but at least six years earlier than the blowup immediately before the exile? Why had it not been sufficient for Ovid to have carefully dismissed married women, in words reminiscent of religious prohibition, from among his pupils at the beginning of Ars Amatoria (I.31–43)? This would seem to correct poems in the earlier work, the Amores (such as the entire Poem I.4), that could be deemed disrespectful to Augustus’s morals legislation. These laws were aimed in part at adulterous wives and their corruptors—but not at men roving at large, nor at sex professionals, and the two categories seem to comprise the usual actors in Ovid’s scenarios. Not only sporting eroticism but also literary eroticism were sanctioned diversions for men. A statesman as proper as Cicero leaves us an example of the latter, cited with amused indulgence by another statesman, Pliny the Younger, more than a century later. At worst, Ovid’s taste for publicity was problematic, as the normal forum for “trifles” and “jokes” concerning sex was the private dinner party.
Moreover, though Ovid may have been best known for his love poetry, his output as a whole speaks of a learned eclecticism that should have done the regime proud. His first extant book (the Heroides) comprised love letters of mythological characters, and, besides assorted minor works, he also produced a tragedy (Medea, now lost), an unfinished collection of Roman lore (the Fasti) based on the calendar, and of course the Metamorphoses. If Augustus did suddenly turn censor, it was in the spirit of “You’re no good! I should have known it back when you did X, but I’m certain of it now that you’ve done Y.” Without Y, there would never have been an outburst about anything.
Erotic Poetry and Elegy in Greece and Rome
Love poetry was quite a late development in the ancient world. At least in oral form, epic poetry dates back for millennia, and of course it contains erotic elements. For example, the Odyssey (VIII.266ff.) features the tale of the adulterous lovers Aphrodite and Ares caught naked in an invisible net rigged over the goddess’s bed. But it was not until the late seventh century B.C.E. on the island of Lesbos that someone emerged as a love poet. This was of course Sappho with her lyrical outpourings.
The circumstances of her writing remain disputed, but the surviving fragments give the same impression to us as the complete poems did to the ancients: the poet is frankly helpless against her passions, which can be like a form of madness. Roughly five hundred years later, the Roman poet Catullus (Poem 51) imitated her most famous poem, about a seizure brought on watching a man and a woman—who is addressed in the first person—as the woman talks and laughs with him. (We also have the original Greek version quoted in the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to a critic called Longinus.) Folklore had long held that Sappho died by hurling herself into the sea, because of unrequited love for a young man.
Catullus’s special homage—apparently the only poem of his that is close to a word-for-word translation of a predecessor—is apt. He is the first Roman we could call a love poet in the mode of Sappho, and we have plausible historical accounts of his unhappy love affair, including a name: it was Clodia, the wife of the consul (one of two Roman yearly heads of state) Metellus, to whom he gives the pseudonym Lesbia (not meaning “lesbian,” which was not at the time the emphasis in Sappho’s reputation: though she reports emotional involvements with women, her memory merely evoked the transports of love—and the delights of literature).
But a word of caution is in order for those who might think that Greek and Roman erotic poets were similar to troubadours, modern love poets, or pop balladeers. Even for Sappho and Catullus, the erotic poets most likely to have spoken sincerely and personally, the work shows literary functions far removed from simple self-expression, one-to-one communication, or even the publicizing of either of these. For example, in asserting the power of love, Sappho uses an exemplum, or invocation of authority from the literary tradition, and here at least this is the lofty, almost abstract tradition of epic. She picks out one character from the Iliad, Helen, and describes the Trojan War’s precipitating crisis from her point of view: Helen left her royal husband and her young child behind to follow her lover Paris to Troy (Fragment 16).
The common modern critical explanation is that Sappho re-forms mythology to testify to a woman’s special interests, as a sort of protest, but this makes little sense. For one thing, though some minds (like Ovid’s, certainly) could be more independent than others, there tended to be no clean delineation between an individual’s inner sense of self and a sense of the self’s outward endowments obtained from education, clan, religion, culture, and nationality, and traditional stories inhered in all of these. Even the poets we might call not erotic but pornographic had no actual ability to set themselves apart from society and claim, “That’s society over there; here I am in defiance of it.” The one exception is Archilochus (early seventh century B.C.E.); perhaps because as an illegitimate son, a mercenary, and a colonist at a time when Greece was emerging from its dark ages, he was that almost unknown phenomenon in the ancient world: an outsider with a standard education.
In contrast, though Catullus howls about his girlfriend’s betrayals—and a speech extant from the murder trial of one of her lovers provides some evidence that he had plenty to howl about—he does it in strict, rarified meter inherited from the great lyric poets of Greece, and his emotion is no less raw when displaced into a female mythological heroine, Ariadne standing in disarray on a lonely sea shore and lamenting her abandonment by Theseus (Poem 64).
Interestingly, this poem is not a lyric but a “little epic,” in dactylic hexameters. Erotic subject matter in epic both relatively short and of the full traditional length had been favored among the learned Alexandrian poets in Egypt and its surrounds, between the Greek Classical period and the Roman literary ascendancy. This phenomenon crystallizes some important differences between ancient erotic poetry and our own, differences I have already stressed: ancient erotic poetry had profound debts to learned tradition, and this kept it relatively impersonal—more in the character of artifact than of documentation. Beyond that, it was hardly ever a practical tool such as a message or a gift to a real beloved. Shakespeare’s sonnets or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese are nothing like what the ancient erotic poets were up to. In their environment, it was easier than it would have been elsewhere for Ovid to transcend toward pure language and pure imagination.
At any rate, in erotic poetry’s evolution, elegiac couplets must have been an apt mediating form where the tension between the personal and public needed balancing over long works—that is, when erotic poetry had developed to the point where long, almost novelistic works became possible. This began in Greece around 400 B.C.E. with the poet and dramatist Antimachus, whose lost poem Lyde made literary myths the vehicle for a lament over a beloved’s death. The genre flowered in Rome under Augustus, when three writers were known mainly or exclusively as love elegists: Gallus (very little of whose work is extant), Propertius, and Tibullus.
Propertius begins his collection with the line “Cynthia was the first to capture poor me with her [sweet little] eyes,” and proceeds to narrate the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the love affair; Tibullus features two girlfriends, Delia and Nemesis. The poems, like Ovid’s Amores, are dozens of lines long, and like them constitute vignettes or episodes; together, they are a sort of story, but without the linear narrative drive of a novel. There are various stock scenes and situations: a blissful, too-short night together; clandestine correspondence; the threat of a rival; the lover is locked outside the beloved’s house at night; he renounces a military career to serve in love’s army; the girl’s shallow or outright mercenary character or influences send him into despair; and so on. Some of these tropes go back at least to Greek Old Comedy and are rife in the early Roman theater of Plautus and Terence. The lover’s speeches on familiar topics, including Beauty Unadorned, Old-Time Piety, and Virtuous Poverty, link the genre to the philosophical schools and the practice of declamation, or display rhetoric.
A special feature of love elegy was the concentration on a single woman and the evolution of her relationship with the narrator. As with Catullus’s Lesbia playing with a pet bird and
