Tibullus and Egypt: A Postcolonial Reading of Elegy 1.7

Abstract

Tibullus 1.7 depends on a greater context of generic conventions for its orientalizing alignment of elegiac gender difference with an east/west opposition. The discursive relationship between Rome and Egypt—in orientalist terms, the west's representational control of the east—evokes the elegiac relations of patron/lover-poet and lover/beloved in the Tibullan corpus. This essay interprets a fundamental ambivalence in Tibullus's representation of Egypt by setting it in the context of the competing discourses of triumphal ritual and Roman love elegy. Tibullus 1.7 speaks not only to an audience of Roman colonizers, but also to a colonized provincial elite, exercising a form of cultural imperialism over a rhetorically constructed Egyptian "Other."

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