2), the Palatine Temple of Apollo (4.6), Hercules’ Ara Maxima (4.9), and the temple of Jupiter Feretrius (4.10). The newly revised elegiac woman is awarded her monuments as well, though they are, for the most part, commemorations of her death. As such, in concluding his meditation on the human course of life and death, Propertius erects various sepulcra that appear as nearly the exclusive property of woman. Given our findings in Chapter Seven, which identified a persistent link between the elegiac puella and the perishable aspects of the natural world, it is not surprising that the women of book four are consistently portrayed as dead, un-dead, or dying. Once transferred 42

For the various forms assumed by the elegiac woman in book four and the importance of that variety in shaping the book’s central dynamic, see Wyke 2002 (revision of 1987), 78–114.

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into what the poet hopes to construct as a linear path leading from Romulean to Augustan Rome, woman becomes the mortal and perishable element against which the male personae of this elegiac project define their own power to overcome or even reverse the processes of physical deterioration (dicam ‘Trioa, cades, et, Troica Roma, resurges,’ 4.1.87).43 The poet introduces Tarpeia, Acanthis, and Cornelia with reference to their tombs (sepulcrum, 4.4.1, 4.5.1, 4.11.1); Cynthia enters the book in spectral form (sunt aliquid Manes, 4.7.1); even Arethusa writes with a dying hand (signa meae dextrae iam morientis erunt, 4.3.6), and paints the image of her wedding in distinctly funereal shades (13–16). Cleopatra, most famously doomed, is at least credited with taking fate into her own hands (iusso non moritura die, 4.6.64). The one living—though, through a remarkable hysteron-proteron, already dead—elegiac woman in the book, Cynthia, is made an unlikely analogue of the virgin participant in ceremonial rites at Lanuvium that mimic the spirit’s departure into the underworld after death.44 The cumulative effect of this host of dead heroines is an exploration of the different narratives available to Roman women, life or love stories shaped according to restrictions governing the Augustan symbolic. And yet these attempts to ‘write the puella’45 once and for all result in narratives that inevitably reflect on the poet’s own story of development interrupted in the book’s introductory poem.

43 Following Hutchinson’s punctuation. Cf. Rothwell 1996, who argues that book four’s examination of Roman monuments often points to the power of nature to undermine human progress; the golden age evident in Horace, Vergil, and even Ovid, is conspicuously absent from Propertius’ account of Rome’s past and implied future. Welch 2005, 34 also points to the sobriety tempering the renewal predicted by Horos and argues that mention of sepulcra in the following pentameter prepares us for the multiplicity of generic lenses through which we are about to observe Roman progress in book four. 44 The possibly fatal (virgo, tale iter omne cave, 4.8.6) ritual involves a quasikatabasis into a volcanic cave, described by the narrator in language reminiscent of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld in Vergil’s epic. See Richardson 1977, 464 for Propertian echoes of Aeneid Six (Aen. 6.126–9, 237–8); cf. also Dee 1978, who notes that the reminiscence ‘conjure[d] up something the ancients felt toward underground caverns’ (43). 45 cf. 2.10.7–8: aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus:/bella canam quando scripta puella meast.

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IV. THIS WOMAN’S WORK: CORNELIA The matrona Cornelia’s testimonial offers a particularly revealing foil for the thwarted thundering of the Propertian amator in poem 4.1, and together their (auto) biographies construct a frame of competing personal histories for the poet’s final oeuvre. Cornelia’s story of a dutiful life and premature death is marked by the very closure behind adamantine doors denied to the elegiac amator, who is condemned to round-the-clock surveillance of the puella’s permeable domus (4.1.143–6). In her bid for commemoration, for final inscription in the symbolic order, Cornelia speaks with a certainty that only the dead can muster: desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum; panditur ad nullas ianua nigra preces; cum semel infernas intrarunt funera leges, non exorato stant adamante viae (4.11.1–4). [Cease, Paullus, to press upon my tomb with tears; the black doorway is laid open in response to no prayers; as soon as the dead have entered the realm of infernal jurisdiction, the paths stand firm with unmoved adamant.]

As antidote to the stasis and deferral that afflicts the subjects of erotic elegy, Cornelia presses for closure, asserting that the temporal trajectories (viae) of individual Roman men and women move in only one direction. Cornelia’s status as an identifiable relic of Augustan society has led commentators either to remark on Propertius’ relatively newfound, but sincere regard for matronly virtues, or, conversely, to argue that the poet conveys the emptiness of a life lived in strict accordance with such virtues.46 On the one hand, as Michèle Lowrie observes, Cornelia is ‘a perfect candidate for being written up,’ since her life story is shaped in exact accordance with Augustan legislation (2008, 176; cf. Stahl 1985, 262). On the other hand, as the same scholar recognizes, the uncomplicated concision of Cornelia’s story makes it something of a rhetorical exemplum to be replicated—a ‘scripted’ role, as it 46 Janan 2001, 147–8, 156–63 summarizes the two opposing schools of thought on poem 4.11 and offers up the groundlessness of what Lacan calls the Law, more specifically, those codes of behaviour governing Cornelia’s conduct, as a reason for such contrary interpretations.

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were, to be performed ad infinitum. As such, we are inclined to draw the same distance between the amator and his final, dutiful subject in poem 4.11 that we drew earlier between the poet-lover and Tullus, whose life was also defined as a form of imitation (if more aemulatio than imitatio, 1.6.19) and subsumed within the greater context of the imperial project (ibis et accepti pars eris imperii, 1.6.34). Cornelia’s distinction is similarly confiscated as one imitable part of her illustrious family lineage (erat magnae pars imitanda domus, 4.11.44). Curran (1968, 138) bleakly interprets Cornelia’s—and thus the Roman matrona’s—description of her life course as ‘an interval between two torches, the wedding torch, whose fire is an augury of life and birth, and the funeral torch, whose fire represents the final consummation and denial of life’. Such a swift progression from one rite of passage to the next constructs a counterpoint to the Propertian poet-lover’s former delay—protracted affairs and resistance to wedlock—as written into books one to three of the corpus: mox, ubi iam facibus cessit praetexta maritis, vinxit et acceptas altera vitta comas, iungor, Paulle, tuo sic discessura cubili: in lapide hoc uni nupta fuisse legar (4.11.33–6). [Soon, the moment when my toga praetexta yielded to marriage torches, and another ribbon bound my hair enfolded within it, I joined myself to your bed, though I was bound to leave it so: may I be commemorated on this stone as married to only one man.]

Just as Horos reminds the poet-lover of the rites of passage marking his entry into adulthood and citizenship, particularly the assumption of the toga that signalled the end of his youth (4.1.131–2), Cornelia reminds her husband of those ceremonies that mark her own assumption of a matrona’s status and responsibilities. She exchanged the dress of her youth (praetexta) for marriage torches just as the poet-lover once gave up his childhood bulla in return for the toga of manhood (toga libera, 4.1.132). For the matrona, however, these rites and the stages of life they inaugurate pass with remarkable swiftness: no fewer than three consecutive temporal adverbs (mox ubi iam) establish a rapidly sequential relationship between the moment when her praetexta yielded (cessit) and the moment when she is joined in marriage, already anticipating another yielding (discessura,

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from discedo) from the wedding chamber unto death. Between those two torches, Cornelia is allowed startlingly little evolution (nec mea mutata est aetas, 45). The constancy of her brief and dutiful life is inscribed as a revealing contrast to both the fickleness of the meretrixpuella and the amator’s carefully graded and developmentally thwarted existence. Cornelia aspires to have her life written in stone and thus inscribed in the symbolic order like so many monuments that mark the progress of time in its historical aspect. Her family’s glory (37–40) along with her own honourable conduct and achievements befitting a Roman wife—achievements remarkably in accord with Augustan social reform, emerui generosos vestis honores (61)47—should earn her the renown (fama) that so preoccupies her (12, 29, 72); quite pointedly, she extols the sort of fama that remains permanently in the written record, as her stress on titulus implies (32, 38). And yet, as Janan notes (2001, 163), the elegy is left uncomfortably open-ended: Cornelia remains forever on trial, waiting for some other voice from the symbolic, be it of judge or poet, to determine her post-mortem existence.48 Since her fame depends entirely on her status as a wife, daughter, and mother, Cornelia can only hope to achieve it through the men who will commemorate her. She lacks altogether the ebullient certainty of post-mortem survival that our poet-lover has so often voiced, but instead recalls the strains of uncertainty that are more delicately woven into the amator’s vision of the future. Cornelia’s defence concludes in a manner that appropriately evokes the gendered and competing modes of time whose evolution we have charted throughout this project. In exhorting her children (pueri, 87) to tolerate the possibility of a stepmother, she glances toward Paullus’ old age: discite venturam iam nunc sentire senectam, caelibis ad curas nec vacet ulla via. quod mihi detractum est, vestros accedat ad annos: prole mea Paullum sic iuvet esse senem (4.11.93–6).

47 As Richardson remarks 1977, 482, thoughts of Augustus lead to Cornelia’s mention of the ius trium liberorum; cf. also Janan 2001, 159–60. 48 cf. Wyke 2002, 113, who notes that, ‘ . . . poem 4.11 is frozen both in time and in place. There cannot be a progression to Elysium, to the Virgilian disquisition on the joys of rebirth and the survey of Rome’s great heroes’.

