Poet/Reader, Authority Deferred: Re-Reading Tibullan Elegy

The Tibullus of twentieth-century criticism is the shy, retiring type. Somewhere between a linguistic somnambulist and a rustic philosopher, he ¹ is dreamy, sensitive, melancholy, thoughtful, and, above all, non-threatening. ² Compared to the work of "exuberant" Propertius or "subversive" Ovid (or even the shade of "rough and ready" Gallus), the elegies of cosy old Tibullus present a gently rolling landscape. Perhaps there is the odd dark cloud, but it is not a hard rain that falls. ³ There are no dangers for the reader lurking in the Tibullan text.

The present piece offers a very different Tibullus. It offers an unreliable, infuriating, even treacherous Tibullus. It attempts to shadow the ambiguous and destabilising manoeuvres of a trickster-text where the reader shares full jeopardy. Like many of the more recent approaches to Roman elegy, this study is concerned not with the relation of the text to the biography of the author, nor with the genre in the abstract, but with the dynamics of reading the texts in question. ⁴ More specifically, it is concerned with how an ancient Roman, a reader of the first circulated "editions" of the elegies, could have constructed meaning from the texts. ⁵ As with all interpretation of text (whether this is made explicit by the critic in question or not), the emphasis must be on what the text could mean, not what it specifically did mean for any one reader at any one time. This is not to argue for an undifferentiated relativism--for an infinity of viable readings, one for every reader. As Paul Ricoeur has put it (1981.213): "if it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal . . . The text is a limited field of possible constructions." While there may be a plurality of possible readings, they are within the "limited field" represented by the particular text. It could be seen as the critical task to chart the boundaries of that field, to develop an appreciation of its breadth, to map out its topography, and to demonstrate what it might be like (and might have been like) to cross it. The present study sets out to do this in the case of Tibullan elegy ⁶ and, specifically, to suggest that the Tibullan text can be a slippery, disorienting field to cross.

While such slipperiness, in general terms, may not be unique to Tibullan elegy, this paper argues that there are factors of text and context which work in its case to particular effects. Instability and uncertainty are foregrounded thematically by the poet/lover's thwarted desire for stability within the amor-relationship. This is specifically linked to the reading process by the poet's parallel ideal of interpretive (and poetic) power expressed most forcefully in Book 2 through the figures of Apollo and the Sibyl (2.5). This draws into focus the Tibullan text's persistent inter-relation of the positions of poet/lover and reader as seekers of (an often denied or deferred) certainty.

The socio-cultural context in which the Tibullan collections were written and first circulated (during the 20s and teens B.C.E.) also lends a particular force to the instability of the Tibullan text. The period of transition from Republic to Principate has long been seen as a time of great cultural as well as political instability and change (even "revolution"). ⁷ This period involved not simply "the collapse of the cultural structures by which authority had been defined in Roman society" (Wallace-Hadrill 1997.22), but a consequent realignment of authority in many areas of Roman culture around the figure of Augustus. ⁸ In such a context, the difficulties of establishing authority or certainty within and over the Tibullan text can be read as an engagement with the Augustan redefinition of authority. Indeed, in several respects, the text intervenes in the same discursive fields...