LAT711: Latin Elegy
Quintilian famously said, "In elegy too we challenge the Greeks." Although indebted to the Greeks, the Roman elegists created a kind of personal love poetry never seen before in literature: a cycle
Quintilian famously said, "In elegy too we challenge the Greeks." Although indebted to the Greeks, the Roman elegists created a kind of personal love poetry never seen before in literature: a cycle of poems describing a love affair with one woman or one man. We will be reading selected elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid and Sulpicia (the sole female representative), with an eye toward appreciating their poetic craft and analyzing what the genre meant to them and their audience.