Classical Association of Ireland

A Reading of Latin Love Poetry

Author(s): Brian Arkins
Source: Classics Ireland, Vol. 13 (2006), pp. 1-22
Published by: Classical Association of Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25528441
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 A READING OF LATIN LOVE POETRY*

Brian Arkins

National University of Ireland Galway

We no longer believe in the statement attributed to the

nineteenth century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke
that 'Roman literature is Greek literature written in Latin',1
but stress instead the originality of Latin literature. Greek
literary genres are transformed, so that, as opposed to
Homer's epics, the Aeneid of Virgil deals with the theme of
history in the form of the Roman Empire, and with the cost
that Empire exacts on the individual person.2 New literary
genres that exhibit an interest in the individual person are
invented in Latin literature: satire, letter-writing, love elegy.3
Indeed Latin love poetry constitutes a highly original body
of work (though written in a short span of some 70 years),
comprising poems by Catullus, by the elegists Sulpicia,
Propertius and Tibullus, by Horace in the Odes, by Ovid in
the Amores. In providing a concise reading of these Latin
poems, this paper will honour the Common Reader of Dr.

* This is a lightly revised version of the presidential address

delivered by Prof. Arkins to the Classical Association of Ireland on
25 November 2005 at University College, Dublin.
Von Treitschke, quoted in P. Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary
of Literary Quotations (Oxford, 1999), 141.6.
A. Parry, 'The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid', Arion 2 (1963),
66-80; reprinted in S. Commager (ed.), Virgil: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966).
3 For this personal note, see G. Williams, Tradition and
Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968), 443-523; for love
elegy, see P.A. Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the
Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2003).

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 2 Brian Arkins

Johnson, as it maintains (against often prolix works of modern

theory) the concept of a unitary Self, the existence of romantic
love, the view that language can, in part, represent reality.4
While evolutionary psychology suggests that women and
men have a natural capacity for love, it is nevertheless the
case that love, like everything else, has a history, that love is,
in part, socially and culturally constructed. At the time of the
Late Republic in Rome, the revolutionary figure of Catullus
wrote a new type of poetry about love and developed a new
concept of romantic love between women and men (this had
been adumbrated in the Hellenistic period).5 In Tom
Stoppard's play The Invention of Love (which is about A.E.
Housman, the Professor of Latin at Cambridge), the character
named Pollard states that 'Like everything else, like clocks
and trousers and algebra, the love poem had to be invented.
After millenniums of sex and centuries of poetry, the love
poem as understood by Shakespeare and Donne, and by
Oxford undergraduates - the true-life confessions of the poet
in love, immortalizing the mistress, who is actually the cause
of the poem, - that was invented in Rome in the first century
before Christ'. Pollard is then specific: 'Catullus ... invented
the love poem'.6 For the Lesbia poems chronicle in a new
way the past, present and future of Catullus' relationship with
Lesbia, its manifold ups and downs and complications, while
these poems introduce a new concept of love that is physical,
emotional, intellectual, that is directed towards a docta puella,
a girl who is educated, intelligent, with taste. Catullus
therefore anticipates the Troubadours of Provence by more

For a vigorous attack on modern (mostly Parisian) theory, see B.

Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare - Contemporary Critical
Quarrels (New Haven, 1993).
B. Arkins, Sexuality in Catullus (Hildesheim, 1982); id., An
Interpretation of the Poems of Catullus (Lewiston, 1999), 18-44.
6 T. Stoppard, The Invention of Love (London, 1997), 13.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 3

than a thousand years, and becomes an important figure in the

History of Ideas.
The emergence of a new concept of love in Rome must be
viewed in the context of the prevailing ideology of the day
and of a new counter-ideology. Rome at the time of the Late
Republic and early Empire was governed by a non-productive
aristocratic elite devoted to political, military and legal affairs,
and characterised by the virtues of responsibility, duty and
hard work (negotium). The emerging counter-ideology
stressed instead the private activities of leisure (otium), poetry
and, above all, sexual love; Cicero in 56 B.C. writes of 'what
are now called love affairs and liaisons' (Pro Caelio 19). This
new stress on love brought into being a genre of poetry now
known as the recusatio, in which the poet rejects political and
military themes in favour of the theme of love, and seems to
anticipate that slogan of the Sixties, 'Make love, not war'.7
For example, Propertius 3.3 rejects themes of Roman military
history in favour of that of the drunken lover seeking
admission to a woman's house.
Indeed what happens in poems by Ovid, by Propertius and
by Horace is that, in a type of semantic slippage, the
vocabulary of military matters is appropriated for love (militia
amoris). Ovid writes that 'every lover is a soldier' (Amores
1.9.1); Propertius writes of love that 'fate wants me to endure
this form of soldiering' (1.6.30); Horace asserts that 'What we
sing of is drinking parties, of battles fought/by fierce virgins
with nails cut sharp to wound young men' (Odes 1.6.17-19).8
Such a transfer of military language from war to the ups and
downs of a love affair was surely designed to bring the
established ideology into question.

