The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus

The bacio mordace, or the biting kiss, was one of the most erotic and consequently very popular poetic tropes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, particularly through the poetry of Battista Guarini (1538–1612) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In his later books of madrigals, particularly the Seventh Book of 1619, Monteverdi was drawn to madrigals with such provocative imagery, although in a more overt way compared to his earlier kiss madrigals of the Second Book of 1590. In his later kiss madrigals, Monteverdi sought to give a musical dimension not so much to a cerebral obsession with kisses, but rather in the execution of them. The concertato medium proved ideal to render musical poets’ syntactical play on who is kissing whom, and the degree to which teeth were involved.

This chapter explores the question of how erotic tenderness was represented pictorially in early Imperial art. The pinakes from cubicula B and D in the Villa della Farnesina in Rome (ca. 20s BCE) are among the earliest surviving tender representations of lovers to have been found in Roman domestic spaces. Since the villa’s discovery in the late nineteenth century, these frescoes have prompted numerous interpretations, mostly of a moralizing, biographical bent. Instead of focusing on the ultimately unanswerable question of who might have owned this splendid residence, the argument presents these well-known wall paintings as expressions of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, namely the formation of a new romantic ideal. Close readings of key passages from Latin love elegy help to situate these images within a larger concomitant debate on privacy and domesticity. This chapter also traces the diffusion of the Roman ideal of amatory tenderness beyond the capital and the court. Two first-century wall paintings from Pompeii, one from the House of Caecilius Jucundus and the other from the House of Lucretius Fronto, demonstrate how quickly this new romantic ideal was absorbed into Roman familial ideology and became emblematic of widespread socio-cultural aspirations.

The introduction examines the pre-history of the elegiac ideal of a life of love. Although Latin love elegy and tender depictions of lovers in Roman wall painting may be described as Augustan phenomena, their roots lay in the ethical and aesthetic transformations that marked the Republican era. From the construction of luxury villas along the Italian coast to the emergence of a more personal style of poetry, we see in this period a new valuation of private life and a growing concern with individual experience among Rome’s aristocracy. Catullus’ poems to Lesbia represent the apogee of this turn toward the intimate and the private. In his verses we see for the first time the fusion of domus (home) and amor (erotic passion) – concepts long seen as mutually exclusive. Catullus’ domestication of erotic passion thus prefigures the elegists’ rejection of Augustan morality and their own construction of an alternative worldview. The poets’ witty appropriation of familial and marital terms also points to the codification of amatory experience in Roman literature and, later, in art. In both images and texts, erotic tenderness manifests itself through a series of metonymies that render love an experience that can be recognized, learned, remembered, and recounted.

In this chapter we extend our analysis of the lena to the poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, where the narrative focus is not as much on her appearance or her poetic skill. Tibullus concentrates his readers’ attention on the grotesque actions that the poet–lover visualizes the lena performing, while Ovid focuses on her intention to degrade elegiac love itself. Though they do not have the profile of Acanthis, these lenae are grotesque figures integral to the Tibullan and the Ovidian conceptions of elegy. The images of ugly, sinister, and disgusting actions with which they are associated are for the reader scripts of aversion integral to elegy. Tibullus constructs his script in the subtle manner typical of his style, by making effective use of the reader’s literary memory, which, through a dynamic play of inter- and intra-textual allusion, he engages in the creation of his elegiac grotesque. Ovid constructs his more economically and with bold strokes, presenting his lena with powerful grotesque images– nocturnal, and savage, under the canopy of a bleeding sky – that leave no doubt concerning his intent to use her to subvert with horrid imagery the idealizing purport of love elegy itself.

A prominent function of the rival in the elegiac scenario is to make it possible for the poet–lover to express the negative emotions of jealousy and indignation, creating the narrative conditions for the elegist to contemplate images of violence, ugliness, and obtuseness through the aesthetic prism of the elegiac form. He thereby gives rise to a sense of artistic beauty that incorporates images of ugliness. The rival is an agent of the paradox of ugliness, physical as well as moral, operating at the core of elegy, and hence an agent of the grotesque. In describing the rival, Propertius resorts to the language of animal behaviour, Tibullus to that of derisible obtuseness, and Ovid to the rhetoric of blood and gore to raise questions about the possibility of a stable erotic relationship founded on the intensity of the protagonist’s passion and on the merits of his poetry. In the course of this process, the elegists reveal that elegiac love, conceived as it is in corporeal terms and in the context of a triangle formed by two lovers and one beloved, is necessarily susceptible to the intrusion of ugly, befouling, and degrading images.

Chapter focuses on Naso’s self-canonizing claims to immortality and his allusive, self-reflexive elegy for Corinna’s parrot, showing how these poems are not just authorial pronouncements coming to us direct from Ovid, but moves in a game Naso is playing with (against) his girlfriend. It emerges that the poet’s grand claims have a contrastive emphasis, whereby Naso’s high pursuits are set off against his girlfriend’s mundane arts. Chapter ends with a discussion of rivalry, focusing on the figures of Dipsas, Tibullus, and the personified Elegy. Key poems: Amores 1.14 and 1.15; 2.5, 2.6, 2.8; 3.14 and 3.15; 1.8 and 3.9.

Main task of this chapter is to distinguish Ovid from the poet-lover of the collection, drawing a sharp line between the poet in the collection and the author of the collection. Offers theoretical reflections on Ovid’s deployment of proper names (fictional names, pseudonyms, “real” Roman names); reads the elegy for Tibullu, as a model for the fictional reduction of Ovid to Naso; and addresses poems that challenge this argument (e.g. the poem featuring Ovid’s wife), showing that even these can be seen to serve the interests of Naso, the fictional character inside the collection. Key poems: Amores 1.1, 2.18, 3.9, 3.13.