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[Learn now to recognize the approach of old age, nor should any path lay idle for the worries of a widower; (the time) taken from me, let it be added to your years: thus may it be pleasing for Paullus to become an old man through my children.]

The promise of Paullus’ longevity urgently awaits teleological expression (venturam iam nunc), and Cornelia, whose life is cut short in her maternal prime (immatura, 17), offers a poignant insurance for its fulfilment: by pledging to her offspring the years stolen from herself, Cornelia hopes to secure Paullus’ enjoyment of old age. In so doing she evokes woman’s capacity for eternity through her regenerative function, prole mea.49 At the same time, Cornelia’s own abbreviated course of life is articulated in stark contrast to the male subjects sketched throughout the course of the libellus, which begins with a history of the amator’s boyhood and ends on the brink of Paullus’ old age.50 A vacuus period of life, celebrated by the profligate Roman iuvenis (if fraught with erotic pain for the elegiac amator, Prop. 1.1.34, Ov. Am. 1.1.26),51 offers very different opportunities for the middle-aged widower; and Cornelia defines Paullus’ potential for happiness as a senex not by love, but by the fruits of a civically responsible marriage. By opening her defence with an account of her virtuous life and concluding with the circumstances of Paullus’ old age, Cornelia redirects the earlier implicit comparison between herself and the amator to a comparative evaluation of the amator—ever eluded by content old age—and Paullus. Can we read the life and love story of Paullus,52 initially locked out of the ianua that bars the living from the dead, as a commentary on the Propertian amator’s life course? 49 Reminiscent perhaps of Messalla’s proles celebrated in Tibullus 1.7, a parallel that makes the discrepancy between the two poems (one marking the life and birthday of the statesman, the other commemorating the death of a matrona) all the more striking. 50 As Hutchison notes 2006, 247, iam nunc is more naturally constructed with the infinitive—following a comparable expression on the puella’s old age in Ars Three; yet the proximity of the future participle to the temporal adverbs also hints at the near arrival of Paullus’ old age. 51 For the vacatio adulescentiae see esp. Fear 2005 and the discussion of Chapter Three, pp. 78–83. 52 Paullus, of course, is not the only unlikely ‘locked-out’ lover in this poetic project; on Hercules of 4.9, see esp. Anderson 1964. Most recently, Welch 2004 has remarked on the spatial implications of Hercules’ role as an exclusus amator: ‘ . . . his performance of the paraklausithyron transforms the hallowed sanctuary of the Bona Dea, locus of aristocratic feminine virtue, into an elegiac bedroom, the realm of erotic sport . . . that is temporarily off-limits to the lover who waits at its doorstep’ (75).

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Both Paullus and the amator, by experiencing time as masculine subjects, offset the temporal modes of feminine subjectivity that define the women of book four. These women are united insofar as most move along a rapidly accelerated life course, and meet a premature end in death that continues to haunt the living. Both amator and statesman,53 by contrast, buy time from their overwhelmingly mortal beloveds, the one a legitimate uxor, the other an ‘off-theradar’54 puella. These investments, however, are made for decidedly different returns, as a quick review of the amator’s continual surveillance of the puella’s house, capping his life course in poem 4.1 (143– 6) should remind us. Though the Propertian speaker relinquishes his identity as lover following poems 4.7 and 4.8, he remains, somewhat like Tibullus in poem 2.6, fixated on the youth, promise, and demise of the elegiac woman—whatever her guise may be—as a measure of his own failure to evolve. At the same time, by emphasizing the elegiac puella’s variously grotesque and austere mortality, he also highlights her failure as erotic object and excuse for his continued delay.

V. OVI DIAN OUTCOMES Ovid also concludes his poetic project with a recantation of loftier, epic themes, and a return to the predicaments of the elegiac amator. The unfulfilled promise of Ovid’s generic evolution has to some extent been addressed in Chapter Five, though it is worth revisiting briefly here, since it allows the patterns of his predecessors to emerge with greater clarity. The amator speaks of treading a ‘greater area’ (area maior, 3.15.18) at the conclusion of Amores Three. In bidding a distinct farewell to ‘unwarlike elegies’ (imbelles elegi, 19) the poet’s reference to Bacchus and a ‘heavier thyrsus’ (thyrso graviore, 17) suggests that the poet will turn his attention to either tragic drama or martial (epic) poetry. Again, we have been led to anticipate such a divergence, since throughout the Amores, Ovid’s poet-lover operates 53

And friend of Augustus; see Hutchinson on the identity of Paullus 2006, 230. The phrase is adapted from James 2003, 213, who describes the puella as a figure who ‘falls below the radar of inquisitive and intrusive public notice’. See Introduction, p. 18. 54

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under conditions similar to those influencing the poet-lovers of Propertius and Tibullus: he writes erotic verses now, because love poetry is appropriate to youth (Am. 1.1.20, 1.15.3, cf. 2.1.3–10). Attempts to handle more serious themes are programmatically interrupted at the start of each volume of Amores but, significantly, the Ovidian lover makes clear in poem 3.1 his intention of deferring, rather than altogether forsaking, the poetry of res Romanae. In as much as the chronology of Ovid’s extant poetry suggests, the prediction of generic evolution at the end of Amores Three is a false one: the next published works are probably more, and decidedly erotic, elegy, the Ars and Remedia.55 As I hope to have demonstrated in Chapter Six, however, from the perspective of the Ovidian praeceptor in the Ars Amatoria, love itself is easily transformed into a historical and linear process. The Remedia carries the irony of love as a linear process further as the speaker casts himself as dux, leading his army of reformed lovers (69–70), while women like Phyllis are abandoned or cast in a different and altogether less flattering light than the puellae of previous elegy. The same laurel-wreathed Phoebus invoked by Tibullus and Propertius to guide their efforts in singing of Messallinus’ priesthood and Octavian’s Actium victory (cf. Prop. 4.6.9–12) is also called upon by the praeceptor (here as vates) in his own attempts to bid adieu to elegiac love (Rem. 75–79). Thus assembling all the paraphernalia of a triumphal procession and renouncing erotic poetry (757–66), Ovid successfully moves his recovered (sanati) pupils along an unflinchingly linear course: hoc opus exegi: fessae date serta carinae; contigimus portus, quo mihi cursus erat. postmodo reddetis sacro pia vota poetae, carmine sanati femina virque meo (Rem.811–12).

The Amores were first composed as a five-book edition, and later published in three volumes not before 16 BCE, the Ars around 1 BCE/CE, though the exact temporal relationship between Am. 3.15 and his erotodidaxis is complicated by the fact that the revised edition of the Amores may have been published about the same time as the Ars. McKeown 1987, 88–9, however, suggests that poem 3.15 originally concluded the last book of the five volume edition. Both the Amores and the erotodidactic poems are commonly thought to have preceded the hexameter Metamorphoses (2 CE-8 CE; cf. Conte 1994b, 341). There is also the possibility that the elusive Medea, which Conte tentatively assigns to the period between 12 and 8 BCE, was composed just after the earlier edition the Amores. For the possible reference to the Medea at Amores 2.18.13–16, see above, p. 116, n. 10 (Chapter Five). 55

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[I have completed this work: give wreaths to a wearied keel; we have reached the port where I intended to go. Someday you will return pious offerings to your sacred poet, men and women healed by my song.]

As Philip Hardie points out in his discussion of the problems posed for the learned reader of Ovid’s Remedia (2006, 174), the praeceptor’s epilogue echoes the renuntio amoris that apparently concluded the Propertian amator’s affair with Cynthia, a renuntio that, as we have observed, was programmatically withdrawn at the opening of Propertius’ fourth book.56 As such we might suspect that this work (hoc opus) that Ovid’s praeceptor has accomplished has little to do with the rehabilitation of his subjects, but instead refers to the creation of a poem, and one that constantly questions the apparatus of those elegiac poems that preceded it. By materializing and reifying the system of signs that constitute—and fail to conclude—Augustan elegy, Ovid allows us to hold the works of his predecessors at arm’s length and question how their love stories came to mean anything at all.57 The teleological directives that have transformed the nature of amor as mora, forcing elegy into quasi-epic trappings, thus pave the way for Ovid’s ‘fine spun’ and dizzyingly linear course of transformations, or Metamorphoses. Ovid would appear to break ranks with his predecessors and—for real, this time—take on the generic enterprises that other erotic poets only dream of. As Stephen Hinds has noted (1999, 51–3), the Metamorphoses advertises itself as an adamantly linear project: primaque ab origine mundi/ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen (Met. 1.3-4, ‘spin forth a perpetual song, from the first origin of the world to my times’); and so it remains, up to the poet’s final vatic pronouncements over the future of his own work (siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam, Met. 15.879). Such a teleological drive— both more and less pronounced as Ovid attempts to fashion the revised Roman calendar in the elegiac Fasti—becomes cautiously retracted in the poet’s exile compositions, where the times of Augustus (in tua 56 Fulkerson’s 2004 article on the failure of the Remedia is also pertinent, since she demonstrates how much of the advice (‘irreparably contaminated by erotic discourse’, 212) in this poem simply returns the pupil to the Ars, undermining his progress and creating a distinctly circular experience of eros. 57 On this point I am influenced by the narratological theory of Paul Riceour 1984, 66–7, who comments on the conclusion that often shapes interpretation of the narrative that precedes it: ‘this conclusion is not logically implied by some previous premises. It gives the story an “end point,” which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole’.

