This paper investigates the figure of the lena in the elegies of Tibullus (I.5; II.6), Propertius (IV.5), and Ovid (Amores I.8). While each poet treats the character of the lena in importantly different ways, each has in common a deep interest in contrasting his own position as both lover and poet with the activities of the lena, a bawd or procuress. All three poets curse the lena, denouncing primarily her malevolent magical powers, her carmina, which are directed against them and their carmina. The lena not only preaches an erotic code which in its emphasis on remuneration and the denigration of poetry directly opposes that of the poet-lover, she also usurps his role as instructor and constructor of the elegiac puella. It is the elegiac poet's prerogative to describe and construct the elegiac mistress. By usurping his role as praeceptor, the lena threatens the poet with both sexual and literary impotence. It is precisely because the lena challenges the male poet-lover's control over these terms that she is such a potent enemy; the woman with a pen, as Pollack writes in The Poetics of Sexual Myth, ‘threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim’. If the elegiac mistress can be said to play a more masterful role as domina in Roman love poetry than in conventional Roman ideology, it must nevertheless be qualified with the reminder that she only plays a role constructed for her by elegy's first-person narrator who demands complete control over the discourse of their relationship, of the rules of the amatory game.
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