Skip to main content

Horace, Cinara, and the Elegiac Discourse of Desire

By Aaron Palmore

This paper reconsiders the poetic function of Horace’s late love Cinara in light of developments in elegiac poetry. While Horace has sometimes been read as an anti-elegist (e.g., Cairns 1995: 356 on Odes 3.7; Commager 1962: 239 on Odes 1.22.), my reading of Cinara demonstrates a close conceptual relationship between late Horace and the elegiac discourse of desire as explored by Ancona (1994), Miller (2003), and Janan (1996, 2001).

Female Networks in Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 1-4

By Christian Lehmann

This paper offers a new perspective the relationship between Ovid and his wife over the course of his exile with particular attention to the way in which he attempts to use her as a conduit to a network of powerful women. In the Tristia she is mostly treated as an exemplary figure whose fortitude in the face of danger Ovid renders mythic. In the fifth book, Ovid strikes a different tone. She might have the power to help relocate Ovid, he observes bitterly: esset, quae debet, si tibi cura mei “if you had the concern for me which you should have” (Tr. 5.2.34).

Roman Elegy Remixed: Gender and Genre in Catalepton 4

By Nicole Taynton

Before all our modern efforts to explain how friendship and politics fit into elegiac “love” poetry, the author of Catalepton 4 of the Appendix Vergiliana had already suggested that elegy’s talk of love is an excuse to explore the lover-poet’s relationships with other men. Catalepton 4, an elegaic poem addressed to Virgil’s friend, Octavius Musa, implies that amici in elegy are the underlying inspiration for elegiac poetry, rather than simply fellow lovers (cf. Gallus in Prop. 1.5, 1.10) or people pursuing goals opposed to the life of love (cf.

Propertius, Martial and the Monobiblos

By Justin Stover

The elegies of Propertius are referred to by the enigmatic description Monobiblos in two places: the incipit of one of the two earliest manuscripts (A, Leiden, Voss. lat. o. 38),incipit monobiblos propertii aurelii nautae, and the lemma to Martial, apoph. 189 (xiv.189), Monobyblos Properti. Current consensus holds that the title in A was interpolated from Martial (cf. Butrica 1996), but there is no consensus as to the precise signification of the word and why it was attached to Propertius' work (Heyworth 2007: xii).