The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Albius Tibullus was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to him are of questionable origins.
Sextus Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age. He was born around 50–45 BC in Assisium and died shortly after 15 BC.
The Ars amatoria is an instructional elegy series in three books by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. It was written in 2 AD.
The Tristia is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of Augustus' banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus in AD 8 remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died without ever returning to Rome.
Gaius Cornelius Gallus was a Roman poet, orator, politician and military commander, at one time appointed by the Emperor Augustus as prefect of Egypt. Although only nine lines of his poetry are extant today, he was considered by Ovid as one of the major Latin poets of the 1st century BC.
Catullus 3 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus that laments the death of a pet sparrow (passer) for which an unnamed girl (puella), possibly Catullus' lover Lesbia, had an affection. Written in hendecasyllabic meter, it is considered to be one of the most famous of Latin poems.
Catullus 2 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) that describes the affectionate relationship between an unnamed puella ('girl', possibly Catullus' lover, Lesbia), and her pet sparrow. As scholar and poet John Swinnerton Phillimore has noted, "The charm of this poem, blurred as it is by a corrupt manuscript tradition, has made it one of the most famous in Catullus' book." The meter of this poem is hendecasyllabic, a common form in Catullus' poetry.
Amores is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity.
Ibis is a curse poem by the Roman poet Ovid, written during his years in exile across the Black Sea for an offense against Augustus. It is "a stream of violent but extremely learned abuse," modeled on a lost poem of the same title by the Greek Alexandrian poet Callimachus.
The Heroides, or Epistulae Heroidum, is a collection of fifteen epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek and Roman mythology in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them. A further set of six poems, widely known as the Double Heroides and numbered 16 to 21 in modern scholarly editions, follows these individual letters and presents three separate exchanges of paired epistles: one each from a heroic lover to his absent beloved and from the heroine in return.
The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic in the period between 62 and 54 BC.
Elegiac comedy was a genre of medieval Latin literature—or drama—represented by about twenty texts written in the 12th and 13th centuries in the liberal arts schools of west central France. Though commonly identified in manuscripts as comoedia, modern scholars often reject their status as comedy. Unlike Classical comedy, they were written in elegiac couplets. Denying their true comedic nature, Edmond Faral called them Latin fabliaux, after the later Old French fabliaux, and Ian Thomson labelled them Latin comic tales. Other scholars have invented terms like verse tales, rhymed monologues, epic comedies, and Horatian comedies to describe them. The Latin "comedies", the dramatic nature of which varies greatly, may have been the direct ancestors of the fabliaux but more likely merely share similarities. Other interpretations have concluded that they are primitive romances, student juvenilia, didactic poems, or merely collections of elegies on related themes.
The Comoedia Lydiae is a medieval Latin elegiac comedy from the late twelfth century. The "argument" at the beginning of the play refers to it as the Lidiades, which the manuscripts gloss as comedia de Lidia facta and which its English translator gives as Adventures of Lidia.
Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic poem written in elegiac couplets by the Roman poet Ovid. In the hundred extant verses, Ovid defends the use of cosmetics by Roman women and provides five recipes for facial treatments. Other writers at the time condemned women's usage of cosmetics.
William of Blois was a French medieval poet and dramatist. He wrote at least one poetical work, which has not survived, as well as some dramas. Two other works that survive are credited to him, but it is not clear if he was actually the author. He also was an abbot of a monastery in Calabria in southern Italy, after being an unsuccessful candidate for the Bishopric of Catania in Italy.
Pamphilus de amore is a 780-line, 12th-century Latin comedic play, probably composed in France, but possibly Spain. It was "one of the most influential and important of the many pseudo-Ovidian productions concerning the 'arts of Love'" in medieval Europe, and "the most famous and influential of the medieval elegiac comedies, especially in Spain". The protagonists are Pamphilus and Galatea, with Pamphilus seeking to woo her through a procuress.
CIL 4.5296 is a poem found graffitied on the wall of a hallway in Pompeii. Discovered in 1888, it is one of the longest and most elaborate surviving graffiti texts from the town, and may be the only known love poem from one woman to another from the Latin world. The poem is nine verses long, breaking off in the middle of the ninth verse; a single line in a different hand is written underneath. It is in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.
The Garland of Sulpicia, also sometimes known as the Sulpicia cycle or the Sulpicia-Cerinthus cycle, is a group of five Latin love poems written in elegiac couplets and included in volume 3 of the collected works of Tibullus. The five poems concern a love affair between a girl Sulpicia and a young man Cerinthus. They are followed in the collection by a further group of six short elegies ostensibly written by Sulpicia herself describing the same affair.