G.'s inquiry into elegiac time addresses one of the fundamental questions scholars have asked of Roman love elegy: is it narrative poetry? Does it tell a story? Or does the lack of specified continuity and chronology between the poems make each nothing more than an individual aperçu? Does elegy's clock move? Yes and no, says G. – it is a stopwatch, alternately frozen and madly spooling out numbers in a bid to circumscribe its eternal idyll. She scrutinises the places where the temporal cycles governing the elegiac amator (central ego and voice of elegy) do and do not coincide with the temporal cycles of others: his mistress, his less-shiftless male friends – and his emperor, ambitious to reform Rome's citizenry. G.'s interest in where these cycles meet and miss elaborates in novel ways elegy's reflection of its historical context. By hastening and extending elite citizen males' years of obligation to state service and married reproduction, the Augustan principate had profoundly reshaped the temporal proprieties governing their lives. By contrast, the elegiac affair records scant progress in time or space for mistress or amator. He, eternally adolescent, chases after her, eternally beyond his grasp. This twice-told tale is no accidental failure, but Fabian resistance, G. argues.
Chapter 1 outlines the focus of the book and its critical methodology. Here G. sketches the elegiac temporal pattern she develops more fully in the following chapters. The null space occupied by elegy's repetitive dalliance is under constant pressure from the adult civic duties the genre repeatedly spurns – and by spurning, keeps in view. That pressure makes logically inevitable those recurring moments when the lover envisions a quite different him and her: he a post-erotic, civic-minded poet, lauding triumphs and matronly virtues and essaying the serious genres of tragedy and epic; she – in one quantum temporal leap – a lonely, impoverished old woman. G. organises this dichotomy conceptually by using Julia Kristeva's concepts of the semiotic, symbolic and ‘women's time’. Kristeva aligns the semiotic with feminine subjectivity, the material body, and resistance to linear movement in time, space and speech. The symbolic squares with masculinity's association with traversing time and space, but also with the linear components of language that govern the process of signification (e.g. syntax). G.'s Kristevan methodology lends rigour and nuance to her readings. It draws into logical coherence seemingly contingent elegiac phenomena – for example the division of erotic labour that has the mistress turn not just homebody, but repetitive, whenever her lover roams. Over and over, Delia chants to Isis as Tibullus gets ready to embark (Tib. 1.3); over and over, Cynthia sings and spins, waiting for Propertius to stumble home drunk from a party (Prop. 1.3); over and over, Calypso asks for tales of Troy to delay Odysseus' departure (Ovid, Ars 2.123–44).
Chapter 2, ‘Coming of Age in Augustan Rome’, grounds G.'s study of elegy's temporality in the socio-historical context of the Augustan principate. The chapter delineates how the princeps' legislation reset the clocks governing his citizens' lives. The civil penalties accruing to the Julian marriage laws specified at what age men and women should be married (at least by 60 for men, 50 for women). They also lowered the minimum age at which young men could assume various public offices (which could be even lower if the candidate had legitimate children). Since assuming office and marriage were considered the final stages in a young man's assuming his adult role, Augustus was both accelerating the civic maturity of his citizens and melding public with private life. The law expected freeborn women – who as young widows under the Republic might have remained unmarried – to continue contracting marriages until the age of fifty. The state thus defined these women solely in terms of their putative biological clocks. By contrast, the Julian laws cared nothing about the marital or reproductive lives of the kind of women (prostitutes and procuresses) whose imaginative counterparts populate elegy; it merely forbade them (along with all infames) from marrying freeborn individuals. The elegiac lover's dalliance with a statutorily unmarriageable woman deviates from the progress of his peers in military, political and reproductive service to Rome. The demur is both ideological and generic, deferring civic and poetic maturation. Where other Augustan poets evolve from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ genres and subject matter – Virgil progressing from the Eclogues to Georgics to the Aeneid, Horace from satiric invective to erotic lyric and finally to the moralising hexameters of the Epistulae – elegy repeatedly dramatises a refusal to grow up and think loftier thoughts.
Having laid her methodological groundwork, G. devotes Chapters 3, 4 and 5 to Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid respectively. This a-chronological order reflects how G. measures relative resistance to Augustan ideals of manhood via poetic themes of progress and stasis. Propertius' Monobiblos shows the amator torturously plodding after the ever-receding Cynthia. Tardus amor blocks his progress to masculine maturity – in sharp contrast to Tullus, nephew of the consul L. Volcacius Tullus and the Monobiblos' poster boy for youthful civic engagement. Yet ultimately, Propertius seeks to redefine temporal propriety in erotic terms. His goal is a happy love affair, in contrast to his current frustration (Prop. 1.10.29–30, 2.2.23–4); he does not wish to end his erotic servitude. By contrast, Tibullus thinks of a future that sternly rebukes his present gender- and class-allegiances. When Delia is a lonely old woman, his patron Messalla will be a venerable senex-progenitor, surrounded by his descendants. Tibullus' vivid diptych puts up less of a fight against what Rome expects of her elite males than Propertius' wishful thinking. And Ovid quite explicitly declares his allegiance to elegy to be a mere waystation on the road to poetic maturity. Amores 3.1 reframes the myth of Hercules, on the brink of adulthood, choosing between personified Vice and Virtue. Ovid's choice is between the ladies Elegy and the loftier, more mature Tragedy; he swears Elegy is just a passing fling, he will be Tragedy's man soon enough (3.1.68). Here and elsewhere in the Amores, erotic dalliance and delay are marked as calculated deferral, rather than outright refusal.
Chapters 6 and 7 together develop in the figure of the puella the complementary themes of stasis and circular repetition vs praeternatural acceleration. While the puella enables the amator's fantasy of inertia and timelessness, she also assumes the burden of time for him. Time inexorably passes while he dances attendance upon her (as it must, in order to measure his devotion) – until his imagination discerns in her the promise of the loathed anus-lena (Tib. 1.6, Prop. 4.5, Ovid Amores 2.6). The vision of the decrepit crone his mistress will eventually become foreshadows the hour when he can abandon her permanently and recommence his progress to man's estate.
Chapter 8 details how the elegists' ‘departure strategies’ – visions of escaping erotic elegy and playing with the grownups – sketch that final hour. Only Ovid actually fulfilled his pledge to essay the big-boy genres, tragedy and epic. However, both Tibullus and Propertius experiment with framing Augustan ideals of civic maturity in elegiac verse. Tibullus ousts Delia entirely from 1.7 in order to celebrate Messalla's Aquitanian military triumph (27 b.c.e.). Nemesis gets four terse lines out of 122 devoted to lauding Messalla's son, Messalinus, for assuming public office (Tib. 2.5). Propertius' fourth book patriotically explicates Rome's monuments and religious observations while relegating Cynthia to the dead (4.7).
G.'s study of elegy's loitering with intent is a valuable contribution to the field of Latin literature, and to elegiac studies in particular. She sheds fresh light on how the elegiac amator and puella's tarrying embodies the most acute anxieties over social, economic and political transformations – over imperial Rome stuck in fast forward (p. 257). In so doing, she has opened new intellectual avenues for readers. The general reader will be enlightened by her book, and anyone making a serious study of elegy will need to engage with it.
