Conclusion

Catullus then is explicitly recognized as the progenitor of Roman love elegy by Propertius and Ovid, and implicitly by Tibullus. In terms of metrical form, the Catullan corpus is atypical of elegiac production. Less than a third of it is written in the elegiac meter, and much of that is written in the form of epigrams rather than elegy proper. Thematically, the Lesbia poems clearly anticipate the later elegiac collections, which are united around the story (or stories) of the poet’s affair with a single named beloved. Again, however, the Catullan corpus shows considerably greater variety than that found in its elegiac descendants.

Like Catullus, the elegists compose complex collections of first-person verse that present themselves as the recounting and ultimately the embodiment of the speaking subject’s lived experience. The lyric consciousness projected by these collections is a complex, self-reflexive, and multi-temporal consciousness made possible by, and dependent on, the process of reading and rereading.

Poem 68, the one poem in the Catullan corpus that most resembles a fully elaborated Roman love elegy, not only serves as a formal antecedent to the genre but also, in its complex relation to the rest of the Catullan corpus, bequeaths to the elegists the model of a split consciousness. It is in this split, as exemplified in poem 68’s use of the domus motif, that we see the emergence of that which ties the history of the elegiac subgenre to the world beyond either individual desire or symbolic institutions. Catullus, therefore, is not only the progenitor of the elegiac subgenre, he is also the symptom of a crisis in Roman political and cultural history that made that subgenre possible.