Luxury as a theme in Latin love elegy

Chandler, Clive

Luxury as a theme in Latin love elegy

Master Thesis

1991

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Classical Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The territorial expansion of Rome in the second and first centuries B.C. was accompanied by an influx of foreign luxuries and fashions into Italy. Roman,society and literature responded to this influx ambiguously, but the overall tone was one of disapproval. The association of luxury with women, attested dramatically at the rescinding of the lex Oppia, was firmly established in erotic literature by the latter part of the first century B.C. Latin Love Elegy provides an opportunity for studying the response of a particular genre to the phenomenon of luxury in an erotic context. After a general introduction to the role of luxury in the economic life of Republican Rome, the literary response to luxury is investigated with special emphasis on erotic literature. Following this, the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid are analysed sequentially and in detail with respect to how these poems treat luxury. It is found that luxury in Latin Love Elegy retains the ambiguity associated with it outside erotic literature, and functions as a rhetorical tool in the process of seduction. ,The attitude of the elegiac persona to luxury sheds light on the fictional lover, and demonstrates how the elegists accommodate in their poetry traditional and contemporary views of a real phenomenon.

Description

Bibliography: pages 170-180.

Keywords

Classical Studies

Reference:

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