20 - Love elegy

Summary

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The elegiac distich appears as a fully developed poetic form in Greece in the seventh century B.C. It is used, as far as we know, for inscriptions, but also in long poems which were sung or chanted to the music of the aulos (Latin tibia), a pipe with a reedy tone something like the modern oboe. There seems to be a linguistic connexion between the Armenian word elegn ‘reed’ and the Greek term έλεγεīov (sc. μέρov). The derivation from ε ε λεγειν ‘to say woe! woe!’ offered as an etymology by Alexandrian scholars is fanciful, to say the least. For Propertius (2.30B.13–16; 3.10.23) the sound of the tibia is somehow associated with drinking wine, making love and, possibly, reciting love poetry. On the other hand, both Horace (A.P. 75–8) and Ovid (Amores 3.9.1ff.) seem to think that the elegiac metre is ideally suited for laments. This probably means that they knew Greek funeral elegies of the archaic or classical period which we no longer have. Horace limits the elegiac distich to votive inscriptions (uoti sententia compos) and laments (querimonia), i.e. epigrams of the kind which we have in Books 6 and 7 of the Greek Anthology. He ignores the erotic epigrams of Meleager's Garland which now form Books 5 and 12 of the Greek Anthology, though he must have known some of them. Incidentally, the satiric epigram was not yet a popular genre in the Augustan age.

In the earliest period, Greek poets of such different temperaments and tastes as Callinus, Tyrtaeus and Mimnermus (all seventh century B.C.) wrote elegiac poems on a variety of themes, but of the three only Mimnermus seems to have dealt with love.