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deduxi tempora, Caesar, opus! Tr. 2.560) supplant ‘Ovid’s’ self-promotion as the principal organizer of Roman chronology.58 The world of exile in fact returns the lover to his locked-out status, with a vengeance,59 hinting that generic evolution and the poet’s bid to grow up and get on with it are not only undesirable: the retraction itself, the posture of eternally arrested development, has become a dangerously codified element of elegiac discourse. In lamenting his graying temples (inficit et nigras alba senecta comas, Tr. 4.8.2), the Ovidian persona signals a Tithonian failure to achieve closure, despite having arrived at the exitus of his life, old age and its waning eroticism. And yet the very possibility for linear alignment with Roma aeterna, admitted by all three elegists, highlights the amatores ultimate failure at achieving this alignment: they all re-tract, re-cant, re-turn to the abject position that defines their relationship to the symbolic order. This move, one of fundamental regression, on some level restores our poets to the mode of women’s time, but with the realization that the puella is no longer indispensible to this construction of subjectivity. Kristeva’s rubric of gendered time illustrates the sort of political capital that can be gained or lost with any movement outside the cursory thrust of masculine temporality. Where ancient models stop short of addressing the social and political impact of investing in women’s time, Kristeva offers a consideration of how a dialectic of temporal modes can be used to determine a viable political stance for women—or any of the marginalized groups that ‘woman’ represents in Kristevan theory, including the famously effeminate elegiac amator—in the face of change. In light of the expectations and anguish that shaped the Principate, the new telos toward which all Roman history was being aimed, the elegiac interest in alternative temporalities, as well as in the puella suggestive of those temporal modes, becomes all the more explicable: women’s time offers a way of masking, if not altogether effacing, the linear trajectory that was pulling a new generation of citizens in its wake.

58 See Hinds 1999, 51: ‘ . . . the exiled Ovid’s requotation and revision of Met. 1.4 can be read as a rueful reordering of the hierarchy of his epic’s two final paragraphs: it is not after all the triumph of Ovid which is the telos of metamorphic history, but the triumph of Augustus’. 59 The amatory modes colouring Ovid’s exile poems are discussed, e.g. in Williams 2002 and Nagle 1980, 42–70.

Epilogue letum non omnia finit (Prop. 4.7.1) . . . Paris would always see [Nana] like that, shining high up in the midst of all that glittering crystal, like the Blessed Sacrament. No, it was just stupid to let yourself die when you’d reached a position like that. Now she must be looking a pretty sight in that room upstairs! ‘And all that pleasure gone for good!’ said Mignon in a melancholy voice, as became a man who did not like to see something good and useful wasted. (Zola, Nana, trans. Holden 1972, 460)

Cornelia of Propertius’ fourth book offers one account of an elite woman’s life course as it is written into elegiac discourse: the swift succession of temporal markers that shape her brief existence, culminating in marriage and childbirth, highlight the advantages that the courtesan-puella, who has no such milestones hurrying her along, holds out for her recalcitrant amator. Had Cornelia lived to the content old age that she hopes to secure for Paullus, she would not have faced the impoverished decrepitude that threatens the courtesan-puella, for as an elite woman and model citizen, her potential is limited by biology and reproductive responsibilities in a different way. At the same time, verbal and thematic parallels that link the matrona Cornelia in poem 4.11 to the meretrix Cynthia of poem 4.7 suggest that, within the larger scope of the genre, time and its governance of the human life course is gendered in a way that transcends class division.1 Both matrona and meretrix use 1

For parallels in depictions of Cynthia and Cornelia, see Grimal 1952, whose reading of the Cornelia elegy is much more positive than my own, though he rightly points to the poem’s identification of the matrona’s virtues as contiguous with and

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language of Roman legal terminology to defend their reputations for posterity, with a keen awareness of how their inscriptions in the symbolic remain largely beyond their control. Why then does Propertius imaginatively grant them this power to set the record straight? Questions regarding the relationship between Cynthia’s indictment in poem 4.7 and her portrayal earlier in the corpus have been productively raised and explored by scholars, in ways that highlight Propertius’ own dismantling of the conventions that govern erotic elegy and its portrayal of the puella.2 This dismantling is furthered in book four through the revelatory proximity of Acanthis (poem 4.5; Janan 2001, 108–9), who as lena issues a sharp critique of the lover’s persuasive rhetoric and whose impoverished old age serves as a cautionary tale to the mistress gullible enough to concede to it. For all the book’s attempts to pry apart the artificial composite of the mistress, shards of the puella’s fragmented past, present, and future are reconstructed in Propertius’ final oeuvre as an alternate biography, in toto, though one that equally serves the amator’s temporal interests. Poem 4.7 follows the nationalist musings on Augustus’ Actium victory in poem 4.6. Together they match the recantatory motion of poem 4.1, which countered the poet’s initial patriotic fervour with a reminder of his own life story from boyhood, a history suggestively implicated in his failure to evolve beyond amatory verse.3 So too does poem 4.7 withdraw from the imperialist advances that conclude its predecessor (4.6.83–84) and turn back to Cynthia’s life and death, abruptly foregrounded. The image that opens the poem is one of a corpse come lately from the funeral pyre, charred by the flames, bones crackling and lips withered from Lethe’s waters. For a woman whose necessary for the survival of the Roman state (449). Rambaux 2001, 309–12 also details the parallels in elegies 4.7 and 4.11 (as well as in the general characterization of Cynthia and Cornelia). It is difficult to accept Rambaux’s argument that both Cynthia and Cornelia ‘appartenaient à une grande famille’, based on a reference to the puella’s avus at 3.20.8, a poem in which Cynthia is never named. See James 2003, 266 n. 53 for a persuasive argument against identifying the puella of poem 3.20 with Cynthia. 2 See especially Wyke 2002 (revised from 1987), 99–108 and Janan 2001, 100–13. On Cynthia’s return as a mortuos ab inferis excitare that works against the traditions of Late Republican rhetoric, see Dufallo 2007, 29–34. 3 For poems 4.6 and 4.7 as the ‘double vision’ that marks the book’s center, see Janan 2001, 102–4; see Welch 2005, 31–2, for the ‘feminine’ influence—and its implications for the poet’s generic affiliations—that defines the poet’s biography in poem 4.1.

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change was so often observed and predicted in the corpus, however, the dead Cynthia remains very much ‘the same’: eosdem habuit secum quibus est elata capillos, eosdem oculos: lateri vestis adusta fuit, et solitum digito beryllon adederat ignis, summaque Lethaeus triverat ora liquor. spirantisque animos et vocem misit: at illi pollicibus fragiles increpuere manus: . . . (4.7.7–12). [She had the same hair as when she was carried out (to the grave), and the same eyes: her garment was burnt at her side, and the fire had eaten away the usual beryl on her finger, and the water of Lethe had worn away the edges of her lips. She sent forth the voice and spirit as if still living: but her brittle hands snapped sharply with her thumbs.]

Cynthia must retain something of her former self in order to be identified; and the physical details (so commentators remind us) take us back, however humorously or incongruously,4 to various hauntings experienced by Greco–Roman literary heroes since Patroclus first appeared to Achilles in book twenty-three of the Iliad (Il. 23.65–7). At the same time, Cynthia’s appearance in poem 4.7, the macabre details of which distinguish it from other undead lovers in the Propertian corpus,5 prompts reassessment of Cynthia’s evolution from the moment when she first seized the amator with her eyes (1.1.1) to the post-mortem moment when he stares dumbfounded back into them, apparently unchanged. Graphic details that piquantly mingle the remembrance of torn fabric and exposed thighs (cf. 2.2.12; 2.15.17–18) with a faint stench of rotting flesh confirm Papanghelis’ assessment of the ‘poetic potential in a woman’s decay’ (1987, 152). And yet the aesthetic—and aestheticizing—effect accomplished by the paradoxically grotesque beauty of Cynthia’s reanimated corpse serves as a mirror reflection of the temporal paradox that has defined her experience as an elegiac puella. Cynthia’s defence of her fides cannot help but glance at her career as a meretrix (Hutchinson 2006, 171), a career that readers of book four will be primed to evaluate from Acanthis’ relatively aged, if 4 For an overview of the poem’s perceived incongruity and resulting comic effects, see Papanghelis 1987, 147–9. 5 cf. Protesilaus of poem 1.19; see Janan 2001, 109; cf. also Hutchinson 2006, 173, who notes that ‘decay becomes more evident than continuity’ in Cynthia.

