Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire

This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialismin terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic spaceas intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome's dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy's treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress assimultaneously a figure for 'captive Greece' and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome's competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome's colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy's rhetoric of orientalism.

Offers the first in-depth analysis of the elegiac construction of Roman imperialism and its relation to gender Argues that Latin love elegy presents Roman imperialism in a way that reinforces Rome's dominance in the Mediterranean Interprets Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives

Auteur
Phebe Lowell Bowditch is Professor of Classics at the University of Oregon, USA. She is the author of Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (2001), A Propertius Reader. Eleven Selected Elegies (2014), and articles on Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, and issues of translation.

Contenu
1.Reading Elegy Against the Grain.- 2.Osiris, Egypt, and Postcolonial Ambivalence in Tibullus 1.7.- 3.Elegiac Cartography and Roman Conceptions of Space.- 4.Imperial Luxury and the Elegiac Mistress.- 5.The Elegiac Triumph: Imperial Pomp and Erotic Circumstance.- 6.Augustan Visions of Hellenism and Roman Imperial Identity.- 7.Isis-Io, Egypt, and Cultural Circulation.-Afterword: The Meroë Head of Augustus