7 This genre of recusatio is a Roman development of the rejection

by Callimachus in the Prologue to the Aitia of military themes; see
W. Wimmel, Kallimachos in Rom (Wiesbaden, 1960).
8 D. West, Horace - The Complete Odes and Epodes (Oxford,
1997), 31.

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 4 Brian Arkins

The new counter-ideology was facilitated by a particular

social and literary background. Crucial here is the fact that
women in Rome enjoyed a prominent role in society.
Aristocratic women were educated, had legal and financial
rights, and entered public space by attending the games and,
most notably, the symposium; this is the class that the
'Lesbia' of Catullus (probably Clodia Metelli) and the poet
Sulpicia belonged to. There also existed in Rome a substantial
demi-monde that was made up of divorcees, of widows, of
freedwomen and of foreigners (often Greek). As Wells says,
'if the expression "demi-monde" is unfamiliar to modern
readers, it is because modern Western society has lost in the
course of this century (the 20th) a recognizable sub-culture of
easy virtue with its own rules and conventions catering
outside marriage to the pleasures of a "respectable" society.
All the evidence shows that such a demi-monde, deeply
penetrated by Greek influence, existed in Rome; the poets
were not indulging in literary fancies'.9 To the top end of this
demi-monde belonged the Cynthia of Propertius and the Delia
of Tibullus, high-class courtesans with material needs;10 to its
bottom end belonged the various women with Greek names
who appear in the Odes of Horace.
The central literary background to Latin love poetry is the
aesthetic programme of Calllimachus that advocates brevity,
originality, erudition and craftsmanship; this programme was
deeply congenial to Latin poets of the late Republic and Early
Empire. Contrary to Harold Bloom's theory of 'the anxiety of
influence', in which the new poet is always contemplating

C. Wells, The Roman Empire (London, 1984), 96.

For these material needs, see S.L. James, Learned Girls and
Male Persuasion (Berkeley, 2003).
11 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford, 1973); for comment,
see T. Eagleton, Literary Theory - An Introduction (Oxford, 1983),
183-85.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 5

his predecessors with fear, this Callimachean aesthetic was a

source of freedom for Latin poets, which provided them with
a suitable literary programme, while simultaneously allowing
them to develop the theme of love in a new way. The point is
made by the first two poems of Catullus: Poem 1 advocates
and exhibits the Callimachean aesthetic; Poem 2 is the first of
the Lesbia-poems.12
A further literary aspect of the love poetry of Catullus and
the Elegists is found in the pseudonyms that the poets use for
the beloved;13 what unites those pseudonyms is a concern with
poetry that underlines the fact that the beloved is being
chronicled in verse, that Cynthia, for example, is a scripta
puella, 'a written girl'. In the case of Catullus and of Ovid,
the pseudonyms relate to earlier Greek poets. Since in
Catullus Lesbia means 'Woman of Lesbos', it inevitably
suggests the love poetry of Sappho, but the introduction of
that name Lesbia into Catullus' version of Sappho's poem
about love between women stresses the fact that the Roman
poet is writing oi heterosexual love. More straightforward is
the pseudonym Corinna in Ovid's Amores, the name of a
Greek poet from Baeotia, and one that suggests the Greek
word for girl, kore.
In the case of the other three male Elegists, the
pseudonyms they use are all linked to the god Apollo, who,
for the Romans, presides with his lyre over the less elaborate
forms of poetry and over love poetry in particular. So in
Propertius 3.3, Apollo directs the poet away from epic
towards the grotto of Venus, goddess of love, and so towards
love poetry. Hence the Lycoris of Gallus suggests the cult

For Callimachus as a liberating figure, see B. Arkins, 'The

Freedom of Influence: Callimachus and Latin Poetry', Latomus 47
(1988), 285-93.
For these pseudonyms, see J.G. Randall, 'Mistresses'
Pseudonyms in Latin Elegy', Liverpool Classical Monthly 4
(1979), 27-35.

