Goetics: The Magical Poetics of Latin Love Elegy

The language and conceptualization of love take for granted a supernatural element. From antiquity to today, we acknowledge the irresistible force of love by attributing to it the character of sorcery. We speak of an infatuated person as spellbound, entranced, enchanted, beguiled, charmed, or even bewitched by the object of desire. To fall in love is to experience a loss of control. Suddenly, another person holds sway over your body and soul. You experience lack of appetite and sleeplessness, and become pale with longing. These same symptoms characterize the suffering of the lovers presented in the elegies of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid. Thus, it should not be surprising that the all-consuming passion described by the Latin love elegists is metaphorically, and even materially, associated with magic.
The enchanting nature of poetry has long been recognized. The earliest Greek texts describe the thelxis (enchantment) created by songs, and classical myths credit the first poets with magical powers. Thus, Orpheus draws wild beasts and even the trees and rivers to him through the power of his song, and Amphion’s lyric compositions compel inanimate stones to do as he wishes. This intermingling of magic and poetry is strongly signaled in Latin by shared terminology: carmen signifies both poem and spell. While many Roman poets recognize the enchanting nature of their verses, the Latin love elegists pay particular attention to the magic in their words. They take advantage of the ambiguity, or polysemy, in the term carmen to associate themselves with the magical songs of mythical poets like Orpheus and Amphion, and with the powerful spells of witches like Medea and Circe. This paper examines the intersection of the magic of love and the enchantment of poetry in Latin love elegy, and illustrates the extent to which the elegists present love magic as an organizing principle of their genre.

Kerill O’Neill was born in Ireland and received his B.A. in Classics from Trinity College in Dublin. He then came to America to study for his Ph.D at Cornell University. Since graduating from Cornell, Kerill has been employed at Colby College in Maine, where he is the Julian D. Taylor Associate Professor of Classics, and serves as chair of the department of Classics. Kerill has disparate, even eclectic areas of research interest from philology to archaeology. He has published on Greek tragedy, comparative literature and Aegean prehistory. Kerill is the field director of the Mitrou Archaeological Project, which is excavating and surveying a prehistoric site in Greece. On the philological side, Kerill works primarily on Latin love poetry.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of Classics, in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.