Amores Plural: Ovidian Homoerotics in the Elegies

Abstract

Although the genre is frequently characterized as overwhelmingly interested in heteroerotic love, Latin love elegy is far more homoerotic than most scholars allow.Ovid in particular has been seen as the 'most heterosexual' representative of the genre, and indeed 'the most heterosexual' poet of his age. 1 Ovid has even been characterized as the poet of heterosexual love; Tom Habinek went so far as to claim that Ovid "invents the category of the heterosexual male". 2 Habinek is far from the only scholar to present us with an Ovid who strikingly departs from the norms of Latin love elegy and, indeed, a much longer Greco-Roman erotic literary tradition of homoerotic poetry, in that his first-person elegies focus almost exclusively on what we would now call heterosexual liaisons.Some readers have claimed that Ovid even displayed hostility towards what we would most conveniently label homosexuality; for example, Peter Green claims that Ovid's 'attitude to adult homosexuality is casual, pragmatic and dismissive' and John Makowski talks of Ovid's 'aversion to pederasty'. 3 .Such characterizations of Ovid are highly problematic, for a number of reasons, which will be discussed here.Readers of Ovid who characterize him in this way have ignored the precise terms in which some of his most often quoted elegiac comments on homosexuality are framed, and have consequently failed to explore the rest of his elegies for hints of homoeroticism.

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