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 6 Brian Arkins

title of Apollo at Delphi, Lycoreus; the Delia of Tibullus

points to Apollo's birth on the island of Delos; the Cynthia of
Propertius (his very first word) recalls Mount Cynthus on that
island where Apollo was born and Callimachus' reference to
this. Finally, the Cerinthus of Sulpicia denotes a substance
manufactured by bees, and so connotes the sweetness of verse.
Some recent critics move on from this literary aspect of the
elegiac mistress to assert that Latin love elegy is entirely
fictitious14 (Catullus is usually sidestepped here); one of them
states that 'Roman erotic elegy does not depict anything',15
recalling Derrida's notorious view that 'there is nothing
outside the text'.16 Here the Common Reader rebels, and
rightly. The excesses of the biographical approach in the past,
as seen in its futile efforts to reconstruct the phases of the love
affair of Catullus or of Propertius, should not lead us to
embrace a new orthodoxy, the doctrine that there is no
connection at all between Latin love poetry and real life.
Those who embrace that doctrine are faced with the
insurmountable obstacle of Catullus; as Basil Bunting says of
Pound's Cantos, 'there they are, you will have to go a long
way round/if you want to avoid them'.17 For Catullus in his
poems persuades us that he is writing about a real world, as
Horace said of his predecessor in the writing of satire,
Lucilius (Satires 2.1.30-33): 'In the past he would confide his
secrets to books. He trusted them/like friends, and whether
things went badly or well he would always/turn to them; in

For a lengthy assertion that 'Cynthia' is fictional, see M. Wyke,

The Roman Mistress (Oxford, 2002), 1-77.
P. Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West
(Chicago, 1988), 7.
For Derrida, see R. Kearney, Modern Movements in European
Philosophy (Manchester, 1987), 113-33, esp. 117.
Basil Bunting, quoted in W. Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of
Ezra Pound (London, 1985), xvi.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 7

consequence, the whole of the old man's life/is laid before us,
as if it were painted on a votive tablet'.18 We must, of course,
allow that Catullus' poems about Lesbia present us with a
male narrative perspective, that the woman has little or no
voice.
In all of this, what is required is a modern control, one
provided by Yeats and other contemporary poets. Green sums
up the issue: 'when we do have adequate evidence with which
to check the persona against the biographical facts - Yeats,
Frost, Eliot, Pound, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are
instances that at once spring to mind - we find, despite the
obvious and predictable difference, a far closer and more
consistent nexus between the poet's life and the poetic
persona than many modern critics care to assume'.19 So there
need be no objection to using external facts to elucidate
poetry; our problem with Latin love poetry is that, for a lot of
the time, we do not possess the facts. One instance will
establish the point. Catullus 107 is a poem of reconciliation
between Lesbia and Catullus, but we know nothing of its
circumstances; Yeats's poem 'Reconciliation' refers to a
renewal of friendship between the poet and Maud Gonne,
after there had been a split between them, when Gonne
married MacBride and so, in Yeats's eyes, betrayed him.20
No one formula will suffice to answer the question 'how
real is Latin love poetry?' At one end of the scale comes
Catullus; at the other Ovid in the Amores; Horace and the
Elegists come in between. It is impossible to doubt that the
Lesbia of Catullus was a real person; equally well, it is
impossible to believe that the Corinna of Ovid is other than a
fiction, constructed for poems that are almost entirely parodic.

18 N. Rudd, The Satires of Horace and Persius (Harmondsworth,

1973), 74.
19 P. Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems (Harmondsworth, 1982), 60
61.
20 D. Albright, W.B. Yeats: The Poems (London, 1990), 506.

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 8 Brian Arkins

In the case of Horace, love is depicted amid considerable

elements of Roman social reality and, in particular, the Roman
symposium, with its potent cocktail of mixed company, wine,
garlands, perfume and sex. It is in the case of Propertius,
Tibullus and Sulpicia that the greatest problem lies. One way
of looking at the Elegists is to see them as the successors to
Gallus, whose love poetry would surely illuminate much of
their topics and settings. Certainly, what we find in the extant
Elegists is not primarily a factual description of the beloved in
each situation, but that on the contrary, the situation tends to
mould the picture to suit his or her requirements.21 Marianne
Moore's well-known formula may be what is needed:
'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'.22
Central to the treatment of love in the Latin poets is the
romantic view of love espoused by Catullus and the Elegists.
It is now fashionable to ignore romantic love in these authors,
but the Common Reader knows that it is there, mirroring the
existence of such love in Roman society and in our own.
Much in Catullus' attitude to sexual matters conforms to
the prevailing ideology of his day:23 the denigration of the
passive role in anal and oral sex, the attack on incest, the
support for marriage. Catullus also subscribes to the classic
split in the male psyche of woman as goddess and whore. But
what makes Catullus unique is that he initiated in poetry the
view that a sexual relationship between a woman and a man
should be not just physical, but also emotional and
intellectual. Crucial to this romantic love is the element of
exaggeration, of hyperbole; as Bacon said, 'The speaking in a
perpetual Hyperbole is comely in nothing but love'.24 It is no

