Roman elegy is well known for its reversal of traditional Roman gender roles: women are presented in positions of power, chiefly but not exclusively erotic, that bear little or no relation to women's lived experience in the first century b.c.e.Footnote ¹ Yet the way elegy presents the beloved in a position of power over her lover, as Sharon James has observed, ‘retains standard Roman social and power structures, thus suggesting an inescapable inequity even within a private love affair: rather than sharing goals and desires, lover and beloved are placed in a gendered opposition … Hence resistant reading by the domina is an anticipated and integral part of the genre’.Footnote ² James's remark is indeed correct for each of the instances in which the domina, or female beloved, speaks directly. When she does so, as James also shows, she speaks at cross-purposes with her lover, following a script that is designed ‘to destabilize him’ in an attempt to keep his interest.Footnote ³ Yet what has not been noticed is that when the beloved is instead male, the situation is quite different. Tibullus' Marathus in poem 1.8, our sole example of a male elegiac beloved-turned-speaker, is the exception that proves the fundamental rule of gender inequity. Marathus, that is, when given the opportunity to speak, does in fact share the aims of a male lover, albeit in pursuit of his own puella. When the gendered opposition so integral to elegy is erased, the beloved no longer protests against the strictures of the genre; when both are male, lover and beloved alike are entitled to speak as elegiac lovers.Footnote ⁴

Very few instances of female speech in elegy are framed, as Marathus' speech is, as direct quotes.Footnote ⁵ In Tibullus, Marathus is the only beloved who speaks directly at all.Footnote ⁶ In Ovid, the sole instances of direct quotation of the beloved are, as James shows, ‘both generic and strategic’, intended to pique the interest of the amator and hence to augment his willingness to pay:Footnote ⁷ six words of possibly feigned disappointment at her lover's lack of interest (Am. 2.18.8),Footnote ⁸ a one-word expression of fear (Am. 3.4.32),Footnote ⁹ and a four-line charge of infidelity following the lover's impotence (Am. 3.7.77–80).Footnote ¹⁰ Even Propertius, identified by James as ‘by far the greatest source of elegiac female speech, particularly in oratio recta’, provides few such instances, and not all of these are clearly direct quotes.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, as James also shows, it can be difficult to determine what constitutes speech by the puellae in elegy, as some is ‘inferable’, some ‘reported’, and far less is ‘directly presented’ as if a quotation.Footnote ¹² From among this last category, Propertius 1.3, 2.29b, and 4.8 form the closest parallels to Marathus in Tibullus 1.8. They thus constitute the bulk of my discussion, which concludes with a comparison of what Marathus has to say and how his speech is validated by the external narrator while that of female speaking beloveds is not. This comparison will make clear that the male author's control of his text extends to the manipulation of the beloved as speaker and is a part of his larger strategy to control his ostensibly powerful domina. This manipulation exposes the genre as forbidden to its female participants, and yet fully open to males.Footnote ¹³ While, as James notes, ‘the puella may turn the lexicon, emotional appeals, and ethical stances of love elegy against her poet’, I hope to show that the poet does not depict her as successful, but instead maintains his control over their fictional relationship.Footnote ¹⁴

In each case the context for the speaking beloved is important. In the first example, Propertius' much-studied 1.3, the amator has been out carousing and arrives at his beloved's home to find her sleeping. After comparing Cynthia to a series of mythological heroines,Footnote ¹⁵ buffeted by the twin storms of Amor and Liber he manoeuvres with Pygmalion-like gestures to craft her into an image that is even more pleasing.Footnote ¹⁶ His physical manipulations, moreover, suggest that the speaker of the poem considers raping her while she sleeps.Footnote ¹⁷ When she awakens, this is what she has to say (Prop. 1.3.35–46):Footnote ¹⁸

Despite the rarity of instances of the beloved as speaker and the poem's popularity with critics, remarkably little has been written about the content of Cynthia's speech.Footnote ¹⁹ Three things are particularly noteworthy for an examination of the beloved-turned-speaker. The first is that it is by no means in line with the image of compliant beauty that the speaker has constructed in the lines leading up to it.Footnote ²⁰ The second is that the speaker is not surprised by what Cynthia has to say. Indeed, the lover hints that she has had reason to berate him before: he hesitates to wake her because he ‘fears the vituperations of her well-known harshness’ (expertae metuens iurgia saeuitiae, 1.3.18).Footnote ²¹ Lastly, the content of Cynthia's objections is confirmed all too well by other poems within the corpus that attest to the lover-poet's philandering.Footnote ²² In other words, she is both a careful reader of elegy as practised by this particular speaker, and no supporter of the behaviour that it chronicles.

