The social and political context for obstruction in Roman love elegy

by Leonard, Amy Kirk

This thesis will examine the presence of erotic obstruction in the poems of the first century B.C. writers of Roman love elegy: Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. While erotic poetry prior to this time period had long necessitated a sense of obstruction, the deliberate construction of a failed love-affair by the Roman elegists serves to define their particular use of obstruction as a unique discursive strategy. The observation has been made that the time period marking the emergence and disappearance of Roman elegy qualifies it as a discrete, time-bound genre. In light of these time considerations, the obstruction motif in elegy, as a means of articulating a continual sense of failure, is capable of giving involuntary voice to events taking place on the Roman socio-political front, specifically, as this thesis will argue, a perceived loss of autonomy under the changing political structures at the end of the Republic.