Synopsis: "In the Flesh: Embodied Identities in Roman Elegy" by Erika Zimmermann Damer (Associate Professor of Classics and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond) deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets (
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid) writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate.
Their interactions focuses on the loosely narrative structure of the genre's cyclical love relationship of rejections, union, and dissolution across the nine books of elegies by
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, published in the first decades of Augustus's Principate between about 28 BCE and 2 BCE.
Acker spliced her letters and diary entries between slabs of appropriated texts from Charles Dickens, Sextus
Propertius, Emily Bronte, and scads of others, producing surprising formal effects and willing her experience into the body of Literature.
Cynthiam adamavit
Propertius quam secundam post Helenam canit.
Propertius (4.11) names Claudia Quinta in a list of virtuous Roman women, (16) but Livy describes a notorious Claudia Quinta in Book 29 of his Ab urbe condita.
When that happens in a work such as Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam or Ezra Pound's Homage to Sextus
Propertius, the reader feels the shiver of authenticity.
Drawing heavily on Ovid, it also echoes
Propertius, Tibullus, Virgil, Martial, Horace, Juvenal, and even Petronius.
I learned to write from authors like Callimachus and Meleager, including the Roman elegists (Catullus and
Propertius, but less so Tibullus), and the indispensable Martial and Ausonius.