Latin love elegy: Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Sulpicia

In the age of Augustus a group of poets made love for a woman the centre of an entire literary genre. Latin elegy used the elegiac couplet, a pairing of hexameter and pentameter, and told in the first person of passion for a domina who was capricious and often unfaithful. Ovid, in the Tristia, traces a precise genealogy: first Cornelius Gallus, then Tibullus, then Propertius, and finally himself, the last heir of the series.

Cornelius Gallus, the lost founder

Gaius Cornelius Gallus, a friend of Virgil and the first prefect of Egypt after Octavian's conquest, wrote four books of Amores dedicated to Lycoris, the pseudonym of an actress known as Cytheris. Having fallen out of favour with Augustus, he took his own life around 26 BC. His work is almost entirely lost: for centuries only a single line was known, together with the testimony of later authors.

In 1978, at Qasr Ibrim in Nubia, a papyrus was found with some lines attributed to Gallus, which confirmed the name of Lycoris and revealed a poet able to interweave love and politics. Virgil paid homage to him in the tenth Eclogue, where Gallus appears in love and in despair among the shepherds of Arcadia, as if to fix for ever the portrait of the elegiac poet par excellence.

Tibullus and the dreamed countryside

Albius Tibullus belonged to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. His two authentic books sing of Delia, then Nemesis, and also of the youth Marathus. His ideal is a quiet life in the country, far from war and wealth, beside the woman he loves. Quintilian, in the Institutio oratoria, judged him the most polished and elegant of the elegists, while acknowledging that other readers preferred Propertius.

The collection bearing Tibullus's name also absorbed poems by other authors of the same circle, among them the short elegies of Sulpicia, Messalla's niece. They are among the very few Latin poems written by a woman to have reached us, and they tell from a female point of view of her love for a young man called by the pseudonym Cerinthus, with a frankness rare for the period.

Propertius and Cynthia

Sextus Propertius, born in Umbria, opens his first book with a line that sums up the genre: «Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis», Cynthia was the first to capture wretched me with her eyes. Cynthia is a cultured, independent and unpredictable woman, and the poet declares himself her slave. This is the servitium amoris, the slavery of love, which overturns the social roles of Roman society.

Propertius later joined the circle of Maecenas and in his fourth book also turned to aetiological and Roman themes, without entirely abandoning Cynthia, who even appears there as a ghost after her death. The elegists reject military and political careers and call their love life a form of soldiering, elegantly overturning the traditional values of Republican Rome.

Latin elegy had a short life, little more than a generation, but it left a repertoire of situations destined to last: the beloved's closed door, the rich rival, jealousy, lovesickness, poetry as the only possible gift. Medieval poets and Petrarch, through direct or indirect reading, inherited much of this language of submission in love and of faithfulness to a single woman.