New England Classical Journal Volume 48 Issue 1 Pages 20-35 5-14-2021 Towards a ‘Political’ Tibullus: Ceres and Grain in Elegies Books 1 and 2 Victoria Jansson The Graduate Center, City University of New York,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/necj Part of the Classics Commons Recommended Citation Jansson, Victoria (2021) "Towards a ‘Political’ Tibullus: Ceres and Grain in Elegies Books 1 and 2," New England Classical Journal: Vol. 48 : Iss. 1 , 20-35. https://doi.org/10.52284/NECJ/48.1/article/jansson This Article is brought to you for free and open access by CrossWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in New England Classical Journal by an authorized editor of CrossWorks. Towards a ‘Political’ Tibullus: Ceres and Grain in Elegies Books 1 and 2 VICTORIA JANSSON Abstract: This article argues that unfulfilled prayers to Ceres in Tibullus’ elegies are symptomatic of Rome’s grain crises at the end of the Republic and beginning of Empire. My approach includes philological, socioeconomic, and psychoanalytic analysis of the elegies, in which the poet examines the shifting definition of a ‘Roman’ in his day. I seek to demonstrate the ways in which the poet grapples with the political and economic forces at work during the most turbulent period of Roman history: a time when income inequality was roughly equivalent to that of the U.S. and E.U. today.1 Keywords: Tibullus, elegy, literary theory, grain, Ceres, Lacan. I argue that the elegies of Tibullus constitute a bold poetic program in which the author explores widespread social change.