21 Williams (n. 3), 535.

22 Marianne Moore, 'Poetry' (1935), quoted in Kemp (n. 1), 176.9.
For Roman attitudes to sex, see M.B. Skinner, Sexuality in Greek
and Roman Culture (Oxford, 2005), 192-282.
24 Francis Bacon, 'Of Love'.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 9

good for the lover to say to the beloved 'you are moderately
beautiful'; Catullus must state that Lesbia is 'very beautiful',
that she is 'loved by me as no woman will ever be loved', that
she is a 'gleaming goddess', 'my life', 'my light' (86.5; 8.5;
68.70; 109.1; 68.160). Furthermore, Catullus appropriates the
vocabulary of aristocratic obligation in Rome for his love for
Lesbia, terms such as amicitia, 'friendship'; fides, 'trust' or
loyalty"\foedus, 'pact' or 'bond'.25 As in the analytical Poem
87: 'No woman can say truly she has been loved as much/as
my Lesbia has been loved by me. /No loyalty was ever found
in any pact/as on my part in love for you'. More: in a simile
that is virtually without parallel in Greek and Roman
literature, Catullus writes that he loved Lesbia 'not as the mob
loves a mistress, /but as a father loves his sons and sons-in
law' (72.3-4). All of which can be summed up in a famous
formula: Catullus wants to enjoy with Lesbia 'an 'eternal pact
of holy friendship' (109.6).
Romantic love is also chronicled by the most significant
woman writer from Rome, Sulpicia, the niece of Messalla
who was the patron of Tibullus and Ovid.26 Sulpicia wrote six
poems in intricate syntax about her love for a man named
Cerinthus (a pseudonym), and so, in a radical move, provides
us with a female version of the love elegy practiced by the
poets Propertius and Tibullus. But what makes Sulpicia most
obviously distinct from Catullus and the male Elegists is that
she, as a woman who names herself in the poems, speaks
freely of her love for Cerinthus, and so acts in a daring way
for a Roman woman, usurping what has been almost entirely
the male role of writing. Of Sulpicia, K.F. Smith stated that
'nothing in all literature could be more characteristically

R.O.A.M. Lyne, The Latin Love Poets from Catullus to Horace

(Oxford, 1980), 24-38.
26 For Sulpicia, see B.L. Flaschenriem, 'Sulpicia and the Rhetoric
of Disclosure', Classical Philology 91 (1999), 36-54.

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 10 Brian Arkins

feminine than these elegies'.27 While Ezra Pound held that 'it
would be worth ten years of a man's life to translate Catullus;
or Ovid; or perhaps Sulpicia'.28
Propertius can be romantic in the manner of Catullus.29
The first two words of Propertius are Cynthia prima, 'Cynthia
first', and he goes on to say 'Cynthia was first, Cynthia will
be the end'. Propertius' love for Cynthia will be eternal: 'Be
what you will, I should never leave you'; 'You will always be
mistress, always wife to me'. And, as with Catullus,
Propertius invokes family affection: 'You only, Cynthia, are
my home, you only my parents' (1.12.20; 1.15.32; 2.6.42;
L 11.23).
But Propertius and Tibullus also espouse a very different
form of romanticism when they proclaim that they are the
slaves of the elegiac mistress, servitium amoris, a topos they
appear to have invented.30 Propertius wants his epitaph to
record that he was unius servus amoris, 'the slave of one
love', i.e. Cynthia; Tibullus asserts of Delia 'My slavery is
harsh and I am held in chains'. This theme of the slavery of
love is doubly counter-cultural. When the male Elegists boast
that they are subject to the whims of a woman, they are
overturning the ideology of gender in Rome which required
that the man be active, the woman passive. Equally, the male
poets subvert the class structure of Roman society, when, as
citizens, they equate themselves with the lowest echelon of
society, the slaves, regarded not as persons, but as chattels. In
all of this, the self-control, the autonomy, the gravitas of a

27 K.F. Smith, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (Darmstadt, 1971),

81.
28 Ezra Pound, 'Horace', Arion 9 (1970), 187.
For the Cynthia-poems of Propertius, see B. Arkins, An
Interpretation of the Poetry of Propertius (Lewiston, 2005), 35-60.
R.O.A.M. Lyne, 'Servitium Amor is \ Classical Quarterly 29
(1979), 117-30.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 11

Roman citizen are recklessly and scandalously abandoned.

No wonder, then, that Propertius can describe his type of love
as 'depravity' (1.6.26), and that Tibullus wants to be called
'idle, inactive' (1.1.58).
Yet another form of romanticism in Propertius and
Tibullus is the linking of love to death; A.N. Wilson writes of
'The morbid marriage of love and death which is the hallmark
of the Romantic approach to life'.31 Like Webster, Propertius
was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the
skin, so that sexual death is the Propertian fantasy par
excellence, as a result, he writes many poems about his own
death and that of Cynthia. So in the simple funeral Propertius
envisages for himself, the chief mourner Cynthia will be
unable to recall him: 'But in vain, Cynthia, will you recall my
mute spirit:/For what will my powdered bones say?' (2.13.57
58). Similarly, Tibullus imagines Delia being present at his
death: 'You'll cry as I'm laid on the litter that is soon to be
burnt,/And cover me with kisses mixed with mourning tears'
(1.1.61-62).
Cynthia's death is a large theme in Propertius because, as
Poe says, 'The death ... of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'.32 In one
of Propertius' greatest artistic triumphs, Poem 4.7, the ghost
of the dead Cynthia criticises the poet because he now has
another woman and indicates that she will rectify this
situation from beyond the grave. Marvell might say 'The
grave's a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there
embrace',33 but Cynthia knows otherwise, for, in a powerful,
macabre image, she tells Propertius that she will possess him
after physical death: 'Others may possess you now. Soon I
alone will hold you./You'll be with me and bone on mingled

