1. 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

2. Love, desire, sex, comedy

3. Augustan morality vs
Elegiac ludi?

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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 “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.

9. 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 (handout)