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Cogor amare: Embodied Compulsion and Elegiac Passivity 

Though coercion is fundamental to the amator’s elegiac pursuit, he frames himself as a victim of compulsion rather than a compeller: forms of cogere appear frequently in the genre, but the amator himself is never its agent. My new study of the dynamics of compulsion in elegy reveals that beneath the amator’s pretense of passivity lurks a gendered distinction in the experience of involuntary action: acts of compulsion affect the amator’s mind, but the puella’s body. 

Relations of dominance have long been a focal point for scholarship on Latin elegy. The amator manipulates the power dynamics of gender and class to succeed in his game of persuasion (Greene 1998, James 2003). Servitium amoris (Copley 1947, Lyne 1979, Murgatroyd 1981, Fulkerson 2013) and militia amoris (Murgatroyd 1975, Cahoon 1988, O’Rourke 2018) often entail the rhetorical subversion of authority; even beyond these tropes, the genre is governed by the amator’s passive posture (Wyke 1994). This paper further destabilizes the lie of elegiac passivity: despite his grammatical control of coercive agency, the amator fails to conceal that only his experience of compulsion is tidily disembodied.  

I first establish that explicit references to compulsion feature the amator often as object and never as agent—the verb itself tends to be agentless or governed by abstract or inanimate forces. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid experience coercion strictly as mental or affective activity: the amator coactus is compelled toward emotion, knowledge, and speech (e.g. amare, flere, scire(e)discerecognoscere, loquiqueridicere); when love is forced upon him, amare denotes emotional rather than physical intimacy. The only supposed bodily coercion the amator suffers is a lack of sex forced by religious observance (Am.3.10.44). 

The puella coacta, meanwhile, is compelled to touch, and be touched, against her will. Though it is crucial to the poet’s self-representation that he does not compel the puella, the genre is suffused with women’s bodies physically compelled. This displacement of coercive agency is most evident at the racetrack, when he informs a recoiling woman that “the seating compels us to be joined” (cogit nos linea iungiAm.3.2.19). The notion that the puella might be sexually forced is also integral to the amator’s masochistic fantasies (Oliensis 2019), as he demands that she feign compulsion during sex with his rival (Am.1.4.65) or imagines that her dreams feature sexual assault (Prop.1.3.30). His rebuke to a gift-seeking puella, comparing her volition to the compulsion of a woman controlled by a leno (quod vos facitis sponte, coacta facit, Am.1.10.21) indicates how elegiac beloveds must conceal real economic pressures beneath a façade of desire. The puella must therefore not only endure compulsion as an unequivocally embodied experience, but also simulate or conceal desire according to the amator’s fluid expectations. Ultimately, the amator’s passive—but disembodied—suffering throws into sharper relief the gendered power differential in elegy: the puella is obliged to bear physical compulsion without complaint, while the amator complains of compulsion he does not physically bear.