Ancient Rome

Abstract

Nearly all extant classical Latin poetry is male authored. The composers of personal love poems—Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—write almost exclusively from the man’s point of view in this supposedly confessional poetry, for which they use elegiac couplets. Latin love elegy is a well-developed genre, but very little of it is woman’s song. Propertius 4.3 is composed in the persona of a woman writing to her lover. Horace, Odes 3.12 may be a dramatic monologue on the subject of love in the persona of a woman. However, if we turn to epic poetry, we find women’s voices echoing themes of anger and betrayal that resonate with other voices throughout this book, and that recall especially the women’s voices of Greek tragedy. Epic lends itself to dramatic speeches, and provides Catullus and Virgil with a framework within which to breathe life into women from the mythic past. In the Heroides, Ovid adapts love elegy to a mythological setting. The epistolary voices of his “heroines” can be rather stilted; Ariadne’s is one of the more dynamic. Ovidian, or pseudo-Ovidian, Sappho is titillatingly scandalous. Roman Ariadne, Dido, and Sappho speak in the grand style, and are very much the products of a learned, intertextual literary culture.