Latin Erotic Elegy

An Anthology and Reader

Paul Allen Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135641955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

This indispensable volume provides a complete course on Latin erotic elegy, allowing students to trace a coherent narrative of the genre's rise and fall, and to understand its relationship to the changes that marked the collapse of the Roman republic, and the founding of the empire.
The book begins with a detailed and wide-ranging introduction, looking at major figures, the evolution of the form, and the Roman context, with particular focus on the changing relations between the sexes. The texts that follow range from the earliest manifestations of erotic elegy, in Catullus, through Tibullus, Sulpicia (Rome's only female elegist), Propertius and Ovid.
An accessible commentary explores the historical background, issues of language and style, and the relation of each piece to its author's larger body of work. The volume closes with an anthology of critical essays representative of the main trends in scholarship; these both illuminate the genre's most salient features and help the student understand its modern reception.

COMMENTARY

CATULLUS

68B

This poem is generally considered the first example of the elegiac genre. It offers the length and complexity typical of the form and anticipates later uses of mythological exempla. The poem is also important because it gives us a rare glimpse into the overall narrative of the Lesbia affair. Here Catullus clearly states that it is an adulterous affair, but that he nonetheless conceives of his relationship to Lesbia as a kind of marriage [10, 13, 37].* Such a demand for fidelity in an adulterous liaison would have been highly unusual in the Roman world and highlights the eccentric nature of the affair portrayed by Catullus [12]. It is this commitment to a woman to whom one would normally owe no such thing that signals the unique status of the elegiac romance in Roman life. This poem also foreshadows later developments in the genre by showing that Catullus’s sense of commitment was not shared by his beloved. It is this presumed inequality of feeling that lies behind the common elegiac theme of servitium amoris or “the slavery of love” [8]. One feature of this theme is the casting of the beloved in the figure of the domina [7], the poet’s literal mistress, an inversion of the normal Roman hierarchy of gender relations. This poem features the first use of the word domina in an erotic context.

While 68B does much to clarify the narrative of the Lesbia affair and its status as model for the later elegists, from a formal point of view the poem is fraught with difficulties. In all the surviving manuscripts, it is printed with a 40-line preface addressed to a certain Mallius or Manius. This preface takes the form of a letter in which Catullus explains that he is unable to provide a poem as Mallius requests because he is wracked with grief on his brother’s death, and in any case he is away from his library in Rome. What follows is either a substitute poem addressed to an Allius or a belated answer to the original request (in which case Allius is the addressee’s nomen and Mallius his praenomen). The problem has vexed scholars for the last two centuries.

Nonetheless, 68B reads as a complete poem. It exhibits a clear ring composition in which recurring motifs are paired around the central panel on the death of the poet’s brother. It alone concerns the poet’s own love affair and so 68A can be left aside for our purposes.

41–46. The poet offers a poem of praise to his friend Allius, promising him poetic immortality in return for the latter’s good offices in the early stages of the Lesbia affair. The Muses will spread his name through centuries to come. Deae is vocative plural.

47. The hexameter from this couplet has dropped out. It presumably referred to the renown Allius would receive while still living, as opposed to the posthumous fame addressed in the pentameter.

49–50. The spider web is a good example of the imagistic style Catullus uses in this poem.

51–66. Here begins the first of several complex similes found throughout the poem. Each is a miniature masterpiece of the Alexandrian art of allusion and aesthetic symmetry and each turns out to illustrate a point far different from what it initially claims. Thus this simile ostensibly illustrates how great Allius’s aid was in Catullus’s time of distress, and hence how deserving it is to be memorialized in poetry. However, if the reader pays careful attention, the tears that Catullus sheds become the stream that comforts the weary traveler. The welcomeness of this cool water is in turn compared to the aid brought by the gods Castor and Pollux to sailors in a storm at sea, who are the very image of Allius in his good offices to Catullus. The poet’s tears and sorrow are thus compared to the aid that Allius gave to relieve them! Could this ambiguity be traced to the fact that, by facilitating the affair with Lesbia, Allius has caused more pain than if he had never done the poet any such favor?

The reader should note the extraordinary symmetry of the description as the poet moves from the dry heat of torruerit, to the volcanic lava of Etna and the hot springs of Thermopylae. These hot springs become the poet’s eyes, which melt (tabescere) and are transformed into the rain that moistens his cheeks. This shower is, in turn, compared to a mountain spring that flows through a valley providing relief to the sweat-covered (sudore) traveler, when the dry summer heat splits open the parched earth. The progression thus is from dry heat to hot liquid, then to cool liquid, and finally back to warm liquid and dry baking heat. The traveler’s salty sweat recalls the poet’s tears while anticipating the storm at sea still to come.

