Latin Love Poetry

Denise Eileen McCoskey, Zara M. Torlone, Zara Martirosova Torlone

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781780761909
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857734730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: World History

I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.

‘I hate and I love.’ The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy – so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practised by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid – Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE–14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets’ key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers. It shows that a highly developed sense of place and landscape informed the elegists’ explorations of passion and desire. In their romantic attachment to the bucolic countryside as well as to the city of Rome, their pursuit of both men and women, and their vibrant exchange with other genres and authors, the Roman love poets are seen to have explored the act of writing as much as the experience of love itself.

DENISE EILEEN MCCOSKEY is Professor of Classics and Affiliate in Black World Studies at Miami University, Ohio, and is the author of Race: Antiquity and its Legacy (I.B.Tauris, 2011).

ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE is Associate Professor of Classics at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (2009) and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (2014).

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Latin Love Poetry offers a clearly written and comprehensive synthesis of the most important scholarship on Latin erotic elegy from the last thirty years. A worthy successor to Lyne’s The Latin Love Poets (1981), it will be this generation’s vade mecum for all those entering the field.

—Paul Allen Miller, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina, author of Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Critical Reader and Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy

This insightful new introduction to the study of Roman love poetry offers a highly engaging and detailed primer, guiding students through the complexities and pleasures of reading and responding to Latin love elegy. Focusing primarily upon the Augustan elegists, but taking in the influences of Catullus, Gallus and Sulpicia along the way, Latin Love Poetry presents an accessible and articulate roadmap for all undergraduates looking to find their way towards a better understanding of this fascinating body of work.

—Genevieve Liveley, Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol, author of Ovid: Love Songs and Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: A Reader’s Guide

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Understanding Classics

Editor: RICHARD STONEMAN (UNIVERSITY OF EXETER)

When the great Roman poets of the Augustan Age – Ovid, Virgil and Horace – composed their odes, love poetry and lyrical verse, could they have imagined that their works would one day form a cornerstone of Western civilization, or serve as the basis of study for generations of schoolchildren learning Latin? Could Aeschylus or Euripides have envisaged the remarkable popularity of contemporary stagings of their tragedies? The legacy and continuing resonance of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – Greek poetical epics written many millennia ago – again testify to the capacity of the classics to cross the divide of thousands of years and speak powerfully and relevantly to audiences quite different from those to which they were originally addressed.

Understanding Classics is a specially commissioned series which aims to introduce the outstanding authors and thinkers of antiquity to a wide audience of appreciative modern readers, whether undergraduate students of classics, literature, philosophy and ancient history or generalists interested in the classical world. Each volume – written by leading figures internationally – will examine the historical significance of the writer or writers in question; their social, political and cultural contexts; their use of language, literature and mythology; extracts from their major works; and their reception in later European literature, art, music and culture. Understanding Classics will build a library of readable, authoritative introductions offering fresh and elegant surveys of the greatest literatures, philosophies and poetries of the ancient world.

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Understanding Classics

Aristophanes and Greek Comedy
JEFFREY S. RUSTEN ∙ Cornell University
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Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Introduction