Introduction: genre and supergenre

'Within elegy [Ovid] achieved an unparalleled variety of output by exploiting and extending the range of the genre as no poet had done before.' This consistently inventive and radical expansion of a highly conventional poetic kind suggests that 'supergenre' might be a better term than 'genre' in discussing the extraordinary Ovidian use of the elegiac form, beginning with traditional erotic discourse but expanding and diversifying to include practically every poetic topic. Ancient genres are often classified by features such as metre and vocabulary, thematic concerns, and generic codes and models; in all but the first, the Ovidian elegiac output shows a remarkable and highly self-conscious variety. Here as so often, Ovid’s work confounds and subverts conventional categories.

The choice of elegy, even redefined as a supergenre, nevertheless needs to be set within the broad range of genres available for Roman poets in the first century bc, and against the ideological and literary factors influencing that choice. First, the impact of the evident political pressure for encomiastic epic for Augustus encountered by all the major Augustan poets: like Horace and Propertius, Ovid avoids this by a firmly non-epic generic policy until the Metamorphoses, though some of his elegiac poems show concern with epic and (the poet later claimed) with political conformism.