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equally mortal, perspective. Cynthia recounts the same genre-defining cyclical engagements woven throughout the elegiac corpus, as she repeatedly entertained the poet-lover’s affections in the Subura (quotiens . . . saepe, 4.7.17–20), wearing out her window-sill with renewed nightly guiles (trita fenestra, 4.7.16). And yet, from the puella’s perspective, the cyclical nature of women’s time cannot forestall the inevitable: in death, she remains under the temporal authority of her amator, who might have granted her another day (unum impetrassem te revocante diem, 4.7.24) or bid her funeral bier to move a tad more slowly beyond the city gates (iussisses lectum lentius ire meum, 30). In death, Cynthia appropriates for herself the same breve memorial—a stark contrast to her longa regna over his poetry (4.7.50)—that the poet-lover had once feared would mark his demise at the hands of a dura puella (et breve in exiguo marmore nomen ero, 2.1.72). The fates of poet and puella will remain, like their bones, critically intertwined, though Cynthia’s indications of the poet’s temporal authority over her remind us that her life, however brief or protracted, will always serve to propel or retard the amator’s love and life story. Cynthia’s request that the amator plant Bacchic ivy on her grave mimetically seals the relationship between the artist’s fertile productivity and the mortality of the puella who insures it: pone hederam tumulo, mihi quae praegnante corymbo/ molli contortis alliget ossa comis (4.7.79–80, ‘on my tomb plant ivy, which by its swelling cluster will bind my gentle bones with its twisted leaves’).6 In this study, I have above all attempted to demonstrate that the elegiac puella, in her capacity as a socially and symbolically marginal figure, offers the poet-lover a space of retreat, a suspension of the literary and political teleologies that threaten to shape the course of his life. Though our elegiac speakers fashion a timeless puella awaiting her lover in the safety of chora-like containment, they also interrogate the very

6 Or, interpreting the lines as a prohibition against planting ivy, we might conclude that Cynthia is trying to sever the ties that bind her mortality to her poet’s immortalizing art. Pone is Sandbach’s emendation, accepted by Fedeli and others. Hutchinson 2006, 186 retains pelle and emends the following clause to indicate a negative purpose—i.e. ‘remove the ivy from my tomb, so that it does not . . . ’. On Cynthia’s rejection of the ivy sacred to Bacchus, poets, and Propertius in particular (2.5.26, 2.30.39, 4.1.62), see Richardson 1977, 460–1; cf. Janan 2001, 112. The ivy in poem 7 also alludes to the ivy that will grace Bacchus’ hair in Propertius’ poetry (3.17.29–30), if the amator should ever manage to move beyond erotic suffering and enjoy what remains of his life (quod superest vitae, 3.17.19).

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myths they have created. As Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid respectively leave us with an aging lena, a dead matron, and an overwhelmingly mortal puella-in-training, we cannot help but gauge the distance between the fates of the rapidly deteriorating beloved and her nearly immortal lover. I must qualify the poet-lover’s longevity, the rewards of maturity that await him, however, because in the end, as various tropes of recantation attest, the amator fails to align his own glorious future with that most timeless of entities, Rome itself, the ‘empire without end’ (imperium sine fine, Aen. 1.279) of Vergil’s Aeneid. A comparison between the construction of time and teleology characteristic of Augustan elegy and that of Augustan epic may clarify the point. This comparison is hardly exhaustive, but merely offered to underscore the different temporal economies—offered as solutions to the single problem of formulating a new Principate—that shape the concerns of roughly contemporary poetic discourses. Vergil’s poem initially presents Aeneas’ involvement with Dido as a delay accomplished in part through erotic discourse (nunc Phoenissa tenet Dido blandisque moratur/vocibus, 1.670–1). In Dido’s appeals to Aeneas through her sister Anna, she asks not to prevent the foundation of the Roman state, but only to delay it, through an ‘empty’ or ‘meaningless’ (inane) grant of time: cur mea dicta negat duras demittere in auris? quo ruit? extremum hoc miserae det munus amanti: exspectet facilemque fugam ventosque ferentis. non iam coniugium antiquum, quod prodidit, oro, nec pulchro ut Latio careat regnumque relinquat: tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere. extremam hanc oro veniam (miserere sororis), quam mihi cum dederit cumulatam morte remittam (Aen. 4.428–36). [Why does he refuse to allow my words in his unyielding ears? To what place does he hurry? Let him allow this final gift to a wretched lover: Let him wait for an easy departure and winds to carry him. I no longer ask for that time-honoured wedlock, which he betrayed, nor that he be without lovely Latium and relinquish his kingdom: I seek a useless stretch of time, respite and space for my heartbreak, until my fortune teaches me, conquered, how to grieve. I beg this final favour (take pity on your sister), which, when he will have given it to me, I will pay back with interest in death.]

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Aeneas, unmoved as an oak-tree, firm ‘with age-old strength’ (annoso . . . robore, 4.441), does not grant even this brief deduction of inane tempus, to be paid back with interest in a quasi-puella’s death. Hinting at the elegiac nature of Dido’s complaints (duras in auris, miserae amanti), Vergil suggestively juxtaposes the queen’s pliant and plaintive nature with the unswerving pietas of a hero for whom no measure of time is meaningless. It is against the predestined telos of Augustus’ ancestor that our elegists have consistently defined themselves, wavering in their devotion to a puella, but finally renouncing their designs for responsible citizenship. All the same, if Aeneas’ compliance with the dictates of ‘the fates’ (fata, cf. Aen. 1.258) offers a model of purpose-driven teleology against which the elegists fashion their poet-lovers, it is also true that the epic hero and those same poet-lovers share in the impulse to look outside their own personae for reasons of delay or departure, claiming to bow to the dictates of a higher order. Significant divergence regarding just what that higher order is—Jupiter’s promise of Roman hegemony or the ‘hard laws’ (durae leges) of a puella—we may read as dialectical responses to the most pertinent questions facing the Roman citizenry under the Augustan Principate. As I hope to have shown in this study, those questions arise largely in reaction to the revised temporal trajectories assigned to both the Roman state and the individual citizen. A look at the elegiac language of time, and in particular language that expresses the desire to forestall what was quickly becoming the inevitable, has, I hope, revealed something of the genre’s raison d’être, though a similar concern evident in the Aeneid reminds us that this language was by no means exclusive to love elegy. There is a profound sense in elegy that youth is no longer endowed with the freedom (libertas) that traditionally defined it, and as such its discourse productively engages with the articulation of young manhood found in contemporary Augustan literature. Though, during the early Principate, the elegiac puella proved to be the poet-lover’s answer to the question of temporal exigencies, the courtesan as domina meets her own end with that of the genre. Once Rome settled down into a comfortable, if complacent, monarchy, the courtesan’s subversive power as an infamis, and thus emphatically marginalized figure, was rendered all but ineffectual. The timing of her demise as a celebrated literary figure we may perhaps appreciate more fully through another literary portrait of a courtesan from a different era:

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‘Ah, she’s changed, she’s changed,’ murmured Rose Mignon, the last to leave. She went out and shut the door. Nana was left alone, her face upturned in the light from the candle. What lay on the pillow was a charnel-house, a heap of puss and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh. The pustules had invaded the whole face, so that one pock touched the next. Withered and sunken, they had taken on the greyish colour of mud, and on that shapeless pulp, in which features had ceased to be discernible, they already looked like mould from the grave . . . [A]round this grotesque and horrible mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed in a beautiful stream of gold. Venus was decomposing. It was as if the poison she had picked up in the gutters, from the carcasses left there by the roadside, that ferment with which she had poisoned a whole people, had now risen to her face and rotted it. The room was empty. A great breath of despair came up from the boulevard and filled out the curtains. ‘To Berlin! To Berlin! To Berlin!’ (From Emile Zola, Nana; trans. Holden 1972, 470)

The conclusion to Zola’s novel, in which the perennially youthful and fecund Nana finally succumbs to smallpox, a mortality drawn in excruciatingly realistic detail on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, reminds us of the courtesan’s power to signify the most acute anxieties over social, economic, and political transformation. For Zola, Nana’s grotesque and elaborate beauty, just like her grotesque and horrific decomposition, define the excesses of the Second Empire that culminated in the Belle Époque of Parisian society. She is, like the Augustan elegiac puella, and like the other grandes cocottes and camélias of nineteenth-century France, a signifier of those alternatives to a more puritanical and socially encouraged course of life that leads to the strengthening of political sanctimony and imperial progress. And yet the courtesan, by the very nature of her profession and the reality of her transient beauty, rarely holds her place in the life course of the politically or socially heterodox citizen. She is, in a sense, glorified because of her transience—the opportunity that she provides for deferral—so that, in the aftermath of her demise, the continued arrested development of the Augustan amator resounds all the more clearly. Before condemning our poets (or novelists) for using and then discarding this potent signifier, it is worth reiterating the astute awareness of the elegists for their subject matter, their understanding

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of the puella’s own past, present, and future. It is said that Zola developed a curious sympathy for his subject, modelled principally on the celebrated courtesan Blanche d’Antigny, who died at the age of thirty-four, probably from tuberculosis, after sacrificing her own lucrative career to nurse an ailing and impoverished lover.7 We might also say that our elegists, despite the vituperation they assign to their self-interested poet-lovers, betray a kind of sympathy for their own subjects, whether they are depicted as perennially young or inevitably old. For, as the putrid and consumptive lena inverts the amator’s rhetoric, she not only shows us what may become of the courtesan in men’s time, but also equips the puella with a means of defending herself against that particular fate. Though the elegist as poet-lover takes an adamant stand against the lena’s instruction, he also allows his beloved to lend an attentive ear, and, for that, the puella is all the wiser. For the ‘human, balanced, and sympathetic interest’ Zola eventually developed for his character Nana, see Holden’s introduction to his translation of Nana 1972, 8. For an insightful and eloquent portrait of Blanche d’ Antigny, see Griffin 2001, esp. 57–65. It is perhaps worth noting that among the remarkable qualities of the courtesan figure as she is depicted throughout history, Griffin assigns preeminence to the virtue of ‘timing’. 7

