Flogging a dead horse

As the name suggests, my Dirty Latin Poetry class reads lots of dirty Latin poetry.

In fact, we're reading almost every scrap of what can be termed "Roman Elegy" this term, (for those of you interested in playing along at home, that's Tibullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, Catullus and Ovid) and it's wonderful because it's a genre that seems to spring into being right around 50(ish) BC, boil rapidly for about fifty years, and then collapse like a flan in a cupboard, never to regain real prominence again except by later imitators.


For my students, reading all this stuff means really getting a feel for the genre, what its dominant tropes were and how they evolved over time.  It's fascinating!

But it is, in some sense, extremely repetitive.  The most appropriate approximation would be to imagine taking a class on Romantic Comedy films from 1990-2000. 

When you first saw Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), you'd be charmed.  When you saw them again in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), you might feel like you were having a bit of a flashback - and by the time you got around to You've Got Mail (1998) you'd probably be sick and tired of the whole thing because you hadn't had those three cinematic morsels stretched out over the span of eight years.

It's pretty much the same with Roman Elegy.

The first time we saw a lover waiting outside his beloved's door, spending a cold night sleeping on her threshold because she wouldn't let him in - my students were taken aback.  "What's he doing! What devotion! How sweet! How could the woman be so cruel?!" 

By the time we'd read about that same situation in another thirty poems, it ceased to be moving.  The genre had a truly limited repertoire, and that's fine if you can wait several years between reading one book of poetry and the next, but since my students are reading a book of elegiac poetry a day, they reached their saturation point pretty quickly.

On the plus side, they've gotten really good at recognizing the standard elements of Roman Elegy...

"We get it, we get it! He's poor, but she wants money. She has lots of other lovers, but he's only devoted to her. He's a poet but she doesn't care about that. Oh, and she's probably just a literary creation whose every action is a meta-poetic reflection of the poet's interaction with his own art. Le sigh."