Metrical Feet on the Road of Poetry: Foot Puns and Literary Polemic in Tibullus

Throughout his two books, Tibullus cultivates feet, chains, and related images as metapoetic symbols to express both his literary program and his involvement in contemporary literary polemic between elegy and epic. Unlike Propertius and Ovid, Tibullus engages only minimally in explicit programmatics and polemics, but metapoetic symbolism reveals literary concerns analogous to those of the other elegists. In Tibullus 1.1, these symbols allow the speaker’s rejection of riches and soldiering to function also as a recusatio from writing panegyric epic for Messalla.