Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy

6. Poetry, Politics, Sex, Status: How the Docta Puella Serves Elegy

My final discussion assesses the results of reading Roman love elegy from the viewpoint of the docta puella (as well as rereading it through an Ovidian lens) and then speculates further about how such a project assists in either clarifying the purposes and workings of elegy or in adding complexity and depth to both the poetry and its contexts. My three focal points are the poetic, political-historical, and female-social axes of elegy (which, perhaps more than any other ancient genre, requires a specific kind of generic woman); and my chief goal is to ask both what functions elegy serves in its very specific historical period and why the figure of the docta puella is needed for those functions. That is, what do the elegists find in this particular woman that meets their poetic needs and goals, which are their personal and professional needs and goals as well? Why, in a time of solidifying peace and prosperity associated with eroding personal and political freedom and responsibility, is the poetic vision of servitude to a noncitizen woman, who makes her living by beauty and sex, so compelling to these elite male poets? Wyke and others have argued that the docta puella is nothing more than a metaphor for elegiac love poetry. Their aim is to separate her from any historical, “real” woman, an aim I support absolutely, as the focus on identifying a historical analogue to any elegiac woman misses the point of the genre. But I would like to pursue this issue further and ask, why this particular metaphor? The puella, as I hope to have shown here, lives in the world of material needs and financial practices; her professional lifespan (like that of elegy itself) is short, so her need to pursue her profession while she can is intense. And it is just this need that allows the elegiac lover-poet to wash up so often, complaining loudly, at her locked door. That is to say, her needs allow her lover-poets to commit elegy. In other words, the 212 6. Poetry, Politics, Sex, Status How the Docta Puella Serves Elegy puella’s profession engenders all the circumstances that elegy needs, that make elegy possible.1 Yet elegy insists on ignoring that profession,acknowledging it only clandestinely and grudgingly, while expecting readers to recognize it immediately.But the fictional docta puella does bear a relationship to historical reality and, as I noted in chapter 1, fiction and reality are not utterly divorced. Before reviewing the results of this approach to Roman love elegy (and I repeat here that this approach simply balances the dominant male voice of both the genre and its recapitulation in scholarship, rather than claiming primacy), it may be useful to review a few aspects of the social contexts in which it was produced. By the time elegy begins to flourish, Rome is a decaying form of a very limited representative government; a gerontocracy with a seven-hundred-year tradition of strictly distinguishing its citizens by their social class; a slaveholding society in which concepts of mastery, dominance, and servitude are all-pervasive; a male culture that creates female subjection by handing child-brides (from age twelve or so) over to adult males; a caste society whose most elite members were, at the time of Roman love elegy, becoming radically reduced in power and stature; a tottering public entity slowly devolving into a monarchy, a form of government long despised by the Romans. The elegiac lover-poets, once members of Rome’s elite (if not its ruling elite, as they are knights, equites, rather than senators), are now being converted into that most pointless of persons, private citizens, just when the princeps is diminishing the dimensions of their private life as well, by urging them to marry and produce children.2 The docta puella allows the elegist time and space in which to explore the meaning of private life, of choices determined by that apolitical organ, the human heart, and attributed to that most capricious of ancient divinities, Cupid. The puella can offer this opportunity because she exists outside the realm of politics—since she is generically a courtesan, she is not subject to legislation mandating procreation,nor does she cause one to violate antiadultery legislation (both of which, as I have said, were, in my opinion, proposed when Propertius was preparing to publish his Monobiblos; see appendix). In other words, the docta puella falls below the radar of inquisitive and intrusive public...