Classical Studies
Until Death? The Afterlife in Latin Love Elegy
Latin love elegy is a highly-learned, short-lived genre which flourished during the uneasy transition from the Roman Republic to the Augustan Empire. The poems of the three major love
elegists—Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—concern the tumultuous affairs between the first-person narrator and the object of his affection. These heartrending love affairs evidently qualify as a kind of “elegy,” a genre traditionally associated with funerary mourning. Indeed, prior scholarship has convincingly argued that all three major love elegists explore some facet of the relationship between love and death. While I do not doubt the importance of the love–death dichotomy, this particular trope has largely obscured elegy’s keen interest in all things pertaining to life and love after death. Scholarship which treats the afterlife in Roman elegy is often limited to a note in a larger commentary or a short article dedicated to one specific poem. In my dissertation, entitled Until Death? The Afterlife in Latin Love Elegy, I offer the first comprehensive analysis of the elegist’s engagement with the afterlife. While my target audience consists primarily of Latinists, especially those who focus on the Augustan Age, I believe that my study will also prove invaluable to anyone interested in the Roman conception of the afterlife and the reception of Latin elegy.