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Epilogue - Tenderness Transformed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2020

Hérica Valladares
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

This final section of the book analyzes how elegiac tenderness was absorbed into a conservative, mainstream discourse on conjugal love. By the late first century CE, the Augustan elegists’ witty and subversive ideal of a life of love became a commonly accepted model for articulating, describing, and commemorating the emotional bond between spouses. The elegists’ ironic use of familial, marital, and domestic terminology to portray the poets’ ardent and illicit love affairs is now itself domesticated and deradicalized. In elite discourse, Pliny the Younger’s letters to his wife, Calpurnia, are an excellent example of the appropriation of the language of elegiac tenderness in the context of a traditional Roman marriage. But as with other aspects of the Roman aesthetic of tenderness, this form of conjugal self-fashioning was not an exclusively elite phenomenon. Both the Pompeian portrait of “Terentius Neo” with his wife and the Roman altar dedicated to Pedana by her husband Donatus demonstrate how a wide spectrum of Roman citizens adopted elegiac models for their own self-representation.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Tenderness Transformed
  • Hérica Valladares, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book: Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire
  • Online publication: 26 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108883917.005
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  • Tenderness Transformed
  • Hérica Valladares, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book: Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire
  • Online publication: 26 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108883917.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Tenderness Transformed
  • Hérica Valladares, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Book: Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire
  • Online publication: 26 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108883917.005
Available formats
×