canon of great love poets which begins with Callimachus and Philitas but now also includes the Roman poets Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, as well as (of course) Ovid himself.
As the direct references to his name in the works of Propertius and Ovid suggest, the third century bce poet Callimachus is hugely influential upon the Roman elegists (and upon Horace, too). Unfortunately, only fragments of his work survive, despite the Roman critic Quintilian describing him as the best – the princeps – of the ancient Greek elegists (10.1.58). However, we do know from Callimachus’ great reputation in antiquity that he was an exceptionally learned and erudite writer (see Hunter 2006; Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2012: 204–269). Callimachus wrote in various meters and genres but is best known for his long and multifaceted narrative poem in elegiacs, the Aitia or Causes, a series of mythological “origin stories” in which Callimachus himself takes on the role of a first-person speaker or narrator (as the Roman lyric and elegiac poets will also later do). Catullus is such a fan of Callimachus that he reworks into Latin a section of this long poem, known as the Coma Berenices or “The Lock of Berenice” (Catullus 66, reworking Callimachus fragment 110), but we need to look beyond such translation, allusion, and imitation if we are to understand the influence that Callimachus has upon Roman lyric and elegy. It is no exaggeration to say that Callimachus shapes the very DNA of Roman elegy and lyric. His influence runs deep in both genres, and ranges from the nostalgic, contemplative, and slightly melancholy first-person poetry that we encounter in much of Horace and Tibullus, to the sophisticated wordplay and witty politics found in Propertius and Ovid. We can see Callimachus’ sway in the hostility towards epic that elegy and lyric both adopt, and in the labels that elegy especially chooses to define itself: epic (and its military focus) is durus or hard; in contrast, elegy (and its focus on love) is mollis or soft – the very same style that is favored by Callimachus himself.
The influence of Callimachus (and the continuing influence of the wider Greek and Hellenistic literary canon) can be tracked through to the last of the Alexandrian poets writing in the first century bce, where the baton is handed over from Greece to Rome. We even know which poets were involved in this handover. The Greek poet Parthenius, who famously taught Greek to Vergil, composed a number of short elegiac poems, including an elegiac lament for his dead wife Arete (now lost) and an elegiac book of short, sad, love stories titled Erotica Pathemata or Sufferings in Love. Parthenius dedicated this book of poetry to his friend and fellow poet Cornelius Gallus – the poet who successive generations of Roman elegists would come to name as the founding-father of their own Latin canon of elegists.
Gallus, writing in the 40s bce was evidently a popular elegiac poet – apparently publishing a five book collection of elegies under the title Amores – but he was also a popular soldier and politician, and this popularity seems ultimately to have led to his premature death (see Raymond 2013). Gallus served as Augustus’ prefect in Egypt, but his many prominent successes there appear to have inspired the emperor’s jealousy and Gallus was forced to commit suicide in 26 bce. His poetry seems not to have been officially banned by Augustus, however, and helped to establish the reputation of the elegiac genre in Rome as politically bold and rebellious in spirit – although not actively “anti-Augustan” (see Kennedy 1992). Gallus’ political fate did not deter his elegiac successors, fortunately. Propertius continued to compose and publish elegy, and in the same year that Gallus committed suicide Tibullus published his first book of elegies. In the following year, Ovid began work on his own three-book collection of elegies – titled, like Gallus’ work, Amores.
Too little of Gallus’ own writing has survived for us to be able to do more than speculate on the content of his own elegies – although a combination of sorrow and love appears to be the theme of at least one surviving fragmentary line, in which Gallus declares himself to be “Sad, Lycoris, because of your misbehavior” (Tristia nequit[ia … .]a, Lycori). Yet his influence upon the shape of the elegiac genre in Rome is unquestionable. Propertius explicitly names Gallus – along with fellow Roman elegists Calvus (whose poetry similarly does not survive) and Catullus (who also writes lyric poetry) – as he ambitiously declares a connection between his own work and this venerable canon of earlier Roman elegists (2.34.87–94):
haec quoque lascivi cantarunt scripta Catulli,
Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena;
haec etiam docti confessa est pagina Calvi,
cum caneret miserae funera Quintiliae.
et modo formosa quam multa Lycoride Gallus
mortuus inferna vulnera lavit aqua!
Cynthia quin etiam versu laudata Properti,
hos inter si me ponere Fama volet.
(So too did the poems of playful Catullus sing
through which Lesbia is better known than Helen herself;
and so too did the pages of learned Calvus confess,
when he sang of the death of poor Quintilia.
And just recently, how many wounds has Gallus washed in
the waters of the underworld, dead because of Lycoris’ beauty.
Yes, Cynthia will live, praised by the verses of Propertius,
if Fame grants me a place among these poets.)
In Amores 3.9, Ovid’s elegiac tribute to the poet Tibullus following his death in 19 bce, Ovid presents this same sequence of elegists – Calvus, Catullus, and Gallus – coming forward to greet Tibullus when he too arrives in the Elysian Fields of the afterlife (Amores 3.9.61–4). And in his autobiographical Tristia (which literally translates as “Sorrows” or “Sad Songs”), Ovid adds his own name to a distinctively Roman elegiac canon that begins with Gallus, then continues through Tibullus and Propertius, until it reaches Ovid himself (Tristia 4.10.51–4):
Vergilium vidi tantum, nec avara Tibullo
tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae.
successor fuit hic tibi, Galle, Propertius illi;
quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.
(Vergil I only saw, and to Tibullus selfish Fate
gave no time for friendship with me.
He was your successor Gallus, and Propertius was his:
after them, fourth in line, was me.)
By repeatedly representing themselves as the successors of Roman as well as of Greek poets, Propertius and Ovid together manage to establish Roman elegy as a distinctive genre in its own right. Writing in the late first century ce, the Roman critic and rhetorician Quintilian could therefore proudly claim that (10.1.93):
Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus. Sunt qui Propertium malint. Ovidius utroque lascivior, sicut durior Gallus.(In elegy as well we challenge [literally – “we call out”] the Greeks; for me, its most concise and elegant author seems to be Tibullus, but there are those who prefer Propertius. By comparison, Ovid is more playful, just as Gallus is tougher/more serious.)
Quintilian’s ranking of the Roman elegists has not always influenced popular or scholarly opinion of this canon, as we will see in the following chapters. Yet it reminds us just how successfully the Romans adopted and adapted this ancient Greek literary form, and how effectively they made elegy their own.
Literary Contexts
