Latin 462: Latin Literature of the Augustan Age Winter 2025
Latin erotic elegy
Prof. Stephen Hinds shinds@uw.edu
5 credits, A&H
T TH 2:30-4:20 pm, Savery Hall (SAV) 169
SLN 16415
The elegiac couplet is a meter with a long history in Greek and in Latin. However, in the later decades of the first century BCE, a particular way of handling the meter gathered momentum and led to the heyday of collections of what moderns refer to as Latin love elegy. A succession of poets (mostly male, but one known female) wrote cycles of first-person elegies describing the tribulations of a lover who is immersed in a high-maintenance affair with a beloved (whose identity is concealed under a pseudonym). These elegiac lovers characteristically distance themselves from the duties associated with public life and Roman citizenship, veer between self-promotion and self-pity, and dramatize their situations with sustained appeals to myth. We will focus especially on the erotic elegies of Propertius and Ovid, but will look at the whole history of the genre, from the lost poet Gallus, via Tibullus as well as Propertius and Ovid, to the female poet Sulpicia.
Textbook: a required reader with commentary will be available through the U Bookstore: Paul Allen Miller, Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (Routledge 2002).
Note that the department’s Latin/Greek 461-2-3 cycles change every year: a course like Latin 462 can be taken more than once, with different topics, during your undergraduate career.
This is an upper-level Latin reading class, which presupposes first-year and some second-year college Latin coursework, or equivalent. Please email the instructor if unsure whether your level of Latin language work is right for this class. The other option is Latin 306, also offered in Winter Quarter, which is in our second year (intermediate) Latin sequence.