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Index Locorum APOLLODORUS Library (Bibliotheca) 3.9.2: 66 APPIAN 3.7.43: 51 3.12.87–8: 52 AUGUSTUS Res Gestae 1: 51 6.1: 42 n. 31 14: 41, 57 19: 55 n. 67 22: 54 35: 39, 55 AULUS GELLIUS Noctes Atticae 2.15.1–4: 44 10.28.1: 37 n. 6 CALLIMACHUS Aetia fr. 1.5: 117 fr. 1.24: 117 fr. 1.27–8: 69 fr. 1.29–38: 5 n. 11, 223 n. 5 Hymn to Apollo 105: 124 111–12: 117–18 CASSIUS DIO 51.22.4: 40 n. 21 52.20: 41 n. 25 52.25: 41 52.26: 39 53.13: 42 n. 28 53.28: 57 n. 71 54.16: 43, 46 54.16.2: 48 n. 51 54.26: 44 n. 37 54.26.1: 40 n. 21 55.10: 38 56.1: 43 56.7: 43 CATULLUS 2.11–13: 67 n. 16 5.2: 12, 126

5.6–7: 12 8.14–18: 15 n. 35 50.1: 89 n. 6 51.13: 89 n. 6 58: 14 61.56: 12 62: 12 62.49: 92 62.55–9: 92–3 63.63: 12; 14 n. 34 64.58,78: 12 68.16–17: 12 100.2: 12 70: 14 72: 14 76.21: 89 n. 6 87.1–2: 14 CICERO Brutus 323: 41 De Natura Deorum 1.77 De Officiis 1.32.117–18: 129 2.59: 41 De Senectute 10.33: 35, 37 n. 9 60: 35 n. 4 82: 91 n. 12 Epistulae ad Atticum 16.8–9: 51 Epistulae ad Brutum 1.16: 52 Epistulae ad Familiares 5.7.3: 63 n. 8 11.20: 51 Philippics 5.15.42: 51 5.42–7: 52 5.50: 52 n. 60 13.11.24–5: 51 Pro Caelio 12.30: 83 Tusculan Disputations 5.72: 63 n. 7

274

Index Locorum

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS Roman Antiquities 7.72: 41 n. 24 EURIPIDES Hippolytus 215–21: 17 HESIOD Works and Days 209–14: 128 287–9: 137 HOMER Iliad 11.1: 5 n. 11 23.65–7: 253 Odyssey 5.1–2: 173 n. 58 5.203–4: 173 n. 58 HOMERIC HYMN TO APHRODITE 218–238: 204 n. 40 227–238: 4–5 HORACE Carmen Saeculare 1: 54 5–8: 55 6: 125 9: 54 9–11: 55 13–14: 55 16–20: 55 45: 55, 126 49–52: 54 Epodes 14: 118 15.9: 54 Odes 1.6.19: 81 1.13.8: 131 n. 38 1.19: 118 1.21.2: 54 1.25: 97, 208 2.12: 118 3.3.4: 125 3.6: 42 n. 31 3.6.23: 63 n. 8 3.8.12: 70 n. 24 4.1–12: 11 JUVENAL Satires 6.592–601: 48 n. 52

LIVY Ab Urbe Condita 1.9.1–3: 184–5 1.43: 37 n. 7 1.59.1: 63 n. 8 6.27.1: 63 n. 8 LUCRETIUS De Rerum Natura 3.95: 63 n. 7 3.838–41: 223 n. 6 4.1278–87: 81 n. 44 MARTIAL Epigrammata 14.189: 59, 140 n. 56 MELEAGER Palatine Anthology (Anthologia Graeca) 12.101: 64–5 OVID Amores 1.1: 114, 123 1.1.13: 123 n. 27 1.1.20: 248 1.1.26: 246 1.2.2: 35 n. 5 1.2.51–2: 123 n. 27 1.3: 21 n. 46 1.3.15–16: 114 n. 4 1.3.26: 214 1.5.8–12: 21 n. 46 1.6.41–2: 131 n. 39 1.8: 213–15 1.8.5–18: 75 1.8.11–18: 210–11 1.8.49–54: 26 n. 55, 213 1.8.91–2: 47 n. 49 1.8.105–08: 214–15 1.8.110–14: 114 1.9: 113 1.9.1–4: 12, 35 n. 5 1.9.3–4: 114 1.9.4: 221 1.9.41: 113 1.10.29: 14 1.13.1: 204 n. 40 1.13.43–4: 157 n. 28 1.15.1–6: 124–5 1.15.3: 248 1.15.41–2: 137 1.15.42: 125

Index Locorum 2.1: 125–7 2.1.3–10: 125 2.1.11–20: 126 2.1.17–18: 123 2.1.23–4: 76 n. 35, 126 2.5.35–6: 221 2.9.28: 102 2.10.19: 113 2.10.35–8: 99 n. 27 2.11.1–6: 21 2.13–14: 48 n. 52 2.18: 116 n. 10, 167–8, 248 2.19.23: 114 n. 4 2.19.51–2: 131–2 3.1: 115–16, 123, 127–38, 145 3.1.15–18: 130–2 3.1.21–30: 132–4 3.1.61–70: 136–8 3.4.21–22: 172 3.7: 6 n. 13 3.7.13–16: 113 3.11: 138 3.15: 247 3.15.5–6: 7 Ars Amatoria 1.31–4: 8 1.39: 170 1.181–92: 56 1.399–418: 169 1.527: 67 n. 17 1.703–4: 170 2.113–22: 217 2.123–44: 173 2.185–92: 66 2.188: 67 n. 15 2.229: 113–14 n. 2 2.277–8: 21 2.353: 25 2.641–662: 171 2.663–702: 221 n. 2 2.717–18: 170 2.731–2: 170 3.3: 171 3.37–8: 25 3.57–8: 8 3.59–68: 215–17 3.59–82: 26 n. 55 3.61–83: 172 3.113–14: 21 3.161–8: 206 3.298–306: 172 3.346–50: 25

3.415–16: 172 n. 57 3.418: 173 3.473: 171 n. 50 3.565: 221 3.611–61: 8 3.752: 170–1 3.810: 170 Fasti 3.771–88: 79 n. 41 Medicamina Faciei Femineae 43–50: 217 n. 73 Metamorphoses 1.3–4: 249, 250 n. 58 15.879: 249 Remedia 23–4: 123 n. 27 55–6: 25, 175, 178 83–114: 174 461: 66 589–94: 175–7 591–608: 25, 173, 175–9 599–604: 177–8 605–9: 179 780: 113–14 n. 2 811–12: 248–9 Tristia 2.237–470: 139 2.560: 249–50 4.8.2: 250 4.10: 139 4.10.55–64: 139–41 4.10.58: 35 n. 5 4.10.93: 140 PERSIUS Satires 5.30–38: 38 PHILODEMUS Palatine Anthology (Anthologia Graeca) 5.123: 156–7 PLATO Phaedrus 258e-259d: 5 n. 11 Timaeus 49a: 149 52a-b: 149 PLAUTUS Epidicus 137: 81 n. 44 Mostellaria 199–202: 190 n. 15

275

276 PLAUTUS (cont.) 287–91: 190 n. 15 PLUTARCH Life of Antonius 16: 51 Moralia 207 e: 55 PROPERTIUS 1.1: 2, 157 1.1.1: 253 1.1.1–4: 73, 155 n. 23 1.1.1–8: 61–5 1.1.3: 208 1.1.4: 68 1.1.9–18: 66–72 1.1.12: 70 n. 25 1.1.17: 96 n. 23 1.1.18: 60 1.1.19–24: 60, 74–7, 126 1.1.25: 9 1.1.25–30: 78–80 1.1.31–8: 80–2 1.1.34: 123, 246 1.1.35–6: 60, 91, 237 1.2.1: 74 1.2.15–22: 21 n. 46 1.2.31: 74 1.3: 25, 153–60 1.3.2: 202 1.3.31–4: 155–7 1.3.32–3: 77 1.3.35–6: 74 1.3.35–40: 157–8 1.3.41–6: 159–60 1.3.43: 74 1.4.28: 193 1.6: 7, 70–1 1.6.1–4: 80 1.6.5–6: 73 1.6.12: 131 1.6.31–4: 80 1.6.34: 17 n. 41, 244 1.7.1–8: 7 1.7.7–8: 12, 236 1.7.7–10: 232–3 1.7.8: 35 n. 5, 78 1.7.20: 9 n. 20 1.7.26: 78 1.8: 160–1 1.8.27: 73 1.10.2–9: 77 1.10.29–30: 82