31 A.N. Wilson, quoted in Kemp (n. 1), 153.4.

Edgar Allen Poe, quoted in T. Papanghelis, Propertius: A
Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (Cambridge, 1987), 145.
33 Andrew Marvell, 'To his Coy Mistress'.

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 12 Brian Arkins

bone I'll grind' (4.7.93-94).34 Cynthia dominates in death as

in life.
The connection that Propertius makes between love and
death is taken by Ovid in Amores 2.10.29-30, 34-35 to its
logical, subversive and parodic conclusion of wanting to die
while having sex: 'What bliss to expire in Love's duel - that,
God willing/Is the way Fd choose to die! ... I'd like to reach
dissolution/In mid-act, die on the job'.35
Romantic lovers expect that their love will be reciprocated
and that they will enjoy the happiness of sexual union what
Blake calls 'the lineaments of gratified desire'; occasionally,
this is related in Catullus, Propertius and Ovid. In a brief
section of Poem 8, Catullus looks back on the happy days he
once enjoyed with Lesbia, days of reciprocity, mutual aims,
mutual pleasure. When in Poem 107 Catullus celebrates a
reconciliation with Lesbia, the poem works through ecstatic
repetition of key concepts, her return to him, the unexpected
nature of this, his desire for her. The poem then concludes
with the rhetorical question 'who in the world lives happier
than I?' to which the answer is 'no one'.
Two successive poems of Propertius, 2.14 and 2.15,
celebrate a successful night of love with Cynthia that makes
him godlike: 'One night can deify any man'. In Poem 2.14,
Propertius is no shut-out lover (exclusus amator), but has
spent the whole night with Cynthia in her house. In Poem
2.15, he waxes lyrical about the occasion: Cynthia's breasts
are naked, embraces are various, kisses linger on the lips.
Both these poems of Propertius stress that the battles of love
are superior to actual warfare: in Poem 2.14, his success with
Cynthia is seen as superior to the archetypal public spectacle
of a military triumph; in Poem 2.15, the weapons and death of

34 G. Lee, Propertius: The Poems (Oxford, 1996), 121.

35 Green (n. 19), 124.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 13

war would disappear if all were to engage in the life of love.

But both poems also end with a note of unease. In Poem 2.14,
Propertius states that it is up to Cynthia whether his ship,
which symbolises the lover, comes safely to shore or sinks out
at sea, that is whether or not he remains successful in love.36
In Poem 2.15, the brevity of life, wonderfully captured in the
image of the faded garland, requires a carpe diem attitude to
love:37

Only don't you, while daylight lasts, forego life's fruit;

All your kisses are still too few.
For just as petals drop from fading garlands
To float haphazard in wine bowls,
So for us lovers who now walk so tall
Tomorrow may bring the fated close.

Successful love is presented in dramatic form in Ovid,

Amores 1.5: the poet is having his siesta on a hot afternoon,
Corinna appears, he tears off her dress (her reluctance is half
hearted), they have sex. While the detail of intercourse is
passed over, Ovid allows his male gaze to linger on the
fetishised parts of Corinna's perfect body in a way that is
more graphic than anything else in Latin love poetry:38

Smooth shoulders, delectable arms (I saw, I touched them),

Nipples inviting caresses, the flat
Belly outlined beneath that flawless bosom,
Exquisite curve of a hip, firm youthful thighs.

But the prevailing tone of most love poetry, including that

by Latin poets, is unhappy. Catullus' contemporary Lucretius
pointed out in his Epicurean denunciation of sexual love that

For this image, see J. Vaio, 'The Authenticity and Relevance of

Propertius II 14, 29-32', Classical Philology 57 (1962), 236-38.
37 Lee (n. 34), 44.
38 Green (n. 19), 92.

