scholarly journals Law and Love: Legal Terminology in Roman Elegy

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlynn Cummings
Keyword(s):  
Love Poetry ◽  
Love Elegy

This paper analyses the use of legal terminology in Roman love elegy of the 1st century BCE.  Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid all employ this seemingly strange vocabulary in their love poetry for different ends, while also sharing some specific similarities.  This legal vocabulary does not make these love poems stilted, dry, nor unemotional, but is used deftly and rather indicates an interesting layer of Roman concern and preoccupation.

How to win girlfriends and influence them: amicitia in Roman love elegy

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 62-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Code ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Love Elegy

It is often said that amicitia, so prominent in the love poetry of Catullus, plays a negligible role in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the elegists avoid the vocabulary of amicitia and prefer to describe the relationships with their beloveds in terms of militia and seruitium amoris. In this paper, however, I shall show that this is mistaken. While the elegists do not use the vocabulary of amicitia systematically, they clearly do continue to appeal to its protocols and moral code – Ovid above all. It will be seen that Catullus and the elegists share the use of the ideology of amicitia to pressurize their beloveds to accept or make a return on the benefacta which they as lovers bestow.

The Poet and the Procuress: TheLenain Latin Love Elegy

1996 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Sara Myers
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Deep Interest

This paper investigates the figure of thelenain the elegies of Tibullus (I.5; II.6), Propertius (IV.5), and Ovid (AmoresI.8). While each poet treats the character of thelenain importantly different ways, each has in common a deep interest in contrasting his own position as both lover and poet with the activities of thelena, a bawd or procuress. All three poets curse thelena, denouncing primarily her malevolent magical powers, hercarmina, which are directed against them and theircarmina. Thelenanot only preaches an erotic code which in its emphasis on remuneration and the denigration of poetry directly opposes that of the poet-lover, she also usurps his role as instructor and constructor of the elegiacpuella. It is the elegiac poet's prerogative to describe and construct the elegiac mistress. By usurping his role aspraeceptor, thelenathreatens the poet with both sexual and literary impotence. It is precisely because thelenachallenges the male poet-lover's control over these terms that she is such a potent enemy; the woman with a pen, as Pollack writes inThe Poetics of Sexual Myth, ‘threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim’. If the elegiac mistress can be said to play a more masterful role asdominain Roman love poetry than in conventional Roman ideology, it must nevertheless be qualified with the reminder that she only plays a role constructed for her by elegy's first-person narrator who demands complete control over the discourse of their relationship, of the rules of the amatory game.

2. Love poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Llewelyn Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Didactic Poetry ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ars Amatoria

'Love poetry' examines Ovid’s ventures into the sub-genre of love-elegy and describes the development of this exclusively Roman literary form over the previous two generations, and the conventions that Ovid had inherited. Ovid wrote three books on the subject of love, these are Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), a meeting of love-elegy and the popular ancient tradition of didactic poetry. The Amores was the collection that launched Ovid’s poetic career, and it set the terms for the rest of it, marking him out as the leading proponent of elegiac verse in Rome. In his approach to love-elegy we also see a style that will characterize much of his later work, playful and intensely self-aware. The Amores is less poetry about love than poetry about love poetry, its primary appeal lying in witty manipulation of poetic convention. Meanwhile, the Ars Amatoria teaches men and women how to find and keep a lover, and then the Remedia Amoris explains how to ‘unlearn’ the lessons of the Ars.

The Courtroom in the Bedroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-141
Author(s):  
Ioannis Ziogas
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
The Rule Of Law

This chapter compares the distinction between what lies inside and outside the rule of law with the blurring of public and private space in the age of Augustus. Love elegy blends private with public life but also bars Roman law from the privacy of the bedroom. The secrecy of lovemaking is emblematic of the autonomy of love poetry, an independent area governed by the sovereign laws of love. At the same time, love’s jurisdiction spreads from the privacy of the bedroom to occupy the spaces of public life. The bedroom in love elegy is part of the discursive independence of sexuality, an autonomy that is the basis of sovereignty. Focusing on representative case studies from the Amores (1.4, 2.5, 2.7–8, 2.19, 3.4, 3.14), the chapter examines the shift to the privacy of the elegiac bedroom against the background of Augustus’ policy of making all aspects of his private life public.

Plant Creepers in the Ancient Tamil Love Poetry

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Kumaran Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Love Poetry

Modeling Perfection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Wasdin
Keyword(s):  
Love Poetry ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Husband And Wife

This chapter shows how three heroic paradigms (Helen, Achilles, and the couple Peleus and Thetis) function in wedding and love poetry. The flexibility of their myths allows for both positive and negative presentations in different contexts. Helen, as the most beautiful woman, serves as a model for both brides and mistresses. Her ability to arouse desire and her willingness to follow her longings make her a complicated ideal. Achilles is equally complex as an archetypal young warrior, albeit one without a stable union who often brings death to his paramours. Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, are famed for their glorious wedding, yet do not go on to become devoted husband and wife. Weddings glamorize fleeting moments of excellence, but the discourse of love poetry shows how fragile these models can be.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

scholarly journals Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger*

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 819-851 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Louise Haugen
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Love Lyric

AbstractNotoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger'sNew Epigramsof 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker's erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger's own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet.

The Early Love Poetry of Heinrich Heine. An Inquiry into Poetic Inspiration

1963 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
S. S. Prawer ◽  
William Rose ◽  
Heinrich Heine
Keyword(s):  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Poetic Inspiration
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