Perhaps because of her experience with him, many of the words Cynthia uses are drawn straight from the key vocabulary of the genre itself. She is ‘pitiable’ (miseram, 40), ‘cheating’ (fallebam, 41), ‘worn out’ (fessa, 42), ‘abandoned’ (deserta, 43); she refers to an affair (externo … amore, 44) and protests at his ‘frequent long delays’ (longas saepe … moras, 44). Most importantly perhaps, her lament is specifically identified as a querella (querebar, 43), clearly marking her as an elegiac speaker. Cynthia's speech here reinforces James's assertion that elegy ‘both laments and requires’ a gendered opposition.Footnote ²³ In this instance, the usual elegiac speaker has – whether intentionally or not – rejected his beloved. As a result, she must take on the role of lamenter, and although the roles are switched, the gendered opposition remains intact.Footnote ²⁴ Yet while Cynthia here laments, she does not speak in a manner identical to the amator.Footnote ²⁵ She does not embrace elegy but instead speaks against it: Cynthia, as Herica Valladares has shown, ‘mirrors [the lover's] own words, so that she effectively turns his metaphors against him’.Footnote ²⁶ She is not, for example, lamenting being locked out, but rather being stood up at home. More importantly perhaps, the activities with which she distracts herself are specifically gendered as those appropriate to women; we certainly never hear of the elegiac amator weaving (41). Yet this gendered activity reveals something important about Cynthia as the amator presents her: her activity is not only appropriate to women generally, but to elegiac women specifically.Footnote ²⁷ Even when she ‘seems to wrest control from the narrator’, Cynthia cannot escape the limitations her genre and her poet place upon her.Footnote ²⁸

Similarly, in poem 2.29b the lover-poet is again behaving in a way that his beloved finds inappropriate, in this instance showing too little trust in her. This is a particularly apt companion piece to the example of 1.3, in that the poem that precedes it, 2.29a, presents a similar situation to that of 1.3.Footnote ²⁹ In that poem the drunken poet (potus, 2.29a.1), who has been out seeking ‘who knows what woman’ (‘nescioquam quaeris’, 2.29a.14), is accosted by a band of cupids and carried along at his neglected and angrily waiting beloved's behest. Poem 2.29b, whether part of the same poem as 2.29a or simply following close upon it,Footnote ³⁰ presents the morning after a night the speaker does not spend with her. It opens with the poet's desire to check on his girlfriend to see ‘if she were sleeping alone’ (si sola quiesceret illa, 23) and his amazement (obstupui, 25) at her beauty – or that she was in fact alone in her bed.Footnote ³¹ Perhaps accustomed to such visits, Cynthia understands straight away why her lover has come to see her and her response once again shows both her comprehension of and resistance to the genre in which she is trapped (Prop. 2.29b.31–8):

Here again, Cynthia uses some of the words and images particularly resonant in elegy to defend herself, in each case expressing the absence of expected elegiac behaviour. She is not ‘fickle’ (facilis, 33) and expects fidelity from her lover, or at least a man who is ‘more faithful’ (uerior, 34) than he is. There are none of the following hallmarks of elegy: no tracks for the hunter of illicit love to follow (uestigia, 35),Footnote ³² no sex that is implied by ‘rolling’ bodies (uolutantes, 36), no ‘pressed-down bed’ (toro … presso, 35), no evidence of ‘sleeping’ together (iacuisse, 36), and not even shortness of breath (spiritus, 38).Footnote ³³ In sum, Cynthia here is specifically renouncing her participation in elegiac behaviour.Footnote ³⁴ Once Cynthia has finished speaking, moreover, the speaker is left on the threshold, returned to his usual position as the exclusus amator. Once again, the opposition is retained, an opposition necessary for the continuation of elegy's narrative progress. Cynthia slips away from his kisses (39), and from that day he is no longer permitted to share her bed (ex illo felix nox mihi nulla fuit, 42), but has ample material for his continued laments.Footnote ³⁵

