Sex, Violence, and the Elegiac Hero in Propertius 2.15

Ellen Greene (University of Oklahoma)

Amatory aggression is a well-known feature of Propertian elegy in particular, and Roman elegy in general. Despite the elegist’s avowed identification with feminine powerlessness and vulnerability and his concomitant classification of elegy as a distinctly "feminine" genre, the male narrator of Propertius’ Elegies often subverts his own rhetoric of subservience by associating love and sex with epic violence. While the Ovidian amator is typically overt in his enactments of violence toward the elegiac mistress, the male lover in Propertius’ elegies often expresses aggression toward his mistress through more indirect means, either through mythological exempla that express the amator’s imagined mastery over the mistress or through the male lover’s attempt to reclaim an identification with epic as a genre. I will argue in this paper that the identification of violence with the elegiac lover, whether physical, in the context of love-making, or rhetorical, in the context of the amator’s invectives against his mistress and his adoption of epic discourse, provides a mechanism for exploring alternatives to traditional notions of Roman masculinity. Just as violence is one of the chief ways for the epic hero to attain glory and exercise his virtus, so it often is for the Propertian amator whose (imagined) acts of violence may be linked to his presentation of himself as both heroic and poetically productive. I will show that the linkage between the speaker’s heroic persona and his creativity depends on equating Cynthia with the elegiac text. The association between the mistress and the elegiac text underscores the extent to which the amator exerts control over the puella by equating her with the source of his own poetic talent, not as Muse, but as literary artifact itself.

I will also argue that Elegy 2.15 provides an excellent illustration of the movement within Propertian elegy from the implicit aggression contained within the amator’s discursive mastery over his mistress to the more explicit alignment of the amator with masculine epic. My analysis will show how the Propertian amator associates Cynthia with epic violence, not only by linking himself and Cynthia with the heroes of epic but also by conflating erotic description and epic narrative. The images in the poem of the puella as pale (candida), partially nude, and ultimately, completely exposed in the speaker’s expression of ideal amatory relations, convey implicitly the male lover’s dominance of his mistress and his aggression toward her. The amator’s mastery of his mistress, however, takes on greater force in his blatant violence (and threats of more violence) toward her. That mastery is strengthened by the causal connection the speaker establishes between amatory aggression and the attainment of glory, a connection reinforced by the implicit parallel between Augustus’ conquest of Cleopatra and the amator’s domination of Cynthia. This parallel points, more generally, to the equivocal nature of Propertius’ stance toward elegiac and “Augustan” themes. Specifically, the narrator’s perplexing presentation of himself as one who engages in violence in his own case and critiques it in the case of Augustus underscores the contradictions characteristic of Propertius’ amatory discourse.