This brief but densely argued monograph is part of the series Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry, which debuted in 2020 under the direction of Scott McGill. The aim of the series, as described on the publisher’s website, is to “provide synthetic reviews of Classical Poetry that reflect the latest research in the field… In containing both broad overviews of subject areas and detailed advanced criticism, volumes are designed to be useful to scholars, teachers, and students alike.” This volume admirably addresses these goals, although there is room for some skepticism about the prospects for a student audience, especially an undergraduate one. That is largely a consequence of Gardner’s laudably uncompromising approach to synthesizing the vast range of critical literature on Latin elegy of the last fifty years or so. Undergraduates can be directed to a wealth of other introductions to the subject, but for teachers and advanced students at the graduate level, Gardner offers a rich and amply documented resource on Latin love elegy, especially in the fields of gender studies and sexuality.
The monograph follows a roughly chronological organization, with an opening section on “Antecedents, Origins, Innovations,” which largely focuses on Catullus and Gallus, with a nod to Hellenistic predecessors such as Philitas and Callimachus. The treatment is necessarily brief and so Gardner largely avoids entering into the intricacies of competing views of the fragmentary remains of Hellenistic antecedents. The discussion of the mechanics of the elegiac couplet in Latin is also cursory, relying primarily on reference to L.P. Wilkinson’s Golden Latin Artistry (Cambridge, 1963), which is accidentally omitted from the bibliography. Some reference to more recent and accessible guides would be useful even for advanced students these days, who might also appreciate being directed to the collections of E. Courtney or A.S. Hollis,[1] where they could find the testimonia and fragments of Gallus. Gardner lucidly outlines the case for Catullus’ poetry as pointing the way towards the preoccupation of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid with constructing, and deconstructing, the elegiac amator/puella. One of the many virtues of a critical survey such as this is the way it opens avenues for extending critical discourse beyond its covers. One avenue that I would have liked Gardner to have engaged with more deeply is the apparent paradox that many of the themes that are later associated with elegy are developed in Catullus’ non-elegiac polymetric poems. In that connection, Gardner’s discussion of the vocabulary of political alliance as a distinguishing feature of Catullus’ elegiacs could have been enriched by engagement with D.O. Ross’ earlier treatment of the subject.[2]
The significance of such quibbles evaporates against the backdrop of the following sections, in which Gardner helps the reader to follow the thematic threads running through the three major surviving elegists’ poetry. In the first of them, “Playing the Gender Card: Augustan Love Elegy,” Gardner is at her best in explicating sample texts: her reading of Prop. 1.1.1-8 on seruitium and the inversion of “the normative dynamics of power governing relationships between men and women in Rome” (35) is exemplary, deftly synthesizing the work of the most recent generation of Propertian critics. Her discussion of the Heroides in this section in concert with Sulpicia and the Marathus poems is an unexpected shift of focus, illuminating the ways in which, for example, Marathus plays the role of a puella. The next section on “(De)constructing the Puella” lays rather more emphasis on the construction of the puella than on deconstruction. Ovid’s narrative of Pygmalion in the Metamorphoses constitutes something of a leitmotiv here, with an appropriate nod to Alison Sharrock and the concept of “womanufacture.”[3] In this context, the subsection on “Elegiac Violence and Twenty-First Century Readers” should be required reading for teachers introducing students to some of the more troubling aspects of the treatment in poetry of puellae that the elegists created, and in the lives and travails of the flesh and blood women who inspired them. The fourth section, “Elegiac Vulnerabilities: Scripting Desire in Augustan Rome,” considers the love elegies within the context of “Augustan values and the moral climate of the early Principate” (p. 67).
In the final section, Gardner serves a dessert course on “Reception and New Directions” that rushes past the usual suspects in Apuleius and others to offer comparative samplings from two films that may not be well known to many readers (certainly not to this one): director Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (2017) and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Ruby Sparks (2012). Gardner argues that these films address “the artist as lover in ways that prompt us to look again at the elegists behind Ovid’s Cyprian artist, and give voice to the puella and her experience of the relationship.” This makes a nice connection with earlier sections of the book in which she sketches out how such relationships are constructed in the elegiac and Augustan contexts.
Any introductory survey will inevitably elicit observations on what might have been discussed, or could have been discussed, or even should have been discussed, none of which will be found here. Readers who have worked their way through this study will be able to judge for themselves where to go next. Inevitably, surveys such as this represent a snapshot of the state of criticism at a moment in time, which will pass, so readers would be advised to consult a copy soon.
Notes
[1] E. Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford, 1993); A.S. Hollis, Fragments of Roman Poetry c. 60 BC – AD 20 (Oxford, 2007).
[2] D.O. Ross, Style and Tradition in Catullus (Cambridge, MA, 1969) 80-95.
[3] “Womanufacture,” JRS 81 (1991) 36-49.