Again, in poem 4.8, it is the poet's faithless behaviour that draws Cynthia's irate response, requiring her to ‘lay down the law’.Footnote ³⁶ While in poems 1.3 and 2.29b the poet only insinuates that he has been with other women, in 4.8 he is in fact caught by Cynthia in a ménage à trois arranged by his slave Lygdamus while he thinks she is at Lanuvium for what he asserts is a dalliance of her own (16; 23–6).Footnote ³⁷ After she flies into a jealous rage and attacks her rivals Phyllis and Teia, scratching their faces and tearing their hair and clothes, she turns on her faithless lover (Prop. 4.8.73–80):

What Cynthia is telling the amator, in short, is not to behave like an elegiac lover. Her demands are specific to where elegiac men go to pick up women and how they behave while doing so. Commentators have duly noted the parallels with Ovid's Ars amatoria in particular.Footnote ³⁸ Her demands (formula legis, 74) are clear:Footnote ³⁹ only if the amator renounces elegiac behaviour will she agree to be a compliant beloved. Her insistence on the sale of Lygdamus has puzzled many scholars,Footnote ⁴⁰ but when we consider the importance of servants in arranging elegiac assignations the reason becomes clear:Footnote ⁴¹ Cynthia attempts to remove every opportunity for infidelity, no matter how tangential or unproven. In this poem, the last in the collection that features Cynthia, the poet neither grants Cynthia the last word, as in 1.3, nor leaves himself bereft on her doorstep, as in 2.29b. Instead, Cynthia's speech in 4.8 is followed by the speaker's seeming submission and her ritual fumigation of the premises.Footnote ⁴² Yet the poet's consequent assertion that he will follow her rules (legibus utar, 81) or, more precisely, ‘make use of’ them points to a central irony of elegy: the rules he insists he will play by are those he himself has created, both as the author of this poem and as practitioner of the genre more broadly. While it may seem here that Cynthia has the upper hand in imposing her rules on the poet-lover, she is in fact trapped even here in the fiction of power the poet has created. Further, the lover-poet here ‘makes use’ of the entire episode of 4.8 as an elaborate ploy, since the result is precisely what he wants when peace is made (res pacta, 88) and they ‘lay down their weapons in the entire bed’ (toto soluimus arma toro, 88). While a surface reading of Cynthia's speech may make her seem ‘more than ever the domina’,Footnote ⁴³ the reality the poem presents is that despite his pose of subservience, the amator retains mastery of the poetic/erotic encounter.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is fitting that the last word on Cynthia in Propertian elegy shows this so clearly.

These three examples illustrate how the elegiac experience is not one that gives its female participants the upper hand, and that the women of elegy must, generically speaking, resist the genre in which they find themselves even when they speak ‘for themselves’. The situation is quite different in the case of Marathus, who does not fight against his lover's manipulations, but rather embraces them and attempts – like the lover-poet in Propertius 4.8 – to use them to his own ends. Given that the Marathus cycle has been most often treated, if at all, as something separate from elegy as a whole because of its homoerotic content, it is worth stressing the similarities Cynthia shares with Marathus.Footnote ⁴⁵ Both appear in multiple poems, as do Tibullus' other love objects Delia and Nemesis, and both are clearly identified as love objects who resist the amator's attempts to woo them in the expected elegiac fashion. When Cynthia and Marathus each speak, however, a clear difference in their behaviour can be discerned, a difference apparent in both the divergent content and context of what each has to say.Footnote ⁴⁶ Marathus, unlike Cynthia in each of the examples presented, is not responding to transgressions from his lover when he becomes a speaking beloved. In fact, his lover is actively assisting him in his pursuit of a love of his own, a thing inconceivable in the world of male–female elegy.

