OVID AND ELEGY
Modern and ancient definitions of Elegy
-
Modern - Poetry of lament
-
Ancient - Poetry written in elegiac couplets (= dactylic
hexameter + pentameter)
Precursors to Roman Elegy
-
Hellenistic Greek writers (?)
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Young men in love in comedies (?)
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Catullus (approx. 84-54 B.C.)
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from Verona (N. Italy), but lived mainly in Rome as adult
-
116 Poems in all, many concerning affair with Lesbia (=Clodia),
some in elegiac meter
I hate and I love. Why do
I do that, you are perhaps asking?
I don't know, but I feel it happening and
I am in torment.
(Cat.
85)
My woman says that she would prefer to marry nobody
else
but me, not even if Jupiter himself asked
her.
She says this: but what a woman says to her ardent
lover
one ought to write on the the wind and the
fast running water.
(Cat.
70)
Lesbia, my mind has been led down this road by
your misdeeds
and so has wrecked itself by its own sense
of duty,
so that by now it could not wish good for you, even if
you became a model
person
nor could it stop loving you, no matter what you
did.
(Cat. 75)
Roman Elegists
Gallus - c.70-26
-
from N. Italy, equestrian family
-
Military leader under Augustus, prefect of Egypt
-
Very little remains (c. 10 lines), mainly from recently discovered
papyrus
-
Supposedly wrote 4 books of poems, beloved named Lycoris
(=Cytheris)
Tibullus - c. 50-19
-
equestrian family
-
2 books of poems
-
beloved named Delia (=Plania)
Propertius - c. 50-5
-
from Assisi, equestrian family
-
4 books of poems
-
beloved named Cynthia (=Hostia)
-
In circle of poets of Maecenas (cf. Vergil and Horace)
Ovid
Themes / Characteristics of Elegy (the elegiac "discourse")
-
subjective style
-
recognition that poems are nugae (trifles)
My first line rose well, noble
and lofty in measure,
But the one you brought next surely corrupted
the text.
What can I do in light verse? I have no
boy I can sing of,
No nice long-haired girl making a theme
for my lays.
(Ovid,
Amores 1.1.17-20)
-
exaggeration / mythologizing
She was beautiful, so, lovely
as Atalanta,
Hunting Maenalian game, armed with the quiver
and dart.
So must another have seemed, Ariadne, lonely on
Naxos,
Weeping for Theseus, false, borne on winds
from the south.
(Amores
1.7.13-16)
-
paraclausythuron (outside the closed door)
-
servitium amoris (the slavery of love)
Possibly now, while you sleep,
your girl is lying beside you:
So much the better for you; so much the
worse for me.
I could accept the chains, given that other condition.
(Amores
1.6.45-47)
-
militia amoris (military service of love)
-
focus on women
Ovid, 43-17 A.D.,
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from Sulmo (Central Italy)
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wealthy equestrian parents
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Educated as a lawyer, soon gave himself entirely to poetry
Works
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Amores
-
Heroides - Letters in verse from abandoned wives/lovers
of various heroes
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Didactic Poems
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Ars Amatoria (Art of Love)
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Medicamina Femineae Faciei (Art of Beauty)
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Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love)
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Fasti
-
Metamorphoses - epic poem
Exiled to Tomi by Augustus in 8 A.D. for "a poem and a mistake"
Tristia & Epistulae ex Ponto - poems
written in exile - attempts
to vindicate himself and his poetry and win recall from
exile
Is elegy in general, and Ovid in particular, Anti-Augustan?
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