The Roman Poetry of Love Elegy and Politics in a Time of Revolution

This study offers a fresh look at the gendered power play at work in Latin love elegy for the undergraduate student and any newcomer to the field. It reviews the elegiac corpus as a whole, presenting the most enduring debates in the scholarship of the last thirty years. A series of chapters focusing on particular poems illuminates the development of this short-lived genre in the context of Augustus' ascent to power by following recognizable threads through the texts to build an understanding of the relationship between this poetry and the increasingly totalising regime.

Efi Spentzou is Senior Lecturer in Latin Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Introduction
Political Turbulence and Literary Innovation: A Genre is Born in Rome
Dream and Desire: Tibullus at a Crossroads
Propertius Unbound: A Latin Lover at Rome
Love-games and Power-games: Ovid and the Politics of Desire
Nomadic Love in Ovid's Amores
Further Reading
Index