As the poem opens, the speaker is addressing an unspecified individual, whose gender is for a while unclear, and asking this person to be compliant to his young beloved. The main speaker then gives way to his young and tormented beloved, who seems a younger version of the poet himself, experiencing the trials of elegiac love for a puella. When Marathus speaks, unlike Cynthia, he is not in dialogue with the amator, but instead speaks to a girl of his own. He is not, that is, in conflict with the speaker, but involved in his own independent amorous pursuits that the speaker supports and endorses.Footnote ⁴⁷ His speech is thus markedly different from Cynthia's on multiple levels, not least in that his momentary identification is as a lover rather than a beloved, and as such there is no question that his words are those of an elegiac amator Footnote ⁴⁸ (Tib. 1.8.55–66):Footnote ⁴⁹

As in Propertius, the lover-poet flags the quotation with ait in line 55, which reminds the reader that the words are reported and that it is therefore the poet who retains control over the speech.Footnote ⁵⁰ Most interesting, though, is what the boy says and how different it is from Cynthia's protestations above. Despite his gender parity with a female beloved to this point – poems 1.4 and 1.8 present Marathus very much in the position of resisting beloved – when he speaks in this elegy, Marathus ‘speaks as an elegiac man’.Footnote ⁵¹ That this is the case only for him and not for Cynthia confirms the gender inequity so central to the genre. While Cynthia may speak only as a resisting beloved in response to her amator's betrayals (actual or perceived), Marathus instead is granted the opportunity to have an elegiac life of his own. Only he is permitted the momentary status of amator rather than remaining a beloved entrapped by the poet-lover's manipulations.Footnote ⁵² His focus is on precisely the things that are a concern for the speaker of elegy: access to his girl (poterat custodia uinci, 55), deception (fallere, 56), secrecy (furtiua Venus, 57; clam, 60), stolen kisses (oscula rapta, 58), nocturnal creeping (media quamuis obrepere nocte, 59), and the silence it requires (strepitu nullo, 60). He is also appropriately miserable (miserum, 61) while his girl is cruel (saeua, 62), does not keep her word (promittit … sed perfida fallit, 63), and keeps him awake at night with her promises that she will come (64–5).

The parallels with Propertius 1.3 are striking, making Marathus a mirror image of Cynthia,Footnote ⁵³ with some important distortions. He, too, is marked as an elegiac speaker, with his words identified as querellas (53), but he embraces the genre and speaks as a male lover-poet – not as a female beloved whose lover has stood her up while he was out drinking (Prop. 1.3), spied on her in the early morning (Prop. 2.29b), or been caught in flagrante with other women (Prop. 4.8). Again unlike Cynthia, Marathus as elegiac speaker receives the endorsement of his lover, whose words at the conclusion of Marathus' speech confirm that the young boy is suffering the elegiac experience he himself knows so well. His advice to the boy that he ‘give up’ because the girl will not give in (desistas lacrimare, puer. non frangitur illa, 67)Footnote ⁵⁴ is the voice of experience that recognizes and validates Marathus' role as an elegiac amator. Further, the poem closes with reminders of Marathus' previous role as a spurning beloved (saepe etiam lacrimas fertur risisse dolentes | et cupidum ficta detinuisse mora, 73–4), the poetic justice that is now being done to him, and the vengeance (poena, 77) that awaits Marathus' girl. Marathus' speech is an important step in his development as an elegiac male, one that constitutes his initiation into a boys' club of Roman elegy. The close of poem 1.8 duly recognizes him as a junior member.Footnote ⁵⁵

Given how rarely the beloved speaks at all in this highly formalized genre, it is all the more significant that the only male beloved the entire genre presents is both given the power of speech and uses it in a very different way from the few female speakers we have, as an independent amator rather than a resisting beloved. This difference may speak to the underlying principles of Roman society, and in particular its fundamental view of gender prerogatives.Footnote ⁵⁶ Marathus' speech, that is, acts out these prerogatives by allowing a male beloved to take on the role of a lover, in just the same way the usual lover-poet does, while instead speaking women must remain in a subject position, relegated to the role of impotent protestor. As Parshia Lee-Stecum has written ‘Tibullan elegy is not a description of the poet/lover's character, attitude, and relationships. Instead, it is a dramatisation of the strategies and dynamics at work in those relationships and employed by the poet/lover.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The same is true, as I hope to have shown, of elegiac practice as a whole when it presents the fiction of a strong female speaking beloved. While both Cynthia and Marathus are ‘doubly ventriloquized’ through their poet in that he ultimately creates the words he attributes to them,Footnote ⁵⁸ the speech each is granted reflects the flexibility – or the lack thereof – the gender of each permits them. While Marathus may play the starring role of amator, Cynthia's part in this drama is limited to a very restrictive script, one that allows the male speaker to retain his dominance,Footnote ⁵⁹ even as he ostensibly gives voice to his domina.