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Preface
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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Invoking Catullus in his poem “The Scholars,” W. B. Yeats mocked classicists for laboring to produce learned commentaries on love poetry, which he describes as devised by desperate young men “[t]o flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.” Yeats’s beauty may have been ignorant, but Catullus’s certainly was not, or she could not possibly have understood the poetry directed at her. And without the ink-borne labor of the learned heads, neither could any reader after the fall of Rome. In fact, given that we have lost so many of the ancient materials to which Catullus had access, it is fair to say that no postclassical reader has fully plumbed any Roman poetry, for it is deeply learned, sometimes to the point of obscurity, and many of its sources are missing. I argue that since Roman elegy expresses its desires toward an educated female love object—the docta puella or learned girl—its texts cannot be taken for purely emotional or spontaneous outbursts; they must be understood from the viewpoints of not only of their male speakers and authors but also of the educated woman who inhabits their pages. My identi fication of that woman as a courtesan based on the meretrix of Roman Comedy is not a new one, though it has been contested by those who believe that the puella to be a citizen wife. In my view, the elegiac docta puella is a generic, poetic fiction who must, for the arguments and adventures of elegy to take place, be independent of male control but not of male financial resources.This generic woman can be nothing other than a courtesan of formidable intelligence, education, and independence. Previous work on elegy has generally focused upon the lover’s viewpoint in interpreting the poetry; by contrast, I seek the key to the poems in their implied reception by the docta puella. By placing the puella in dialogue with the historical context that shaped the way Roman audiences read her— by elucidating her interests, her status, her financial and social constraints— ix Preface I hope to make a silent character speak. Elegy itself challenges us to apply what we know of ancient women’s lives in order to supply the puella’s longmuted voice; meeting that challenge can alter, fill out, and radically change our readings of elegy. I offer herein readings of elegy that explore the potential response of the docta puella to the persuasive strategies directed at her and a consideration of the implications that these readings pose for Roman love elegy as a whole. In the hopes of opening up elegy studies to nonspecialists, nonclassicists, and students, I include an appendix of classical terms, concepts, historical information, and background. I have also provided my own deliberately literal (and thus often awkward) translations of all quoted Latin and Greek. I regret the awkwardness of these translations, but I consider line-by-line fidelity crucial to my arguments, so I have made no attempt to render the elegance, tension, and extraordinary beauty of Roman elegy, let alone its concise linguistic wit. Often I have needed to make line references to unquoted material in Latin; nonclassicists may find it helpful to have translations at hand. I recommend Peter Green’s translations of Ovid, and Guy Lee’s of Tibullus and Propertius. The Loeb classical editions have fairly literal translations and may be easier to find. I have used the Latin texts of Postgate (1915) for Tibullus, Fedeli for Propertius, McKeown for Ovid’s Amores, and Kenney (1995) for the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris. Since the manuscript tradition for Propertius in particular is so troubled, readers referring to the English translations will occasionally find that line numbers or poem divisions do not match up, but the line numbers are always marked as from the manuscripts. In some instances, I have preferred a reading from a different editor of Propertius (reading 3.25 as a separate elegy, for example); such instances are identified in the notes. I came to this project many years after I first read elegy, in an undergraduate Latin course on Ovid. For a long time I thought it was a shame to have read the last elegist first, rather than reading the poetry in its chronological development (insofar as that chronology is determinable), but eventually I realized that it was a very lucky thing indeed, as Ovid’s reading of elegy colored my own and provided me a key to understanding it, as I argue in...