Epilogue

Summary

Scholars have long recognized that Latin love elegy’s essential erotic plot is based on the conflict between the adulescens amator and meretrix in Roman comedy, and particularly its focus on the competition between lover and beloved for sexual access, behavioral control, and the economic interests of both parties. This chapter argues that Catullus was an exemplary figure for the elegists who first showed how Roman comedy could enter sustained personal poetry, and it is argued that Catullus was, with respect to the erotic and economic conflict, a proto-elegist. This chapter explores how Catullus examines the stock scene of the excluded lover in one understudied cycle of his poems, where he limned the essential elements of Roman elegy’s appropriation of Roman comedy’s “greedy girl” motif, serving as a bridge between the two genres and a window through whom Ovid and other elegists viewed Plautus and Terence.