Roman Poets: Latin Love Elegy

The Elegiac Verses of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid

Oct 5, 2008

By turns anguished and satirical, the love elegists rejected poetic tradition and drew on their lives, their loves and their literary ambitions to write elegiac couplets.

Roman love elegy was a popular form of poetry in the late Roman Republic and early Empire. It was inspired by the Greek epigrams produced by a poetic movement in Alexandria, the Novi Poetae (“New Poets”).

The word 'elegy' derives from the Greek elegia, meaning "mourning song", and it is accordingly used for poems commemorating the dead. Due to metrical similarities, the lamentations characteristic of love elegy, and the expressions of personal sentiment common to both love poetry and commemorative verse, the term elegia was used to describe both genres.

Key Characteristics of Roman Love Elegy

Both epic and elegy were written in dactylic feet. However, while epic was written in dactylic hexameter (six dactylic feet to a line), elegy was written as a series of couplets, each consisting of one line in dactylic hexameter and one line of dactylic pentameter (five dactylic feet to a line).

For this reason, elegiac poets sometimes described elegy as "missing a foot" or "lame". In the programmatic opening poem of his Amores ("Loves"), Ovid attributes his decision to write love poetry instead of epic to Cupid's theft of a (metrical) foot.

Other popular themes include the evocation of rural idylls, celebration of a patron's military success, and elaborate dinner-party invitations.

The Poets

The founding father of Roman elegy. He wrote poems in elegiac, epic and lyric metres on subject ranging from the castration of Attis to the death of his brother, but he is best-remembered for the series of poems about Lesbia, his beloved. His constant refrain of miserum me, and his expressions of undying devotion became standard colours in the elegist's palette, and his poem of lament for Lesbia’s dead sparrow inspired a parody by Ovid and a subtle critique of the Roman imperial court by Statius.

The dreamiest of the elegists, and the author of fewer, but longer poems that drift from wealth to piety to marriage to sickness to religious rites to Delia (his first beloved) to Nemesis (his second). Included in his third book are six elegies purportedly by the Roman poetess Sulpicia. No works by any other female Roman author are known to survive.

Characterised particularly by his declarations of eternal fidelity, Propertius virtually invented servitium amoris ("the slavery of love" - the theme of the lover locked in servitude to his mistress) and drew heavily on mythological allegory. His beloved is Cynthia, although by the middle of his fourth book she is almost forgotten, appearing only in two poems, and then as an angry ghost.

The youngest and most self-conscious of the love-elegists. Writing under the emperor Augustus, Ovid pokes fun at the imperial program of moral improvement and boasts of his many conquests and infidelities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ovid was sent into exile on account of his poetry and an "error". J. C. Thibault, in The Mystery of Ovid's Exile, argued that this "error" was in fact the seduction of the emperor's grand-daughter Julia, who was exiled for adultery in the same year.

The copyright of the article Roman Poets: Latin Love Elegy in Poetry is owned by Jessica Wright. Permission to republish Roman Poets: Latin Love Elegy in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.