51. Amathusia = Venus. She is duplex as the bringer of pleasure and pain.

53. Trinacria rupes = Mt. Etna.

54. Oetaeis Malia Thermopylis = the warm springs at the base of Mt. Oeta in Thessaly near the pass of Thermopylae, hence the latter’s name: “hot gates.”

65. Castor and Pollux, the divine brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra, are the traditional gods of sailors.

67–69. Allius’s service was to provide his country home as a secluded spot where Catullus and Lesbia could have their first adulterous rendezvous. Some argue that domina could not refer to Lesbia since Allius did not provide her, and therefore it must mean that he provided a mistress of the house to give them proper cover for their dangerous liaison. Nonetheless, by providing his domus, Allius in effect created the conditions under which Lesbia became Catullus’s domina. Compare erae (135); domina (156).

Note the way the sentence spills over the bounds of the couplet. Later elegiac practice would tend to make each couplet a self-contained syntactical unit. Catullus’s metrical practice in this poem is closer to that of his Hellenistic sources than his Latin successors [33].

70–76. This sentence is extraordinary on several levels. 1. Its depiction of Lesbia as a shining goddess is striking and underlines the inversion of normal power relations between the genders. 2. The image is clearly that of a bride crossing the threshold. Catullus is the awestruck groom waiting inside the house to receive his divine bride. 3. But this is an ill-omened marriage because Lesbia’s sandal squeaks (arguta . . . solea) as it crosses the threshold (limine). How could things be otherwise since this is in fact not a marriage but adultery? 4. This sentence introduces the longest simile of poem (73– 130) in which Lesbia is compared to Laudamia approaching Protesilaus on the day of their ill-fated wedding.

Like the previous similes, this one too is not what it seems. As more than one commentator has noted, while Catullus says he is comparing Lesbia to Laudamia, the situation described in the simile as a whole applies far better to him than to her. This takes the inversion of gender roles to another level, as the poet figuratively becomes the bride rather than the groom.

74. Protesilaus was the first soldier killed in the Trojan War. He departed the morning after his wedding night. The theme was popular in ancient literature, with some versions featuring a return from the realm of the dead for one night and others Laudamia’s fashioning a likeness of him that she takes to her bed. In all versions, the pathetic futility of their love is central.

77–78. Ramnusia virgo = Nemesis, goddess of divine retribution. This aside is ironic since Catullus’s relation with Lesbia had not been sanctified by sacrifice, and hence his domus too (household, but also the physical building) had been begun in vein (frustra).

79. The hungry altars (ieiuna . . . ara), desiring blood (cruorem), are a powerful image of the doomed nature of Laudamia and Protesilaus’s marriage, and a foreshadowing of the description of the Trojan war as well as of the tomb of Catullus’s brother, which immediately follows. Pium refers both to the blood sacrifice duty (pietas) owed the altars and to the blood of the dutiful or innocent who will pay the ritual debt.

81–84. The syntax here is difficult. Laudamia is forced (coacta) to give up the embrace of her husband before (ante . . . quam) the coming of a second winter would have filled (saturasset, syncopated pluperfect subjunctive) her love’s hunger during its long nights. As we find out later in the poem, it is Catullus who must live with his desire for Lesbia unfulfilled.

85–86. Quod refers back to the entire idea expressed in line 84. Isset is a syncopated form.

87–100. The set of associations woven into this passage is extremely complex. In outline, the mention of the Trojan War that occasioned Laudamia’s loss of Protesilaus recalls to Catullus the loss of his brother whose tomb was to be found near the site of Troy. The Trojan War was the cause of the death of countless young men who, like Catullus’s brother, were struck down in their prime. Thus, Catullus’s sense of loss for his brother is implicitly compared to Laudamia’s for Protesilaus. At the same time, the cause of the Trojan War, Helen’s infidelity, recalls that of Lesbia to whom Laudamia is explicitly compared. The conflation of the poet’s grief for his brother with his sorrow over a love affair gone wrong, in the context of a simile comparing the first night of that affair to Laudamia’s wedding night, makes this one of the most difficult and powerful passages in all of Latin poetry.

91. Quaene: the interrogative -ne is equivalent to the colloquial English, “isn’t it?” or the French “n’est-ce pas?”.

92–96. This passage echoes 68A.20–24. Adempte is vocative. The domus sepulta recalls both Laudamia and Protesilaus’s domus incepta frustra (74–75) as well as the domus loaned to Catullus and Lesbia by Allius (68).

101–04. The syntax again is difficult. Pubes, the subject of fertur, is modified by properans, lecta, and Graeca. In the second clause, the hyperbaton, or disruption of normal prose word order, is again difficult. Gauisus modifies Paris and takes its complement in the ablative (abducta . . . moecha), making libera . . . otia the o...