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 14 Brian Arkins

desire is endless and will never be satisfied, that total union

between a woman and a man is impossible.39 So failure in
love is a major topic of love poets from Catullus to Yeats.
When Byron sardonically asks 'Think you if Laura had been
Petrarch's wife/He would have written sonnets all his life?'40
the answer is clearly 'no'; fulfilled love does not have to be
chronicled. John Berryman makes the point explicit about
Yeats and Maud Gonne: 'If Maud Gonne had called Willie's
bluff and gone to bed with him, she wouldn't have filled his
days with misery. No misery, no poems'.41
What leads Catullus to be unhappy in his love for Lesbia is
the perceived existence of rivals, including the sexually
voracious Gellius, the politician Marcus Caelius Rufus, the
Spaniard Egnatius who washes his teeth with urine, and
Lesbia's brother. The sexual jealousy then experienced by
Catullus leads to a paradox: his sexual desire for Lesbia
intensifies, but his regard for her is greatly diminished; as
Poem 75 makes clear: 'Now I know what you're like. So
although I burn more fiercely with passion,/yet you are much
cheaper, much less significant in my eyes'. The justly
celebrated Poem 85 provides a two-line summary that views
the paradox as inexplicable and a cause of agony:

odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?

nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

It must be stressed that, no matter how many people translate

odi et amo as 'I hate and I love', that is not what it means

R.D. Brown, Lucretius on Love and Sex (Leiden, 1987); M.

Nussbaum, 'Beyond Obsession and Disgust: Lucretius' Genealogy
of Love', Apeiron 22 (1989), 1-59.
Byron, Don Juan, Canto III, viii.
John Berryman in D. Toomey (ed.), Yeats and Women (London,
1992), 106.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 15

here. Translate as follows:42

I loathe her, I lust for her. How so, perhaps you ask?
I do not know, but feel it happen and am racked.

The major difficulty that Propertius experiences in love is

the harshness of his mistress Cynthia, a dura puella, 'hard
girl', who is expert in savage abuse and often treats the poet
badly. The catalogue of Cynthia's perceived misdemeanours
includes the following: she rarely admits Propertius to her
house; she is slow to visit him when he is sick; she heads off
to Baiae on the Bay of Naples, a resort with a notorious sexual
reputation; she attacks Propertius for loving another women,
but she herself has other lovers, including a prominent
politician and a toy boy. In the case of Tibullus, who wanted
to live as dream-type life of simplicity in the countryside with
his mistress Delia, a major cause of dissatisfaction was the
devotion of Delia, a courtesan of the demi-monde, to the city
of Rome. There was no possibility of Delia leaving Rome and
living on the land, as Tibullus himself realised: 'Like a fool, I
pictured a life of bliss, but the god shook his head' (1.5.19
20). Ironically, the countryside is the site of a different
problem for Tibullus, when his other mistress, who has the
ominous name of Nemesis, goes to the countryside for harvest
festivities with a rival (2.3). As Lysander says in A
Midsummer Night's Dream, 'For aught that I could ever
read,/Could ever hear by tale or history,/The course of true
love never did run smooth' (1.1.132-35).
Love is not only difficult, but it may also come to an end -
as we see in Catullus and Propertius. Catullus moves on from
ambivalence about Lesbia to rejection of her as a deviant
woman with an insatiable sexual appetite in three bitter poems
(58, 37, 11). Catullus asserts in Poem 58 that the Lesbia he

42 Arkins (n. 5, 1999), 36,

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 16 Brian Arkins

loved so much, more indeed than himself, now engages in

squalid sexual activity in the open air with ironically
characterised Romans: 'now at crossroads and in back alleys,
she masturbates the great-hearted descendants of Remus'.
Using the obscenity traditionally associated with iambic
metre, Catullus in Poem 37 locates Lesbia in a brothel in the
centre of Rome, and asserts that she there has sex not only
with men of rank, but also with paltry backstreet adulterers,
and, above all, with the disgusting Egnatius from Spain, who
washes his teeth with urine. Catullus' macho revenge is to
threaten to make two hundred of these men fellate him, and so
perform what Roman ideology regarded as the disgraceful
passive role in oral sex.
The most impressive of these poems of rejection is Poem
11,43 which is, in formal terms, a priamel that consists of a foil
and a climax. The foil deals with the willingness of two
friends of Catullus, Furius and Aurelius, to go with him to the
ends of the earth, and so ensure that he escapes from the pain
of love. But in the climax, Catullus, who is no longer
prepared to address Lesbia directly, requires instead that these
men to deliver to her a message of divorce (per nuntium):

pauca nuntiate meae puellae,

non bona dicta:
cum suis vivat valeatque moechis
quos simul complex tenet trecentos,
nullum amare vere, sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens;

nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,

qui illius culpa cedidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est.

For Catullus 11, see G.S. Duclos, 'Catullus 11: atque in

perpetuum, Lesbia, ave atque vale', Arethusa 9 (1976), 77-89.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 17

Simply deliver to my girl a brief dis

courteous message:
farewell and long life with her adulterers,
three hundred together, whom hugging she holds,
loving none truly but again and again
rupturing all's groins;

and let her not as before expect my love,

which by her fault has fallen like a flower
on the meadow's margin after a passing
ploughshare has touched it.

