This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

A counterpoint to Rome’s most powerful (and most proudly Roman) vehicle, essedum, is the subject this chapter. A brief introduction discusses another non-Roman battle car, the scythe-chariot, and the ways in which its portrayals can externalize onto Eastern enemies Roman currus’ dangers and violence. Essedum represents an alternate strategy of domestication. This war-chariot of the Britons, first encountered and described by Caesar during his British expedition, was subsequently appropriated as an exotic and fashionable means of getting around Rome and its environs. As the vehicle’s original associations fade through time, the conveyance becomes increasingly normalized for quick trips and even seems to have become a kind of light stagecoach for long-distance journeys. Still, as the chapter argues, essedum’s lingering identity as mobile spoils of war available for leisure use by elites allowed the vehicle to function as a safe, subordinate alternative to the pinnacle achievement represented by the triumph.

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 Propertius 4.7, Cynthia is conceived as the character who, in her role as the beloved, can infuse a sinister sensation of the grotesque into the very concept of elegiac love, of which she is the source and the protagonist. The poet ventriloquizes her voice, superimposing her role and gender identity on his, in a strategy that enables him to transmit to the realm of his aesthetic choices her grotesque embodiment of elegy, as well as her allegation that, in charging her with infidelity, he was not truthful about her. In this poem, Propertius’ elegiac programme appears to be centrally committed to a grotesque ethos, derisive and destabilizing of the epistemological and aesthetic conventions by which the genre is presumed to be governed. As a result, the conceptual and aesthetic domains of the genre appear deeply marked by uncanny imagery, contradiction, and instability of form. The imaginative world of this elegy requires readers to shift their interpretive base continually, accepting the incongruous realm of beauty pierced by ugliness as the manifestation of a poetic congruity of a higher order. That dialectical form of congruity is the distinctive feature of the Propertian elegiac grotesque.

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.

Propertius 4.5 is the poet–lover’s vindictive fantasy against the lena, the character who is most inimical to him in the dramatic scenario of love elegy. He expresses his hostility towards her by depicting her as a profoundly grotesque creature, wicked and revolting in every way. Propertius enables the poet–lover to be mercilessly punitive and to use images likely to generate a strong emotional reaction. The images contemplated by the poet–lover in his rage are the same ones contemplated by us, Propertius’ readers, as we move through the text. Being expressions of a rejected lover, such images are likely to generate a sequence of vehement emotions, both within the narrative and in the reading experience, while our gaze and the poet–lover’s both remain fixed on the lena as an embodied source of the dark passions that course through the poem. We would miss the genre’s signature of authenticity if we did not conclude that the grotesque is implicit in and central to the Propertian elegy.

This chapter turns to Propertius and Philip Sidney and, taking its cue from from Cynthia as the eroticised muse of Propertian poetry, and the scornful muse of Astrophil and Stella 1, explores metaliterary themes of poetic practice. Reading the muse as a figure for ideas of inspiration and creativity, for authority and canonicity, we consider how the selected texts negotiate, articulate and configure ideas about the nature, identity and cultural function of poetry in Augustan Rome and Elizabethan England.