Teaching the death of elegy. The Lygdamus elegies ([Tib.] 3.1-6)

A compact textual unit of six elegiac poems opening the third book of the Corpus Tibullianum ([Tib.] 3.1-6), the Lygdamean cycle recounts the end of a love romance, the discidium of the young lover poet Lygdamus with his elegiac mistress, Neaera. Through a fictional re-creation of his love story, from the initial dedication of a refined, polished libellus, a Muses-inspired carmen ([Tib.] 3.1), and the ‘celebration’ of his soon-to-be death and funeral as a form of immortalization of his figure of hearth-broken elegiac poet, victim of the deceitful and cruel puella ([Tib.] 3.2), to the dream-visitation from Apollo, stimulating the poet to act as a wise lover ([Tib.] 3.4), and the closing hymn to Bacchus ([Tib.] 3.6), Lygdamus provides his readers, would-be lovers, with a case study of elegiac love and credentials himself as a prototypical figure of lover poet, poeta amator. In idealizing an elegiac scenario of antagonistic love conflicts and admitting defeat as a lover, Lygdamus, moreover, takes on the role of master of love, praeceptor amoris. Lygdamus’ story intends to teach how to experience a typical elegiac love affair without suffering the traditional elegiac pitfalls and enduring love agony. This paper focuses on Lygdamus’ construction of his elegiac persona and calls attention to intertextual allusions to elegiac models, in particular Catullus and Ovid’s erotodidascalic poetry, as central to Lygdamus’ fashioning of his fictional love story as a paradigm of elegiac infidelity. It argues that, by means of his elegiac textual body, the poet re-establishes the classic paradigms of elegiac love as Sapphic nosos, illness and mental distress, and immortalizes his love story as a model of literary elegy. At the same time, by recalling Catullus’ Ariadna and acting the role of the Ovidian master of love, Lygdamus competes with past elegiac literature. He expects his readers to draw on his love romance with Neaera to learn how to love. Through the story of his discidium the lover poet celebrates the death of elegiac love and enters into the canon of the elegiac poets.