In contrast to the wide world of the foil, the climax of

Poem 11 describes the narrow world of Lesbia's promiscuity
(great though that is), and the way it has brought about the end
of Catullus' love for her; he is indeed merely a peripheral
casualty of her progress in lust. That concept is brilliantly
conveyed in a striking reversal of gender roles: throughout
Greek and Latin literature, the plough is a symbol of male
sexuality,45 but here it is the female Lesbia who becomes the
plough and the male Catullus who becomes the innocent
flower. A reversal of gender roles echoed by a man in
Merriman's The Midnight Court: 'There's a goat with a
middle-aged spread,/With one gammy leg and a golliwog's
head/Who was married today and is mated by now,/While a
Virgin like me goes untouched by the plough! \46
Remembering that the closing poems of Augustan poetry
books are programmatic, we find that Poems 24 and 25 of
Book 3 of Propertius mark the end of his relationship with
Cynthia (there are in fact two Cynthia-poems in Book 4). In
Poem 24, Propertius regrets his previous excessive praise of

44 G. Lee, The Poems of Catullus (Oxford, 1991), 13.

See D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and
Other Essays on Greek Love (London, 1990), 205, n. 180.
Brian Merriman, The Midnight Court (Dublin, 1966), 15.

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 18 Brian Arkins

Cynthia's beauty and undertakes a significant

deromanticisation of the love object: he used liken the colour
of Cynthia's cheeks to 'rosy Dawn', but 'in fact your cheeks
were white with make-up' (line 7-8). Propertius has at last
learned the lesson taught by Lucretius that ludicrous
romanticisation of the love object is to be avoided. The
climax of that tradition of calling things as they are comes, as
one might expect, in Swift when he asserts that 'Celia shits'.47
Propertius goes on to say that he is now free of Cynthia, that
Good Sense has won the day, a far cry from the subjugation
Cynthia imposes on him in the opening poem of Book 1.
In Poem 25 of Book 3, Propertius stresses what will await
Cynthia in her old age after his five years of servitude to her
are over. Propertius will no longer be a shut-out lover
because it is now Cynthia's turn to be excluded from
somebody's house, and complain about the arrogance of
lovers. This situation will come about because Cynthia will
become old and ugly: her 'red-gold hair' will be replaced by
'white-hair', her 'smooth neck' will sport 'wrinkles'.
Accordingly, she must 'learn to dread beauty's aftermath'.48
If Propertius once said 'Cynthia will be the end', now he is
saying this will be end of Cynthia.
The Odes of Horace that deal with love - about 30 in
number - modify to a great extent the romantic view of love
espoused by Catullus and the Elegists.49 Horace derides
Tibullus' excessive grief about the loss of a woman named
'bitter Sweetie' in endless, whining elegies, and his
inappropriate jealousy of a younger rival; Tibullus must
accept the way of the world, the fact that Venus, goddess of
love, presides over 'a cruel joke' that sees her join together

Swift, 'The Lady's Dressing-Room'.

48 Lee (n. 34), 102.
49 For Horace's Love Poetry see B. Arkins, 'The Savage Joke of
Venus', in N. Rudd (ed.), Horace 2000: A Celebration (London,
1993), 106-19.

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 19

those who are incompatible (Odes 1.33). Horace also

parodies stances of the elegiac lover: the notion that the lover
is sacrosanct; the existence of physical symptoms of love; the
motif of the shut-out lover; the concept that the lover is a
soldier (Odes 1.22; 1.13; 3.10; 3.26). Moreover, Horace lists
a large number of obstacles to love. Propertius might say that
'true love knows no limit' (2.15.30), but Horace is acutely
conscious of 'limit': the fickleness of the femme fatale; the
interfering uncle; the existence of rivals; class difference; fear
of infidelity; the inopportune return of love. And yet, for all
that, Horace is not immune from love, since, as Aristotle said,
'Intellect alone moves nothing'.50 At the end of the poem that
derides Tibullus, Horace proves himself the slave of a wild,
ex-slave Myrtale when a more attractive woman was on offer.
A further typically Horatian theme, the passing of time and
the inevitability of death, is brought to bear on the conduct of
love by women and by men: human beings progress through a
single cycle of life, moving from childhood to youth to
maturity to old age, and must adapt her or his behaviour in
love to each particular phase. In essence, love is to be
pursued by the young, whose season is Spring and whose
colour is green; love is to be avoided by the old, whose season
is Winter and whose colour is white/grey. Things, of course,
are never that simple: women and men are often unwilling or
unable to adapt their sexual behaviour to the phase of life they
are at. So the young girl Chloe (whose name means 'green
shoot') refuses to pursue love with Horace in the Spring; so a
succession of older women who are past it are still pursuing
male lovers. In the most complex of these poems about an
older woman, Odes 4.13, Horace is at first delighted that Lyce
is now old, and castigates her for drinking, singing, and
pursuing love at the symposium. But after four stanzas that
eloquently present that theme, the tone radically alters as

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139a 35.

