INTRODUCTION

Abstract

Roman erotic elegy is one of the most influential genres in the history of western poetry. It is not too much to say that our conception of romantic love as the passionate attachment of one person to another, to the exclusion of all other concerns – money, fame, social propriety – was first codified by the Roman elegists. It was from the elegists, and Ovid in particular, that the medieval poets of courtly love derived their most famous and influential conceits. Likewise, the love sonnets of the Renaissance poets from Petrarch to Shakespeare would be unimaginable without the elegiac predecessors from which they self-consciously drew. The sonnet tradition, in turn, established the conventions for romantic devotion and the life of love that have dominated western culture until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. In short, to study the elegiac poets is not just to study a genre of poetry practiced by a people long dead, in a tongue no longer spoken, and in a far away place. To study Latin elegy is to uncover the storehouse of themes and images from which our modern notions of love and commitment have been constructed.