Index Locorum 1.11.29: 63 n. 6 1.12.11: 74 1.12.20: 74 1.13.6–8: 69 1.14.9–10: 71 1.14.21: 35 n. 5 1.15.4: 131 1.15.23: 77 n. 37 1.17.9: 77 n. 37 2.1: 120–1, 122 2.1.16: 17 n. 41, 50 2.1.72: 137 n. 50, 218, 254 2.1.73: 35 n. 5 2.1.73–8: 120–1 2.1.78: 192 n. 20 2.2.3: 21 n. 46, 192–3 2.2.3–6: 206 2.2.15–16: 196 2.3.12: 198–9 2.4.15–16: 209 n. 49 2.5.27: 194 2.7: 6, 8, 34 n. 2, 42 2.8.8: 3 2.9: 159 n. 29 2.9.33: 196 2.9.34: 199 2.10: 120 n. 22, 233, 235 2.10.7–8: 242 n. 45 2.12.5–6: 68 2.14.9–10: 11 2.14.14: 131 2.14.22: 131 2.14.32: 202 2.15: 196–9 2.15.8: 131, 202 2.15.19–26: 197–8 2.15.20: 47 n. 49 2.15.23–4: 203 2.15.39: 196 2.15.49–54: 198–9 2.16.22: 199 n. 30 2.17.17: 199 2.18(a-b): 193–5, 200–7 2.18a.5–8: 201–2 2.18a.5–22: 4–5 2.18a.9–18: 202–3 2.18a.19: 35 n. 5 2.18a.19–20: 26 n. 55, 204 2.18a.20: 212, 221 2.18b.25: 206 2.18b.30: 206 2.18b.33–4: 47 n. 49

Index Locorum 2.20.21–2: 76 2.23.23–4: 79 n. 39, 82 2.25.5–10: 220–1 2.25.9–10: 206 2.25.28: 221 n. 3 2.25.37: 220 2.26.58: 235 2.28.37: 76 2.28.57: 26 n. 55 2.29.9: 14 2.29.15: 212 n. 60 2.29.27: 62 2.30.13–18: 12 2.30.27: 64 n. 9 2.33b.33–6: 193 2.34.23: 202 n. 37 2.34.51–4: 234 2.34.55: 7 n. 15 2.34.59–84: 11 3.1.17: 64 n. 9 3.3.19–24: 119 3.4.7–15: 119 3.5: 233–5 3.5.23–6: 233–4 3.5.47–8: 234, 236 3.7.19: 222 3.8.11: 14 3.9: 121–2, 235 3.9.20: 122 3.9.35–6: 121 3.9.45–57: 122 3.9.47: 138 3.10.17: 21 n. 46, 193 3.11.49: 14 3.12.15: 62 3.12.17: 63 n. 5 3.15.3–4: 79 3.15.7: 79 n. 40 3.17: 235–6 3.17.19–20: 235, 254 n. 6 3.17.29–30: 254 n. 6 3.20.7: 62 3.20.8: 47 n. 49, 252 3.20.14: 77, 157 n. 28 3.21: 236 3.22: 8, 236 3.23: 237 3.24/25: 97, 207–8 3.24/25.1: 14 3.24/25.9: 76 3.24/25.31: 234, 237 3.24/25.31–8: 2–3, 207–8

3.24/25.32: 202 3.24/25.36: 14 4.1: 238–42 4.1.55–8: 239 4.1.57: 28 4.1.129–30: 7 n. 15 4.1.132: 79 n. 41, 244 4.1.143–6: 243, 247 4.3.6: 242 4.3.45: 63 n. 5 4.4.1: 242 4.5: 211–12 4.5.1: 242 4.5.11–18: 75 4.5.13–14: 210 4.5.59–62: 26 n. 55, 211–12 4.5.61–2: 210 n. 54 4.5.67: 216 n. 71 4.6.64: 242 4.6.83–4: 252 4.7: 252–4 4.7.1: 242, 251 4.7.7–12: 253 4.7.15–18: 38 4.7.79–80: 254 4.8.1: 238 4.8.6: 242 n. 44 4.8.13: 62 4.11: 243–7 4.11.1: 242 4.11.1–4: 243–4 4.11.33–6: 244–5 4.11.93–6: 245–6 QUINTILIAN Institutio Oratoria 8.5.6: 139 10.1.98: 139 SAPPHO fr.58–9: 204–5 SERVIUS Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues 1.42: 53 n. 61 4.48–9: 38 n. 13 SUETONIUS Divus Augustus 12: 51 n. 58 26: 57 31: 40 n. 22 32: 44 n. 37

277

278 SUETONIUS (cont.) 34: 34 n. 2, 43 35: 44 n. 37 38: 40 n. 21, 41 43: 40 44: 40 n. 22 56: 57 n. 71 64: 57 n. 71 SULPICIA (Corp. Tib.) 3.14–15: 5–6 n. 12 3.18: 5–6 n. 12 TACITUS Annales 2.83: 40 n. 21 TERENCE Andria 608: 89 n. 5 Eunuchus 972: 81 n. 44 TERTULLIAN 4.8: 42 n. 32 TIBULLUS 1.1: 88–98 1.1.5–10: 89–91 1.1.7: 92 1.1.9: 230 1.1.23: 86, 107 1.1.53: 87 1.1.53–6: 7 1.1.53–8: 91 1.1.57–8: 88, 110 1.1.58–74: 93–6 1.1.65–72: 35 n. 5 1.1.69: 186 1.1.69–72: 12 1.1.71: 87 1.1.73–4: 88 1.1.77: 96 1.2.23–4: 96 1.2.35: 14 1.2.43–54: 75 1.2.55–6: 162 1.2.91–100: 96–7 1.3: 25, 98–101, 161–7 1.3.1: 98, 105 1.3.1–4: 7, 17 n. 41 1.3.11–16: 162–3 1.3.19–20: 163 1.3.23–32: 88, 163–5 1.3.35–6: 98 1.3.35–50: 21

Index Locorum 1.3.50: 99 1.3.53: 105 1.3.53–6: 99–100 1.3.61–4: 102 1.3.63–4: 100 1.3.67–82: 100 n. 30 1.3.82 1.3.83–4: 101 1.3.83–94: 165–7 1.4: 187–9 1.4.27–34: 68 1.4.27–38: 34 n. 1, 187–8 1.4.28: 91 n. 14 1.4.37–8: 54, 229 1.4.79–80: 12, 35 n. 5, 188 1.4.81: 131 1.5: 101–3 1.5.3–4: 88, 101, 133 1.5.40: 14 1.5.49–58: 209–10 1.5.59: 75 1.5.69–70: 102 1.6: 103–4 1.6.17: 35 n. 5 1.6.58–9: 47 n. 49 1.6.67–8: 8 1.6.75: 101 1.6.75–84: 186 1.6.77–82: 20 1.6.77–86: 26 n. 55, 103 1.6.82: 88, 97, 109 1.6.85–6: 87, 88 1.7: 87, 104–9, 224 1.7.1–8: 104–5 1.7.9: 87, 105, 110 1.7.27–48: 106–7, 111 1.7.55: 133 1.7.55–64: 107–9 1.7.56: 20, 88, 97 1.8: 189–92 1.8.15–16: 189–90, 191 1.8.17–26: 75 1.8.21: 76 n. 35 1.8.39–50: 26 n. 55, 190–2, 208 1.8.41: 78 n. 38 1.8.43: 196 1.8.43–4: 206 1.8.45: 207 n. 44 1.8.78: 192 1.9.47–50: 193 n. 22 1.10.39–40: 86 1.10.39–44: 109–10, 221

Index Locorum 1.10.43–44: 85, 97, 112 2.1.34: 111 2.1.73–4: 111, 227 2.2.18–20: 103 2.4.2: 80 n. 42 2.5: 112, 224–30 2.5.91–4: 225–7 2.5.109: 62 n. 3, 86 2.5.109–12: 227–8 2.5.113–22: 228–9 2.5.114: 231 2.5.121: 54 2.6: 229–32 2.6.13–14: 230 2.6.29–40: 47 n. 49 2.6.36: 131 2.6.44–53: 210 ULPIANUS (Digest) 13.2: 48 n. 51 23.2: 49 n. 56 23.2.43.6: 49 VALERIUS MAXIMUS 6.9: 44 VELLEIUS PATERCULUS

2.62.6: 51 VERGIL Aeneid 1.279: 255 1.670–1: 255 4.428–36: 255–6 4.441: 256 5.545–602: 40 7.378–83: 102 n. 34 Eclogues 1.42: 53 4.26–8: 108 6: 118 10: 15–17 Georgics 2.523–6: 225 n. 11 3.40–3: 118 n. 15 3.16–18: 11 4.119: 212 n. 58 4.563–6: 11 XENOPHON Memorabilia 2.1.20: 137 2.1.21: 129 2.1.21–33: 134–6

