Much of Latin’s beauty rests in the fact that Latin is a language of eros, which is of course a primary component of human life and of every culture on earth: a system of metaphors, images, and terms that define and classify the experience of love in all its forms, physical, psychological, and especially cultural, as separate from other languages and spheres of expression, such as politics and war. An entire genre is dedicated to love, the elegy, which again has its origins in Greece, as do all the most important genres of Latin literature, and which paves the way for the great erotic poetry of the vernacular tradition. Its most distinguished representatives, among those whose work has survived, are Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, all of whom lived under Augustus. Though we must also give a nod, at the very least, to Cornelius Gallus, a friend of Virgil’s, of whose work, however, almost nothing remains. Virgil recalls him in his last eclogue (which inspired John Milton to compose his Lycidas), and in truth there’s a strong link between bucolic poetry and the love elegy. We see this in Tibullus’s first elegy, among the most precious works in Latin poetry, an ingenious blend of the two genres. The elegy, beyond its role as an expression and study of emotion, dares to offer itself as a lover’s manual, turning this into a discipline all its own. As is the case with Ovid.
Love, however, also has its place in the comedies, in Virgil’s epic, in his Eclogues, as I’ve just mentioned, and even in his Georgics, which end with one of the most memorable love stories of the ancient world (the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice); we find it in Catullus’s and Horace’s poetry; it’s in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Apuleius’s novel, and so on. Even in his philosophical poem, Lucretius employs the vocabulary of love, right from the poem’s opening line, which depicts a postcoital Mars and Venus. Love, in short, is everywhere. It is sensual bliss, it is a yearning, a waiting, a stripping away of all reason. Love, at least in Latin, leads almost inevitably to suffering. Catullus adopts it as his highest ideal, a form of correspondence that is consecrated by the act of marriage (hence his works in honor of the betrothed), though he also shows its destructive aspects, its vexing and disappointing side—infidelity, above all. Even Lucretius’s Mars, though we find him resting in Venus’s lap after the struggles of war, ends up hurting himself, because love is indeed vulnus, “wound.” In Book IV of De rerum natura, Lucretius provides us with another crudely anti-idealistic depiction of love: what else are lovers but two who can never become one, who seek wholeness in vain through sexual encounter, each straining to enter the other by violence. Frustration prevails, without fail:
[…] etenim potiundi tempore in ipso
fluctuat incertis erroribus ardor amantum
nec constat quid primum oculis manibusque fruantur.
Quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfigunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere id ipsum,
quod cumque est, rabies unde illaec germine surgunt.
(IV.1076–83)
[…] it’s in that very moment of possession
that lovers’ love spins out in all directions
and hands and eyes no longer know what pleasure to seek first.
And what they find, they press hard and cause pain
to the flesh, their teeth sunk into lips,
planting kisses—for pleasure’s not pure,
an eagerness to injure lurks beneath, to harm
that thing from which our madness spawns.
This love-disease is a search for pleasure (voluptas), nothing more. First a drop of sweetness in the heart, then the cold grip of anguish. And yet Lucretius reminds us that love, especially for men, cannot be avoided, since it is a physiological condition, an impulse to ejaculate, which, if ignored, exacerbates pain, causing an ulcer.
And then there are the thousands of fantasies, the endless mental projections (simulacra) that swarm like ghosts, that bring no peace or security, but only reignite one’s lust with a constant stream of illusions. The desired person cannot be taken in like food, but only as an abstract image—the very opposite of what would satisfy one’s desire. Centuries and centuries before Petrarch or Proust, Latin, through Lucretius, gave expression to the lover’s anguished imagination:
ex hominis vero facie pulchroque colore
nil datur in corpus praeter simulacra fruendum
tenuia; quae vento spes raptast saepe misella.
Ut bibere in somnis sitiens quom quaerit et umor
non datur, ardorem qui membris stinguere possit,
sed laticum simulacra petit frustraque laborat
in medioque sitit torrenti flumine potans,
sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis,
nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram
nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris
possunt errantes incerti corpore toto. (IV.1094–1104)
but of the human face and beautiful complexion
one can enjoy in a body nothing but
vagrant ghosts; scant hope that the wind often dashes.
As in a dream when the thirsty man asks for water but no water
is given that could quench the burning thirst in his limbs,
and yet he pines after a mirage of drops and toils in vain
and thirsts as he drinks while down in a surging river.
So in love Venus taunts lovers with ghosts,
and they cannot sate their bodies by looking—though they are near—
nor can they draw anything from the supple limbs
as they grope aimlessly across the other’s entire body.
