Elegiac Couplet - Elegy in The Augustan Age

Elegy in The Augustan Age

The form reached its zenith with the collections of Tibullus, Propertius, and several collections of Ovid (the Amores, Heroides, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto). The vogue of elegy during this time is seen in the so-called 3rd and 4th book of Tibullus. Many poems in these books were clearly not written by Tibullus but by others, perhaps part of a circle under Tibullus' patron Mesalla. Notable in this collection are the poems of Sulpicia, the only surviving Latin literature written by a woman.

Through these poets—and in comparison with the earlier Catullus—it is possible to trace specific characteristics and evolutionary patterns in the Roman form of the verse:

• The Roman authors often write about their own love affairs. In contrast to their Greek originals, these poets are characters in his own stories, and write about love in a highly subjective way.
• The form began to be applied to new themes beyond the traditional love, loss, and other "strong emotion" verse. Propertius uses it to relate aetiological or "origin" myths such as the origins of Rome (IV.1) and the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill (IV.6). Ovid's Heroides—though at first glance fictitious love letters—are described by Ovid himself as a new literary form, and can be read as character studies of famous heroines from mythology. There is also Ovid's Fasti, a lengthy elegiac poem on the first six months of the Roman calendar.
• The Romans adopted the Alexandrine habit of concealing the name of their beloved in the poem with a pseudonym. Catullus' vexing Lesbia is notorious as the pseudonym of the teasing Clodia. But as the form developed, this habit becomes more artificial; Tibullus' Delia and Propertius' Cynthia, while likely real people, lack something of the specificity seen in Lesbia, while Ovid's Corinna is often considered a mere literary device.
• The poets become extremely careful in forming the distinctive pentameter line of their verses. Examples:
  • A trend toward the clear separation of the pentameter halves. Catullus, for example, allows an elision across the caesura in 18 cases, a rare flaw in the later poets (Ovid, for example, never does this).
  • The pentameter begins to show a semi-regular "leonine" rhyme between the two halves of the verse, e.g. Tib. I.1–2, where the culti ending the first half of the pentameter rhymes with the soli closing the verse:

Divitias alius fulvo sibi congerat auro

Et teneat culti iugera multa soli,

• • While Catullus shows this rhyme in about 1 in 5 couplets, the later elegists use it more frequently. Propertius II.34, for example, has the rhyme in nearly half its pentameters. Rhyming between adjacent lines and even in the two halves of the hexameter is also observed, more than would be expected by chance alone.
  • Unlike Catullus, later poets show a definite trend toward ending the pentameter with a two-syllable word. Propertius is especially interesting; in his first two books, he ignores this rule about as frequently as Catullus and Tibullus, but in the last two books endings other than a disyllabic word are very rare. Ovid has no exceptions to the disyllable in his Amores, and only a few proper names occur as polysyllabic endings in his later work.
• The hexameter follows the usual rhetorical trends of the dactylic hexameter in this age. If anything, the elegists are even more interested in verbal effects like alliteration and assonance.