The Politics of Elegy: Propertius and Tibullus

Abstract

The Roman love poets, Propertius and Tibullus, writing under the first emperor, Augustus, treat their 'patrons' and the emperor himself in ways that are analogous to the way they treat their mistresses, as inhabiting a world inaccessible and alien to the poet. The chapter challenges accepted ways in which certain terms and ideas are understood: literary patronage; the idea of a programmatic poem; 'love elegy', 'erotic elegy', and the recusatio. The actual nature of the genre is the central issue at stake. Many individual poems are discussed and reinterpreted.

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