Week 9: Ovid’s Lovers: learning how to laugh in Augustan Rome Roman Laughter Week 9: Ovid’s Lovers: learning how to laugh in Augustan Rome

Love, desire, sex, comedy

Augustan morality vs Elegiac ludi?

Love, desire, knowledge: the amator, orator, actor Can you teach someone how to love, how to seduce, or how to have a successful relationship? Is success in love about playing by the rules? Compare Cicero’s questions: Are great comedians made, or born? Can oratorical wit be taught? Orator – amator – actor : see e.g. Amores 2.7 and 2.8 for the poet’s transformation from one to the other

elegy as ludus Play Flirtation Fun Entertainment Performed poetry (e.g. Tristia 2.509-20) Spectacle/game of viewing (nb. The circus and theatre as pick-up joints, e.g. at Amores 3.2, Ars 1.89ff.)

Love Elegy and New Comedy Key figures: Key events/themes: adulescens Seduction Virgo Rape Hetaira / scortum Bartering of female bodies Servus / ancilla Masculinity compromised? Lena (female pimp) Generational tensions: the novus Senex Eunuchus

Major differences Marriage is generic goal of New Comedy; to be avoided in Elegy Inarticulate/ hapless comic adulescens vs canny poet-lover Elegiac puella is sophisticated and often learned (docta) The comic adulescens must deal with paternal pressure; the elegiac poet-lover operates free from family constraints

Terence’s Eunuch and Roman erotic elegy ‘I should propose also to locate in the tradition of the Eunuch the complex of themes that constitutes Roman elegy: the ambiguous status of the mistress, who remains aloof from marriage; the problem of greed and gifts; the necessary role of the rival; and the emphasis on sincerity and inner feeling, for which the Roman elegists have been honored as the inventors of subjective love lyric.’ Konstan, D. 1986. “Love in Terence’s Eunuch: The Origins of Erotic Subjectivity.” AJP 107: 369–93, 391 ‘I am inclined to agree that Terence is particularly rich as a source for elegy, as his adulescens character often shows a sensitivity and commitment that are not found in the Plautine version (see Pamphilus in both Andria and Phormio, for example), traits that are a point of pride in the elegiac speaker’s view of himself.’ S.James, in ‘Elegy and New Comedy’ in The Blackwell Companion to Roman Love elegy, Ed. B.K.Gold, 2012.

Like for like: playing the woman fallite fallentes, ‘deceive the deceivers’, Ovid Ars 1.645: Cf. an id flagitiumst… nunc referam gratiam atque eas itidem fallam ut ab eis fallimur. / ‘Is it such a crime that I should pay them back and deceive them as they deceive us?’ Chaerea at Terence, Eun.382, 385. Also compare the rape scenes at Eun.581ff., and Ars.1.681-98 (handout)