279

General Index Acanthis 208–16, 242, 252–3 Actium 54, 198, 248, 252 adulescentia 37 n. 9 see also iuventas adultery 42, 46 n. 46 see also lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea Aeneas 18, 39, 112, 224, 226, 255–6 aging 5, 10, 13, 33–6, 48, 114, 188, 193–4, 213, 215–16, 223, 229 amator historical context of 17–20 poetic life course 3, 28–9, 35–6, 47, 120–1, 181–2, 185–6, 188, 219–23, 254–6 puer as 186, 189–92 social class 7, 34, 40 as Tithonus figure 4–5, 223, 232 Amor/amor in Ovid 113–14, 116 n. 10, 123, 125, 127, 249 in Propertius 66, 68, 73, 78, 80, 81–3, 234 (as tardus) 20, 36, 57, 68–70, 73, 145 in Tibullus 85, 93, 97, 111, 131, 167, 227 Ancona, Ronnie 10–11, 34 n. 1, 182 n. 2, 186 n. 9 Antony, Marc 116 anus 2–3, 5, 14, 25, 101, 165–7, 191, 194, 204–5, 207–18 Apollo 77, 118, 189, 224, 227, 229, 241 and Augustus 33, 53–5 Ara pacis 57 Ariadne 153–4, 160, 168, 169 n. 46 Atalanta 59–60, 63, 66–8, 74 Augustus, Emperor (C. Octavius) 18, 36, 111, 116, 134, 249–50, 256 and citizen life course 19, 38–44, 49, 236 and triumphal processions 106 n. 40, 107 n. 44, 119, 122, 235 youthful representations of 33, 50–7, 123 n. 27, 138 n. 54, 229 Aurora 4–5, 21, 157 n. 28, 165–6, 173 n. 58, 193–6, 199–207, 220

autobiography 10, 55, 115, 137 in Ovid’s Tristia 138–41 Bacchant 154, 175, 176, 178, 209 Bacchus 56, 79 n. 41, 154 n. 21, 176, 187, 189, 235, 247, 254 n. 6 identified with Osiris 106–7, 109 n. 45 bucolic, see pastoral poetry bulla 38, 240, 244 Caesar, Julius 39, 51, 53, 227 calendar 19, 23 n. 49, 226, 249 Callimachus 69, 102, 117–18, 119 n. 18, 124, 175 n. 61, 223 n. 5 casta 62–4, 75, 101, 129, 166 Cato the Elder (in Cicero’s De Senectute) 35, 37 n. 9, 45 n. 44, 202 n. 36 Catullus 12–15, 34 n. 1, 89, 92, 126 chora 146, 149–52 and feminine subjectivity 22, 174, 150 and Kristeva 21, 146, 149–51, 174, 180, 231 and Plato 149–50 and properties of puella 25, 73–4, 152, 159–61, 167, 181, 254 chronology 1, 61–2, 76 of amator’s youth 79, 80 and generic evolution 248 Roman 250 (see also calendar) Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero) 35, 41, 44, 49, 51–2, 83 Cleopatra 242 closure and death 231–2, 241, 243, 250 and elegiac narrative 2, 3 n. 7, 6–7, 28, 36, 73, 168, 201, 218, 228, 230, 237 and Kristevan drives 231 n. 23 coming–of–age for elite Roman male 33–44 as generic convention 36, 83, 116, 127–8, 134

General Index for new generation under Principate 55 see also toga virilis Corinna 48 n. 52, 139 Cornelia 242, 243–6, 251 courtesan/meretrix elegiac puella as 8, 18, 168, 256 impoverished future of 109, 208, 211, 215 and matrona 129, 145, 245, 251 and New Comedy 6, 166, 190 n. 15, 198 n. 28 social and legal status 34, 47–9, 63, 152 n. 19, 164, 179, 215–17, 253 Zola’s Nana as 257–8 cultus 184, 194, 214, 217 cursus honorum 7, 19, 35 n. 4, 41, 57, 70, 228, 236 Cynthia 2–3, 9, 14, 20, 25, 61, 63, 65, 72–7, 83, 131, 145, 192–3 as Aurora figure 4–5, 194–207 future/old age of 207–9, 212, 218 social and legal status 8 n. 17, 63 and women’s time 153–61, 166–7, 168–9, 174–5 death drive 98–9, 162 n. 33, 231 deferral 115–16, 243, 257 and elegiac affair 6, 73 and generic evolution 28, 86, 123, 129, 138, 239 in Ovid’s erotodidaxis 169 delay, as characteristic of elegy 6, 9–10, 59–60, 72, 80–2, 91, 115, 129, 133, 159, 241 see also mora Delia 14, 87–8, 91–8, 100, 138, 188, 224 future/old age of 87, 101, 103–4, 105, 109–10, 166, 169, 174, 186 social and legal status (as puella of Tib. 1.6) 8 and women’s time 87–8, 98, 161–5, 167, 175 Dido 255–6 Dio (Cassius Dio) 33, 39–40, 41, 42 n. 28, 43, 44 n. 37, 46, 48 n. 51, 50 Dionysus 176 n. 64 see also Bacchus Dipsas 114, 210–11, 213–15 domina 256 Cynthia as 63, 199 Delia as 93, 96

281

epic 11 n. 26, 69, 184–5, 255 Ovidian 24 n. 51, 139, 247, 250 n. 58 and recusatio 115, 117–20, 121–2, 126–7, 133 equestrian class 7, 34, 40 and Augustan Principate 41, 43, 57, 121 n. 23 eternity of amator 136, 206 as property of women’s time 22, 28, 151, 246 of puella 21, 145, 174, 180 exclusus amator 25, 127, 163, 200, 246 n. 52 see also paraclausithyron family 150, 176 n. 64 of Augustus (Imperial) 57, 106 n. 40 and inheritance 7 n. 15 and lineage 91, 244, 255 and matrona 45, 47 during Principate 37 n. 8, 43 and puella 47 n. 49 father Augustus as 39, 55–6 Messalla as 106, 110, 228–9 in Plato’s Timaeus 149 role in son’s maturation 38, 108, 224 and time in western thought 151 n. 16 fatherhood 34 n. 2, 110 n. 49 feminine subjectivity 24, 152–3, 247 see also time and feminine subjectivity feminism 8 n. 18, 24, 26 freedom, see libertas Freud, Sigmund 99, 231 n. 23 Gallus, Cornelius 5 n. 12, 15–17, 75 n. 29, 118, 119 n. 18 as character in Propertius’ Monobiblos 67, 69, 70 n. 23, 192 n. 19 gender and elegy 8, 21, 72, 175 and Kristeva 24, 151, 180, 230 n. 20, 250 and life course 9, 112, 191, 192 n. 18, 251 and nature/culture binary 181, 182–5 Golden Age (aurea aetas) 21, 23, 54 n. 65, 94 n. 18, 98–100, 108, 242 n. 43 Greenblatt, Stephen, and new historicism 50

282

General Index

hair and old age 4, 5, 97, 109, 190, 195 n. 26, 206 and youth, coming–of–age 119, 189, 224, 228, 229 n. 8 Harlow, Mary and Laurence, Ray 9 n. 19, 19 n. 44, 34 n. 1, 38, 42 n. 27, 52–3 Hellenistic poetry 13 n. 32, 65 n. 12, 118, 170 n. 48, 189 n. 14, 208 Heracles /Hercules 20, 116, 128, 134–6, 246 n. 52 hetaira 6 Horace 10–11, 34 n. 1, 81, 125, 182 n. 2, 185–6, 208 and Augustan Principate 42, 54–6, 126 and recusatio 118–19 Io 154, 164 n. 38 Imaginary, the 18, 133, 147–8; see also Lacan infamis 48–9, 256 infidelity of Lesbia 14 and Roman wives 46 inertia 10, 21, 36, 57, 219 and Ovid 124, 130 and Tibullus 86, 88–92, 95–6, 100–2, 111–12 Isis 88, 161, 163–5, 174 isolation, spatio–temporal 15, 25, 67, 104 of elegiac love 104, 224 of puella 145, 159, 165, 175, 178–9 iuventas 37–8, 45, 55 n. 67, 78 n. 38, 186–7, 192, 229 see also aging; coming–of–age James, Sharon 8 n. 17, 16 n. 39, 17–18, 192 n. 18, 247 Janan, Micaela 18, 24 n. 52, 212, 238 n. 35, 245 jouissance 23, 28, 77, 150, 176 n. 62 Julius Caesar, see Caesar, Julius Konstan, David 6, 85 n. 1, 105, 164 n. 38, 173 n. 58 Kristeva, Julia 3–4, 145–52 and passim and the chora 21–2, 146, 149–51, 167, 174 and the death drive 99, 231 and the semiotic 22, 147–9 and women’s time 3–4, 22, 26, 28, 74, 82, 171, 174, 177–80, 250

