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Latin Love Poets and the Biographical Approach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
In 1962 J.P. Sullivan reprinted in Critical Essays on Roman Literature, Elegy and Lyric an essay by H.F. Cherniss with the title ‘me ex versiculis parum pudicum’, which he described as a ‘still too little heeded warning against the biographical fashion in literary criticism’. Fashions seem now to have changed. The biographical approach is out of favour. Recent studies of Latin poetry give the impression that the key to it is to be found not in the writer's personality and experience, but in the Greek, particularly Hellenistic, poetry which he supposedly used and imitated, in the form and structure of the poem, even in its position in relation to others in the same book. ‘The only thing’, writes Georg Luck, ‘that the elegiac poets take seriously is their art’ —as if Propertius was never serious about Cynthia. The refusal to believe that Latin poets meant what they said leads to some strange perversities of interpretation. We had always supposed that after Tibullus gave up, or was given up by, Delia he took a new mistress whom he called Nemesis, and that, as he tells us in 2.6.29–40, she had a sister who died from falling out of a window. Now it appears that Tibullus invented Nemesis to give variety to his poetry, and invented the unfortunate sister to give factitious reality to Nemesis.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1976
References
NOTES
1. Sullivan, J. P. (ed.), Critical Essays on Roman Literature, Elegy and Lyric (London, 1962), 12.Google Scholar
2. According to J.P. Elder it is of no moment whether the Marathus of Tibullus 1.4.8 and 9 existed; ‘what is noteworthy is the position of the Marathus poems’ (op.cit. 90).Cf. Margaret Hubbard on Propertius 3.20, Propertius (London, 1974), 89–90.
3. The Latin Love Elegy (2nd edn. London, 1969), 13.
4. Williams, Gordon, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968), 505 and 538.Google Scholar
5. Ibid. 549–57.
6. Tibull-studien 1930 (Vienna, reprinted 1968), 100. For Ovid's view see AA 2.683–4. Propertius has a poem (1.20) addressed to Gallus who was in love with a boy, and in another (2.4) he briefly commends this kind of love as less troublesome than that of a woman. But there is no sign of personal involvement.
7. Quintilian 10.1.100.
8. Williams, , op. cit. 557.Google Scholar
9. Luck, , op. cit. 92–9.Google Scholar See also Bulloch, A. W., Proceedings of Cambridge Philological Society, N.S. 20 (1973), 71–89.Google Scholar
10. Cf. Catullus, 63.64–7.Google Scholar
11. Cf. Cicero, De or. 1. 200. This point is made incidentally by Burck, E., Von Menschenbild in der römischen Literatur (Heidelberg, 1966), 212.Google Scholar
12. A.P 12.109; Williams, , op.cit. 557.Google Scholar Dr. Bulloch (see n.9) interprets the poem, unconvincingly in my opinion, as designed to win back Marathus from Pholoe.
13. So too the translators T.C. Williams and Constance Carrier.
14. This point is made by Helm, R., Tibull, Gedicbte (Berlin, 1959), 3.Google Scholar
15. Allen, A. W. in Critical Essays on Roman Literature, Elegy and Lyric, 146.Google Scholar
16. Williams, , op. cit. 529.Google Scholar
17. Why posit a lost Hellenistic original for the moonlight scene, as Miss Hubbard does (op. cit. 20–2), when the moon shines in Rome just as much as elsewhere?