What lines! With what bitterness, what sad irony he traces the limits of man’s perception! To look but not see, to touch but not grasp. Even his assault on hope—which he describes with a rare diminutive (misella)—is a lyrical routing! We can hear the wind that steals it. And again we run into the concept of error, which we encountered in the previous excerpt: that aimless groping of another’s body, which, worse than an idle search, is a journey down a deceptive path. Because for Lucretius, of course, true pleasure is in thought, in reasoning, not in such illusions like the longing for physical possession.
Let’s turn for a minute to Propertius (c. 50–16 B.C.E.), the greatest of the elegiac poets under Augustus: the most profound, who gave most elegant and passionate expression to the language of love. As Catullus had his Lesbia, so Propertius had Cynthia (Ovid, on the contrary, has Corinna and many others).1 Propertius turns his focus to the sweeter side of love, though not even he could avoid depicting its physical and spiritual tax. Love is furor, “madness”; morbus, “illness”; servitium, “slavery”; militia, “war”; toxicum, “poison.” It steals your words, drains your complexion, your physical strength. And there’s no finding the source of such torment. No doctor has the cure:
omnis humanos sanat medicina dolores:
solus amor morbi non amat artificem. (Elegies, II.1.57–58)
Medicine cures all human ails:
love alone rebuffs the master of its suffering.
The tortured lover’s walk is a funeral march. The cause, of course, is a woman: beautiful, fickle, unfaithful. One day she wants you, the next she’s running off with who knows who, your world turned upside down. Propertius, even without Lucretius’s philosophical vision, sees love’s fluctuations as part of the broader historical flux:
omnia vertuntur: certe vertuntur amores:
vinceris aut vincis, haec in amore rota est. (II.8.7–8)
Everything changes: certainly loves change:
you’re conqueror or conquered, so turns the wheel of love.
Love, meanwhile, and discussions of love, clearly become a new lens through which to view the decline of Republican freedom. The love elegy portrays the end of an era. It is born, in fact, from the ashes of antiquity’s great discourses. It is a fleeing but also a polemical renunciation of higher allegiances, of literary projects that set themselves in dialogue with politics—military politics—and the goals of the empire:
Pacis Amor deus est, pacem veneramur amantes:
stant mihi cum domina proelia dura mea. (III.5.1–2)
Love is a god of peace; it’s peace we lovers worship:
my battle is the long battle with my woman.
Virgil, who would seem to us the very embodiment of an imperial mouthpiece, came to the epic form despite himself: several times in his Eclogues he contrasts minor and major poetry, declaring his preference for the former. Ovid tried his hand at writing the supreme poem with his Metamorphoses, but ends by erecting a monument not to stability and Augustan order but to perennial crisis. In his elegies—despite the surrounding pressures—Propertius expresses his disregard for any such grandiose poetry quite consciously, and even with an expressly antipolitical intent, countering the Virgilian ideology of the dynastic epic with a more personal ideology:
nec mea convenient duro praecordia versu
Caesaris in Phrygios condere nomen avos.
Navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator,
enumerate miles vulnera, pastor ovis;
nos contra angusto versamus proelia lecto;
qua pote quisque, in ea conterat arte diem. (II.1.41–46)
to write hard lines in praise of Caesar’s name,
straight back to his Phrygian roots, is not for me.
The sailor speaks of winds, the plowman oxen,
the soldier counts his wounds, the shepherd sheep;
me, I tell of struggles in a narrow bed:
let men spend their day at the art at which they excel.
His opposition to Virgil—an immense literary superego from the very start, destined only to grow in notoriety over the coming millennia—erupts in the final elegy of Book II:
me iuvet hesternis positum languere corollis,
quem tetigit iactu certus ad ossa deus;
Actia Vergilium custodis litora Phoebi,
Caesaris et fortis dicere posse ratis,
qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma
iactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus.
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grai!
nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade. (II.34.59–66)
Me, whom the god struck clear to the marrow, I’m one
for lying and languishing among yesterday’s garlands.
Let Virgil sing the shores of Actium, with their guardian Phoebus,
and Caesar’s sturdy ships; Virgil, who
now evokes the arms of Aeneas of Troy,
and the walls that line Lavinium’s shores.
Give way, O Roman writers! Give way, you Greeks!
Something greater than the Iliad is born.
Just beneath this passage, Propertius lays out the exact literary canon—a sort of antitradition—in which he envisions his own poetry: Varro, Catullus, Calvus, Gallus. All poets who wrote on a range of topics but who are here singled out for their love poetry. And of course he can’t go without mentioning his renowned Greek predecessor, the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, whose work influenced Roman poets as early as Ennius. Propertius invokes him in the first elegy of Book III, along with Philitas, Callimachus’s teacher (only a few fragments of this poet and Homeric philologist remain), reaffirming his faith in concise, polished poetry: “non datur ad Musas currere lata via,” “the road to the Muses is not broad” (III.1–14). The topic of exigency comes up again in the ninth elegy of Book III, where the poet, while out at sea, declares his preference for rivers, once again mentioning Callimachus and Philitas (III.9.35–44). I cannot help quoting at this point the incipit of Ezra Pound’s celebrated “Homage to Sextus Propertius”—a splendid example of modernism’s classical heritage:
Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas
It is in your grove I would walk,
I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,
and the dance into Italy.