Lacan, Jacques 18, 21–2, 23 n. 50, 101 n. 32, 146–8, 243 n. 45 lena 8, 28, 75, 170 legal status of 48–9 and natural world 209–11 and puella’s future 76, 114, 182, 207–16, 232, 252 lentus 128, 130–2, 237 Lesbia 12–15 Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, see Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea 42–3, 46, 48, 49, 216 libertas 38 n. 12, 40, 77–80, 256 and Augustus 33, 51 Liebestod 195, 201, 235 life course 9–11, 19, 241, 247 and passim of amator 69, 80, 83, 87, 91, 97–8, 114, 124–5, 128, 135–41, 202, 228 and Augustus 19, 50–1, 54–5, 129, 227 of elite male 34–5, 37–44, 57 of matrona 45–7, 244, 251 of puella/meretrix 14, 21, 28, 47–50, 182, 209, 213, 218, 257 see also aging; coming–of–age Lycoris 15–16, 17 n. 41 marriage 6, 34–5, 38, 62–3, 92, 129, 225 for elite men 41–4 for elite women 45–7, 244–6 precluded, for elegiac lovers 8, 18, 48 n. 51, 49–50, 110, 216 see also Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea masculine subjectivity 6 n. 12, 7 and elegy 59, 82, 98 and time 3, 22, 99, 169, 177, 228, 239 matrona 8, 34, 45–7, 49, 225–7 Cornelia as 243–4, 251 v meretrix (in Ovid) 129, 216–17 maturity, see aging; coming–of–age; life course McGinn, Thomas 42 n. 29, 48–9 Meleager 64–5, 72 Messalla, Valerius Corvinus, M. 20, 85, 87–8, 90–1, 98–101, 104–12, 224, 228, 246 n. 49 Messallinus (son of Messalla) 40, 86, 220, 224–5, 228–9 Milanion 59–60, 65–70, 72, 78 militia amoris 7, 113 n. 2, 114, 221

General Index Miller, Paul Allen 8, 18, 69, 100, 101 n. 32, 148 n. 6, 232 n. 24 mora 10, 16, 36, 57, 69 n. 21, 70, 98, 121–3, 155–7, 162–3, 187–8, 192–3 and passim and Dido 255 in Ovid’s erotodidaxis 66, 170–4 see also delay; deferral mulier 13–14, 45 n. 42 Myrrha 174–5 Nana (identified with Blanche d’Antigny) 257–8 narrative 1–2, 62 n. 4, 249 n. 57 and coming–of–age 11, 36, 134 deferral and delay in 9, 24 n. 51, 66, 119 n. 18, 140 elegy’s implied 6, 36, 73, 85, 160, 168, 218 and passim of generic evolution 114–16, 127, 237 and repetition 164, 180 in the Res Gestae 50, 55 of the self 9 n. 19, 19 see also mora nature (natura) 92, 173, 181, 188–91, 234–5, 242 n. 43 and feminine subjectivity 22, 27–8, 75–6, 182–4, 193–4, 196, 200, 203, 206 and the lena 209–14 and Roman ideology 35, 184–5 Nemesis 14, 86, 131, 224–5, 227–31, 240 New Comedy 6–7, 13 and anus or lena 49 n. 54, 165 n. 40, 166 and courtesan 8 n. 17, 48 n. 52, 198 n. 28 Octavian, see Augustus Orestes 175–7 otium 89 Ovid 5, 7–8, 12, 14, 99 n. 27, 102, 113–41, 145, 152, 185, 247–50, 255 and Augustus’ youth 56–7 and autobiography 138–41 and erotodidaxis 25, 66, 154, 167–79, 180, 198 n. 29, 206, 215–17, 221, 235 and lena 210, 211 n. 55, 213–15 and recusatio 20, 115–16, 123–38

283

paraclausithyron 96, 146 n. 1, 161 pastoral poetry 15, 16 n. 39, 17 pater, see father Phryne, lena of Nemesis 210 Phyllis 25, 168, 173, 175–9, 248 Plato 21, 149–51, 180 poet–lover, see amator Ponticus 9 n. 20, 78, 201 pregnancy 152 n. 19, 174 Principate, foundation of 18–20, 23, 33, 36, 38, 41 n. 24, 44, 55, 112, 223, 250, 255–6 see also Augustus propemptikon 70, 160 n. 31 Propertius 12, 14, 21 n. 46, 59–83, 131, 185, 192–3, 196–9, 255 and Aurora/Tithonus myth 4–5, 194–5, 199–207, 220–1 and book four 18, 238–47, 249, 251–4 and chronology 1–2 and future prospects 232–8 and lena 208, 210–12 and marriage 6, 34 n. 2, 42, 129 and recusatio 40 n. 23, 117–23, 134 and the relicta puella 153–61 and resistance to coming–of–age 9, 28, 36, 59–72, 79–83, 88, 219 and women’s time 75–7, 91, 168, 171, 179 puella and aging/life course 3, 8–9, 25–8, 47–9, 97, 103–4, 109, 114, 182, 207–18 and passim as alternative to civic pressures 117, 145, 179–80, 220–2, 241, 247, 256 as Aurora figure 5, 21, 195, 199–207 and the chora 25, 73–4, 152–4, 160, 174–5 legal and social status of 7 n. 16, 18, 34 and nature 185, 193, 196–9 and recusatio 119–21, 123, 126 as velox 67, 72–3, 82 and women’s time 4, 10–11, 22–4, 87, 146, 158, 164–5, 168, 171, 183 and passim puer delicatus 28, 34 n. 1, 187, 189 pulsions 99 n. 28, 148–9, 151, 160, 174 querelae 200, 222 Quindecimviri 86, 224

284

General Index

Real, the 18, 23 n. 50, 147, 150 n. 14 recusatio 20, 40 n. 23, 115–19, 228 and Ovid 123–38 and Propertius 119–22, 233 repetition as characteristic of elegy 1, 6 n. 13, 11, 24, 71, 100–2 and puella 153, 158–9, 162–4, 168, 171 verbal, in Tibullus 87, 162 n. 33, 230 and women’s time 3, 22, 88, 146, 150–2, 179–80 rus/rura 85, 93 rusticus, in Tibullus 86, 88, 92–4, 97, 110 saga 75–6, 162, 209–10 Sappho 194 n. 24, 200, 204–5 Saturn, age of, see Golden Age segnis 91, 93, 113, 188 semiotic, Kristevan 18 n. 42, 22, 87 n. 2, 147–51, 162 n. 33, 231 n. 23 see also chora senex 110, 226 n. 15, 227, 246 amator as 12, 97, 114, 158–9, 221 Delia as 20, 88, 103–4, 109 Messalla as 20, 109–10 separation in Demeter/Isis myth 164 n. 38 of poet–lover and puella 165, 223 servitium amoris 78–9, 80, 101, 123, 233 space, and feminine subjectivity, see chora; women’s time; stasis stasis as elegiac ideal 10, 16, 62, 65, 71, 82, 96, 180 and Kristevan drives 149 and recusatio 122, 124–5 rejection of, by amator 235, 237 and spatiality 81 Sulpicia 5 n. 12, 34 n. 1 Symbolic, the 18–19, 101 n. 32, 147–8 Kristeva’s concept of 22–3, 26, 146, 147–8, 150–2 Theseus 154 n. 21, 160 Tibullus 5, 7 n. 15, 12, 20, 57, 85–112, 116 n. 9, 185–92, 224–9, 255 and inertia 88–98 and lentus, to describe beloved 131 and Messalla 98–112, 224 publication dates of 1 n. 2, 225 n. 11 and puer delicatus 34 n. 1, 187–90, 191

and recantation 28, 229–32, 240 and the relicta puella 25, 146, 161–7, 179 and saga/lena figure 75, 209–10 and terms for beloved 14 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 26 time cursive v monumental (Nietzsche) 23 in elegy 1–4, 8, 9 n. 22, 11–12, 17, 36, 59, 61–2, 137 and passim embodied in life cycle 9–10, 10 n. 23, 33, 47, 55, 86, 102, 109, 128 and feminine subjectivity 3–4, 21–4, 25–7, 28, 60, 73–7, 133, 146, 151–2, 153–80, 250 in Vergil’s Tenth Eclogue 16–17 in Horace’s Odes 10–11 and masculine subjectivity 3, 6 n. 12, 22–4, 60, 71, 80–3, 99, 151, 169–73, 228–9, 231–2, 239–40 and passim Roman measuring of 10 n. 23, 34 n. 16, 70, 77 n. 37, 90, 91 n. 13, 112 see also age/aging; calendar; Golden Age Tithonus 4–5, 173 n. 58, 193–6, 199–206, 219–21, 223 see also amator toga libera, see toga virilis toga virilis 19, 37–8, 40, 45 n. 41, 55 n. 67, 79, 82, 240, 244 triumph celebrated by Augustus 122, 134 celebrated by Messalla 1 n. 2, 104–7, 110–12 during Principate 106 n. 40 Tullus 20, 40, 59–60, 65, 69–72, 77, 80–3, 85, 236 univira 46 n. 47 uxor 44 n. 38, 45, 109–10, 221, 247 vates 209 n. 49, 228, 231, 233 n. 25, 240, 248 Vergil 11, 15, 40, 53, 108, 184, 224 n. 9 and death of Tibullus 225 n. 12 and Golden Age 23, 242 n. 43 and recusatio 118 and time in the Aeneid 225–6 vir as adult Roman male 19

General Index role in elegy 47 n. 49 in tragic or epic discourse 132–3 war 16–17, 56, 198 as province of youth 114, 126, 220 training Roman citizens for 39 and triumph 109 witch, see saga

285

wives 43, 46, 63 n. 5 see also uxor; matrona women’s time (le temps des femmes), see time and feminine subjectivity; Kristeva Wyke, Maria 7 n. 16, 129, 134, 245 n. 48 youth, see iuventas Zola, Emile 257–8