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The Politics of Elegy: Propertius and Tibullus

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The Politics of Elegy: Propertius and Tibullus CHAPTER EIGHT THE POLITICS OF ELEGY: PROPERTIUS AND TIBULLUS Marcus Wilson The reader of current scholarship on Roman elegy cannot but be struck by a stark inconsistency between two modes of reading (often employed simultaneously), one applied to the erotic relationships articulated in the poems, the other applied to the political relationships. In the case of the former, there is a general acceptance of the principle that the representation of the poet’s relationship with his lover is far from being a direct refl ection of real life, that it is reshaped according to generic conventions, is (to some degree) fi ctionalized, and that the mistress portrayed is a scripta puella, a literary creation.1 By contrast, the poets’ relationships with patrons and ultimately with the emperor are treated almost universally as indicative of historical realities of the social, economic, and political hierarchy under Augustus, and enormous effort has been put into identifying precisely the poets’ male addressees and charting the convergence (or divergence) of the themes of the poems with Augustan political ideology.2 These discordant ways of thinking about the poetry of Propertius and Tibullus may satisfy some historians who take seriously only the political or power relations evident in the poems and feel they can disregard as trivial or conventional the expression in the same texts of personal emotions and amatory desires. Yet, for those concerned to understand the poetry in its fullness as poetry, this critical situation is deeply unsatisfying. There is, of course, no close parallel between the function of this poetry with that of Augustan visual art which, being public (since most of that which survives is public in its original 1 Veyne (1988); Wyke (1987) 47–61; Kennedy (1993); McNamee (1993) 215–48; Lee-Stecum (1998) 304–9; Greene (1998) 37–66; James (1998); Wyke (2002); James (2003) 21–6; Ancona and Greene (2005) 1–9. 2 Hence the ongoing confl ict between pro-Augustan and anti-Augustan readings of elegy. This dichotomy is rejected by Kennedy (1992) 26–58 and Kennedy (1993) 35–8, but for a systematic critique of his position, see Davis (2006) 9–22. See also Miller (2004) 30. Prominent among recent readings that reiterate the case of the pro-Augustan interpretation are Galinsky (1996); Newman (1997); Cairns (2006). 174 marcus wilson presentation and imperial in theme), conveys an offi cially sanctioned perspective on Augustus’ principate.3 Elegiac poetry is a poetry of markedly different individuals, each with a different take on the world and, in particular, the Roman world. Private life provides the context for most of the poems, such that public and political themes struggle to compete with it, and that struggle is itself thematized by the elegists, who regard the political from the point of view of outsiders already committed to unconventional, or as some might have put it, un-Roman, values. Whether measured in number of poems or number of lines, the relationships of Propertius with Cynthia or Tibullus with his lovers outweigh many times over the former’s relationship with Maecenas and the latter’s with Messalla as poetic subjects. Each poet is deprived of coherence, split into two, made to be one sort of writer when dealing with love and another sort of writer when dealing with his relations with his male associates. Some poems are to be regarded as arising directly from the poet’s personal poetic preoccupations whereas others are more or less commissioned work,4 in which the poet is a craftsman putting into verse ideas that are suggested if not imposed by a patron. Delia, Nemesis, and Cynthia, we are required to believe, are characters in a drama5 whereas Tullus, Gallus, Maecenas, Messalla, and Macer are outside the play and belong to history. No doubt some readers will respond by saying, “Yes. That’s just the way it is. There are two types of relationships in the poetry, one fanciful, the other real.” Such a response, though, betrays a lack of awareness of how the two ways of reading depend at least as much on competing modern critical assumptions and methodologies as on the evidence of the actual poems. The approach to the love relationships has been shaped by decades of theorizing about the nature of literary invention and the transformative 3 As explored by Zanker (1998). Davis (2006) 23–4 astutely observes that “Augustan ideology is most clearly and unambiguously expressed not in works of literature, but in the visual arts, in building, sculptural and numismatic programmes, for example, and in cultural events promoted and approved by the regime.” See also White (1993) 120–58. A case can be made that the poets sometimes set out to challenge through their poetry the ideological meaning imposed by the princeps upon the visual urban space of Rome. See, for instance, Rothwell (1986) 829–54; Fantham (1997) 12–35; Welch (2005) 296–317. 4 Cairns (2006) 347 refers to a number of Propertian poems as “commissioned,” e.g., 2.31, 3.4, 3.18, 4.11. Similarly Hubbard (1974) 100 wrote of Propertius produc- ing “poems to order.” 5 Warden (1980) 86: “Each poem is a little drama.” For the relation to new comedy see James (1998) 1–16 and James (2003) 21–5..
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