Callimachus and Philitas (or Philetas, according to Pound’s spelling), who was from Cos, are here not just part of the modern poet’s rendition of Propertius’s ancient poem, but a testament to Pound’s own willingness to insert his work within the legacy of Greece and Rome.
Addressing Ponticus (an epic poet by now consigned to oblivion), Propertius proudly defends his minor poetic vein, which will bring him no shortage of glory, serving as an example to other hapless lovers (I.7). He also revives the myth of the “initiation rite” dream—by then firmly associated, as we saw, with Ennius, the acclaimed father of Latin epic poetry (III.3.6). Stretched out in the shade of Mount Helicon, home to the Muses, the poet is dreaming of the ancient kings of Alba Longa when suddenly Apollo appears (it’s worth noting here that the first line of the poem uses two words found in Virgil’s pastoral poetry, recubans and umbra). The god encourages him to shift his focus, to find themes more suited to his intellect, to forge a new path. At this point they’re joined by Calliope, one of the nine Muses, who more or less repeats Apollo’s advice (quit writing about war, in other words). She then wets his lips with holy water, to signify the completion of the initiation process.
Propertius, we must remember, also wrote elegies about Rome’s past—splendid elegies on antiquity and archaeology (collected in Book IV). His poetry, nonetheless, is for the large part concerned with love; love that asserts itself against history and genealogy; love that is, as it might be termed, anti-Roman. This constitutes a radical departure from a predecessor like Catullus, who sees in love—despite all the difficulties a relationship with a woman brings—the perfect integration between the individual and society, between province (his own upbringing) and city. Catullus may condemn love’s deterioration, the breaking of bonds and promises, but he believes deeply in love. Which brings him great suffering. Propertius spares himself such belief. There is no love, in his view, that doesn’t cause anguish: “omnis […] timetur amor” (I.11.18), “all love is fear.” Infidelity is the rule, not the exception: “nemo est in amore fedelis” (II.34.3), “no lover is faithful.” His suffering is born not simply from displeasure or from disappointing circumstances, though these may seem the subject of his poetry, but from a profound sense of bewilderment, a distrust from the very outset. Lesbia, in the end, will stand for Catullus as a missed opportunity to achieve his high ideal—the ideal, though, will remain. Cynthia is never an ideal: she’s merely a beautiful woman who causes suffering and from whose bondage he must free himself. Though there’s pain in both cases, the historical significance of the pain has changed. It has passed from a protest against the corruption of the present day to an acceptance of our destined solitude.
Nor is such acceptance without its dose of nostalgia (which, as we’ve seen, is a fundamental aspect of Roman culture and one of its most enduring legacies). The archaeological elegies from Book IV that we spoke of earlier, which lament a Rome that is no longer, can be read with respect to the first three books as a grand dirge for the death of the ideal. An ode to the happiness of origins—a happiness born of love—appears in elegy 13 of Book III as well. After denouncing lust, the frivolity of women, and the infidelity of wives, Propertius embarks on an ode to the serenity of early farm life, when girls were content to receive flowers and fruit from their suitors; when we made our beds in the grass, beneath the shade of trees. Now nature gives home only to the sad lament of the poet torn from his lover. Here are the marvelous opening lines, which Petrarch may well have had in mind when writing his “Solo et pensoso …”:
Haec certe deserta loca et taciturna querenti,
et vacuum Zephyri possidet aura nemus. (I.18.1–2)
Places like these, deserted and deaf to laments,
where the breath of Zephyr fills the empty wood.
At the close of this same elegy, he returns to exalt the connection between the heart’s desolation and the desolation of the countryside:
pro quo, divini fontes, et frigida rupes
et datur inculto tramite dura quies;
et quodcumque meae possunt narrare querelae,
cogor ad argutas dicere solus aves. (I.18.27–30)
in exchange, I get sacred fountains and cold rocks,
and a wink of sleep by some deserted trail;
and whatever story my laments may tell,
I must tell it alone, in the presence of the trilling birds.
Solus: in this single adjective rests the entire poetics of marginalization, estrangement, exclusion, the unheard lament. In Propertius’s elegies, solus appears with symbolic frequency, resounding like a declaration, principium individuationis, proclaiming a true form of identity. To conclude, I quote this spectacular line:
solus ero, quoniam non licet esse tuum. (II.9.46)