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 20 Brian Arkins

Horace recalls his own former love for Lyce and writes of her
as of no other woman in the Odes:51

quo fugk Venus, heu, quove color? decens

quo motus? quid habes illius, illius,
quae spirabat amores
quae me surpuerat mihi,

felix post Cinaram notaque et artium

gratarum facies?

Where has your charm gone? Where is your complexion?

Where is that lovely way of moving? What remains
of the girl, who breathed the breath of love,
who stole me from myself,

the girl I so loved after Cinara, and where is

that artful beauty of yours I knew so well?

While Horace distances himself to a great extent from the

Elegists' total devotion?to love, Ovid goes a step further: in
the Amores, Love Affairs,52 he presents a full-scale parody of
love elegy in general and of Propertius in particular, a poet
who regularly read his work to him; elements of pastiche are
also present.53 The difference between parody and pastiche is
that parody subverts the original and is comic, pastiche
colludes with the original and is not necessarily comic. That
the Amores are essentially a parody of love elegy is
established in the opening programmatic poem of Book 1,
which begins with a witty parody of the recusatio of

51 West (n. 8), 128.

52 For Ovid's love poetry, see R. Armstrong, Ovid and his Love
Poetry (London, 2005); G. Lively, Ovid: Love Songs (London,
2005).
53 For parody, see M.A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post
modern (Cambridge, 1993); for Ovid and Propertius, see K.
Morgan, Ovid's Art of Imitation: Propertius in the Amores (Leiden,
1977).

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 A Reading of Latin Love Poetry 21

Propertius, the refusal to write epic and the intention to write

of love instead; Cupid, the god of love, reduces every second
dactylic hexameter of Ovid's epic poem to the pentameter of
the elegiac couplet, forcing the reluctant Ovid, who is not in
love, to deal with the theme of love.
The enabling mechanism for Ovid's parody of love elegy
is that he is not a poet either of love or of sex, but of
eroticism;54 what is involved in 'eroticism' is the treatment of
love as a game, in which the man employs various techniques
in order to win the woman, and in which the pursuit is of
greater interest than the capture. The Amores of Ovid are
therefore much closer to the spirit of Hellenistic epigrams
about love as written by Callimachus and others than to Latin
love elegy. This flippancy is found also in Ovid's mock
didactic poem The Art of Love,55 viewed by the Emperor
Augustus as manual of seduction, and one of the reasons he
exiled Ovid to the Black Sea in AD8.56 Ovid never returned
to Rome; with this 'soft philosopher of love',57 Latin love
poetry comes to an end.
To conclude. In the past, many students who were starting
to learn Latin began with the present tense, active voice,
indicative mood of the verb amare, 'to love': amo, amas,
amat, amamus, amatis, amant: I love, you love, he/she loves,
we love, you love, they love. In Irish Murdoch's novel
Bruno's Dream, the old man Bruno links this conjugation of
amare to the fundamental power of love: 'Amo, amas, amat.
Latin begins where everything begins'58. In Canto 80, Ezra

54 See C. Magnis, Danube (London, 1999), 382: Ovid 'was not the
poet of love or of sex, but of eroticism'.
*5 A.S. Hollis, Ovid Ars Amatoria Book I (Oxford, 1977); P.
Gibson, A Commentary on Ovid Ars Amatoria III (Cambridge,
2003).
56 J.C. Thibault, The Mystery of Ovid's Exile (Berkeley, 1964).
Dryden, 'Love Triumphant' (1694).
Iris Murdoch, Bruno's Dream (London, 1969), 283.

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 22 Brian Arkins

Pound goes further, revising Descartes' famous motto cogito

ergo sum, 'I think therefore I am', to amo ergo sum, 'I love
therefore I am'.59 Neither Lucretius nor Virgil nor Ovid could
subscribe to that belief; Horace could subscribe to it only in
part; but Catullus, Sulpicia, Propertius and Tibullus could
state in good faith amo ergo sum, 'I love therefore I am'. Two
of these - Catullus and Propertius ? are among the greatest of
Latin poets, among the greatest of world poets.60

59 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London, 1987), 493.

60 For the reception of Propertius by Pound, see B. Arkins,
'Pound's Propertius: What Kind of Homage?', Paideuma 17
(1988), 29-44; for the reception of Catullus, see B. Arkins, 'The
Modern Reception of Catullus' in M.B. Skinner (ed.), The
Blackwell Companion to Catullus (Oxford, forthcoming).

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