of the state into private affairs. Horace refers to the laws on a number of occasions (in fact, it is his Carmen Saeculare which helps historians to date the legislation to around 18 bce) but his point of view on the topic seems to waver. In Odes 3.24 he is found calling upon Augustus to rein-in the decadent and immoral behavior of Rome’s citizens, before pointing out that state intervention probably isn’t the best way to tackle this social problem (35–6). But in Odes 4.15 (written after the legislation has been passed) we find Horace praising Augustus for his intervention and for ushering in a return to good old-fashioned family values (4.15.10–12). For the elegiac poets, though, the new marriage and adultery laws were definitely unpopular: Propertius has one of his characters (the lena) suggest that puellae should “smash the damnable laws of chastity” (frange et damnosae iura pudicitiae, 4.5.28); Ovid in his Amores (2.2) insists that his own adulterous affairs are no real crime; and in his elegiac Ars Amatoria he offers what might well be read as a “guide to the art of adultery.”
The Augustan law on marriage set down a system of incentives and penalties (praemia et poenae) for marriage between citizens of all classes. Widows were expected to remarry within a year of their husband’s death, and divorcees expected to remarry within six months of their divorce. Unmarried men and women were penalized financially and unable to inherit. And, in a particularly petty ruling, unmarried men over the age of twenty-five and unmarried women over the age of twenty were banned from attending certain public entertainments. The law also introduced a number of prohibitions, most notably forbidding members of the senatorial order to marry certain kinds of people – including freedmen, freedwomen, actors, actresses, and anyone whose father or mother was an actor or actress. The marriage law also prohibited any freeborn person, including senators, from marrying those whose status was deemed infamia: that is, prostitutes, pimps, procuresses, and any persons publicly prosecuted for adultery. Meanwhile, new adultery laws dealt with extra-marital relations. Under the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, adultery, which had previously been dealt with as a private concern within and between families, was now made subject to public scrutiny and state involvement. Formally criminalizing adultery for the first time in Rome’s history, this law established severe penalties for those caught in the act (on the marriage and adultery laws see especially Gardner 1986; Treggiari 1991; Dixon 1992; Liveley and Shaw 2020).
These political moves by Augustus provide an important backdrop for the ways in which the women of elegy in particular are represented. The elegiac puella is probably best understood as a fictional construct (see Alison Sharrock 1991; and Chapters 9 and 10 in this volume). Catullus’ Lesbia, Tibullus’ Delia, Propertius’ Cynthia, and Ovid’s Corinna all conform to an elegiac stereotype: they are beautiful but vain, clever but calculating, jealous but unfaithful, passionate but cruel. Yet the most significant characteristic of the stereotypical puella is the fact that she does not belong to the group of respectable, marriageable, women as defined by Augustus’ new marriage laws. Whether we are supposed to regard the women in Latin elegy as married women engaging in adulterous affairs with their poet-lovers (as appears to be the case with Catullus and his married lover, Lesbia) or whether we are supposed to see them as high-class courtesans or meretrices (as suggested by the occasional appearance of the lena – the procuress or “madam” – in Tibullus 2.6, Ovid Amores 1.8, and Propertius 4.5), these women are definitively not “marriage material.” Indeed, that seems to be the point of the puella. She is for recreation and pleasure, not for procreation and marriage – as Propertius 2.7 (which appears to refer directly to Augustus’ marriage laws) makes clear. As such, the decision to focus upon the puella as an object of love and desire, to make her the foundation upon which the elegiac poet builds his poetry and his life, represents an unconventional and even radical move.
In this context, it is important to remember that Roman culture does not equate erotic or romantic love with marriage or with modern, predominantly western, notions of “living happily ever after.” As Paul Allen Miller reminds us, in the Roman world it appears that “Love … was a regrettable extravagance to be tolerated in young men. They could have their flings with a courtesan or meretrix, provided they did not despoil the family fortune, but were then expected to settle down in a traditional arranged marriage and pursue a career in law, the military, or politics” (Miller 2002: 3–4). These are the kinds of love affair we find in Roman comedy, and even in Roman lyric, while in Roman epic we find that those who do put love above duty tend to come to a bad end themselves and to threaten the safety of the Roman state (Vergil’s Aeneas and Dido, for example). In choosing to celebrate their love for a puella over all else, then, the Roman elegists place their lifestyle choices in flagrant opposition to Augustus’ attempts at social and moral reform.
In fact, in simply choosing to write elegy or lyric rather than epic, in wanting to sing the praises of a puella rather than of a princeps, to tell of amor rather than of arma, the Roman lyric and elegiac poets adopt a profoundly “counter-cultural” stance. Their writings, therefore, not only reflect but contribute to what is sometimes described as Rome’s “cultural revolution” during this period (see Habinek and Schiesaro 1997; Wallace-Hadrill 2008). Thus, once we recognize and understand the current events and socio-political setting to this turbulent – even traumatic – period of Roman history, we can better understand the poetry that responds to this revolutionary context. And so, now that we know the backstory, we can turn to the poets themselves.
Guide to Further Reading
There are several studies that offer good starting points for understanding the social, political, and cultural contexts in which Latin lyric and elegy was originally produced, including: J.P. Sullivan, “The Politics of Elegy.” Arethusa 5:1 (1972): 17–34; Judith Hallett, “Woman as Same and Other in Classical Roman Elite.” Helios 16 (1989): 59–78; Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (1993); Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture (1996); Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro, The Roman Cultural Revolution (1997); Thomas Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature (1998); Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (2008); Efrossini Spentzou, The Roman Poetry of Love: Elegy and Politics in a Time of Revolution (2013); Stephen J. Harrison, “Time, Place and Political Background.” In Thea Thorsen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy (2013), 133–150. Jasper Griffin’s Latin Poets and Roman Life (1985) is a little dated now but is still useful background reading. D. O. Ross on Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry: Gallus, Elegy, and Rome (1975) is also still useful as an introduction to the elegiac genre, as is W. R. Johnson’s The Idea of Lyric (1982) on lyric traditions. Other useful studies of genre and canon and the relationship between Greek and Latin lyric and elegy include George Luck, The Latin Love Elegy (1959); Paul Allen Miller’s Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (1994); Roy Gibson’s “Love Elegy.” In S. J. Harrison, ed., A Companion to Latin Literature (2006) and Richard Hunter’s The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome (2006).
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